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Overtolerance and Cultural Integration in Postmodern Societies
A growing challenge in postmodern societies is the tension arising from expansive tolerance toward culturally distant groups, particularly when mass immigration brings traditional or survival-oriented value clusters into contact with highly secular, self-expressive ones. Ronald Inglehart’s modernization theory, developed with Christian Welzel, provides a framework for understanding this dynamic.
The historical foundations encouraged openness. The Renaissance revived curiosity about diverse classical and non-European ideas, while the Enlightenment promoted reason, individual rights, and tolerance as alternatives to religious or traditional authority. The Industrial Revolution amplified economic benefits through global trade and cultural exchange, enriching Western societies with new foods, fashions, music, and ideas. The Information Age has further accelerated connectivity and exposure to diversity, reinforcing self-expression values that prize personal autonomy, tolerance, and openness.
Inglehart and Welzel show that rising existential security drives a shift from survival and traditional values (emphasizing security, conformity, and in-group loyalty) toward secular-rational and self-expression values (prioritizing autonomy, choice, tolerance, and quality of life). High self-expression societies have historically thrived on this openness, which supported trade, innovation, and cultural vitality.
In the 21st century, however, large-scale immigration from regions retaining stronger traditional or survival orientations has made cultural distance more visible. While tolerance remains a core self-expression value, it can facilitate the emergence of parallel societies when integration lags. Differences in attitudes toward authority, gender roles, religion, and individual autonomy can hinder the transmission of the high-trust norms and secular institutions painstakingly built over centuries in host societies. Combined with below-replacement fertility among native populations and higher birth rates among some immigrant groups, this raises long-term demographic pressures. In extreme scenarios, native cultures risk becoming minorities by century’s end, potentially straining the very institutions—rule of law, social trust, gender equality, and individual freedoms—that self-expression values helped sustain.
Inglehart and Welzel frame the underlying value shift as human development. The contemporary challenge lies in maintaining genuine openness and integration capacity without allowing tolerance to erode the shared secular and self-expressive foundations upon which prosperous, high-trust societies depend.
Go to Balancing quality of life.
References
Habermas, J. (1989). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society (T. Burger, Trans.). MIT Press. (Original work published 1962)
Inglehart, R., & Welzel, C. (2005). Modernization, cultural change, and democracy: The human development sequence. Cambridge University Press.
Inglehart, R. (2018). Cultural evolution: People’s motivations are changing, and reshaping the world. Cambridge University Press.
Putnam, R. D. (2007). E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and community in the twenty-first century. Scandinavian Political Studies, 30(2), 137–174.
World Values Survey. (n.d.). Findings and insights and The Inglehart-Welzel cultural map. https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org
