Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times

by Jonathan Sacks

the multiple consequences of a single underlying shift in the ethos of the West. Climate change has many causes and symptoms: greenhouse gases, toxic emissions, the loss of tropical rainforests, rising sea levels, the melting of ice caps and glaciers, the proliferation of extreme weather conditions, the extinction of species of plant and animal life and the threat to many more. Different though these are, they are all part of a single phenomenon: global warming. Likewise, divisive politics, inequitable economics, the loss of openness in universities, and the growth of depression and drug abuse are the result of what I call cultural climate change. They are the long-term consequences of the unprecedented experiment embarked on throughout the West a half-century ago: the move from ‘We’ to ‘I’