Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times

by Jonathan Sacks

A free society is a moral achievement.

Societal freedom cannot be sustained by market economics and liberal democratic politics alone. It needs a third element: morality, a concern for the welfare of others, an active commitment to justice and compassion, a willingness to ask not just what is good for me but what is good for all-of-us-together. It is about ‘Us’, not ‘Me’; about ‘We’, not ‘I’.

Freedom itself will be at risk from the far right and the far left, the far right dreaming of a golden age that never was, the far left dreaming of a utopia that will never be.

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’

All countries and cultures have three basic institutions. There is the economy, which is about the creation and distribution of wealth. There is the state, which is about the legitimisation and distribution of power. And there is the moral system, which is the voice of society within the self; the ‘We’ within the ‘I’; the common good that limits and directs our pursuit of private gain.

Whatever its source, morality is what allows us to get on with one another, without endless recourse to economics or politics. There are times when we seek to get other people to do something we want or need them to do. We can pay them to do so: that is economics. We can force them to do so: that is politics. Or we can persuade them to do so because they and we are part of the same framework of virtues and values, rules and responsibilities, codes and customs, conventions and constraints: that is morality.

Morality achieves something almost miraculous, and fundamental to human achievement and liberty. It creates trust.

There are moral choices and there are the consequences of those choices. The market gives us choices, and morality itself is just a set of choices in which right or wrong have no meaning beyond the satisfaction or frustration of desire. The result is that we find it increasingly hard to understand why there might be things we want to do, can afford to do, and have a legal right to do, that nonetheless we should not do because they are unjust or dishonourable or disloyal or demeaning: in a word, unethical. Ethics is reduced to economics.

A free society is a moral achievement, and it is made by us and our habits of thought, speech and deed.

When there is no shared morality, there is no society.

That is because these are social goods: goods that exist by sharing. These are goods that have a moral or spiritual dimension, and they have this rare quality that the more we share, the more we have. That is why the market and the state, the fields of economics and politics, are arenas of competition, while morality is the arena of cooperation.

health is not a matter of never being ill. It is the ability to recover.

There is no liberty without morality, no freedom without responsibility, no viable ‘I’ without the sustaining ‘We’.

When ‘I’ prevails over ‘We’, loneliness follows.

For any social institution to exist, we must be prepared to make sacrifices for the sake of the relationship or the group. That is true of marriage, parenthood, membership in a community or citizenship in a nation. In these environments we enter a world of We-consciousness, in which we ask, not what is best for me but what is best for all-of-us-together.

You cannot build a social world out of a multiplicity of I’s.

Morality places a limit on individualism. Those who seek the benefit of the group must pay the price.

A leader cannot be in the fray and above it at the same time.

we should not ask ourselves what we want from life. We should ask ourselves, what does life want from us.7 There is a difference between the call from within and the call from outside: it is the difference between ambition and vocation

That is what gives morality its unique power, central to the human condition. We are capable of two quite different experiences: call them the ‘I’ and the ‘Me’. I am both subject and object. I feel my feelings as only I can feel them. That is the ‘I’ as subject. But I can also stand outside my feelings and pass critical judgement on them. That is the ‘Me’ as object. Standing outside, ‘I’ take into account other factors: the feelings of others, the likely consequences of my deeds, the duties and responsibilities I carry, and so on. This means that humans are capable of second-order evaluations

Morality is the capacity to care for others. It is a journey beyond the self.

This is not to criticise self-help. But, in the end, we each have to take responsibility for our lives. The decisions, the willpower, the stamina and resilience are up to us. But for most of us, it is other people who make the necessary difference to our lives, guiding us, inspiring us, lifting us and giving us hope. It is the quality of our relationships that more than anything gives us a sense of meaning and fulfilment.10 Most important of all, it is the ability to love that lifts us beyond the self and its confines. Love is the supreme redemption of solitude.

Something is missing when human interaction is no longer face to face: the whole affective dimension that makes us living, breathing, feeling persons in relation with other persons. One of the prevailing assumptions in an age of science and technology is that communication is about the exchange of information – in which case it doesn’t matter whether it is done face to face, or by letter, or email or text. Information I wanted to hand on to you has now been received by you. But it isn’t so. True communication involves personal presence.

Speech is the medium of relationship.

Morality is born when I focus on you, not me; when I discover that you, too, have emotions, desires, aspirations and fears. I learn this by being present to you and allowing you to be present to me. It is this deeply subtle interaction that we learn slowly and patiently through ongoing conversations with family, friends, peers, teachers, mentors and others. We develop empathy and sympathy. We learn what it is to receive acts of kindness and then to reciprocate them.

I learn to be moral when I develop the capacity to put myself into your place, and that is a skill I only learn by engaging with you, face to face or side by side.

In a contract, two or more individuals, each pursuing their own interest, come together to make an exchange for mutual benefit.

In a covenant, two or more individuals, each respecting the dignity and integrity of the other, come together in a bond of love and trust, to share their interests, sometimes even to share their lives, by pledging their faithfulness to one another, to do together what neither can achieve alone.

A contract is a transaction. A covenant is a relationship. Or to put it slightly differently: a contract is about interests. A covenant is about identity. It is about you and me coming together to form an ‘Us’. That is why contracts benefit, but covenants transform. Covenant is about the logic of cooperation. That is what differentiates marriage and the family from economics and politics, the market and the state, which are about the logic of competition.

In the course of its evolution, a unique challenge was posed to Homo sapiens by two factors: we stood upright, which constricted the female pelvis, and we had bigger brains – a 300 per cent increase – which meant larger heads. So human babies had to be born more prematurely than any other species, and thus needed parental protection for much longer. This made parenting more demanding among humans than among other species, the work of two people rather than one.

The revolutionary shift from ‘We’ to ‘I’ means that everything that once consecrated the moral bonds binding us to one another – faith, creed, culture, custom and convention – no longer does so. The energy now localised in the ‘I’ has been diverted from family, congregation and community, all of which have now grown weak, leaving us vulnerable and alone.

That is the price of radical individualism, massively accelerated by smartphones, social media and the loss of contexts in which we form enduring moral commitments. Everything has become immediate, transactional and presentational. We hide behind our profile and become the masks we wear.

We need a little more ‘We’ and a little less ‘I’ if we are to negotiate some of the challenges the present century still has in store for us.

Business, he had told me some years earlier, is not about short-term profit, but about long-term benefit to the public, shareholders and employees alike.

The market economy has generated more real wealth, eliminated more poverty and liberated more human creativity than any other economic system. The fault is not with the market itself, but with the idea that the market alone is all we need. Markets do not guarantee equity, responsibility or integrity. They can maximise short-term gain at the cost of long-term sustainability. They cannot be relied upon to distribute rewards fairly. They cannot guarantee honesty. When confronted with flagrant self-interest, they combine the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity. Markets need morals, and morals are not made by markets.

Markets were made to serve us; we were not made to serve markets. Economics needs ethics.

Markets do not survive by market forces alone. They depend on respect for the people affected by our decisions. Lose that and we will lose not just money and jobs but something more significant still: freedom, trust and decency, the things that have a value, not a price.

eudaemonia, his term for happiness. This central idea was for him inextricably connected with the moral life. Happiness is, he said, an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue. It is a matter of living well and faring well.

This was an important shift, from eudaemonia, happiness as a state of being-and-doing, to hedonia, a state of feeling, the pursuit of pleasure.

a consumer society focuses attention on what we do not (yet) have, rather than on what we do.

A consumer society, in short, encourages us to spend money we don’t have, on products we don’t need, for a happiness that won’t last. The reason such happiness does not last lies in the fundamental difference between hedonic happiness, a momentary feeling of pleasurable sensation, and eudaemonic happiness, which is the lasting feeling brought by having lived a good, meaningful and worthy life.

a person’s true happiness consists only in wisdom, and the knowledge of the truth, not at all in the fact that he is wiser than others, or that others lack such knowledge: such considerations do not increase his wisdom or true happiness.

Gratitude is the opposite of the mindset of a market-led, consumer society. It is about satisfaction with what we have, not hunger for what we do not have.

Far more than what we buy or earn or own, happiness is a matter of what we do, what we are and how we relate to others.

Joy is happiness shared.

The Sabbath is a focused one-day-a-week antidote to the market mindset. It is dedicated to the things that have a value but not a price. It is the supremely non-market day.

The Sabbath is one way of setting limits to the market and its mindset, focusing on the dimension of time. There are other ways, too: values such as loyalty that are not sacrificed to the pursuit of profit; aspects of happiness that derive not from what we earn or own or buy but from what we contribute to the lives of others; and gratitude for what we have rather than yearning for what we do not have.

The democratic institutions we have inherited from the past were made for a different age and a slower pace of change. Technology moves fast, while the democratic process is slow. The problems we face today, economic, social and environmental, are global, while our most effective political structures are at best national. It would be astonishing if our democratic structures were not strained under such circumstances.

The American Declaration states: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness . . .’ The French Declaration begins: ‘Men are born and remain free and equal in rights.’

on the Anglo-American model there are three key social arenas: the state, individuals, and civil society. It is the third sector, civil society, that is seen as most vital to the health of democracy, because that is where we come together at a local level, forming moral communities where people help one another in face-to-face and side-by-side relationships, to do together what we cannot do alone. It is this area, smaller than the state but bigger than the individual, that creates and sustains what Tocqueville called the ‘art of association’, and that he held to be the necessary ‘apprenticeship of liberty’.