Conference back40::soapbox

837.0. "It is time to return to the Judeo-Christian ethic" by COVERT::COVERT (John R. Covert) Sun Feb 23 1997 20:18

               Tradition and the politics of Babel

     Jonathan Sacks, the British Chief Rabbi, traces the origins of
     our political crisis to the eclipse of Judaeo-Christian
                morality since the Enlightenment
                                                         

The Politics of Hope is an unusual, in fact unique, book for a Chief Rabbi 
to have written.  It is not about Judaism.  It is written, not for Jews 
especially, but for all of us as members of a liberal democratic society.  
It is not about religion, except in the most general sense that its central 
concern is about how we can learn to live peaceably, responsibly and 
graciously together � a concern which morality, politics, religion and 
secular humanism all share.  To write it, I have had, as it were, to 
disrobe and immerse myself in literatures I had never before studied.  I 
did so because of my concern about certain acute structural weaknesses in 
contemporary society, and my dismay at the quality and depth of our public 
conversation as we approach the millennium and think about our collective 
future.  The book is about a certain kind of crisis within Western liberal 
democracies, and how it might be overcome by a new and more effective style 
of politics.

My argument can be stated simply.  There are two concepts of a free 
society, one liberal, the other libertarian.  For the past 50 years the 
libertarian view has prevailed.  Shared by British and American politicians 
on the Left and Right, it maintains that a free society is ideally one in 
which individuals are left free to pursue their own choices.  The central 
question of politics is whether this is best achieved by governments doing 
as much as possible or as little: should we have a maximalist or minimalist 
State?  The maximalists argue that the task of the State is to give 
everyone as far as possible the resources with which to pursue their 
private vision of the good life.  The minimalists argue that this is best 
done by the opposite strategy, namely by leaving as many resources as 
possible in the hands of individuals.

Philosophically, the debate has been between John Rawls and Robert Nozick.  
Economically, it has been between Keynes and Milton Friedman.  Politically, 
it has been between the Roosevelt-Beveridge vision of a welfare state and 
the "small government" programmes of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.  
But both sides share an ideal, however deeply they differ in the means they 
adopt to achieve it: namely, of an arena in which the State guarantees the 
freedom of the individual to realise his or her own choices.  Morality has 
no part to play in politics beyond fair procedures and the transparency and 
accountability of governments.  All significant moral decisions are to be 
made by individuals.  Indeed, morality itself is a purely individual 
concern.  On both views the key players � the only players � are the State 
and the individual.  Beyond that, as Margaret Thatcher once said, "There is 
no such thing as society.  There are individual men and women, and there 
are families."

This is a tenable view, and there is only one thing to be said against it.  
It has been tried and it has failed.  It has given rise to a social order � 
or more precisely, to a social disorder � more bleak than any within living 
memory.  Today many parts of Britain and America are marked by vandalism, 
violent crime and a loss of civility; by the breakdown of the family and 
the widespread neglect of children; by an erosion of trust and a general 
loss of faith in the power of governments to cure some of our most 
deep-seated problems; and by a widespread sense that matters crucial to our 
future welfare are slipping beyond our control.

It is not my intention to criticise the past, second-guess the leaders of 
an earlier generation, or adopt the false righteousness of hindsight.  The 
politics of the past have run their course, and we must search for a new 
way.

Fortunately, this is less difficult than it seems.  We are able to go back 
to the writings of those who set out on the path towards a free society and 
reacquaint ourselves with what they had in mind.  As soon as we do this we 
discover in many cases that their concerns are uncannily like ours, and 
they had wise things to say which we have since forgotten.  Their view of 
politics was liberal rather than libertarian.  Their central question was: 
how can we create a society in which everyone can participate, and everyone 
achieve the maximum possible dignity?  Their answer was not to privatise 
morality and rule it out of order in political debate.  Some important 
moral issues are private, but not all are.  In particular, it is impossible 
to create a good society without a vigorous process of public debate and 
without some consensus about the kind of society we wish to create.  Nor is 
the creation of society a matter, simply, of state action on the one hand 
and the private choices of individuals on the other.  Societies are made 
not just by states and individuals, but also and crucially by what we do, 
severally, freely and together in a thousand local contexts and 
constituencies.  If libertarianism is a politics of interests, liberalism 
is a politics of involvement.

The good news is that wherever this kind of politics has been tried, it 
works.  Compared to libertarianism, it yields a social order in which we 
are less vulnerable and confused.  Above all, it is the most powerful 
available antidote to despair, because it leaves us less exposed to forces 
beyond our control, to decisions in which we do not have a part.  These are 
my views, but not mine alone.  Increasingly, they have come to be shared by 
philosophers, economists, social commentators and literary critics.  Most 
importantly, they have begun to be adopted by politicians at both ends of 
the political spectrum � by Democrats and Republicans in America, and 
members of the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democratic parties in 
Britain.  There was nothing wrong with the politics of collectivism and the 
politics of private initiative, but their greatest days lie in the past and 
we are ready for something different and more challenging.  My name for it 
is: the politics of hope.

A vision once guided us, one that we loosely call the Judaeo-Christian 
tradition.  It was not a single ethical system, more a related family of 
them.  It did not answer all questions, and even when it was at its height, 
there were vexed moral debates.  But it taught us moral habits.  It gave us 
a framework of virtue.  It embodied ideals.  It emphasised the value of 
institutions � the family, the school, the community � as vehicles through 
which one generation hands on its ideals to the next.  In its broad 
outlines it was shared by poor and rich alike, by miners, labourers, 
politicians, teachers, the police, judges, fellows of Oxbridge colleges and 
children in the village school.  You could catch traces of its influence 
from pubs to pulpits to cricket matches.  It bound us together as a nation 
and gave an entire society its bearings.

That tradition has been comprehensively displaced.  In its stead has come a 
variety of substitutes: ethics of work and success, cults of physical 
fitness, consumerism and salvation-by-shopping, therapies, New Age 
mysticisms, alternative lifestyles, sub and counter-cultures, resurgent 
ethnicities of multiple kinds, and Internet-surfing as a mode of global 
identity.  Never before have we been faced with such kaleidoscopic variety, 
but it fails to cohere.  It does not provide us with the resources to 
connect our present with an identifiable past and future.  It does not give 
unity to a life.  It does not lend structure and stability to our 
relationships.  It does not connect our private desires with a larger 
purpose of which we are a part.  It is less like music, more like noise.

The alternative world we have come to inhabit has its roots deep in 
history.  In my book I follow it back to Hobbes in the 17th century.  
Others would date its genesis earlier still.  It did not come into being as 
a result of Thatcherism or Reaganomics in the 1980s, or the "permissive 
society" of the 1960s, or the welfare state of the 1940s.  Each of these 
merely carried further tendencies that were present long before.  That is 
why serious thinkers have understood that what is really at stake in the 
present debate is the Enlightenment itself as an adequate account of human 
nature and rationality.  Many aspects of that revolution in thought were 
necessary and beneficial.  We could not undo them, nor should we wish to.  
But in one aspect it was simply wrong, in its attempt to assimilate our 
understanding of humanity to science.  The belief was that just as science 
was opening the way to limitless progress in our understanding and control 
of the physical world, so a scientific morality would create an order of 
rational, tolerant and benevolent human beings, free of the conflicts and 
prejudices of the past.  That was a noble undertaking, but like the Tower 
of Babel it was aimed too high, and the result is that we find it 
increasingly difficult to communicate with one another.  We are left, like 
the builders of the tower, isolated and confused.

Fortunately, we are not without hope.  The Judaeo-Christian heritage never 
disappeared, and it exists today as a great reservoir of moral energy and 
aspiration.  Nor are we called on to abandon the heritage of the 
Enlightenment, for it taught us two things that must never be forgotten: 
that religion is not science, neither is it politics.  Religion is not the 
best way of understanding what is; its domain is in the realm of what ought 
to be.  Nor is it an appropriate vehicle of power.  In these respects the 
Enlightenment was closer to truth than the religious establishments of the 
day.

But in one respect it simply failed to understand the nature of human 
society.  We are not atoms, held together by the force-field of the State.  
We are children and parents, neighbours and friends.  We are self-conscious 
beings, knowing what it is to feel the pain of loneliness, yet not willing 
to abdicate our selfhood in total fusion with others.  We seek 
individuality and relationship � individuality through relationship.  We 
learn to pronounce the "We" the better to be able to say "I".  Thus is born 
the intricate dynamic of society, beginning with the family and extending 
outward, through which we learn to trust others and to act so that others 
can trust us.  This requires us to internalise a complex of rules, virtues, 
dispositions and habits mediating between the self and others, allowing us 
to sustain relationships without the use or threat of force.  As John 
Macmurray reminds us, these habits are precarious and need constant 
renewal.  "The institutions by which society maintains itself are not 
natural," he writes.  "They are artefacts, and they are maintained by 
effort in order to sustain the personal life of men and women, and to 
prevent a relapse into the barbarism of a nearly organic life."  As we have 
come to know all too well in the 20th century, civilisation has a thin 
skin, and is easily wounded.

� Jonathan Sacks, 1997

o The Politics of Hope (Jonathan Cape, �15.99) will be published on March 6.

    
    
    ah, yes. Let's stifle individuality. Let's give up freedom in the name
    of "cohesion". I think the chief rabbi has spent a little too much time
    sniffing incense.
    
    

    Interesting perspective.

    Once I tossed my own internalized definitions of "liberal" and
    "libertarian", I found a better understanding of what was being
    presented.  
    
    Interesting global view, IMO.

    What's with the upside down exclamation marks?