Wednesday, November 24, 2021

Morality: Restoring The Common Good in Divided Times, by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks - A Review

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks/Times of Israel
Jonathan Sacks’ Morality, Restoring The Common Good in Divided Times is a deeply spiritual critique of present-day society.

His message is sobering: Unless we move quickly to include morality into our politics, and stop the advance from a “We” to an “I” society, we’re headed for tough times.

(Sacks is not an intellectual lightweight and so his book, at times, becomes a bit difficult for a non-philosophically or theologically-minded person to handle.)

He weaves Socrates, Spinoza, Descartes, Nietzsche, Hume and Darwin - to mention a few - into his argument. And Sacks adds the breakdown of marriage, the rise of social media, and the loss of love and forgiveness as contributing to the loss of a sense of the common good.

In the early chapters of Morality, Sacks writes of Nietzsche, that for him, “there are no truths…only interpretations.” Which creates “a world without shared meanings,’ where “it is easy to feel lost.”

Sacks argues that since the 1960s, individualism has substituted for morality. And that individualism is reflected in our consumer-driven society resulting in an economy that values our productivity over our humanity.

Sacks continues: “As communities atrophy and voluntary associations lose their power, people turn to the state to meet their needs.”

He sees Western society moving from individual identity, rooted in religion, to one based on nation, race, and class.

For Sacks, the stage was set with Social Darwinism, where the strong survive at the expense of the weak.

Sacks cites Friedrich Hayek who believed that only religion can save us from the “'fatal conceit’ that by conscious intent and deliberate planning we can improve on the morality of the past and redesign our basic human institutions.”

At this point, Sacks explains that he sees multiculturalism as contributing to moral crisis. “Meant to promote tolerance, it has given rise to new and dire forms of intolerance. It turned society from a home into a hotel, in which each group has its room but where there is little or no sense of collective belonging.”

(For an opposing view, let me recommend Out Of Many Faiths by Eboo Patel to counter Sacks’ argument).

According to Sacks, without a morality grounded in religion, truth vanishes. Sacks writes: “A world of truth is a world of trust, and vice versa. In it, there is something larger than individuals seeking their own interest… A respect for truth is essential for authority, collaborative endeavor, and human graciousness. But it requires humility. I have to be able to recognize that certain facts are true even though they challenge my convictions. I have to acknowledge that there is something larger than me.”

For Sacks, the development of the Internet and Social Media have only exacerbated this issue.

Says Sacks, “In a world without an agreed-upon basic moral code, do not expect truth to survive. That is our world today. The manipulative use of social media in the interests of economics and politics, wealth and power, has led us directly into a post-truth era in which trust in public institutions is at an all-time low. This is what happens when we try to run a society based on the market and the state alone.”

A couple of chapters later in Morality, Sacks adds a culture of victimhood to the ills driving us away from a sense of the common good.

“In the contemporary state, groups campaign for something never before held to be the business of politics: recognition, regard, self-esteem. Culture has become political… The traditional curriculum of canonical texts – the Bible, Shakespeare, and the rest – is held up to represent the hegemony of dead white males and must therefore be set aside. This body of literature leads excluded groups to have a negative self-image, and this impacts on their life chances… All of this leads to a politics of competitive victimhood.”

Sacks sees this as a major problem. 

He goes on: “When individual feelings (negative self-image) become part of the self-definition of the group, and when groups call for remedial action by the state, then identity politics or the politics of recognition is born. This is at the heart of contemporary multiculturalism and constitutes its greatest danger.”

(Again, I mention Eboo Patel’s book, Out of Many Faiths, as a counter-argument to Sacks’ line of thinking.)

Three-fourths of the way through Morality, Sacks sums up his position. “What has happened in the past half-century has been precisely what de Tocqueville feared. It took a long time to appear, precisely because of the strength of the institutions on which he discerned American democratic freedom to rest: religion, community, family, and the sense of the nation as a moral community. As these eroded from the 1960s onward, individualism was left as the order of the day, and is so today… The ‘I’ prevails over the ‘We.’ We have the market and the state, the two arenas of competition, one for wealth, the other for power, but nothing else, no arena of cooperation that would bridge the difference between the wealthy and powerful and the poor and powerless.”

He writes: “To become moral, we have to make a commitment to some moral community and code. We have to make a choice to forgo certain choices. We have to choose the right restraints…We may be more aware than any other generation of the multiple ways of being moral, but that does not mean that we are endlessly poised between them all… morality is a one-to-one relationship between a person and a way of life. It is a choice that precludes other choices. Only the willingness to make a choice allows you morally to grow.”

Sacks notes that, in the past, religion was the mortar that held society together, keeping us other-centered, on the common good.

“[B]y establishing moral communities on a large scale through shared beliefs and rituals rather than by frequent face-to-face interaction, religion solved the problem of establishing trust between strangers. Without this, it is doubtful that humanity would ever have left the hunter-gatherer stage.”

For the remainder of his book Sacks looks forward, with tempered optimism, towards the future of Western society as he finalizes his argument for morality – especially morality that includes some sort of religious belief.

“Morality matters because we cherish relationships and believe that love, friendship, work and even the occasional encounters of strangers are less fragile and abrasive when conducted against a shared code of civility and mutuality… We are touched by other people’s pain. We feel enlarged by doing good… Decency, charity, compassion, integrity, faithfulness, courage, just being there for other people, matter to us… They matter to us because we are human.”

“To begin to make a difference, all we need to do is change ourselves. To act morally. To be concerned with the welfare of others. To be someone people trust. To give. To volunteer. To listen. To smile. To be sensitive, generous, caring. To do any of these things is to make an immediate difference…”

For Sacks, this change involves moving from a contract-driven to a covenant-driven society.

“What matters is not wealth or power but the transformation that takes place when I embrace a world larger than the self…Covenants ask us to think about the impact we have on others.”

“We need to restore the covenant dimension to politics. Britain and America are today deeply divided societies, and the politics of recent years has played on those divisions.”

But despite these deep divisions, Sacks is ultimately hopeful. 

He makes the point, “This is not, however, the first time that divides have opened up in societies on the basis of economic or geographical stratification… Nations used to be held together by a single dominant religion or family of religions, and by a shared culture.”

Sacks finishes his point, “We can no longer build a national identity on religion or ethnicity or culture. But we can build it on covenant. A covenantal politics would speak of how, as a polity, an economy, and a culture, our fates are bound together. We benefit from each other. And because this is so, we should feel bound to benefit one another.”

And then Sacks lists the benefits of this approach.

“A nation is enlarged by its new arrivals who carry with them gifts from other places and other traditions. It would acknowledge that, yes, we have differences of opinion and interest, and sometimes that means favoring one side over another. But we will never do so without giving every side a voice and respectful hearing. The politics of covenant does not demean or ridicule opponents. It honors the process of reasoning together. It gives special concern to those who most need help, and special honor to those who most give help… Covenant does not, in and of itself, suggest a larger or smaller state. It is not on the right or left of politics. It is, rather a way of thinking about what politics actually represents.”

Sacks concludes, after a sobering reckoning: “[W]e can change. Societies have moved from ‘I’ to ‘We’ in the past. They did it in the nineteenth century. They did so in the twentieth century. They can do so in the future. And it begins with us.”

Saturday, November 20, 2021

A Conversation with Lauren Casper, Author of Loving Well in a Broken World

Lauren Casper is the author of Loving Well in a Broken World: Discovering the Hidden Power of Empathy. She is an essayist, author, and advocate, writing about loss, hope, faith, and social issues and being a good neighbor in a messed up world. 


Fairly early on in your book, you quote Elie Wiesel, who said, “the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.” That’s quite a chillingly thoughtful statement. In your opinion, what does indifference look like at this moment in the 21st Century?

I think it looks much like it has throughout history – ordinary people who are purposefully turning a blind eye to the pain, suffering, and need around them.

 

I love your interpretation of the parable of the Good Samaritan. You write that “[T]his man would have known what it felt like to be despised, tossed aside, and ignored. Instead of seeing only costly inconvenience in a heap of bloodied flesh, the Samaritan saw a physical representation of how he had been treated all his life. He saw more than what was readily visible. He saw a person… a neighbor.”  Why is it so important to see ‘more than what was readily visible.’?

Well, there’s always more to the story than what we can see. We are more than our circumstances – we’re all human beings with stories. Say there’s a kid on the playground being really rough and aggressive with a smaller child. My first instinct might be to go yell at the kid to knock it off, but maybe what I don’t know (don’t see) is that his parents split up and his mom moved away and he’s got all this hurt and anger pent up inside. He’s just a kid and doesn’t know how to express it or work it out, so it comes out on the playground. If I knew all that, my first instinct would be a lot gentler. I’d approach him with compassion and choose my words more carefully. We can choose the gentler approach the first time without knowing the backstory, can’t we? It isn’t always easy, but we can retrain ourselves to pause, remember we don’t know everything, and treat each person in our path with dignity, compassion, and care.

 

You go on to quote Wiesel again, “The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference. Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies. To be in the window and watch people being sent to concentration camps or being attacked in the street and do nothing, that’s being dead.”  Why do you think Wiesel drew a connection between the inability of being able to empathize and being dead?

I think what he was saying, in a much more eloquent way, is that those who can’t empathize are dead inside. If you can watch your neighbor be beaten in the street and sent to die in a concentration camp and do nothing… feel nothing? There’s an essential part of humanity missing in someone when that happens. Not empathizing in those moments chips away at what makes us human.

 


You write about the function of pain. “Our own pain might be the one thing that causes us to stop closing our eyes… It’s easy to ignore or judge suffering when we naively assume it will never be us… I may be a slow learner, but pain is an effective teacher.” I’d never thought of pain this way! Is there anything else you’d like to mention about the ability to feel pain as we go through life?

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about toxic positivity and what that looks like, and how it impacts relationships. I think that when we refuse to feel or acknowledge the hard and painful parts of life in ourselves, it makes us more likely to fall into a toxic positivity trap with others. If we aren’t able to deal with our own pain and deny it or sweep it under the rug, we’ll probably do the same with those around us. Eventually, that makes us untrustworthy friends. In my own life, there are friends I will not go to with hard things because I know I won’t be heard.

 

Your book also touches upon the importance of emotions. “If we are brave enough to honor our emotions, they can point us toward our hurting neighbors and help us to love them well. When we’re honest, our feelings can show us what’s missing in our neighborhood and where a need might be waiting that only we can fill. A world without emotions is a world without grace and compassion. A world without feelings is a world without understanding and care.”  Is it only in western culture that we’re taught to suppress emotions, or is it more widespread? I wonder if, at one point in history, humans began to suppress their emotions as a survival tactic, which, ironically, over time, stopped working?

Those are great questions! I’ve never lived outside of western culture, so I can’t speak to how it is in other parts of the world. I would guess that we aren’t unique in this. The idea of suppressing emotions starting as a survival tactic is really interesting. I think that happens today – especially for those who are experiencing trauma.

 

You point to one solution to the lack of empathy, while including fear in the equation. “It’s the fear of others that causes us to act in ways that are apathetic or even hateful rather than loving. That fear is often because we simply don’t know each other. As a result, our social fabric – locally and globally – is unraveling… Research has shown that our empathy is diminished to the point of being virtually absent when the suffering person is a member of a different social, racial, or cultural group... If we want to love our neighbors, we have to break out of our bubbles.” You give a great example of breaking out of the bubble, with high schoolers engaged in the Project Connection activity. Can you briefly describe how Project Connection works, and the importance of focusing on teens teamed with younger kids with special needs?

Project Connection is an organization started by a local High Schooler. A group of teens volunteer to be partnered with children with disabilities. Each child has at least one teen “buddy.” Once a month there is an event hosted by the teens – last month was a costume party at a local playground. For two hours, the kids get to play with their teen buddy and the benefits to this are mutual. The kids feel important and seen and get to have fun in a safe environment that is catered to their needs and abilities (which is rare in day-to-day life) and the teens get to build relationships with people who experience the world differently than they do. So, whether they realize it or not, they are expanding their worldview.

 


Another example of reaching outside of the bubble is how we choose our friends. One of your best friends is from Afghanistan. Would you like to mention how you met and how you both maintain that friendship?

Zari’s husband and mine went to the same college and knew each other from work. We lived on the same street when we met and our kids were babies at the time. We were both stay-at-home moms and would get together so the kids could socialize and we could have some grown-up conversation. Our husbands are close friends, so there are a lot of family dinners shared together as well. They moved about an hour’s drive away a couple years ago so we are really intentional about maintaining our friendship. We get together about one Saturday a month and our families spend the whole day together. Zari and I text and talk on the phone in-between visits and our boys will have video chats sometimes as well. Our friendship is one of my most treasured relationships.  

 

You lay down a challenge for Christians (actually the same challenge could hold true for anyone). “It may seem uncomfortable, unnatural, and awkward to step out of comfort zones and challenge the status quo, but maybe that’s because we Christians have forgotten that’s what we’re made to do. We weren’t created to live up to society’s standards and remain comfortably in our bubbles; we were made to be misfits and rebels and to embrace the unexpected. If we claim to follow Jesus, there is no other way to live.” Do you ever wonder what our nation, our world, would look like, if more of us stepped outside our bubbles and embraced the unexpected?

I do and I don’t know what it would look like. I hope it would look like a more inclusive, just, and kind society. It might be messier at times. Restoration is hard work, but it’s worthy work.

 

You also include having an accurate sense of history as an important ingredient of empathy. You wrote: “When tales of conquests of land and resources are only told from the colonizers’ perspectives… they become the hero of the story, and the voices of those who were oppressed and enslaved and stolen from are excluded from the narrative. We learn an incomplete history, which prevents us from understanding the struggles some nations and communities face today. So instead of understanding and even repentance, we offer judgment and ridicule.” Do you think this skewed sense of history could be a contributing factor to not being able to identify with those living on the margins and Jesus’ love for them?

Absolutely. When we are fed an incomplete or incorrect story we aren’t able to understand the context of a person’s lived reality.

 

Is there anything else you’d like to mention?

I think any hardship has the potential to help us learn to empathize with those around us. My struggles with anxiety have certainly helped with that, but it’s a double-edged sword. Sometimes my anxiety makes me want to run away and hide from the world. But, there’s a difference between taking breaks for the benefit of my own mental health, and turning a blind eye and embracing indifference because it’s the easier path. Taking breaks to prevent burnout is wise, embracing indifference because it’s more comfortable is selfish. 

Wednesday, November 10, 2021

The Walk Of A Lifetime, 500 Miles on the Camino De Santiago - A Review

John Keats, began his poem, Endymion: “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”

For Russ Eanes, his 500-mile walk along the Camino De Santiago perfectly fits into that category.

Eanes is a walker. And his book, The Walk of a Lifetime, 500 Miles on the Camino De Santiago, records his journey.

He had dreamed of taking this historic pilgrimage for twenty years. Then, at 61 years of age, his life aligned with his dream. In the Spring of 2018, he joined millions of other pilgrims who, over the course of centuries, had walked the trail that spans from the border of France, through northern Spain.

Eanes writes, “My opportunity [to walk the Camino De Santiago] came this past year [2018], not long after I decided to leave my job and take my own year-long, unpaid sabbatical. I had reached 60 and knew it was the time. My last child had graduated from high school and the nest was officially empty. I was too young to retire, but old enough to know that I needed to slow down and reorient my life.”

Throughout The Walk Of A Lifetime, Eanes records his thoughts and heart as he traverses the Camino De Santiago. He blends insight and inspiration as he lets us in on the slice-of-life experiences he encounters along the way.

We learn what it’s like to routinely get up at 6:30 in the morning, with 15 or more miles of walking ahead. Sometimes uphill, sometimes through mountain passes, sometimes through fog, rain, and heat. We find Eanes at the end of the day, more than ready to sleep, most of the time sharing rooms with fellow travelers.

It took Eanes five weeks to complete the journey. All but one of them, he walked by himself – but he was seldom alone.

For Eanes, the trip was never about the actual walking – although this is a man who clearly loves the outdoors. Gradually, his mind slows down, matching the rhythm of his walking and the Camino itself.


With one week left, anticipating his wife Jane joining him, Eanes writes:

“It was a gorgeous day for picture taking. I stopped to take a particular shot of sheep pastures and hills to the south. Every few feet the angle got better, or the light got better, so I stopped, re-framed and focused it, and took another shot. Then I just stopped – it hit me that there was no way that I was going to get the ultimate shot. The calculating, the thinking, were distracting me from the moment. I already had over 2,000 photos from the Camino. I decided that I would commit this time, this place, to memory and recall forever that it was beautiful. No need to record it, except in my memory; no need for another picture. I put the camera away for the time being, along with the guidebook. Thoreau said, “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.” I was rich in scenery, I would be rich in memory; I could “let it alone;” I could do without another picture. I just wanted to drink it all in, let the moment saturate me. And it did.

I dug into my pocket and pulled out my sheet of prayers – I had them memorized, so I really didn’t need it – and as I prayed my morning office, I stopped when I got to this verse in Psalm 37

‘Let the dawn bring news of your faithful love,

For I place my trust in you.

Show me the road I must travel

for you to relieve my heart.’

I repeated the sentence, ‘show me your heart,’ several times. This had been in my prayers for a long time: five years? Ten years? I had prayed it through difficult times of work, through the many pressures of family life, through my many moves, through my inner dis-comfort and mis-fit in society. Who was I? Why was I so different? Where did I fit? What road, what path through life was the way I was supposed to follow? Up until then, I wasn’t certain.

Yet at that moment, in prayer, it hit me: this was the road. This was the road, the Way, but more than the physical road, this was Life itself. Not just the walking, the outdoors, not just the culture: it was all of it wrapped together, having all the time I needed, not being in a hurry, not having any agenda. It was a day to be fully alive, a day I return to over and over in my memory. I knew right then that I should never forget this moment, this answer to prayer.

It was a gift of grace.”

This, perhaps, is the core of Eanes’ book and his message to us. It’s what the Camino is all about. It’s what life is about.

The power of TheWalk of a Lifetime lies in the fact that it isn’t just Russ Eanes’ journey, but that it could also be ours.

Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire!

Pinocchio: Art Credit, Disney If ever there were a time for a national "Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire" award, it's now. And certai...