ON TOLERATION.<i> By Michael Walzer</i> .<i> Yale University Press: 122 pp., $16.50</i>

The biggest shock I’ve had in a long time came a few months ago when one of my best friends told me that I am a threat to him and his family. I am an advocate of homosexual marriage. From where I sit, I am asking for nothing more than admittance to a core institution-- no, the core institution--of civilized adult life. But to my friend, I am not knocking on his door but knocking it down and then wrecking the house. Being gay is fine, he said, but must I also destroy this most cherished institution? Must I attack the right of America’s majority culture to propagate its core values? I believe I am asking for toleration, expressed as legal equality. He believes I am making war.

The culture wars, as they have been called, might just as well be called the toleration wars. They are not only about the particulars of abortion and pornography but also about who is imposing his culture on whom. It is this second, larger argument that gives the culture wars their acrid odor of universal offendedness.

In March, Rep. Ernest Istook Jr. (R-Okla.) proposed a constitutional amendment saying, in part: “The right to pray or acknowledge religious belief, heritage or tradition on public property, including public schools, shall not be infringed.” Secular Americans love to accuse the religious right of intolerance. But the religious conservatives who are trying (for the third time) to make school prayer constitutional believe they are oppressed, not intolerant. They believe they are being systematically driven from public life and stripped of the power to teach their values to their children.

The trouble today is that we have no template to show where toleration ends and cultural imperialism begins. Easy appeals to civil liberties break down when every side feels invaded and coerced. So “On Toleration,” a tight-knit, elegant and agreeably compact analysis of the subject by Michael Walzer, the prolific political theorist, could not be more timely. The pity is that it is not also more useful.

Walzer impressively breezes past the shibboleths that dominate civics book discussions of toleration. Should we tolerate the intolerant? Far from being, as our sophomore seminars intoned, the central and most difficult issue for a theory of toleration, the question all but answers itself: Yes, of course. In any tolerant society, many of the groups that are tolerated are themselves intolerant. (Try telling a dissident Catholic that the church is tolerant.) The big problem is not whether groups are tolerant but whether political regimes are tolerant and, more important still, what that actually means.

So Walzer begins anatomizing regimes of toleration. He identifies five, among which three are prominent: the multinational empire, which, as with the British and the Ottomans, gives considerable autonomy to ethnic and religious groups, provided they don’t make trouble; nation-states like France, which publicly enshrine a dominant culture but, within broad limits, leave minorities and dissidents alone; and immigrant societies, which are rooted in no single ethnic or religious base and expect everyone to tolerate everyone else. Walzer thinks the United States is the preeminent example of an immigrant society. Some cultural conservatives, who see the U.S. as rooted in European culture and “Judeo-Christian” (read: Christian) ethics, would disagree. That, in brief, is the difference between Patrick Buchanan and the rest of us.

Walzer’s taxonomy is elegant and convincing, all the more so when he takes up what he calls complicated cases, where the models mix and collide in the real world.

In French colonial schools, coal-dark African children used to dutifully recite that they were descended from the Gauls, but those days are gone. In France, a new immigrant generation is rocking the boat, resisting traditional Frenchification and demanding full citizenship coupled with room to “act out their group identity in public.” Israel, in Walzer’s fascinating analysis, is a nation-state to its “national minority” of Palestinian Arab citizens while simultaneously being an immigrant society, fractured and cacophonous, to its Jews. The European Union is a new sort of hybrid, but as its people flow across newly opened borders, it will come to resemble an immigrant society.

And what about the U.S.? Here one begins to wish for a little more help. The American scene is riven by Lockean liberals who insist that the individual (or sometimes the family) is the only social unit deserving civil rights and state recognition, and by multiculturalists who believe that groups must also be given their due.

In its strong form, multiculturalism holds that group identities are socially fundamental, that group differences should be affirmed and celebrated by schools and governments and that no group has any “privileged” standing from which it may criticize any other group. Walzer rightly notes that strong multiculturalism is divisive and illiberal. He might also have added incoherent because multiculturalists are happy to condemn and even repress groups that dislike multiculturalism. But what is really catching on with school boards is a weaker, friendlier kind of multiculturalism, which says it merely wants to teach schoolchildren about groups’ heritages and differences and which smilingly urges mutual respect.

Opponents of multiculturalism have made strong arguments against even the weaker Barney-ized version of multiculturalism. Encouraging students to think of themselves as members of races or tribes may inflame resentments and harden boundaries; teaching generic respect for other cultures and traditions may subvert critical thinking and moral discrimination; and teaching admiration for diversity may foment contempt for unity. Such charges may be misplaced, but they are worth addressing. Thus, one feels shortchanged when Walzer writes that weak multiculturalism leads Americans “to understand and admire their own diversity,” adds blandly, “There is no reason to think that this understanding or admiration stands in any tension with the requirements of liberal citizenship” and then passes on.

And if he is right about the transition to a “postmodern” America, an America where identities are so jumbled as to blur the very concept of toleration, what does that mean in practice? Atomized cultures and groupless individuals suffer from anomie, Walzer writes in his final chapter; groups in America are weakening and shrinking and so government, he concludes, should subsidize community-based groups and activists: “Group life won’t rescue individual men and women from dissociation and passivity, unless there is a political strategy for mobilizing, organizing, and if necessary subsidizing the right sort of groups.”

Much disappoints here. Walzer’s claim that “the number of Americans who are unorganized, inactive, and undefended . . . is on the rise” is based on an influential paper (“Bowling Alone”) by Robert D. Putnam, a political scientist. Walzer seems unaware that subsequent research has found Putnam to have been, in the technical parlance, just plain wrong.

Membership and activism are high and (if anything) increasing; the number of groups is rising (rapidly); and Americans remain among the “joiningest” peoples in the world. Walzer’s claim that stronger groups will gradually move “toward mutual toleration and a democratically inclusive politics” sounds like 1970s boilerplate, the sort of thing people said before politics fell siege to a horde of notoriously parochial special interests. His assumption that subsidies reinforce civic spirit is glib. And what can he possibly mean by subsidizing the “right sort” of groups?

So Walzer’s resplendent analysis culminates in a cursory pendant, one that will probably be ignored by those not predisposed to agree with it. What disappoints, I hurry to add, is not so much what is here as what is missing: a framework that applies Walzer’s taxonomy of toleration to America’s angriest conflicts, so that we “postmodern vagabonds” of the immigrant society can figure out where the boundaries of toleration properly lie. It speaks well of Walzer that the elegance of his map-making raises expectations for an equally astute guidebook. But I suppose we will just have to argue after all.