Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times

by Jonathan Sacks

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.”

now our children and grandchildren are paying the price of abandoning a shared moral code: divided societies, dysfunctional politics, high rates of drug abuse and suicide, increasingly unequal economies, a loss of respect for truth and the protocols of reasoning together, and the many other incivilities of contemporary life.

the pursuit of the right and the good is not about self but about the process of unselfing, of seeing the world for what it is, not for what we feel or fear it to be, and responding to it appropriately.

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.

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.

Somehow, almost without noticing it, in the past half-century, the French model has come to dominate both Britain and America. Rights have ceased to be restrictions on the scope of the state, and have become instead entitlements, demands for action by the state.