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May 16 - May 30, 2021
Not everything collective is political. Some of it is moral, a matter not of power but of conscience, duty and virtue.
What happens when civil society grows weak and all that is left are the market and the state? That is when people begin to make demands of the state that the state cannot satisfy. The state cannot create strong families or supportive communities. It cannot provide children with stable and responsible parents. It can finance schools, but it cannot create inspiring teachers. It cannot generate the work ethic, self-control and resilience that are vital if individuals are to escape the vicious circle of poverty and unemployment and lead lives of happiness and hope.
If we continue to adopt the French model of rights and stop believing in the existence of a significant arena of individual responsibility, we will lose the sense of common morality that finds its natural home in families and communities. We will be left only with the market and the state. The market cannot deliver distributive justice. The state cannot deliver dignity and resilience, civility and responsibility, for and in its citizens. The state can deliver much: health, welfare, education, defence and the rule of law. But it cannot deliver the active citizenship that creates, daily, in
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the long story of the West from the Reformation to today. It began with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment escape from particular identities to a universal humanism. This led to the nineteenth-century Counter-Enlightenment in the form of nationalism, racism and Marxism. In the 1960s an escape began from group identities into individualism, and since the 1980s there has been a counter-reaction in the form, first of multiculturalism, then of identity politics.
Society is about the moral values we share. The state is about the pursuit and application of power.
‘Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.’ Patriotism, by contrast, he defined as ‘devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force upon other people’.
John Stuart Mill in his 1859 essay, On Liberty, where he stated that ‘the only purpose for which our power can be rightfully exercised over any member of the civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.’
Sometimes the fate of a life depends on the ability to say and hear the word No.
What makes climate change so significant in this context is that it highlights the fatal weakness of an I-centred culture, where the major institutions of the market and the state are the only recognised authorities.
Morality makes a difference to the way we think about problems and their solution. It shifts us from self-interest to concern for the common good, and from a narrow focus on immediate gain to more distant horizons. We need to be able to think in this collective, long-term way if we are to avoid the short-sightedness that led people to think that you could abandon morality without paying a momentous price.
We need space in our lives to gather collective wisdom about the common good, and to consider sacrifice now for the sake of benefit in generations to come.
Where there is a strong moral arena independent of the pursuit of wealth or power, the market or the state, then truth stands a chance of surviving intact against the assaults that will from time to time be made against it.
A world of truth is a world of trust, and vice versa.
A respect for truth is essential for authority, collaborative endeavour and human graciousness. But it requires humility.
‘Comment is free’, said C.P. Scott of the Manchester Guardian in 1921, ‘but facts are sacred.’
‘Everyone is entitled to his own opinion,’ said Daniel Patrick Moynihan, ‘but not to his own facts.’
Differences become divides. We begin to inhabit disconnected islands of the likeminded.
Without moral commitment, the still small voice of truth is inaudible beneath the cacophony of lies, half-truths, obfuscations and evasions.
Without truth, no trust; without trust, no society. Truth and trust create a world we can share.
challenged every day, and in every way.
(responding to insults is a feature of honour cultures; dignity cultures encourage people not to take things personally).
the very idea of the university as a moral space has become attenuated, and in its place – as with society as a whole – come the values of the market (the university as a production-line of career-enabling qualifications) and the state (the university as the arena of a struggle for power).
Populism is the politics of disappointment, resentment and fear.
Dismiss a contrary view and you impoverish the entire culture.
First they built a future. Only then did they allow themselves to remember the past.
To survive tragedy and trauma, first build the future. Only then, remember the past.
Suffering, Eger says in her book, is universal, but victimhood is optional.
Often we cannot choose what happens to us, but we can always choose how to react. We are never defined by events. To allow ourselves to be so defined is to hand sovereignty over our own lives to others.
The power of the drama lies in the fact that everything the characters do to circumnavigate fate only brings them closer to its realisation. That is the essence of Greek tragedy. Human freedom is an illusion destined to be shattered on the unyielding rock of inevitability.
There are tragic cultures and there are hope cultures, and, though some combine elements of both, the two are ultimately incompatible. In hope cultures, we are agents. We choose. All depends on what we decide, and that cannot be known in advance. In tragic cultures, we are victims. We are acted on by forces beyond our control, and they will eventually defeat even the strongest.
Guilt cultures conceive of morality as a voice within – the voice of conscience that tells us whether or not we have done wrong. Shame cultures think of morality as an external demand – what other people expect of us.
The most primitive experiences of shame are ‘connected with sight and being seen’, but it has been interestingly suggested that ‘guilt is rooted in hearing, the sound in oneself of the voice of judgement; it is the moral sentiment of the word’.
Judaism, with its belief in an invisible God who created the world with words, is an attempt to base the moral life on something other than public opinion, appearance, honour and shame.
about politics: that it exists to reconcile the conflicting desires and aspirations of people within a polity, and to do so without violence, through reasoned and respectful debate, listening to, while not agreeing with, opposing views, and trying as far as possible to serve the common good.
Be wary of an age in which people find war a solution to the decadence of peace.
five features of social media: First, it is anonymous. You don’t have to give your true name, or reveal your real identity. Second, it is invisible. You don’t see the people you are insulting, and they don’t see you. Third, it is not done in real time. It is asynchronous. There is a time gap between your saying what you have to say and others hearing it. Fourth, it is unregulated. There are no ground rules. Fifth, and most important, it is not face to face, the mode in which all our most important communications are governed by everything that we have inherited in terms of interpersonal
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This is the Jewish equivalent to the story of Socrates. The Delphic Oracle proclaimed Socrates the wisest in Athens because although he knew nothing, everyone else also knew nothing, whereas Socrates alone knew that he knew nothing. The Jewish variant states that we all know something, and the wisest is the one who knows that we all know something, and is therefore willing to learn from everyone, for none of us knows all the truth, but each of us knows some of
Hence the three principles of civility: 1. For there to be justice, all sides must be heard. 2. Truth on earth cannot aspire to be truth as it is in heaven. All truth on earth represents a perspective, and there are multiple perspectives. 3. The alternative to argument is violence. That is why the argument must continue and never cease.
power of decision is what makes us moral agents, and humans will always have it in a way that mere algorithms as such do not.
The secular equivalents of religious ecstasy are sports events and rock concerts. But these are disconnected, one-off events, with no underlying unity. They are momentarily thrilling but not ultimately fulfilling. They offer distraction but not meaning, escape but not engagement. The big issues of life have been replaced by entertainment. Is that enough?
pagan cultures experience meaning as fate. Axial cultures, such as the great monotheisms, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, experience it as faith. Postmodern cultures, though, dismiss it as fiction.
Fiction has no reality outside the self, they say, which is why it can provide us with distraction but not with meaning. It can allow us to escape enjoyably from the world, but it is not in itself a mode of engagement with the world. That, it seems to me, is an impoverished view of the nature of stories and the unique human gift of narrative understanding.
In the context of a life, a story is not merely fiction. It is the pursuit of meaning.
the human mind has two primary modalities: science, which takes things apart to see how they work, and religion, which puts things together to see what they mean.
We are, in large measure, the story we tell about ourselves, which means that we are always a work in process. Nor do we construct our story out of nothing.
Yet what narrative does is to show us how the future can redeem the past, how what seems like a disaster now can turn out to have been a turning point in the journey whose final destination is more remarkable than might have been otherwise.
George Bernard Shaw, who said, ‘You see things and say, “Why?” But I dream things that never were, and say “Why not?”
Life is a story. It is our response to the call of suffering in the world.
in any form of collective life, there will be a need for both competition and cooperation. Morality is the domain of cooperation. It is the place where we set competition aside and say, explicitly or implicitly: let us work together for the common good.
we hand on our genes to the next generation as individuals, but only survive as members of groups.
