## Faith in the Future, Part I; The Moral Covenant, Chapter 3; Why Morality Matters ###### Faith in the Future, Part I; The Moral Covenant, Chapter 3; Why Morality Matters 1 [Faith in the Future, Part I; The Moral Covenant, Chapter 3; Why Morality Matters 1](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Faith%20in%20the%20Future/s/Part%20I%3B%20The%20Moral%20Covenant,_Chapter%203%3B%20Why%20Morality%20Matters/r/1) **Maggid Books, 2024:** ***Why Morality Matters*** ###### Faith in the Future, Part I; The Moral Covenant, Chapter 3; Why Morality Matters 2 [Faith in the Future, Part I; The Moral Covenant, Chapter 3; Why Morality Matters 2](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Faith%20in%20the%20Future/s/Part%20I%3B%20The%20Moral%20Covenant,_Chapter%203%3B%20Why%20Morality%20Matters/r/2) **Maggid Books, 2024:** The contemporary world has given morality a rough ride. The word itself evokes all we distrust most: the intrusion of impersonal standards into our private lives, the presence of judgement where judgement does not belong, the substitution of authority for choice. When a politician moralises we suspect that he or she is searching for an excuse not to pay for something. When a religious leader moralises we fear the imposition of certainties we no longer share, and we suspect that fundamentalism is not far behind. When a particularly newsworthy crime or social trend provokes ethical debate, it will not be long before voices are heard dismissing the conversation as “moral panic.” We have come to share George Bernard Shaw’s conviction that morality is one person’s way of disrupting someone else’s innocent enjoyment, or as H. G. Wells called it, “jealousy with a halo.” ###### Faith in the Future, Part I; The Moral Covenant, Chapter 3; Why Morality Matters 3 [Faith in the Future, Part I; The Moral Covenant, Chapter 3; Why Morality Matters 3](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Faith%20in%20the%20Future/s/Part%20I%3B%20The%20Moral%20Covenant,_Chapter%203%3B%20Why%20Morality%20Matters/r/3) **Maggid Books, 2024:** But this cannot be the whole picture. We do still care, and care passionately, about concerns that are essentially moral. We are disturbed by legal injustice and extreme economic inequality. We care about war and famine and their toll of innocent lives. We are distressed by our destruction of the environment in pursuit of economic growth. We are not indifferent to the suffering of others or to the harm we may be laying in store for future generations. We are as moral as any other generation. Perhaps more so, for television has exposed us in the most vividly immediate ways to sufferings that in a previous age we would hardly have known about, let alone seen. And our greater affluence and technological prowess have given us the resources to address ills – physical and economic – that an earlier generation might have seen as something about which nothing could be done, part of the sad but natural order of things. We are certainly not amoral. We remain sharply aware of the difference between what is and what ought to be. Morality matters to us now no less than it did to our grandparents. But undeniably its *agenda* has changed. That is what deserves reflection. ###### Faith in the Future, Part I; The Moral Covenant, Chapter 3; Why Morality Matters 4 [Faith in the Future, Part I; The Moral Covenant, Chapter 3; Why Morality Matters 4](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Faith%20in%20the%20Future/s/Part%20I%3B%20The%20Moral%20Covenant,_Chapter%203%3B%20Why%20Morality%20Matters/r/4) **Maggid Books, 2024:** Many reasons have been advanced as to why the concept of morality as a set of rules beyond the self has suffered an eclipse. We have become less religious, and religion was the classic source of our belief in a revealed morality, commandments engraved on tablets of stone. We have become more culturally diverse, and we now know that what seems wrong to one group may be permissible in a second and even admirable in a third. We have inherited, however indirectly, a set of ideas from Marx and Nietzsche, that what passes for morality may be the mask over a hierarchy of power, a way of keeping people in their place. From psychoanalysis we have developed a suspicion that morality is a way of suppressing natural instinct, and as such is an enemy of self-expression. Perhaps, after the horror of two world wars, we simply reached the conclusion that previous generations had led us into the wilderness instead of the promised land, and the time had come to try another way. Each of these analyses has truth to it, and there may be many more. ###### Faith in the Future, Part I; The Moral Covenant, Chapter 3; Why Morality Matters 5 [Faith in the Future, Part I; The Moral Covenant, Chapter 3; Why Morality Matters 5](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Faith%20in%20the%20Future/s/Part%20I%3B%20The%20Moral%20Covenant,_Chapter%203%3B%20Why%20Morality%20Matters/r/5) **Maggid Books, 2024:** But there is, I suspect, a political dimension too. The twentieth century has witnessed a vast expansion of the power and presence of the State. Things that were once the province of families, communities, religious congregations, voluntary organisations and co-operative groups have been appropriated by governments; among them education, health care, and welfare. In part this was motivated by economic and political necessity. The modern nation-state needed a mobile population, one whose members shared a common culture and education. As women joined the workforce, care facilities had to be provided by the State. The standardisation required by industry and war spelled the break-up of more local traditions and associations. But there was also a profound moral dimension to the growth of the State, namely a terminal dissatisfaction with the inequalities of privilege. Why should some people but not others have access to the best schools and doctors? Could a decent society allow families to languish because of poverty and unemployment? These were, I believe, the right questions at a certain period in the development of western democracies, and they led to the caring State. ###### Faith in the Future, Part I; The Moral Covenant, Chapter 3; Why Morality Matters 6 [Faith in the Future, Part I; The Moral Covenant, Chapter 3; Why Morality Matters 6](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Faith%20in%20the%20Future/s/Part%20I%3B%20The%20Moral%20Covenant,_Chapter%203%3B%20Why%20Morality%20Matters/r/6) **Maggid Books, 2024:** But even the right decisions have long-term consequences, not all of which are benign. The growth of the State meant the atrophy of many of those local institutions, from the family outwards, where people learned the give-and-take of human relationships and the subtle codes of civility without which it is difficult for people to live closely together for very long. More importantly it broke the connection between what we do and what happens to us, which is of the essence of moral responsibility. A child “going wrong” in the past would be supported by family and friends, but they would deliver an unmistakable moral rebuke. Continued support came with conditions. The caring State can deliver no such message because a State is neither family nor friend. It is of its essence impersonal. It is there to help with few strings attached. It cannot, may not, make moral judgements. It is beyond its competence and remit to make distinctions between the sufferings that befall us and those we bring upon ourselves. No one sought to have the State undermine moral responsibility. But inevitably that has been its effect. It left it redundant and unemployed. ###### Faith in the Future, Part I; The Moral Covenant, Chapter 3; Why Morality Matters 7 [Faith in the Future, Part I; The Moral Covenant, Chapter 3; Why Morality Matters 7](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Faith%20in%20the%20Future/s/Part%20I%3B%20The%20Moral%20Covenant,_Chapter%203%3B%20Why%20Morality%20Matters/r/7) **Maggid Books, 2024:** The story of the late twentieth century is one of the displacement of the community by the State and hence of the replacement of morality by politics. That is why our moral agenda has changed. Our concerns – with inequality and injustice, war and famine and ecology – go deep. But these are issues to be addressed to governments. We are willing to make sacrifices on their behalf. We join protests, sign petitions, send donations. But these are large-scale and for the most part impersonal problems. They have relatively little to do with what morality was traditionally largely about: the day-to-day conduct between neighbours and strangers, what Martin Buber called the “I-and-Thou” dimension of our lives. Instead, in our personal relationships we believe in autonomy, the right to live our lives as we choose. ###### Faith in the Future, Part I; The Moral Covenant, Chapter 3; Why Morality Matters 8 [Faith in the Future, Part I; The Moral Covenant, Chapter 3; Why Morality Matters 8](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Faith%20in%20the%20Future/s/Part%20I%3B%20The%20Moral%20Covenant,_Chapter%203%3B%20Why%20Morality%20Matters/r/8) **Maggid Books, 2024:** A profound political change took place in the 1980s. It surfaced as Thatcherism in Britain, Reaganomics in the United States, and most significantly in the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. It was as if the realisation had dawned in many countries simultaneously that what had once been a solution – the hyperactive State – had now become a problem. The pursuit of equality interfered with liberty. State intervention inhibited economic growth. High taxation thwarted enterprise. Collective spending was less satisfactory all round than individual spending. The government should do and take less, the individual should do and keep more. It was one of those swings of the pendulum that occurs periodically in human affairs, from centralism to localism or vice versa. But what has become increasingly clear in the 1990s is that *the “State” and the “individual” are not two opposed forces.* They belong to one another. They are twins. Without the modern State the modern individual could not have come into being. They have grown together like ivy against a tree. ###### Faith in the Future, Part I; The Moral Covenant, Chapter 3; Why Morality Matters 9 [Faith in the Future, Part I; The Moral Covenant, Chapter 3; Why Morality Matters 9](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Faith%20in%20the%20Future/s/Part%20I%3B%20The%20Moral%20Covenant,_Chapter%203%3B%20Why%20Morality%20Matters/r/9) **Maggid Books, 2024:** The modern individual is defined by his or her independence from long-term commitments to the past or the future. Authority is not vested in the past, in the form of parents or traditions or communities of belonging. Even Philip Larkin’s wonderfully embarrassed description of mid-twentieth-century religious awe – “Hatless, I take off my cycle-clips in awkward reverence” – is too pious for us now. Nor are we comfortable with the idea of personal responsibility towards an open-ended future. Marriage and parenthood have become contractual and conditional rather than “till death do us part.” Individualism of this order could not have existed without a powerful and all-present State. Collectivism and individualism, though they seem opposed, are two sides of the same coin. The responsibilities shouldered by the one give the other the freedom to be what it is. ###### Faith in the Future, Part I; The Moral Covenant, Chapter 3; Why Morality Matters 10 [Faith in the Future, Part I; The Moral Covenant, Chapter 3; Why Morality Matters 10](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Faith%20in%20the%20Future/s/Part%20I%3B%20The%20Moral%20Covenant,_Chapter%203%3B%20Why%20Morality%20Matters/r/10) **Maggid Books, 2024:** The eclipse of collectivism and the retreating tide of the State form our foreseeable political future. On this, parties on both the left and right of the political spectrum currently agree. And just as people of moral conviction welcomed the advancing State as an answer to deep social injustices, so they can see in its subsequent retreat other moral gains. The Judaeo-Christian tradition places great weight on individual responsibility and liberty. Government is necessary, but the less the better. That is the consistent message from Samuel to the last of the prophets. The more responsibility we delegate away, the less we are called on to act as the image of God, shaping our world individually by His will. Virtue is greater for being uncoerced. Better the good deeds that grow from below than those which are imposed from above. ###### Faith in the Future, Part I; The Moral Covenant, Chapter 3; Why Morality Matters 11 [Faith in the Future, Part I; The Moral Covenant, Chapter 3; Why Morality Matters 11](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Faith%20in%20the%20Future/s/Part%20I%3B%20The%20Moral%20Covenant,_Chapter%203%3B%20Why%20Morality%20Matters/r/11) **Maggid Books, 2024:** What, though, has now become clear is that political change has moved far in advance of moral change. The tree has been removed, leaving the ivy unsupported. We have abandoned collectivism but not yet the individualism which was its symbiotic partner. As the State withdraws part of its protective shelter, many people find themselves suddenly exposed. Single-parent families, the unemployed, inhabitants of inner-city ghettoes and others become the casualties. It is, and will continue to be, a traumatic experience whose pain only the most heartless can ignore. ###### Faith in the Future, Part I; The Moral Covenant, Chapter 3; Why Morality Matters 12 [Faith in the Future, Part I; The Moral Covenant, Chapter 3; Why Morality Matters 12](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Faith%20in%20the%20Future/s/Part%20I%3B%20The%20Moral%20Covenant,_Chapter%203%3B%20Why%20Morality%20Matters/r/12) **Maggid Books, 2024:** A world in which, in many areas where we had grown used to seeing it, the State is not there will be one in which we will have to re-learn many of the moral habits which came so naturally to our ancestors but have come to seem strange to us. We will have to rebuild families and communities and voluntary organisations. We will come to depend more on networks of kinship and friendship. And we will rapidly discover that their very existence depends on what we give as well as what we take, on our willingness to shoulder duties, responsibilities and commitments as well as claiming freedoms and rights. The “I-It” relationship of taxation and benefit will increasingly be replaced by the “I-Thou” of fellowship and community. And we may well come to see that the eclipse of personal morality, which dominated the consciousness of a generation, was a strange and passing phase in human affairs, and not the permanent revolution many thought it to be. ###### Faith in the Future, Part I; The Moral Covenant, Chapter 3; Why Morality Matters 13 [Faith in the Future, Part I; The Moral Covenant, Chapter 3; Why Morality Matters 13](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Faith%20in%20the%20Future/s/Part%20I%3B%20The%20Moral%20Covenant,_Chapter%203%3B%20Why%20Morality%20Matters/r/13) **Maggid Books, 2024:** If so, I welcome the future. For it promises to restore to human relationships the compassion and grace, the mutuality and faithfulness, which the Hebrew Bible saw as a lasting ideal – more than that, as the way we bring the divine presence into our lives. The unattached society of the past thirty years has been one of unparalleled personal freedoms. But it has also been one of growing incivility and aggression, of exploitation and manipulation, of temporary alliances rather than enduring loyalties, of quick pleasures over lasting happiness. It has been, quite simply, immature. So long as someone was there – the omnipresent State – to pick us up when we fell, it was overwhelmingly seductive. But it has become dysfunctional and cannot be sustained. ###### Faith in the Future, Part I; The Moral Covenant, Chapter 3; Why Morality Matters 14 [Faith in the Future, Part I; The Moral Covenant, Chapter 3; Why Morality Matters 14](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Faith%20in%20the%20Future/s/Part%20I%3B%20The%20Moral%20Covenant,_Chapter%203%3B%20Why%20Morality%20Matters/r/14) **Maggid Books, 2024:** Morality matters. Not because we seek to be judgemental or self-righteous or pious. Not because we fondly recall a golden age that never was, the world of Jane Austen perhaps, when men were chivalrous, women decorous, sin discreet and all ranks of society knew their place. It matters not because we are fundamentalists, convinced that we alone possess the moral certainties which form the architecture of virtue. Nor is it because we wish to relieve ourselves of responsibility for the pain, suffering and injustices of the world by blaming them on the victims who made the wrong choices. It matters not because we wish to impose a tidy-minded order on the chaos of human imagination and experiment, nor because we are ignorant of *autre temps, autre meures* and of the fact that ours is not the only way people have chosen to live. ###### Faith in the Future, Part I; The Moral Covenant, Chapter 3; Why Morality Matters 15 [Faith in the Future, Part I; The Moral Covenant, Chapter 3; Why Morality Matters 15](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Faith%20in%20the%20Future/s/Part%20I%3B%20The%20Moral%20Covenant,_Chapter%203%3B%20Why%20Morality%20Matters/r/15) **Maggid Books, 2024:** Morality matters because we cherish relationships and believe that love, friendship, work and even the casual encounter of strangers are less fragile and abrasive when conducted against a shared code of civility and mutuality. It matters because we care for liberty and have come to understand that human dignity is better served by the restraints we impose on ourselves than those forced upon us by external laws and punishment and police. It matters because we fear the impoverishment of significant groups within society when the only sources of value are material: success and wealth and physical attractiveness. In most societies – certainly ours – these are too unevenly distributed to be an adequate basis of self-worth. ###### Faith in the Future, Part I; The Moral Covenant, Chapter 3; Why Morality Matters 16 [Faith in the Future, Part I; The Moral Covenant, Chapter 3; Why Morality Matters 16](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Faith%20in%20the%20Future/s/Part%20I%3B%20The%20Moral%20Covenant,_Chapter%203%3B%20Why%20Morality%20Matters/r/16) **Maggid Books, 2024:** Morality matters because we believe that there are other and more human ways of living than instinctual gratification tempered by regret. It matters because we believe that some projects – love, marriage, parenthood – are so central to our being that we seek to endow them with as much permanence as is given to us in this unpredictable and transitory life. It matters because we may not abdicate our responsibility for those we brought into being, by failing to provide them with a stable, caring environment within which to grow to maturity. It matters because we believe there are other routes out of the Hobbesian state of nature – the war of all against all – than by creating a Leviathan of a State. It matters because as long as humanity has thought about such things, we have recognised that there are achievements we cannot reach without the collaborative bonds of civil society and the virtues which alone make such a society possible. ###### Faith in the Future, Part I; The Moral Covenant, Chapter 3; Why Morality Matters 17 [Faith in the Future, Part I; The Moral Covenant, Chapter 3; Why Morality Matters 17](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Faith%20in%20the%20Future/s/Part%20I%3B%20The%20Moral%20Covenant,_Chapter%203%3B%20Why%20Morality%20Matters/r/17) **Maggid Books, 2024:** Morality matters, finally, because despite all fashionable opinion to the contrary, we remain moved by altruism. We are touched by other people’s pain. We feel enlarged by doing good, more so perhaps than by doing *well,* by material success. Decency, charity, compassion, integrity, faithfulness, courage, just being there for other people, matter to us. They matter to us despite the fact that we may now find it hard to say *why* they matter to us. They matter to us because we are human and because, in the words of Sir Moses Montefiore, we are worth what we are willing to share with others. These truths, undervalued for a generation, are about to become vital again; and not a moment too soon.