Introduction: Sharing Duties

For Jews, and not only Jews, the religious voice is above all a moral voice. Abraham is chosen so that he will instruct his children “to do righteousness and justice.” Moses tells the Israelites, “Justice, justice shall you pursue.” Isaiah begins his prophetic mission with the most powerful speech ever made against the idea that you can serve God in the house of prayer while ignoring Him in the market place. Micah sums up the religious quest in three imperatives: “To do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.”

No idea in the Hebrew Bible has been more influential than this, that society is founded on a moral covenant between its members, vested in an authority that transcends all earthly powers, and whose most famous symbol is the Ten Commandments engraved in stone. Underlying it is a proposition which even today has not lost its power to surprise and inspire. In the beginning God created the world as a home for humanity. Since then He has challenged humanity to create a world that will be a home for Him. God lives wherever we treat one another as beings in His image.

That vision inspired the great champions of liberal democracy from Locke to Jefferson and beyond. But today, though vestiges remain, it is in eclipse and a quite different set of values prevails. It owes its inspiration morally to Nietzsche and politically to John Stuart Mill. On this view, society is not a collaborative enterprise framed by a shared covenant. Instead it is an aggregate of individuals pursuing private interests, coming together temporarily and contractually, and leaving the State to resolve their conflicts on value-neutral grounds. The key words in this new scheme are not moral rules and duty but autonomy and rights. The key principle of both morality and politics is that we should be free to act as we please so long as we do not harm others.

On the face of it, nothing could be more desirable. In practice, though, the human cost of this new dispensation has proved very high indeed in terms of fragile relationships, broken marriages, confused and uncared-for children, growing inequalities, rising crime, self-reinforcing circles of deprivation, a decline in civility and a weakening of the civic bond. The strong survive, as they always did. But that was not the prophetic test of a just and compassionate society, nor can it be ours if anything of that older morality persists, if we are moved by the plight of poverty in the midst of affluence, if we see too many wasted lives and wonder what kind of world we are creating for our children.

Worse still, the new individualism narrows the horizons of human happiness. I called one of my 1990 Reith Lectures “Demoralisation,” and I deliberately chose that ambiguous word. There is a deep connection between ethics and the human spirit, between morality and morale. If we lose the former, the latter begins to fail. It was Emile Durkheim in his classic study of suicide who coined the word anomie to describe a situation in which the individual loses his moorings in a shared moral order and becomes prone to a sense of meaninglessness and drift. A straight road leads from individualism to cynicism and despair.

Society is a moral enterprise. That crucial insight of the Hebrew Bible remains as powerful now as it ever was. We cannot live alone. But we cannot live together without conflicts. How we resolve those conflicts determines the quality of our lives as members of families and as citizens. It was Judaism’s great contribution to see the human arena as something other than a state of ongoing war in which power reigned supreme. A society could be constructed on the rule of law and justice, its rougher edges smoothed by an active sense of kinship and compassion. At the heart of such a society is a concept of the common good, meaning not that there is some ultimate good on which we all agree, but simply that we must learn to live together if we are to pursue any good at all, and that means at least some shared morality.

The following chapters are about family, community and the health, or otherwise, of our moral environment. They begin with a brief article I wrote at the time of the James Bulger case, the tragic murder of a two-year-old child which evoked a rare mood of national introspection. In it I set out what I thought had gone wrong with British society. The subsequent lectures and articles develop the argument in greater depth. In each case I have tried to evoke sentiments that reach beyond the Jewish community or even the community of religious believers, for these are issues which affect us all. The language I use is not theological, but moral. Beneath it, though, is a simple religious conviction, that God is to be found less in the “I” than in the “We,” in the relationships we make, the institutions we fashion, the duties we share, and the moral lives we lead.