I read Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks z”l over Yom Tov [the holiday, in this case, Passover]. This is a masterwork. There is so much in it, and he effortlessly goes from discussing history to economics to Jewish theology and more. I will need to reread it in order to fully appreciate everything he is doing. In the interim, I will say that I think this is essential reading, especially for college students.
The book is structured in five units:
The Solitary Self
Consequences: The Market and the State
Can We Still Reason Together?
Being Human
The Way Forward
He does an excellent job in his preface of explaining how the units work together. I will reproduce that below, and then move to specific excerpts that spoke to me.
In Part One, “The Solitary Self,” I look at the impact of the move from “We” to “I” on personal happiness and well-being, in terms of human loneliness, the overemphasis on self-help, the impact of social media, and the partial breakdown of the family.
Part Two, “Consequences,” is about how the loss of a shared morality has serious negative consequences for both the market and the state. This section begins with a chapter, “From ‘We’ to ‘I,’” that is a brief intellectual history of the growth of individualism. It ends with a chapter, “Time and Consequence,” that attempts to explain why decisions that seem sound in the short term can be disastrous in the long term.
Part Three, “Can We Still Reason Together?,” is about the progressive loss of respect for truth and civility in the public conversation. It has become very difficult to talk and listen across divides. Is truth still of value in politics? Is the collaborative pursuit of truth still the purpose of a university? How have social media affected the tone and tenor of our relationships with one another? What does all this do for trust, an essential precondition of the good society?
In Part Four, “Being Human,” I look at the connection between morality, human dignity, and a meaningful life. I also look at why morality is necessary, the different forms it can take, and the connection between it and religion.
Finally, in Part Five, “The Way Forward,” I set out my own credo as to why morality matters, and then suggest ways in which we can strengthen it in the future.
-pages xi-xii
One of the aspects of this book that I found most fascinating were the historical treatments of the history of “individualism,” (a concept that so many of us take for granted as having always existed; it didn’t) and also the history of “happiness,” especially what happiness was originally taken to mean as opposed to what it means to us today. This first excerpt will focus on markets without morals, and what happens in such a case.
Markets Without Morals
Bernard Mandeville, the renegade thinker who in 1714 published The Fable of the Bees, otherwise known as Private Vices, Public Benefits- a work that in many ways anticipated that of Adam Smith- scandalized the British public by suggesting that avarice, a private vice, could be turned, through economic activity, into public benefit. Note, though, that this is not what Adam Smith advocated. Smith spoke not of passions but of interests. His most famous line was: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” Smith did for economics what Hobbes had done for politics. He showed that self-interest led logically to the creation of a system of commercial contracts, as it did vis-a-vis the state in the form of a social contract.
The Enlightenment thinkers, Smith, Hume and Montesquieu, knew that religion was loosening its hold on people; that the authority of the Church had been compromised by the violence and warfare it had led to between Catholic and Protestant. They searched therefore for a more neutral, secular basis for the key institutions of society: namely, what Bishop Butler called “cool self-love,” and what Alexis de Tocqueville called “self-interest rightly understood.” However, none of them ever assumed that a market could function without morals.
As mentioned earlier, Adam Smith himself wrote a major work of moral philosophy, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, before he wrote The Wealth of Nations. Its opening sentence tells us immediately the context within which he conceived the working of the market: “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.” He took it for granted that to be human is to have a moral sense- this was the shared assumption of the figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, including David Hume and Adam Fergusson. That interpersonal relations should be governed by morality was fundamental to his understanding of what it is to be human.
Yet David Hume, even in the eighteenth century, can be found warning against the perils of consumerism: “this avidity alone, of acquiring goods and possessions for ourselves and our nearest friends is insatiable, perpetual, universal, and directly destructive of society.” So there remains the risk of tension between self-interest and the common good. How, in practice, is this resolved? In recent years, people have turned from purely theoretical accounts of human behavior to social science experimentation. Significant studies have been conducted to consider the decision-making process, when it is a question of balancing considerations between selfishness on the one hand and fairness on the other.
[…]
There is no question that the behavior of banks, other financial institutions, and CEOs of major corporations has generated much anger at the most visceral level. After all, gut instinct is what drives our feelings of justice as fairness. But that behavior is the logical consequence of the individualism that has been our substitute for morality since the 1960s: the “I” that takes precedence over the “We.” How could we reject the claims of traditional morality in every other sphere of life and yet expect them to prevail in the heat of the marketplace? Was that not the point of the famous speech delivered by the actor Michael Douglas in the film Wall Street, that “greed- for lack of a better word- is good”? Greed “captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit,” he said: it marks “the upward surge of mankind.”
In a world where the market rules and its operation is driven by greed, people come to believe that their worth is measured by what you earn or can afford and not by qualities of character like honesty, integrity and service to others. Politics itself, because it can assume no shared morality among its citizens, ceases to be about vision, aspiration, and the common good and becomes instead transactional, managerial, a kind of consumer product: vote for the party that gives you more of what you want for a lower price in taxes. You discover that politicians are claiming unwarranted expenses or getting paid for access: in short, that politics has come to be seen as a business like any other, and not an entirely reputable one. That is when young people no longer get involved in politics. Why should they? If all that matters is money, they can make more of it elsewhere.
Any position of leadership, however, makes you responsible to the people who have entrusted some part of their destiny to you. That applies to businesses, financial institutions, and global corporations. Without morals, markets cannot function. The very words we use imply as much. The word “credit” comes from the Latin cred, the same root we see in “credo,” meaning “I believe.” “Confidence,” the presence or lack of which shapes markets, comes from the Latin root fides, meaning to have faith in someone or something. “Fiduciary” has the same origin. Trust, the lack of which produced the banking crisis of 2008, is predicated on trustworthiness. These are, or were, fundamentally moral terms. When there is a breakdown of trust, something significant is going wrong.
The market economy has generated more real wealth, eliminated more poverty, and liberated more human creativity than any other economic system. The fault is not with the market itself, but with the idea that the market alone is all we need. Markets do not guarantee equity, responsibility or integrity. They can maximize short-term gain at the cost of long-term sustainability. They cannot be rerlied upon to distribute rewards fairly. They cannot guarantee honesty. When confronted with flagrant self-interest, they combine the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity. Markets need morals, and morals are not made by markets.
They are made by schools, the media, custom, tradition, religious leaders, moral role models, and the influence of people. But when religion loses its voice and the media worship success, when right and wrong become relativized and all talk of morality is condemned as “judgmental,” when people lose all sense of honor and shame and there is nothing they will not do if they can get away with it, no regulation will save us. People will continually outwit the regulators, as they did by the so-called securitization of risk that meant no one knew who owed what to whom.
Markets were made to serve us; we were not made to serve markets. Economics needs ethics. Markets do not survive by market forces alone. They depend on respect for the people affected by our decisions. Lose that and we will lose not just money and jobs but something more significant still: freedom, trust, and decency, the things that have a value, not a price.
-pages 95-99
Consuming Happiness
I cannot overstate how immediately relevant Rabbi Sacks’ book is. On April 11, The Atlantic published a piece called ‘Why American Teens Are So Sad.’ The Ringer responded to it on April 22nd with its piece ‘Why Are American Teenagers So Sad and Anxious?’ As a teacher of teens, and a facilitator of our school’s student-led mental health awareness club, this is of obvious relevance to me. I found the points in both articles to be discussed -broadly and more specifically- in Rabbi Sacks’ Morality. I also think that neither article went far enough, while Rabbi Sacks’ book does- especially his treatment of what happiness used to mean as opposed to what it means now.
Aristotle believed in eudaemonia, his term for happiness, which was “inextricably connected with the moral life” (100). Yes, there are physical prerequisites for happiness, but for the most part it is about “living nobly, courageously, temperately, and wisely. It is not about having wealth or popularity or power. IT is about what kind of human being you become” (101).
In the Hebrew Bible, similarly, “happiness, or blessedness- the terms are almost interchangeable- means living in accord with the word and will of God, which is how the Bible construes the moral life” (101).
We currently live in “the most affluent age in history” (102). Standards of living have risen, we can “travel around the world, be in touch with friends, buy almost anything we like, see our favorite films, read our favorite books, find out the answer to almost any question, instantly and without friction” (102). And yet our teens are miserable. Why? There is no one answer- there are various reasons taken together that have led to our current mental health crisis. However, I would like to highlight the following point, which I think is a major contributing factor.
One reason is that a consumer society focuses attention on what we do not (yet) have, rather than on what we do. It depends on inducing a widespread mood of envy and avarice. It distorts our system of values in absurd ways. Can it really be a sane conclusion that happiness means the must-have designer handbag, or the wildly expensive handmade Swiss watch that you “never really own,” merely “look after for the next generation,” but which tells the time no better than the one you can buy for almost nothing? The flaunting of the lifestyles of the rich and famous is calculated to induce envy and misdirect attention from what people are to what they have.
[…]
As a former director of General Motors Research Lab once put it, advertising is the “organized creation of dissatisfaction.” Happiness is good for us, but it is bad for business. Hence we have to be induced to see it as always lying just around the corner, immediately after the next product we buy.
A consumer society, in short, encourages us to spend money we don’t have, on products we don’t need, for a happiness that won’t last. The reason such happiness does not last lies in the fundamental difference between hedonic happiness, a momentary feeling of pleasurable sensation, and eudaemonic happiness, which is the lasting feeling brought by having lived a good, meaningful and worthy life. Hedonic happiness requires constant stimulation. Hence the idea of the “hedonic treadmill”: getting what we want only temporarily satisfies desire. We almost immediately find new things to desire, so that though we may find ourselves better off materially, we do not become happier psychologically.
[…]
Living in a consumer society inflames our discontent. It feeds our sense of inadequacy. It encourages us to make comparisons with other people. Social media in particular has created entirely new sources of unhappiness.
[…]
This means that the potential for endless dissatisfaction is easily activated. Instead of feeling happier because we have more than we had last year, we can find ourselves focusing on the fact that others in our reference group also have more, so we continue to strive, comparing ourselves against them.
-pages 103-108
Thus, the need, the urgency, of recovering “the older philosophical and religious tradition that sees happiness in terms of a life well led” (109).
The Politics of Anger
Rabbi Sacks’ treatment of Korach, an agitator in the Hebrew Bible, especially his comparison to today’s cultural climate, is superb. I’m going to include excerpts below.
Korach was a populist, one of the first in recorded history, and populism has reemerged in the West, as it did in the 1930s, posing great danger to the future of freedom. What links populism on the one hand, and the phenomenon of “wokeness” discussed by Barack Obama on the other, is that they are both binary, both extreme. Both divide the world into good and evil, black and white, with no shades of gray. Both see themselves as the oppressed and their opponents as the oppressors. They see no saving grace on the other side.
Populism is the politics of anger. It makes its appearance when there is widespread discontent with political leaders, when people feel that heads of institutions are working in their own interest rather than that of the general public, when there is a widespread loss of trust and a breakdown of the sense of the common good.
People come to feel that the distribution of rewards is unfair: a few gain disproportionately and the many stay as they are or lose out. There is also a feeling that the country that they once knew has been taken away frrom them, which might be because of the undermining of traditional values, or because of large-scale immigration.
Discontent takes the form of rejection of the current political and cultural elites. Populist politicians claim that they, and they alone, are the true voice of the people. The existing leaders are sharing out the rewards among themselves, indifferent to the suffering of the masses. Populists stir up resentment against the establishment. They are deliberately divisive and confrontational. They promise strong leadership that will give the people back what has been taken from them.
[…]
The Korach rebellion was a populist movement, and Korach himself an archetypal populist leader. Listen carefully to what he said about Moses and Aaron: “You have gone too far! The whole community is holy, every one of them, and the Lord is among them. Why then do you exalt yourselves above the assembly of the Lord?” (Num 16:3).
These are classic populist claims. First, implies Korach, the establishment, represented by Moses and Aaron, is corrupt. Moses has been guilty of nepotism in appointing his own brother as High Priest. He has kept the leadership roles within his immediate family instead of sharing them out more widely. Secondly, Korach presents himself as the people’s champion. The whole community, he says, is holy. There is nothing special about you, Moses and Aaron. We have all seen God’s miracles and heard his voice. We all helped build his Sanctuary. Korach is posing as the democrat- so that he can become the autocrat.
Next, he and his fellow rebels mount an impressive campaign of fake news- anticipating events of our own time. We have to infer this indirectly. When Moses says to God, “I have not taken so much as a donkey from them, nor have I wronged any of them” (Num 16:15), it is clear that he has been accused of just that: exploiting his office for personal gain. When he says, “This is how you will know that the Lord has sent me to do all these things and that it was not my own idea” (Num 16:28), it is equally clear that he has been accused of representing his own decisions as the will and word of God.
Most blatant is the post-truth-style claim of Datham and Aviram: “Isn’t it enough that you have brought us up out of a land flowing with milk and honey to kill us in the wilderness? And now you want to lord it over us!” (Num 16:13). This is the most tendentious speech in the Torah. It combines false nostalgia for Egypt as a “land flowing with milk and honey,” replacing their slavery there with the image of God’s promised plenty for them in the Holy Land, blaming Moses for the report of the spies, and accusing him of holding on to leadership for his own personal prestige- all three outrageous lies.
-pages 189-190
Rabbi Sacks then discusses the difference in Judaism between an argument for the sake of heaven and one that is not for the sake of heaven. (This is actually a text I taught to seventh graders back at CESJDS.)
What matters in Judaism is why the argument was undertaken and how it was conducted. What is the fundamental difference between an argument for the sake of heaven and one that is not? Following Meiri and other medieval commentators, the sages were distinguishing between an argument for the sake of truth and one for the sake of victory. Hillel and Shammai were arguing for the sake of truth, the determination of God’s will. Korach, who challenged Moses and Aaron for leadership, was arguing for the sake of victory: he wanted to be a leader, too.
In argument for the sake of truth, if you win, you win, but if you lose, you also win, because being defeated by the truth is the only defeat that is also a victory. We are enlarged thereby. As Rabbi Shimon ha-Amsoni said: “Just as I received reward for the exposition, so I will receive reward for the retraction.” In an argument for the sake of victory, if you lose, you lose, but if you win, you also lose, for by diminishing your opponents, you diminish yourself. Moses won the argument against Korach, but only at the cost of invoking a miracle in which the earth opened up and swallowed his opponents. Yet this did not end the argument. In this kind of confrontation, there is no benign outcome. You can only aim at minimizing the tragedy.
The entire thrust of postmodernism, inspired by Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, is to develop a “hermeneutics of suspicion” in which there is no truth, only victory. Every argument is a (concealed) exercise of power, an attempt to establish a “hegemonic discourse.” Judaism rejects this idea, not because it is never true- in the case of an argument not for the sake of heaven, it is- but because we can tell when it is and when it isn’t. There is such a thing as truth, and collaborative argument in pursuit of it. That is the basis of trust on which all genuine communication depends.
-pages 191-192
I love this explanation of the importance of argument- and especially, what lies at its heart- and how it ties in to populism. Rabbi Sacks goes on to write
In his excellent short book What is Populism?, Jan-Werner Muller argues that the best indicator of populist politics is its delegitimization of other voices. Populists claim that “they and they alone represent the people.” Anyone who disagrees with them is “essentially illegitimate.” Once in power, they silence dissent. Wokeness has the same argumentative structure. Those who hold attitudes or make remarks or use terminology outside the received woke norms are to be denounced, shamed, “called out,” or “cancelled.” That is why the silencing of unpopular views on university campuses today, in the form of “safe space,” “trigger warnings,” and “micro-aggressions,” is so dangerous. When academic freedom dies, the death of other freedoms follows.
-page 192
Indeed
A healthy culture protects places that welcome argument and respect dissenting views. Enter them and you will grow, others will grow, and you will do great things together. But resist with all your heart and soul any attempt to substitute power for truth. And stay far from people, movements, and parties that demonize their opponents. As Barack Obama said: “If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far.”
-page 194
There’s so much more in this book, but I hope I have whet your appetite, and that you are eager to read it in its entirety! What I love best is that at the end, Rabbi Sacks remains hopeful- he believes we can help our world move from the self-centered “I” to the other-focused “We,” and that we can “retain the spirit of kindness and neighborliness that humanized our fate during the months of lockdown and isolation when people thought of others, not themselves” (327).
I also really appreciated Rabbi Sacks’ thoughts on his wife and his marriage. As he writes
One day early in my final year I saw, across a college courtyard, a girl who was everything I was not. She smiled, she radiated sunshine, she was full of joy. It took me three weeks to put aside metaphysics and say, “Let’s get married.” Forty-nine years, three children, and nine grandchildren later, I know it was the best decision of my life, because it’s the people not like us who make us grow. Marriage is the supreme embodiment of openness to otherness.
-pages 311-312
As someone who married a person who came from a culture unlike mine, and who has character traits and qualities that are the opposite of mine, this spoke to me. On the Myer-Briggs scale, I’m an ENFP, given to imagination, flights of fancy, and feeling everything, and my husband is my exact opposite. He is sturdy, stable, grounded, logical and loyal.
He is the string and I am the kite, and long may we soar.
I hope we continue to meet, love and be open to…the people not like us.