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being done in the name of
the right not to be offended
— a right that would have
terrified George Orwell,
whose dictum, engraved on
the walls of the new BBC
Broadcasting House, states:
“If liberty means anything
at all, it means the right to
tell people what they do not
want to hear.”
This is closely related
to a third phenomenon
playing an ever-larger part
in the liberal democracies
of the West, namely
identity politics. There
was a time, until recently,
when politics aspired to be
about what is best for the
nation. One of the lasting
unintended consequences
of multiculturalism is that
we no longer think of the
nation as a whole. Instead,
the electorate has been
fragmented into a series
of subcultures, defined by
ethnicity, religion, gender
or sexual orientation.
These can easily become
competitive interest groups,
less concerned with the
common good than with
what is good for those-like-
me.
Each group can be
encouraged, by the mood
of our time, to see itself
as a victim and to identify
an oppressor who can be
blamed for their current
predicament. This gives rise
to a divisive and rancorous
politics that divides society,
like the dualisms of old, into
the children of light and
the children of darkness. It
also provides a justification
for the use of social media
to manipulate public
opinion by fake news and
“alternative facts.” When it
comes to defending your
group against oppressors,
people think that the end
justifies the means.
These are dangerous
tendencies at both an
individual and collective
level. You can see this in
the spate of bestselling self-
help books about anxiety
and depression on the one
hand, and, on the other, a
string of books with titles
such as How Democracies
Die, The Suicide of the West
and The Retreat of Western
Liberalism.
What connects the
personal and the political
was given a name more than
a century ago by the great
sociologist Emile Durkheim.
He called it anomie: a state
of instability, in societies
and individuals, resulting
from the breakdown of a
shared set of moral beliefs
and attitudes. This would
lead, he thought, to a rise in
suicides as well as a loss of
social cohesion.
Since the 1960s, we have
come to believe that you
can outsource morality to
the market and the state.
The market is about wealth,
the state about power. The
market gives us choices,
and the state deals with
the consequences of those
choices. Within those
parameters we can do
whatever we like so long as
it does not directly harm
others.
We are learning that this
only works in the short
term. In the long term,
when all that matters is
wealth and power, the
wealthy and powerful gain
and the poor and powerless
suffer. That’s what has
happened for at least a
generation. Hence the anger
and loss of trust that today
divide societies throughout
the West.
There is an alternative.
Since civilization began,
morality has been human-
ity’s internal satellite nav-
igation system as we have
journeyed toward the undis-
covered country called the
future. It has taken different
forms, but it is always about
caring for the good of oth-
ers, not just ourselves; about
decency, honesty, faithful-
ness and self-restraint, treat-
ing others as we would wish
to be treated. It’s the world
of “we” not “I.”
While the market and
the state are about com-
petition, morality is about
cooperation. It is born
and sustained in families,
communities, voluntary
organizations and religious
congregations. Altruism,
Viktor Frankl taught us, is
the best cure for depression.
Virtue, as Aristotle noted, is
the basis of strong societies.
And we can each make a
contribution. As Melinda
Gates reminds us in the
last program of the series:
Change one life for the
better and you’ve begun to
change the world.
Morality is the redemp-
tion of our solitude. With it
we can face the future with-
out fear, knowing we are not
alone.
This article was first published in
The Daily Telegraph, Sept. 1, 2018.
The late Rabbi Lord Jonathan
Sacks served as the chief rabbi of
the United Hebrew Congregations of
the Commonwealth, 1991-2013. His
teachings have been made avail-
able to all at rabbisacks.org.
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