Conversations: Featuring Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] we're by sex thank you so much for giving us your time you're a renowned thinker I've admired your writing for many many years from the other side of the globe it's a great privilege to meet you personally and to be able to draw out some issues that we think of great importance to contemporary Australia as as they are to Britain and the rest of the West can I begin by saying that you've pointed out the English philosopher John Locke's distinction between liberty and license Liberty being the freedom to do the right thing mm-hmm license being the freedom to do whatever you feel like whenever you feel like without any sense of responsibility now many social commentators are you among them I think worried that we're losing sight of true Liberty in our individual lives we're slipping into licence why is it become easy to confuse the difference well it's interesting you know there's a fundamental difference between freedom from and freedom too and I like the explanation that the American journalist David Brooks gives of freedom too he says freedom to play the piano yes he says in order to have freedom to play the piano I basically have to chain myself to the piano it's a whole discipline if I want to have that liberty of playing the piano well then I have to renounce many other things I have to make a choice to renounce choices so Liberty is about freedom - it's about all the restraints and the disciplines that you need in order to have a free society whereas in the West I think for the last half century or maybe even more we've put the emphasis on the freedom from the person who did this most famously was the late Sir Isaiah Berlin and his famous two concepts of Liberty his 1957 lecture where he settled for freedom from rather than freedom too now why did he make that choice in 1957 because he felt that the biggest threat to Liberty in the West was totalitarian societies specifically the Soviet Union I mean he'd come to Britain fleeing for as a child fleeing from the Russian Revolution in 1917 so he emphasized the freedom from which is all about license it's all about worrying about a totalitarian state that is gonna tell you what to do and therefore for you the most important thing is freedom from I don't want anyone to tell me what to do I thought that made sense in 1957 it doesn't make any sense today because the biggest threat to Liberty today is the collapse of Western liberal democracies because we don't have any moral beliefs and commitments anymore or at least we find it very difficult to say what those are and I think we have to see Liberty the way David Brooks sees playing the piano you actually have to learn disciplines and you have to forgo certain things otherwise you lose Liberty you've I think been doing quite a bit of work and have a book coming up on the question of morality what is it where's that come from so what is morality can you have a society without a set of underpinning of commonly agreed values well this is another experiment we have been engaged in since the 1960s until 1960 nobody would have believed you could have had a society without a moral consensus on fundamental issues as we know that consensus was basically dismantled throughout the whole of the West in the 1960s al idea of a sexual ethic the whole idea of the sanctity of life whether it be abortion or euthanizing all of these things came into question and so for the first time ever people began to think is a society is a group of people held together by a market economy on the one hand a political system on the other but nothing else the market gave you freedom to buy or choose whatever you want and the Liberal Democratic State guaranteed your freedom to live as you like and that meant no shared morality now can you survive like that well the short answer is for a while but no very long and we are beginning to see now the discontents we're beginning to see people really asking what is it to be British Australian what commitment do I have to love my neighbor so I I think we're just at the dangerous end of an experiment that was very radical in its time and we're beginning to pay a price for it the ultimate expression perhaps of those what have to be seen as deep divisions David books himself talks about 60 years of narcissism and of ruthless meritocracy leaving us divided and tribe alized and distrustful yeah it seemed to be what we're seeing here in Britain now with Briggs it and the inability for people to hear one another respect one another find a way together by negotiated consensus sure and indeed Trump's America very deeply divided sure morality I think is the we within the eye the thing that inside my head that tells me to be concerned about other people's welfare if we lose that all we have is the eye and in the end if we don't have you and I a shared set of values a shared framework of reasoning then in the end probably we will arrive at the conclusion that the loudest voice wins that's when you get very divisive politics like the politics of brexit or the 2016 American presidential election and you begin to realize that people have lost that ability to reason together which is part of feeling that we're all members of a single moral community and that we have to deliberate together because we're in this together you made a comment recently which particularly interested me around the disintegration of our moral language even the language has changed and words at once guided us yeah I think I have you rightly here right wrong ought duty loyalty virtue honor now that I sort of have an antiquated a musty air about them as though they're from a bygone era mmm have you heard many of those lately now I haven't they're just not in circulation no and they're incredibly incredibly important you know the concept of Honor for instance you know there are certain things you do let's say you're a finally successful businessperson there's some things you don't do because they're just dishonorable and that constrains you from certain things that might be very much in your advantage but very much to other people's disadvantage and to know that you're dealing with an honorable person who recognizes certain codes of what you do and don't do that generates trust lose trust and you lose everything so again going back to David Brooks because he's written the Magna was a book and we've been talking about it the road to character I recommend that people should get a hold of it and read it but he describes I think they sort of drift into narcissism as as being centering on this idea that I don't stop and think about you talk about the big me the drift towards the big me so perhaps the big me if it's all about me we don't think we need these sorts of words we don't need the concept but I had a long time in the Federal Parliament of Australia and it strikes me struck me then that strikes me now that we live in an age when we inculcate in our children that it's their the center of their own universe it's all about them the big me books is for it but we love that value system when we see it reflected back in us her to us by the people we elect we say they behave as though it's all about them don't they understand it's not they're there to look after us they're there to serve us so in a sense I think we're actually very conscious that we don't like where the demos has gone where we've gone that takes me way back to Moses meeting God in the burning bush and God tells them go and lead my people to freedom and mozi says Who am I and God says in effect it isn't about you leadership isn't about the leader leadership is about the people you lead and the cause you lead for so and that's a wonderful antidote to narcissism in the end the great leaders of the people who attach themselves to something bigger than themselves and that is what really makes heroes out of people I think we have had once you take morality out of the equation the we then you're only left with the I so lose a little moral dimension from society you're going to encourage narcissism come what may but one of the real dangers here and I hope I'm not too down on these social media is this whole world of Facebook and snapchat and Instagram is all about the presentation of self Here I am look at me it's a it's a call for attention it's it's it's a kind of construction over of an image which can sometimes be very narcissistic so I think the technology and the morality here of created a bit of a perfect storm I think it's a very interesting line just to pursue for a moment I was trying to explain the other day that I've come to see this issue of the way social media is being used as turbocharging for our young people the capacity to model the way we now relate to one another whether it's bad behavior in Parliament whether it's the modern tendency to cut people off if you disagree with them and not engage with their ideas but to demonize them social media has made it possible to turbocharge that to the point where I think you use the expression every young person steps out of line too badly they can be so ostracized as as though they're canceled and we know in Australia from some we have a problem with youth suicide it can have devastating effects oh the problem of teenage suicides is pretty pretty widespread in the West and very very bad here in Britain we had a report recently which said that a quarter of fourteen-year-old girls had self harmed in some way in recent years so these are having devastating effects cyberbullying and rejection and this feeling of fear of missing out FOMO all these things they're really playing havoc with teenagers emotions especially teenage girls no I think you've done quite a bit of traveling every year just you've been around sitting down with young people talking with them sympathetically out of a concern for their well-being mmm you know very honorable motives what have you learnt you've just touched on some of it but where are they how do they make moral decisions that we've said the very language of relationship and of commitment to one another's become antiquated and musty through lack of use what sort of frameworks are they using to make I'll tell you what frameworks they use some of them find it at home some of them find it among teachers some of them find it among role models very interesting role models you know journalists sports stars people who have done things that they regard as brave or courageous or honorable you know and I find that you know although they like any the the kind of formal curriculum or the doctrines that we used to have they do recognize good role models when they see them I'm sure that's right I once saw a leader talking to a group of young people and he asked them in their groups to discuss who they most admired and then he pulled the whole group together and each group had to explain who they'd most admired and when they had finished he said do you notice almost none none of them actually they were not people who were highly wealthy or extremely glamorous they're wrong people who had about them hmm qualities of the Spirit if you like yeah and of decency and humanity yeah they're the people we really admire yeah so that's who young people are looking for yeah I still think we probably need to do more though to return to a consensus around which we can give them a better framework on how to confront the moral issues that they're going to live with throughout their lives well I have this extraordinary privilege of doing a five-part series for the BBC on morality with some of the world's greatest experts people like David Brooks and Jordan Peterson men you know Steven Pinker the neuroscientist and Mike Sandell the Harvard political philosopher a lot of these people and on these programs on each program we had an interactive session in which young people 17 and 18 year olds reflected on what they heard from the interviewees and it was a verdict of everyone who heard the series that the young people were the stars of the show now stars of the show in which the other voices were the world's greatest experts on these various fields of sociology psychology politics economics so I am tremendously impressed by young people today I think we went through a bad period the Me Generation the epidemic if now see that we went through a very bad period people tell me that I gen or generation Zed or whatever you call it the kids born 1995 or on would have a much more realistic approach to things they know that life is going to be hard they don't have the sense of entitlement that maybe kids of a generation earlier had and I found them to be engaging altruistic realistic streetwise but in no way cynical or disillusioned so one of the biggest surprises for me was just how hopeful I came away from this encounter with young people today it's reassuring because they're going to face some enormous challenges yeah I think they know that economic as much as anything else but this comes back to the you point that you made really you know you've got the market economy you've got government the state and then you've got a civic society and and what I find interesting in many ways about what's now become becoming known as the peace and moment is that young people are keen to hear from him what is effectively a pretty tough message I watched him in front of young people in Sydney sellout crowds particularly young men and it wasn't as if he was just a motivational speech speaker telling them that they were wonderful in the world was wonderful if they just did this that and the other everything it would be arrived far from it he was saying you know redemption will not be through the political process it'll be the level of the individual you need every one of you we all need to examine ourselves long and hard and be honest about our failings and shortcomings go back to our bedrooms tidy ourselves up then go out and be Noble so I think that that fits with what you're saying about the realism and desire to rise to the occasion Jordan Peterson is our generations mr. tough love yes that is the voice that has been missing and you know instead we've had what the late Philip brief called the triumph of the therapeutic it's all about your feelings or we had the whole 1980s movement of self-esteem and jordan peterson is cutting through the whole lot of that and saying though it is as he said on our program the world needs you to get your act together you say get on with it stop worrying about feelings and start actually make your own bit you know a whole series of books by a navy US Navy SEALs have been bestsellers in the States essentially delivering the same message I think that is a voice that had been missing and it's an interesting voice I'd call it the Victorian virtues voice yeah which is get up and you know get on with it and it's a mark of how systematically that had been moved removed from our culture that our Jordan Peterson emerges as has an inspirational figure because actually he's just a figure out of time yes that's right from rules for living yeah for people at 50 years ago they would have said what's the fast yeah sure it's obvious it's true and one of the interesting things he said I heard him say this I didn't realize the full significance until I stopped I think about it said don't think an empathy culture can sort out your life for you because that's the message that we get too much now I think from some of the cultural elites who want to say well you're all victims unless you're a victim maker and and if that is really what drew me to Jordan Peterson his absolute refusal to endorse a victim culture yeah I you know my moral tutors the most powerful moral tutors I've ever had him my life have been a Holocaust survivors now these people really were victims their lives were were full of victims and yet these were some of the most life-affirming people I ever met who simply refused to look back refused to define themselves as victims said okay I'm gonna have to begin life again in a new country without my family so my fellow survivors will become my family and what did they do they built careers they had jobs they built marriages they had children and then 50 years later but not before they started telling their grandchildren what had happened to them they became the most non victim people I ever met there's a remarkable book now it became a best-seller in the States and here called the choice by Edith eager Edith eager was a like the late Viktor Frankl who went through Auschwitz Edith eager went through a schvitz survived survived the death march eventually moved to America became a psychoanalyst used all the pain in her life to heal the pain of others and then wrote her first book at the age of 90 Wow and became a best-seller and it's a life-affirming book and that is the meaning of the name of the book the choice will you or won't you see yourself as a victim so everything that I had learned from the Holocaust survivors chimed with everything I was reading about Jordan Peterson especially his daughter Mikaela who had this terrible illness and and Jordan was explaining to me in our interview about how they had agreed very early on she had agreed never to see herself as a victim that's incredibly powerful mm-hmm what you've just said ought to be something that every young person who's being tempted to paint themselves as a victim should hear because it's actually a terrible entrapment it's not a release it's not an answer to the problem to see yourself as a victim it essentially means to see yourself as powerless you have placed yourself at the hands of the victimizer the oppressor now you can't do that you're giving away your life it's also it strikes me a situation where you start to fail to examine your own conscience it's not your fault it's everybody else's fault and that always seems to me to be a bad place for a person to go Peterson again tells each one of us go and face the reality that the the dividing lines between good and bad that we draw around the place don't run between you and me or between me and you know somebody in another part of Australia or a different sex or whatever it's somewhere across here for every one of us yeah and we need to understand that freedom in weight depends upon us being honest freedom means accepting responsibility and that's a big leap robber sex the Peterson moment people's response to it seems to me to again point to the fact that we all need meaning and purpose we need to know who we are why we're here is there any sense to be made of it all does it open the way again for people to start to reengage with faith do you think in the West which because become almost ridiculously secular well I have tried to formulate a distinction that I think is important between science and religion and I formulated in this way science takes things apart to see how they work religion puts things together to see what they mean so religion is about the pursuit of meaning that is its fundamental role in life it is not a pseudoscience or no alternative designs it is about meaning I think the more that we become scientifically sophisticated the more we will begin to realize that science cannot deliver that from a strictly scientific point of view there is no meaning the universe just happened we just happen it was all a massive accident there's no purpose to it there's no logic to it it's a mere random happenstance and that is because science is always looking for causes and causes are always before the events they caused so science is always looking for something in the past but you and I whenever we get up and do anything we are facing the future whether it's pouring ourselves a cup of coffee or making a major business decision we are going trying to bring about some future state of events that hasn't happened yet and that is what meaning is all about it's all about what is this big story of which I'm a part and where is it tending to so science is always looking backwards and finding explanations religion is always looking forward and finding meanings and I think feel this very very strongly as as a Jew you know one of the things that makes Jews Jewish is that when somebody asks is has the Messiah come we always say not yet we're always looking forward so I think the more we realize that science is not going to substitute for religion it's not going to give us a story a narrative a plot the more we will turn back the way Jordan Pederson does and looks at the great classic met in the heart the great stories that have framed our expectations and hopes we won't look back as people try at leaders a day and say well Genesis disproves God you said some quite powerful things about the triteness of the way in which we say well it didn't happen in seven days therefore Genesis is a fairytale you know I cannot get over how uninterested the Bible here is and he gives it 34 verses for the entire creation from from from beginning to end and What's it telling us it isn't trying to tell us the how of Big Bang and he's trying to tell us some really rather fundamental things namely number one a very controversial proposition historically that God looked at the universe and saw that it was good this universe really is good it isn't just an accident it is good number two that he created every one of us in His image we would not get Western Justice democracy Liberty without that idea and the loss of that ideas what's been undermining those freedoms we've lost the capacity to see the spark of the divine was recognized in one another sure the idea that a higher authority says I may disagree I'm free to disagree with you yeah but I'm not free to therefore trash you or disrespect you yeah I mean you know separation of church and state in America but they still have on the dollar bill or do they still have In God We Trust I think they do think so so the fact is that we're there out trust in something bigger than you you are not going to get a stable democracy and I think you can see this very simply in two famous sentences two historic sentences both of them taking place towards the end of the 18th century you got the American Declaration of Independence we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights on them life liberty and the pursuit of happiness that is a religious sentence it says all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator that's a religious sentence 1789 the French revolutionary assembly all men are born and remain equal in rights a completely secular sentence yes and within months within years revolutionary terror yep and the complete breakdown of Liberty as a profoundly important point one revolution resulted in freedom yeah because of its understanding of our true condition yeah the other a man-made and ultimately quite an evil proposition sounds attractive yeah produce bloodshed mayhem yeah and and this yeah in fact I think you summed up beautifully recently one doesn't need to compromise to bring unity but one does need to recognize the integrity of one another's opponents yeah how did that might be understood in the context of Britain and a divided America yeah I think we've lost this wonderful thing probably the single most distinctive feature of Judaism the art of argument we never stop arguing I mean Abraham argues with God so does Moses so does Jeremiah said his joke all the rabbi's in the Talmud spend their time arguing with one another why because that is how you arrive at truth through the collaborative pursuit through respectful listening to your opponents and I think truthy emerges from that process and once you lose faith in reasoned argument which is losing respect for your opponent's really I'm right you're wrong how do you Bernard Lewis once put it I'm right you're wrong go to hell you know that yep you know something up you lose that respect for argument then you lose your respect for your opponents and you have pure division not just pure division you did see I think in the American presidential election real demonization yes you know I mean families broke up over yes people lost friends because they could not speak respectfully to one another and as Americans march under banners saying not my president in other words my fellow Americans can't be trusted with democracy yeah they should be all their political capacity to be involved should be canceled that's a terrible thing to say democracy means abiding by the rules even if you lose yeah and we're forgetting that someone said to me the other day it doesn't mean if I disagree with you it doesn't mean I hate you it may mean I love you I'd love to go back then out to universities and you and I were younger once and then the late 60s you headed off to Cambridge to study philosophy and you talked about that quite a bit one of the things that you've said is that your professors taught you that morality was no more than the expression of emotion or subjective feeling and it was within limits whatever I chose it to be you went on to say to me this seemed less like civilization than the breakdown of civilization what's happening in our universities it was obviously startingly and it seems to have continued we look to them to provide the skills the education the capacity to discern truths to arrive at informed decisions and no one seems to feel they're doing as good a job as they called at the moment philosophy in the 1960s throughout the West I think reached a very bad point and a very significantly bad point when they came up with the theory known as emotivism which is morality is just the expression of my feelings now if morality is just the expression of my feelings there's no argument about feelings I know the argument you like tea I like coffee you like ice cream I prefer whatever you know there's no argument about this so you have made moral argument impossible once you've made moral argument impossible you have kind of disbanded the the the the basis the intellectual basis of the university at least the university philosophy department and I think that that was when something began of which we are really seeing the consequences today of if since I can't since morality is only a matter of my feelings and since my feelings matter to me if you distress my feelings then I don't want you talking to me and then we get into this whole situation which is affected universities certainly in the States and Britain and and and Australia I gather of no platforming yes of safe spaces for your warning trigger microaggressions all these things which are there for very reasonable reason to protect student feelings but there's something beyond students feelings which is reasoning through to what is a justifiable feeling and what is an unwarranted feeling that there's something that makes certain emotions rational or appropriate and others irrational and inappropriate that was always the job of philosophy from the days of Aristotle you know am I am I feeling too much or too little this is the whole enterprise of Aristotle's ethics what emotion is appropriate to the circumstances am i being cowardly courageous or foolhardy so somehow or other this abandonment of Aristotelian reason and this emphasis on emotion which happened really in the between the 1930s and the 1960s laid the foundation for what I see is a dangerous situation in today's universities which is that the views that students don't agree with us simply hound it out and Jordan Peterson himself has suffered from this being debarred from having a research fellowship in Cambridge this summer my number of philosophies teacher of mine Sir Roger Scruton being accused of all sorts of things and removed from a government appointment on the basis of an interview in a journal which is widely acknowledged to have been a misrepresentation of his views can I just say on that point what's that closely mmm because it's very obvious that he was tried judged and executed before the facts were on the table yeah the New Statesman were in the end forced to publish the full text of the interview and it became very clear that his views have been misrepresented I think people like Roger Scruton and Jordan Peterson fall outside of the consensus but that is what a university is about to give space to those people who fall outside of the consensus otherwise we are back at the situation in fourth century BCE Greece where the citizens of Athens sentence Socrates to death for corrupting the young well I don't think that sentence anyone to death nowadays but social death social death social ostracization can't be canceled yeah we were talking about that earlier to tease us out a bit this what you might for one of a better term the empathy culture who dare not offend somebody you ought to wrap them in cotton wool I don't mean just sew it we should be cruel but you know what I mean by that so that they're not offended you courses are design around not offending students as a priority rather than challenging them stretching them exposing them to different thinking that seems to be very much against young people's interests that's the first point the second point though that strikes me as remarkable about the so called empathy culture is that the point you've just made if you dare to disagree with it politeness goes right out the door they don't seem to matter how badly they hurt you or break you or damage you how do we understand this desire on one hand to mollycoddle people and wrap them in cotton walls so they're not challenged but to absolutely excoriate anybody else who dares to adopt a different position in the field of ideas it's a very deep and beautiful idea it's a very religious idea common to Judaism and Christianity hate the sin love the sinner and this belongs to a particular view of morality which says that I am one thing and my acts are another that I can criticize somebody's acts yes without devaluing the person and we're losing that distinction and we're losing a similar distinction between me the person and the views I happen to espouse or the life choices enough when I was a student in Cambridge my postgraduate tutor the lights of Bernard Williams was Britain's most distinguished atheist he was most distinguished philosopher of his generation but he was I'm an absolute genius elapsed Catholic incredibly brilliant man and I by that time had become quite religious and we could not have been more different it was just I wish there was an abyss between us in terms of our beliefs but he never belittle my beliefs he never felt let me feel Mille a Theodore rejected or in any shape or form he was respectful the whole time the only thing he insisted was that I was lucid that I was cogent that he understood what I was saying that it made sense and so I felt very very respected even though my views were clearly very challenged and I think we lose that and today we have to get back to that situation of seeing that the university is really fulfilling its role in preparing us for the public conversation preparing us for meeting people who are not like us by teaching us to listen respectfully to those with whom we disagree in the shore knowledge that they will release and respectfully to our views and that's what universities should be modeling that's a sort of do unto others as you'd have them do unto you isn't it it often requires it sees love is not always just a feeling it's a doing thing mmm it's a willingness through gritted teeth to say I disagree with what this person is saying so strongly that I'm tempted to give and take offense by the minute we do that we're both going to be diminished mm-hm and we'll get a suboptimal outcome we have to I mean I have to learn this in politics you know you've got to rise above it and seek to engage with the idea but that's not what we're doing at the moment there's there's something that follows on in our judgmentalism we seem to be finding it very hard to forgive well I feel very strongly about this the Americans after Pearl Harbor did something extremely interesting one of the most interesting things I ever came across the government doing they realized that they were going to have to wage war against the country they didn't understand and so they asked an anthropologist by the name of Ruth Benedict and basically they said Ruth explained the Japanese and she did and it was later published as a book called the chrysanthemum and the sword and she explained the difference between a shame culture and a guilt culture shame and honor guilt and righteous are very very different cultures America is a guilt culture Japan was a shame culture now in a guilt culture there is that separation between the person and between the sinner and the sin so that even though the person Sint nonetheless they remain intact and you'll forgive you can forgive a guilt culture is a culture of forgiveness because the person remains pure whatever a shame culture is unforgiving if you have been shamed then you know you go off quietly and commit suicide now the West being a Christian guilt culture always had space for forgiveness but today we the West is no longer a Christian culture it's a media driven culture and we are in one of the supreme shame cultures of all time that's what viral social media do to you you get it wrong that's it you are shamed for life and shame cultures don't have space for forgiveness and that's why we've lost forgiveness in public life it's very dangerous it is unbelievably dangerous I mean forgiveness essentially tells us that we are not held captive by the past it also tells us I think it doesn't not that we're loved ya and respected yeah I do think that in the way that we've abandoned so much understanding of our own history and our own culture the loss of an understanding of the importance of forgiveness after all the founder of Christianity asked the question how many times should we forgive seven times no seven times seventy in other words we've been as we've been given much much might be demanded of us I do wonder how we rebuild harmony without a willingness to properly recognize that others will stumble as we stumble and have to be given the opportunity to get back up again the waste at the very least is terrible the human carnage of a lack of forgiveness seems dreadful I remember in 1999 when the NATO operation in Kosovo do you remember that yeah and I was making a I was making a film for the BBC each year I would make a a film just before the Jewish New Year and we decided let's do it from Kosovo which had not yet got back to normal the NATO troops were still guarding everywhere but the three hundred thousand refugees of the Kosovan Albanians the Muslims we're coming back and I stood in the middle of Christina I mean all the bomb rubble and I said this is where you see the power of one word to change the world yeah the word forgive if the Kosovo and Albanians and the servers and the crowds can forgive one another then they have a future but if they can't they are destined to replay the Battle of Kosovo of 1389 until the end of time you know all peace three months between nations and between individuals depend on a capacity to forgive that's a profound insight so I don't think we can let go of it I mean if if Christianity if Judaism had given humanity nothing but this it would have been sufficient I think I'd throw out a gentle challenge I often do this to the post modernists what's your substitute mm-hmm given the place you've taken us to yeah what is your substitute yeah what is the substitute for forgiveness it's a it's a rhetorical question that I respect I mean substitute authorities forgetfulness yeah and that's how you do it if you don't have forgiveness the trouble is that now anything recorded on the Internet is there forever it's not for what we have abandoned forgetfulness yes so we jolly well better get back forgiveness now you told a remarkably powerful story about victims of the Holocaust effectively forgiving not playing the victim card what is it though that is now saying that graciousness if I can put it that way repudiated by a rise of anti-semitism in many Western countries well here we come to a subject which is very much Jordan Peterson's as well which is victimhood anti-semitism when when bad things happen to a country or a culture they can ask one of two questions and the whole fate of that culture will depend on which of the two they ask they can ask what did we do wrong or they can ask who did this to us if they ask what did we do wrong then they go through the necessary business of repentance remorse whatever it is putting things right again and then they go on and they recover but when they ask who did this to us they define themselves as a victim and any victim must have a victimizer an oppressor and when any culture has suffered some kind of major confusion or humiliation and they say who did this to us they are looking for a scapegoat to blame and historically that turned out to be the Jews we were the most significant long Christian minority in a Christian Europe Israel today is the most significant non Muslim country in a largely Muslim Middle East one way or another if people are looking for someone to blame they will use the Jews there's usually no substance to it anti-semitism is 99.9% pure myth but myth has this power that it takes away the pain of asking what did we do wrong oh we can blame somebody else and right now the turbulence in Europe is providing that kind of fruitful ground for three tributaries in this new river of the new anti-semitism so if it is coming from Islam in the Middle East and some of it is coming from the old far right and far left that still exists in some form or other throughout Europe it's a shattering thing to think that this could happen within living memory of the Holocaust but it has it is indeed a shattering thing in conclusion then and on that rather somber note can I again say that your work in pulling people together and encouraging them to think calmly and rationally and reasonably and in a spirit of cooperation and forgiveness is remarkable can we at this point in the lifecycle of Western societies rebuild sufficient virtue and civic glue to use the words of our foremost political editor in Australia so in order to if you like regroup rebuild harmony and even prosperity there is a Harvard neuroscientist called Steven Pinker it's very interesting man wrote a book many years ago called the language instinct and which he tells a fascinating story that I really didn't understand there's something called a pidgin you know pidgin English yes which is a language that slave owners used to slaves yes it has a vocabulary but no grammar right yes it's just commands and basic things it turns out that second-generation speakers of pidgin the children of slaves basically develop something called a Creole and a Creole is a pidgin plus grammar these children without any formal instructions have created their own language out of the very fragmentary language that their parents had because we have within us something called the language instinct so even though you think that slaves have lost their language their children recreate a language on the basis of those fragments that their parents have given them I think the same applies to morality you know there's a kind of pigeon situation we've lost the grammar of morality we still have a few of the words but we've lost the whole grammar of it but I tell you the next generation the generation growing up now will turn that in the two Creole because not only do we have a language instinct we have a moral instinct as well and those young people that I meet are just so impressive they really are they know how dangerous the world has become they know perfectly well how hard they are going to have to work just to make a living but certainly to make a life well one of the problems that God is that we're handing them a financial mess we are handling them a financial mess yes and that is something that I feel very very bad about so I but I do have faith in them because they are going to bring back some of the morality that's been missing for the last 50 or 60 years I pretty strongly think that they're going to learn forgiveness as well I don't can't tell you whether they're gonna become more religious or less I think some will go one way some will go another but I do think they have a moral instinct and I do think they're gonna build a world of which we can be proud thank you very much indeed thank you [Music]

Channel: John Anderson

Views: 31,183

Keywords: Rabbi Sacks, Jonathan Sacks, John Anderson, Judaism, Freedom, Morality, Philosophy, Israel, Anti-semitism, Jew, Christianity, Religion

Id: 6tiBfM7W8wA

Length: 55min 22sec (3322 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 29 2019

Reddit Comments

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Submission Statement: John sits down with Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, public figure, religious leader, philosopher, academic and author. They discuss freedom, morality, religion and much more.