Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times

by Jonathan Sacks

Maslow himself, in the months before his death in 1970, began to have profound doubts about the movement he had influenced. He had been carrying out tests on those with high scores of self-esteem. What he discovered was that they ‘were more apt to come late to appointments with the experimenter, to be less respectful, more casual, more forward, more condescending’, and various other antisocial behaviours. Carl Rogers, the American psychologist known for his practice of ‘unconditional positive regard’,3 another strand of the self-esteem movement, also had second thoughts, seeing how it encouraged self-indulgence. Eventually he took to writing to those who wanted work at his Institute: ‘Less self-esteem, please. More self-discipline.’

There is a fascinating passage in the Talmud, describing an event in the third century, which tells of a certain rabbi who had the power of healing. When he laid his hand on someone who was ill, he was cured. Then, continues the Talmud, he fell ill himself and sent someone to fetch another rabbi to heal him. Why, asks the Talmud, did he not cure himself? It answers: a prisoner cannot release himself from prison.5 It takes someone else to turn the key that unlocks the door.

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

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.

It is unhealthy to spend several hours a day in front of the screen. Not only does it damage physical and mental health; it is addictive and can cause depression. Not only does it inhibit the acquisition of social skills that any person needs in his or her transactions with the world; it results in shorter attention spans, damaging the capacity for sustained and focused thought. Most fundamentally, it leaves us morally underdeveloped, addicted to a search for popularity that has little to do with character, virtue or anything else, and that is the worst possible training for resilience or happiness in the real world of real people and real relationships.

Some resesrchis now showing that it's not the time spent but what is done and how that's important.

the Cambridge mathematician Alan Turing proposed a test for artificial intelligence. What would a machine have to be able to do for us to be convinced that it is a form of intelligent life? His answer was: we would have to be able to hold an extended conversation with

Further, we needed to not be able to distinguish it from a human. It's the quality of the conversation that matters.

Social media have played a significant part in the move from ‘We’ to ‘I’. In the world they create, I am on the stage, bidding for attention, while others form my audience. This is not how character is made, nor is it how we develop as moral agents. 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. Morality is about engaging with the raw human vulnerabilities of others that lie beneath the carefully burnished image, and about our ability to heal some of the pain. 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.

Levinas believed that moral obligation is born at the moment when we encounter what he called ‘the face of the other’. His view was that some basic act of recognition takes place when we make eye contact with another human being: here is a person to whom I have duties because he or she is a person, even if, in the biblical phrase, they are an orphan, a widow or a stranger. In this immediate, pre-reflective encounter, morality is born. ‘The face speaks to me and thereby invites me to a relation’, he wrote.26 ‘The face opens the primordial discourse whose first word is obligation.’27 It is only when we encounter another human being that we begin to communicate and construct a shared world out of the act of communication: ‘Meaning is the face of the Other, and all recourse to words takes place already within the primordial face-to-face of language.’

To be fully human, we need direct encounters with other human beings. We have to be in their presence, open to their otherness, alert to their hopes and fears, engaged in the minuet of conversation, the delicate back-and-forth of speaking and listening. That is how relationships are made. That is how we become moral beings. That is how we learn to think as ‘We’. This cannot be done electronically.

Marriage is fundamental to society because throughout history it has been the most fundamental way in which we recognise something beyond the ‘I’ of self-interest, namely the ‘We’ of the common good, cooperative relationships, shared identity and collective responsibility.

No one surely wants to go back to the narrow prejudices of the past – loveless marriages, authoritarian families, harsh parenthood and the rest. But our compassion for those who choose to live differently should not inhibit us from being advocates for the single most humanising institution in history. The family – man, woman and child – is not one lifestyle choice among many. It is the best means we have yet discovered for nurturing future generations and enabling children to grow in a matrix of stability and love. It is where we learn the delicate choreography of relationship and how to handle the inevitable conflicts within any human group. It is where we first take the risk of giving and receiving love. It is where one generation passes on its values to the next, ensuring the continuity of a civilisation. For any society, the family is the crucible of its future, and for the sake of our children’s future, we must be its defenders.

A world without shared meanings is one in which it is easy to feel lost.

The absurdity of consumerism has reached a height in the form of fashions and lifestyles adopted by the rich to seem like the exceptionally poor. Hence the fashion for extreme thinness. Throughout history, being thin has been a sign of poverty, and the opposite for wealth. The very words for honour and weight are, in most languages, the same or closely similar. Now these values are reversed. Or take the fashion for wildly expensive ripped jeans designed with great skill to look as if one had nothing else to wear, and they had been worn for years, their colour faded and their fabric torn. You can spend a fortune to look as if you were down and out and needed clothes from a charity shop.

by constantly inflaming our discontents, an advertising-driven, consumer society that ostensibly aims at happiness becomes in the end a system for the production and distribution of unhappiness.

Happiness is good for us, but it is bad for business. Hence we have to be induced to see it as always lying just around the corner, immediately after the next product we buy.

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 Sabbath is in fact one way of living out John Maynard Keynes’s vision of an age of limited work in which leisure becomes a way of celebrating the human spirit. What makes the Sabbath so transformative an institution even today is that it does not involve waiting for the Keynesian moment of the fifteen-hour week to arrive, if indeed it ever does. It takes the utopian future and translates it into now, making it still the most effective form of work–life balance ever devised. It is a day of gratitude, when the restlessness of the week subsides and we find refuge in an oasis of rest.

Utopian politics, whether in its Rousseau-inspired French revolutionary form or its later Marxist version, eventually becomes a dystopian nightmare, and sooner rather than later.

Not everything collective is political. Some of it is moral, a matter not of power but of conscience, duty and virtue. This is where the moral life is at its strongest, where we are constantly exercising our altruistic muscles, and where we form the friendships and loves that redeem us from our solitude.

In Mary Ann Glendon’s words, ‘the new rhetoric of rights is less about human dignity and freedom than about insistent, unending desires’. Rights talk, she says, ‘easily accommodates the economic, the immediate, and the personal dimensions of the problem, while it regularly neglects the moral, the long-term, and the social implications’.

Populist politics is (to adapt the words of Marx) ‘the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions’. But populism is unlikely to deliver redemption.

Populist politics involves magical thinking. The belief that a strong leader, with contempt for the democratic process, divisive rhetoric, relaxed about the truth or otherwise of his or her utterances, ignoring the conventions of normal politics, appealing directly to the people, blaming the state of the nation on some subgroup of the nation, or perhaps on neighbouring nations and peoples, and speaking not to the better angels of our nature but to the worst, can restore a nation’s former greatness – that is magical thinking.

It is genuinely sad to see how, almost without people noticing, Britain and the United States have abandoned their own unique tradition, that of Locke and Jefferson, and instead embraced the Rousseau-esque French revolutionary model of rights as claims against the state, instead of rights as the protection of individuals from the state, so that they could achieve by their own local, cooperative, altruistic efforts what politics and power cannot achieve, namely a devolved sense of responsibility for the welfare of others.

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 myriad local contexts, the face-to-face care and compassion that constitute the good society.

identity politics is a clear and present danger to liberal democracy. It fragments the body politic and balkanises society. It discourages talk about the common good. It can quickly turn into the politics of grievance and competitive victimhood. This creates a vicious circle of social divisions leading to divisive politics that deepen and harden social divisions. It is one of the causes of the Us-versus-Them mentality that leads to populism, which itself, as we have seen, is a warning signal of democracy in danger.

to heal the trauma, a determined effort was made by the thinkers of the Enlightenment to abolish identity in the name of the universal.

All three movements offered a strong sense of belonging in place of the abstract, identity-less, human-being-as-such that was the human person as understood by eighteenth-century rationalism. This was one of the great transformations in the history of the West, from the Age of Reason to that of Romanticism and Revolution. In place of the universal came a new sense of the particular, whether defined by nation, race or class. Instead of focusing on what united humanity, thinkers started to focus on what makes us different. These ideas, born in the nineteenth century, bore bitter fruit in the twentieth. Nationalism gave rise to two world wars. Racism led directly to the Holocaust. Marxism led to Stalin, the Gulag and the KGB. If we add Chinese Communism to the mix, collectively these movements led to the loss of some 100 million human lives.

‘Sharing a common identity builds support for inclusion; bringing differences of ethnic and religious identity to the fore evokes the very exclusionary reactions it is meant to avoid.’

Identity politics deepens the fragmentation caused by multiculturalism, adding to it not just culture and ethnicity but also other forms of identity based on gender and sexual orientation. There is a real danger here of the splitting of society into self-segregating, non-communicating ghettoes. One of its axioms is that ‘Only a member of my group can understand my pain.’ This is the very opposite of Terence’s dictum ‘I think nothing human alien to me.’ Over three hundred years the West has, with some success, developed an ethic of tolerance and respect for difference, and in a liberal society the prejudice and discrimination that undoubtedly still exist are to be fought wherever they occur. But that is precisely incompatible with an identity politics that builds walls around minorities, allowing no one else to enter, and at the same time insists on recognition from the wider society. As Mark Lilla told students at Rutgers University in 2016, ‘You cannot tell people simultaneously, “You must understand me” and “You cannot understand me.” ’8

This reaction against liberal individualism, like the nineteenth-century reactions against Enlightenment universalism, will end in tragedy. It turns difference into exclusion and suspicion. It builds walls, not bridges. It abdicates the hard work of understanding, respecting and working with and for the people not like us. It encourages a mindset of victimhood and oppression. It abandons ideas of the common ground and the common good.

identity politics is the latest chapter in 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.

By being what we uniquely are, we contribute to society what only we can give.

because of the rise of the far right to meet the newly resurgent far left, it becomes very urgent indeed that we recall George Orwell’s fundamental distinction between patriotism and nationalism. Nationalism, which he opposed, is ‘inseparable from the will to power’. Its abiding purpose is to secure ever more prestige for the nation: ‘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’.11

If there is no such thing as a national moral community, if civil society atrophies and dies while all that is left are the competitive arenas of the market and the state, then liberal democracy is in danger.

Complex systems are unpredictable.

Chaos theory tells us that any complex system is unpredictable, and humanity is certainly a complex system.

we have a problem at the very heart of utilitarianism: we have no way of knowing what the long-term consequences of any decision will be, especially when many people will be affected.

The law of unintended consequences will always defeat our best intentions.

You will hear people arguing with absolute certainty that they are sure that a development is safe, and it may be years, decades before the danger ensues. That is what Hayek meant by ‘the fatal conceit’. That is how good people make bad decisions.

Unless we have resolve in the present, we will be bequeathing future generations a planet with rising temperatures, more extreme weather patterns, longer and more extreme droughts, warmer ocean temperatures, more intense tropical storms, melting sea ice, shrinking glaciers, rising sea levels, plastic-polluted oceans, air-polluted cities, low-lying coastal regions rendered uninhabitable, and extinctions of animal and plant species on an almost unprecedented scale.

A world of truth is a world of trust, and vice versa. In it, there is something larger than individuals seeking their own interest. Truth becomes the intellectual equivalent of a public space that we can all inhabit, whatever our desires and predilections. It was only when science developed ways of testing the truth of hypotheses by experiment, evidence and evaluation that knowledge became more than opinion and real progress could be made in this arena. Where there is honesty – truth and truthfulness – there tends to be law, order and prosperity. A respect for truth is essential for authority, collaborative endeavour and human graciousness. But it requires humility. I have to be able to recognise that certain facts are true even though they challenge my convictions. I have to acknowledge that there is something larger than me.

The Internet has not yet developed a reliable ethic of truth.

The resultant filtering out of opposing views leads to a mistrust and deepening lack of understanding of those whose opinions are not like ours. Differences become divides. We begin to inhabit disconnected islands of the likeminded.

the difference between the mafia and a postmodernist was that the mafia makes you an offer you can’t refuse; a postmodernist makes you an offer you can’t understand.

In a world without truth, fake news and alternative facts flourish because there is nothing else, nothing that stands above the conflicting voices and clashing narratives. Truth was defeated in theory long before it was destroyed by social media.

Where truth dies, there dies trust.

In the absence of accountability to the truth, all that is left is spin, obfuscation, denial, and the manipulation of public opinion.

It was Nietzsche who foresaw what was likely to happen. When people gave up their faith in religion, it would not be religion alone that they would lose. They would lose morality, and with it a concern for truth, and then even science would lose its authority. Science, he said, can only function if we bring to it a prior conviction: ‘The question whether truth is needed must not only have been affirmed in advance, but affirmed to such a degree that the principle, the faith, the conviction finds expression: Nothing is needed more than truth, and in relation to it, everything else has only second-rate value.’

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.