MORALITY Morality_HCtextF1.indd i 7/2/20 10:58:21 AM ALSO BY JONATHAN SACKS Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence The Great Partnership: God, Science and the Search for Meaning Future Tense: A Vision for Jews and Judaism in the Global Culture The Home We Build Together: Recreating Society To Heal a Fractured World: The Ethics of Responsibility From Optimism to Hope: A Collection of BBC Thoughts for the Day The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilisations Radical Then, Radical Now: On Being Jewish (in USA, A Letter in the Scroll) Celebrating Life: Finding Happiness in Unexpected Places The Politics of Hope The Persistence of Faith: Religion, Morality and Society in a Secular Age One People? Tradition, Modernity and Jewish Unity Morality_HCtextF1.indd ii 7/2/20 10:58:21 AM MORALITY RESTORING THE COMMON GOOD IN DIVIDED TIMES JONATHAN SACKS NEW YORK Morality_HCtextF1.indd iii 7/2/20 10:58:21 AM Copyright © 2020 by Jonathan Sacks Cover design by Chin-Yee Lai Cover copyright © 2020 Hachette Book Group, Inc. Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights. Basic Books Hachette Book Group 1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104 www.basicbooks.com Printed in the United States of America First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Hodder & Stoughton First US Edition: September 2020 Published by Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Basic Books name and logo is a trademark of the Hachette Book Group. The Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out more, go to www.hachettespeakersbureau.com or call (866) 376-​­6591. The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sacks, Jonathan, 1948- author. Title: Morality : restoring the common good in divided times / Jonathan Sacks. Description: First US edition. | New York : Basic Books, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020022056 | ISBN 9781541675315 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781541675322 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Ethics. | Common good. Classification: LCC BJ1012 .S235 2020 | DDC 170/.44--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020022056 ISBNs: 978-1-5416- 7531-5 (hardcover), 978-1-5416- 7532-2 (ebook) LSC-C 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Morality_HCtextF1.indd iv 7/2/20 10:58:21 AM ToTo ourour grandchildren: Noa,Noa, Ari,Ari, Elisha, Gedalya,Gedalya, Zev, Zev, Ariella,Ariella, Natan, Talya,Talya andand NoamNoam ַהַ�ְלָאַ� הֹגֵּאֹל אִתִי מָ�ָל�רְ� יָבֵרֶ� אַת�הְ�ָ�ִרים ְוִיָקֵּרָא בֶהְם שִׁמְי וֵשֲׁם אֹבַתַי אְבָרָהְם וִיְצָחק ְוִיְדָגּוּ לֹרְב בֶּקֶרָב הָאֶרץ׃ (Gen.(Gen. 4848:16):16) MaMayy allall yyouou do be blessed Morality_HCtextF1.indd v 7/2/20 10:58:21 AM 9781473617315 Morality (487j) - final pass.indd v 21/01/2020 11:04:58 Morality_HCtextF1.indd vi 7/2/20 10:58:21 AM Contents Preface and Acknowledgments ix INTRODUCTION Cultural Climate Change 1 PART ONE The Solitary Self 1. Loneliness 23 2. The Limits of Self- Help 36 3. Unsocial Media 47 4. The Fragile Family 60 PART TWO Consequences: The Market and the State 5. From “We” to “I” 75 6. Markets Without Morals 85 7. Consuming Happiness 100 8. Democracy in Danger 116 9. Identity Politics 127 10. Time and Consequence 141 PART THREE Can We Still Reason Together? 11. Post- Truth 159 12. Safe Space 169 13. Two Ways of Arguing 183 14. Victimhood 195 15. The Return of Public Shaming 206 16. The Death of Civility 213 vii Morality_HCtextF1.indd vii 7/2/20 10:58:21 AM viii Contents PART FOUR Being Human 17. Human Dignity 227 18. Meaning 240 19. Why Morality? 252 20. Which Morality? 263 21. Religion 276 PART FIVE The Way Forward 22. Morality Matters 295 23. From “I” to “We” 308 EPILOGUE 323 Further Reading 329 Notes 335 Index 351 Morality_HCtextF1.indd viii 7/2/20 10:58:21 AM Preface and Acknowledgments The journey of which this book is the culmination began more than fifty years ago. Although I have spent much of my adult life as a religious leader, my first love, long before I decided to become a rabbi, was moral philosophy, which I studied at both Cambridge and Ox- ford. I was incredibly blessed to have as my tutors three of the greatest philosophical minds of our time. My third-​­year undergraduate tutor was Roger Scruton. My doctoral supervisor at Cambridge was Ber- nard Williams and at Oxford, Philippa Foot. They were outstanding. But the state of moral philosophy in gen- eral was not. It was clever but not wise. A. J. Ayer told us, in a famous chapter of Language, Truth and Logic, that moral judgments, being unverifiable, were meaningless, the mere expression of emotion. An- other philosopher told us that ethics was a matter of inventing right and wrong. Morality—​­so went the popular view—​­was either subjec- tive or relative, and there was little in academic philosophy of the time to say otherwise. James Q. Wilson, the great Harvard political scien- tist, discovered, while teaching a class on Nazi Germany, that there was no general agreement that those guilty of the Holocaust had com- mitted a moral horror. “It all depends on your perspective,” one stu- dent said.1 All three of my teachers knew that there was something wrong with all of this. It was superficial, philistine, and irresponsible. Each found a way out, though it took time. Bernard Williams told me in 1970 that he did not know how to write moral philosophy—​­though he quickly recovered and produced his first book, called, like this one, Morality, in 1971. I had meanwhile decided that the best place to begin was within my own tradition of Judaism, which has had an almost ix Morality_HCtextF1.indd ix 7/2/20 10:58:21 AM x Preface and Acknowledgments unbroken conversation on the nature of a good society since the days when Abraham was charged to teach his children “the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just” (Gen. 18:19). There were others who could see what was going wrong. Philip Rieff said that “culture is another name for a design of motives direct- ing the self outward, toward those communal purposes in which alone the self can be realised and satisfied,” and that this was now being systematically abandoned in pursuit of what he called “the triumph of the therapeutic.”2 Joan Didion, in her book The White Album, wrote, “I have trouble maintaining the basic notion that keeping promises matters in a world where everything I was taught seems beside the point.”3 For me, the most persuasive was Alasdair MacIntyre and his mas- terwork, After Virtue, in which he argued that though we continue to use moral language, “we have—​­very largely, if not entirely—​­lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”4 All we possess, he said, are disconnected fragments of what was once a coher- ent view of the world and our place within it. He ended the book with a warning of “the coming ages of barbarism and darkness.” That book, despite its pessimism, brought me back to moral philosophy. Mac- Intyre has been one of the great influences on my life, though there is this obvious difference between us: being Jewish, I am disinclined to pessimism.5 I prefer hope. Love your neighbor. Love the stranger. Hear the cry of the other- wise unheard. Liberate the poor from their poverty. Care for the dig- nity of all. Let those who have more than they need share their blessings with those who have less. Feed the hungry, house the home- less, and heal the sick in body and mind. Fight injustice, whoever it is done by and whoever it is done against. And do these things because, being human, we are bound by a covenant of human solidarity, what- ever our color or culture, class or creed. These are moral principles, not economic or political ones. They have to do with conscience, not wealth or power. But without them, freedom will not survive. The free market and liberal democratic state Morality_HCtextF1.indd x 7/2/20 10:58:21 AM Preface and Acknowledgments xi together will not save liberty, because liberty can never be built by self- interest alone. I-based societies all eventually die. Ibn Khaldun showed this in the fourteenth century, Giambattista Vico in the eighteenth, and Bertrand Russell in the twentieth. Other-​­based societies survive. Morality is not an option. It’s an essential. This book was written before the coronavirus pandemic and pub- lished in Britain just as it was reaching these shores. Yet it spoke to the issues that arose then: the isolation many suffered, the selfless behav- iors that allowed life to continue, the self- ​­restraint we had to practice for the safety of others, the realization that many of the heroes were among the lowest paid, the challenge of political leadership in time of crisis, and the importance of truth-​­telling as a condition of public trust.