Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times

by Jonathan Sacks

university was a place where you listened respectfully to views radically opposed to your own, in the knowledge that others would listen respectfully to yours.

Not always the case now!

(responding to insults is a feature of honour cultures; dignity cultures encourage people not to take things personally).

it is hard to see how the concept of micro-aggression can be made morally coherent. If I do not intend to offend you, how can I be held guilty for disturbing your hypersensitivity that reads into my words something that was neither meant nor would have been so understood by most people?

In some respects, obviously, tolerance has won many important battles, in relation to respect for gender and sexual orientation in particular. Yet after several decades of non-judgementalism, moral relativism and expressive individualism, we now have in their place judgementalism and moral absolutism, based on something as primordial as group identity. The new intolerance is ugly and regressive.

The ideal of the university used to be of a moral community, collectively engaged in the collaborative pursuit of truth. To be sure, doubtless it often fell far below that standard. But 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).

Indignation becomes a potent political weapon when power prevails over the ethos of learning.

everything Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is designed to minimise, contemporary campus politics is designed to maximise, with great potential harm. So, for example, students are encouraged to engage in mind reading, attributing thoughts to speakers who may have no such idea in mind. They catastrophise, believing that terrible events are about to happen. They label, seeing individuals in stereotyped form. They engage in dichotomous thinking: you are either on my side or the other side. There is no nuance, no complexity, just with-me or against-me. They over-generalise, seeing a universal law, instead of an isolated occurrence. And so on.

That is what happens when we exercise our right not to be offended. Our safe space is created by confining someone else to the ghetto, or worse.

Nietzsche rightly warned that when truth dies, all that is left is the will to power. The first place where this comes to light is the university, the home if not of truth itself then at least of the pursuit of truth. There are indeed injustices in society; there are prejudices; there are disadvantaged minorities. Their case must be heard and their battles fought. But that belongs to the domain of politics. It is not, and should not be, the domain of academia. There is a difference between truth and power. They have different logics and different homes.

The university must be the guardian of open debate, courteous argument, civil speaking and respectful listening. It must provide space for dissenting minds and for voices that challenge our comfortable assumptions. It must teach us to distinguish truth from falsehood, cogent argument from sophistry, the presentation of evidence from mere passion and persuasion. Never must it fall into the ‘intellectual organisation of political hatreds’ that reduced European universities to moral bankruptcy in the 1920s and 1930s, for if it does so it will have betrayed its mandate to protect our political freedoms by defending intellectual freedom.

Against the outer wall of the BBC’s new Broadcasting House in London there stands a statue of George Orwell, and engraved above is a sentence he wrote, in very much the same spirit: ‘If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’

No institution that denies a hearing to the other side can be a vehicle for justice, the furtherance of knowledge or the pursuit of truth.

Even the good have failings; even the bad have saving graces.

you cannot bring about change in a free society by indignation, condemnation, character assassination and self-righteousness, all communicated by social media. You change the world by changing people, and you change people by engaging with them, recognising that they too are people with values and ideals of their own.

Populism is the politics of disappointment, resentment and fear.

In argument for the sake of truth, if you win, you win, but if you lose, you also win, because being defeated by the truth is the only defeat that is also a victory. We are enlarged thereby.

In an argument for the sake of victory, if you lose, you lose, but if you win, you also lose, for by diminishing your opponents, you diminish yourself.

The entire thrust of postmodernism, inspired by Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, is to develop a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ in which there is no truth, only victory. Every argument is a (concealed) exercise of power, an attempt to establish a ‘hegemonic discourse’.

There is such a thing as truth, and collaborative argument in pursuit of it. That is the basis of trust on which all genuine communication depends.

When academic freedom dies, the death of other freedoms follows.

A free society depends on the dignity of dissent.

Dismiss a contrary view and you impoverish the entire culture.

A healthy culture protects places that welcome argument and respect dissenting views. Enter them and you will grow, others will grow, and you will do great things together. But resist with all your heart and soul any attempt to substitute power for truth. And stay far from people, movements and parties that demonise their opponents. As Barack Obama said: ‘If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far.’

To survive tragedy and trauma, first build the future. Only then, remember the past.

There is a fateful difference between the two. I can’t change the past. But I can change the future. Looking only back, I will see myself as an object acted on by forces largely beyond my control. Looking forward, I see myself as a subject, a choosing moral agent, deciding which path to take from here to where I want eventually to be. Both are legitimate ways of thinking, but one leads to resentment, bitterness, rage and a desire for revenge. The other leads to challenge, courage, strength of will and self-control.

What is new and dangerous is the culture of victimhood. It involves the blurring of the boundaries between the personal and the political. It has to do with what Philip Rieff called ‘the triumph of the therapeutic’.

the very basis of liberal democracy, which is built on the threefold separation between nation, group and individual: between state, civil society and private life.

Viktor Frankl, another survivor of Auschwitz, who said that in the death camps they took away every freedom except one: the freedom to decide how to respond.

Suffering, Eger says in her book, is universal, but victimhood is optional.

‘There is a difference’, she says, ‘between victimisation and victimhood.’ All of us are likely to be victimised at some stage. We will suffer abuse, injury, ill fortune or failure. We live exposed to forces beyond our control. Victimisation comes from the outside. But victimhood comes from the inside. ‘No one can make you a victim but you.’ We develop a particular kind of mindset, ‘a way of thinking and being that is rigid, blaming, pessimistic, stuck in the past, unforgiving, punitive, and without healthy limits or boundaries’. We become ‘our own jailors’.

victimisation comes from the outside, often in the form of forces we cannot control. But healing comes when we refuse the self-definition of victim.

There is always a choice. 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 essence of Greek tragedy. Human freedom is an illusion destined to be shattered on the unyielding rock of inevitability. The Judeo-Christian ethic, by contrast, is about guilt and responsibility.

There is no fate that is inevitable, no future pre-determined, no outcome we cannot avert. There is always a choice.

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. The only redemption of victimhood is to refuse that self-definition. In the long run no good can come of it, for it belongs to a world of tragedy. It divides us into victims and oppressors – and we are always the victims, while the others are the oppressors.

The choice of freedom brings the defeat of victimhood and the redemptive birth of hope.

Social media has, in effect, brought back public shaming, the kind of rough justice that occurred before the modern age, or may still occur in places where law enforcement is felt to be ineffective and vigilante groups enforce community norms without any formally constituted legal authority.

The problem with vigilante justice is that it follows no legal norms. There is no due process. The accused has little chance of presenting his or her case. There is no impartial procedure for deciding whether a wrong has been committed and, if so, what should be the appropriate punishment. Instead, there is mob rule. And once the mob has been let loose, it becomes difficult to distinguish between genuine cases of wrongdoing, and other accusations motivated by malice, or a desire for revenge, or some other less than fully moral cause.

‘zealotry is often fuelled by people working out their psychological wounds’.

Shaming is an ancient response to wrongdoing that began long before the establishment of courts of law and judicial procedures.

the reappearance of revenge as a force, courtesy of social media, is a massive social regression. So too is the re-emergence of a shame culture – public dishonouring without trial, due process, pleas in mitigation, proportionality and the possibility of forgiveness.

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. To feel shame is to experience or imagine what one looks like in the sight of others who pass judgement on us. Shame cultures are other-directed. Guilt cultures are inner-directed.

Guilt cultures make a sharp distinction between the sinner and the sin. The act may be wrong, but the agent’s integrity as a person remains intact. That is why guilt can be relieved by remorse, confession, restitution, and the resolve never to behave that way again. In guilt cultures there is repentance and forgiveness. Shame is not like that. It is a stain on the sinner that cannot be fully removed. A shame culture does not provide forgiveness; it offers something similar but different, namely appeasement, usually accompanied by an act of self-abasement. In a guilt culture it makes sense to confess your sins. In a shame culture it makes no sense at all – instead it becomes all-important to cover up your wrongdoing by any means possible. As Herbert Morris puts it: ‘With guilt, we are disposed to confess; with shame to hide. We seem to rid ourselves of guilt, when we are fortunate enough to do so, by restoration; we seem to rid ourselves of shame by changing ourselves.’5

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. As God tells Samuel, ‘The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart’ (1 Sam. 16:7). Hence the ethic of the divine word; hence the key term in Judaism, Shema: ‘hear’ or ‘listen’. Hence the importance of the inner voice, of conscience, of guilt rather than shame; of repentance, not rejection; of forgiveness rather than appeasement; of the integrity of the individual regardless of his or her deeds. This was, and remains, one of the most revolutionary shifts in the history of ethics, and Western civilisation owes a great deal to it.

‘dining with the opposition’. This was civility in its deepest sense.

Civility is more than good manners. It is a recognition that violent speech leads to violent deeds; that listening respectfully to your opponents is a necessary part of the politics of a free society; and that liberal democracy, predicated as it is on the dignity of diversity, must keep the peace between contending groups by honouring us all equally, in both our diversity and our commonalities. All politics is about the pursuit of power, but liberal democratic politics carries with it a special responsibility to use that power for the dignity of each and the good of all.

if you associate with people who share your views, you will all become progressively more extreme.

There cannot be justice if there has been no speech in defence of the accused.

when two propositions conflict it is not necessarily because one is true, the other false. It may be, and often is, that each represents a different perspective on reality, an alternative way of structuring order, no more and no less commensurable – nor contradictory – than a Shakespeare sonnet, a Michelangelo painting and a Schubert sonata.

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.