Section 19 Group 4 Tolerance

Last Wednesday we finished our political pod casts with a discussion over Tolerance by Wendy Brown. She starts off by giving an universal definition saying, " tolerance is all about the management of some undesirable element of foreign body, invading or taking up residence within the host. Brown then goes on to explain that a level of personal tolerance is necessary to get along the world, but when the principle is raised to a political level it can have negative effects. "It cloaks inequalities; it even sometimes substitutes egalitarian principles". She uses 2008 election issues, such as gay marriage, to help illustrate her point, saying that many people said they were not for marriage inequality, rather tolerance. Brown makes the point that this implies that some people have to be tolerated rather than made equal in our society. Our groups main discussion point came from the question, at what point are you tolerating, and what point are you just, for lack of a better word, not caring? Many of us agreed that a lot issues that have no affect on us we tend to have no opinion of, and don't get involved in disagreements or debates concerning those matters. Is that considered tolerance? And is that one of the negative effects that Brown was worried about? It seems that everyone has at least one issue where they would cross the blurry line of tolerance and voice their opinion, so its safe to assume that problems will  arise when it comes to certain groups "being tolerated" , rather than equally incorporated into our society.

Questions

Why does Brown prefer the term tolerance to toleration?

What does Brown say that tolerance has become a substitution for?