Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times

by Jonathan Sacks

What has happened in the past half-century has been precisely what de Tocqueville feared. It took a long time to appear, precisely because of the strength of the institutions on which he discerned American democratic freedom to rest: religion, community, family, and the sense of the nation as a moral community. As these eroded from the 1960s onward, individualism was left as the order of the day, and so it is today. The individual trumps society. The “I” prevails over the “We.” We have the market and the state, the two arenas of competition, one for wealth, the other for power, but nothing else, no arena of cooperation that would bridge the difference between the wealthy and powerful and the poor and powerless. No social animal lives like this. No society has ever survived like this for very long, not even the greatest: not ancient Greece, not the Rome of antiquity, not Renaissance Italy. In each of these three cases, the release from traditional moral restraints for a while unleashed a burst of energy and creativity, but was too quickly followed by decline and fall. A society of individualists is unsustainable. We are built for cooperation, not just competition. In the end, with the market and the state but no substantive society to link us to our fellow citizens in bonds of collective responsibility, trust and truth erode, economics becomes inequitable, and politics becomes unbearable.