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| Rabbi Jonathan Sacks/Times of Israel |
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.”
“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.”
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