Review of Jonathan Sacks, Morality

 

Jonathan Sacks, Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times. London: Hodder & Stoughten, 2020. xv + .  M365 pp.

 

With great prescience just prior to the earth-shattering events of the Corvid-19 pandemic which is still-reshaping the way we look at ourselves and the world we have made for ourselves, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who passed away in November 2020, former Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, evaluates the morality that needs to be restored. He is much lauded by many inside and outside of the Jewish community as a great theologian of our age and moral leader for all time.

 

From the perspective of what has happened to culture, learning and social responsibilities both in the United Kingdom and the United States over the last half century, the descent into selfish, foolish, bigoted and ignorant trumpism has been going on for quite a while and is no sudden moral lapse exposed in 2016. Rabbi Sacks’ Morality is about the need to strengthen our commitment, deepen our sympathy and extend our empathy, to conceive of society in terms of mutual respect and love, and to do so with a sense of justice and moral responsibility, and not out of sentimentality or superficial spirituality.

 

His Jewish perspective also becomes increasingly evident as the book continues and once you pass the critical mass of his argument and enter the second half of the book, his renowned deep thought and profound learning kicks in, making this a sobering book loaded with mature discussions, so that cultured and educated readers will not be disappointed.  By Jewish perspective I mean, first of all, a using of the Torah , Talmud and other rabbinical legends, as well as his own experiences in his role of Chief Rabbi for Great Britain and the Commonwealth, to make points; and second, the deep analysis and discussion of the logical, philological and spiritual significance of current events so discussed; and third, his sense of fairness, justice and tolerance, respect  and love for all people. In these ways, too, Rabbi Sacks stands as the exemplary foil to the horrible egotistical, truth-mangling and moral indifference of Donald J. Trump.

 

Sacks has always read widely, far beyond theology and Jewish studies, and, now it seems also, popularly; and, though he has occasionally picked up the latest buzz words and jargon (“mindful”, “societal,” etc.) along the way, he masters the current notions of intellectual history and is thus able to criticise the faults that have developed within them, with particular emphasis on changes in American concepts of democracy, liberty, individuality, freedom and identity. In this way, he provides a good survey of the kind of transformation in Western Civilization over the past forty years, the radical shift to the religious right, the slide into know-nothing populism, and the dangerous loosening on the world of Trump and his supporters, those who, following the trumped up questioning of the November 2020 presidential election, seem like armed gangs of thugs–the so-called Proud Boys and other White Nationalist, anti-feminist, anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic hate groups—roaming the streets of large and small American cities. Post-Brexit Britain, as well as fascist-type movements in France, Poland and Hungary also share in these anti-democratic trends.

 All of this madness has a method to it, to be sure, and Sacks tracks it down both in the short run, over the past four decades, and in the long run, over the last four centuries. Events have consequences that at first don’t rise to the surface of public consciousness and it may take a whole generation (thirty or forty years) for the effects to be felt: the vast slaughter of the Great War, the Holocaust during World War Two, the availability of birth con troll pills, the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the terrorist attacks on 11 September and so forth.  Similarly thinkers who may have written in the seventeenth or eighteenth century do not become dominant until two or three hundred years later, when the situations and their ideological opponents are forgotten: Hobbes rather than Locke, Kant rather than Hegel, Nietzsche rather than Wagner. One generation grows up with film, another with radio, another with television, one with video, another with cell-phones, one with social media and so forth and so on.   

 The central theme adumbrated in the sub-title to this book, “Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times,” is that society works best when it centres a covenantal concern for We rather than the contractual divisiveness of I, where people care about one another and the larger entity of “we the people”.  For fifty years, he says, western societies have backed away from a sense of social responsibility and moderate balancing of diverse interests. He points out that various points in recent history the whole outlook of many western nations has shifted from I back to We, so that really is possible because it has happened many times. 

 What he doesn’t explain, though, is why the situation slips away again, sometimes because of devastating wars, dire economic catastrophe, far-reaching political collapse—yet these are the names of the changes, not reasons why the psychological props of covenantal communities don’t hold. Without such understanding—could it be, as psychohistorians suggest, from insidious changes in child-reading practices; mass trance-like delusions fostered on society by cynical and fascist elements in commerce,  industry and government?—much of what Sacks seeks to happen seems like pie in the sky.

His moving example of the way the citizens of Gander, Newfoundland came together as a whole to care for the scores of airliners forced to land at its international airport following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the USA admirably shows a collective impulse to work together for the good of the whole. But that was for less than a week. The splitting of the US voting public during the 2020 election, with some 70 million people favouring the insufferable nonsense of Trump and 80 million seeking to throw him out of office does not bode well for a lasting return to normality, civility and mutual toleration, given that things were still in the state of I-dominance that Sacks despairs of throughout this book.

The long Corvid-19 pandemic throughout the world may also be a test-case for how well societies in different nations put aside their selfish, competitive and stupid refusal to work together to control the disease. Some indications show that there is a desire to establish a better world order that can be fairer, more kind and gentle than the world has trended towards since the 1960s , but there is no sign yet of a real change. Too many people confound anarchy with freedom by refusing to self-isolate, maintain social distancing and wear masks; fall prey to snake-oil hucksters peddling empty dreams and magic cures; and anti-vaccine conspiracies that defy scientific testing and processing information.

It would be wonderful if large majorities in the population followed the arguments that Rabbi Sacks outs forward.  The dangerous prevalence of social media and other substitutes for face-to-face discussion and debate remains to be solved. The corporate structures are still, for the most part, predicated on managerial and share-holder profits, not on living wages and care of workers and their families, or for the production of useful goods and services which are properly shared through all of the community. Health services, education and safe housing are not yet considered basic human rights for everyone. In other words, what the world will look like after the pandemic ends remains to be seen. No one knows whether the improvements and good wishes promised by the sacrifice of so many front-line and essential workers—from doctors and nurses, cleaners and bus-drivers through to delivery people and supermarket check-out clerks—will continue; or whether, as happened in Gander in 2001, the indications of a long lasting We-society is a seven day wonder.