Values: What should ‘The West’ stand for?

Introductory remarks

Charles Moore. Moderator: I know, Jonathan, you were interested in taking up the idea of democracy and going further in all that. Please tell us what you have to say. 

Rabbi Sacks: Yes Charles, can I add what a privilege it is to be in this forum and to have had the privilege of listening to Henry Kissinger. And it's just reformulated a song of my youth which should now go “Will you still need me, will you still heed me, when I'm 94?’ which is a source of hope that I wasn't expecting to have this morning and I feel much energised by it.

The real question I want to pose is which Western values? Which West? And here I want to turn to a distinction made by one of Margaret Thatcher's favourite thinkers, Friedrich Hayek, who in the Constitution of Liberty distinguishes between two traditions of human rights - what he calls the Anglo-American and the French. And they are very, very, distinct. The French one, famously the revolutionary declaration of des droit de l'homme et de le citoyen of 1789 - all men are born and remain equal in rights.

And the American Declaration, influenced by Locke via Jefferson, which says “We hold these truths to be self-evident… that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

They sound similar. They are in fact extremely different in three respects.

Number one, the French Declaration is clearly and emphatically a secular one. The American one is clearly and emphatically a religious one, talks about the Creator endowing human beings with rights. That is what Tocqueville meant when he said that “In France I saw the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty marching in opposite directions but in America I found them going hand in hand.” 

Second, the French formula was a formula for maximal government. In other words, human rights constitute an ideal template which it is the job of governments to implement. The American - the Anglo-American - tradition was a formula for limited government rights. They were not something guaranteed by the State. To the contrary, there was a statement of saying that there's certain areas - life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness - which are bluntly not the State's business. It's a formula for limited government. 

And number three, the French formula was based on atomic individuals separate from their constitutive attachments, their families, communities, faith tradition, and so on.

It's a point that Burke made very forcibly at the time, whereas the Anglo-American one was predicated on a very strong civil society. Families, congregations, communities, charities, and all the rest of it, standing between the individual and the State.

So you had two very different traditions in the West. And the cultural climate change - almost unnoticed - that has happened in the past half century, is that the French version has taken over the elites in both England and America. So we are all French. Now this is pretty bad news for anyone who believes that the Anglo-American tradition has something to be said for it.

The French tradition leaves very little between the individual and the State. And the end result of that is when the individual feels that the State is not meeting its needs, it turns to populist politics. Because private individuals, shorn of families and communities - which are dying on their feet in Britain and America - feel powerless and hence turn to strong leaders to defeat, a. the current elites and b. the outsiders - whoever those outsiders are - and populist politics is the beginning of the end of liberty.

So I would like to see a reinstatement of those Anglo-American values, at least in England and America, because the greatest danger facing the West is not the one we've been talking about. 

The one we've been talking about is real and significant. We have four ancient and extremely dignified civilisations that have felt marginalised by the modern world and are now reasserting themselves, namely Russia, China, India and Islam. Those four traditions are reasserting themselves in powerful ways and there's not a lot we in the West can do, except hope that it happens in a benign way.

The great danger is the moral vacuum at the heart of Western political structures. The French system believes that liberty is a political achievement. The Anglo-American tradition believes that freedom is, at least also, a moral achievement. And without that moral substance, born and cultured and cultivated in families, communities, and traditions - some religious and some national - the West will be left with a vacuum out of which disorder will follow.

Other panellists

Charles: Now is that a statement about our morality or is that because of the facts about the state of the world. Jonathan do you?

Rabbi Sacks:  I think Richard was right in mentioning the word ‘demos,’ to have a democracy, and what Margaret Thatcher expressed so powerfully is what it was to be British, what it was to be English. I don't want to get into that nuance. I remember when she first entered Parliament, and she was described as a “parliamentary Boadicea, with Hansard in one hand and a hat pin in the other. And she was magnifique in that role. And she kind of embodied a national pride which very much identified with the people. She was in that sense a politician who appealed over the heads of the politicians to the people.

And what's been breaking down in Britain and America is a sense of what that people is, or that beautiful phrase, which is central to American politics, “We, the people.” The reason I knew something was going askew in American politics is when the two most profound observers of American society - one from the right, Charles Murray, of the American Enterprise Institute, one on the left, Robert Putnam, of Harvard, both published books. Charles Murray, “Coming Apart,” Robert Putnam, “Our Kids,” which said in effect that the American story has broken down for half of America. Half of America, the America you read about in “Hillbilly Elegy” and “Strangers in Their Own Land.” the America of the - what do they call them - “the flyover states,” “the poor whites.” 

That half of America no longer identifies with the American story because social mobility has declined almost to frozen form today, in the last 40 years. The vast mass of Americans have seen their real standards of living static or declining. The American dream is no longer theirs.

Now take the English equivalent. I used to - I didn't close synagogues - but I did once in a while officiate at funerals, and I remember a whole generation of Anglo-Jews had engraved on their tombstones, “A proud Englishman and a proud Jew.”

Now I can tell you today, Charles, what it is to be a proud Jew. I can't tell you what it is to be a proud Englishman. And that was what UKIP and what Brexit were trying to rectify.

Our problems are global, but our only functioning political institutions are national. Tip O'Neill said “All politics is local.” And therefore, we have to recover that sense of being in this together as a nation. And that is what is missing today from the elites. There are an awful lot of people who feel the elites are cosmopolitan and they own no particular loyalty to this country or that. And that is what we are failing in our duty to immigrants, because when my parents came over, they knew exactly what it is to be English.

Jews spoke Yiddish for a thousand years. They said about one of my predecessors that ‘He spoke 10 languages, all of them Yiddish.’ And Jews lost Yiddish in one generation, because my parents insisted - and all their generation insisted - that we, their children, were good English men and women.

And today, for Muslims, for Sikhs, for Hindus, coming into Britain, what is this national character to integrate into? And that is leaving them estranged, so strengthen the nation and you will strengthen that entire constellation of values that allows the West to stand up for itself. 

Other panellists 

Rabbi Sacks: I have a fairly unusual CV for a Chief Rabbi, namely that my primary school was St Mary's Church of England Primary School and my secondary school was called Christ College. That's in fact how I knew Margaret Thatcher first, because she was my local MP. And I was studying politics, and whenever I had an essay to write, I used to go along to her in her surgery and ask for her views on the subject at hand.

And on one occasion, I had to write an essay on proportional representation, and I said to Mrs Thatcher in her surgery, ‘What do you think about proportional representation?’ And she looked at me and she said, ‘You're not a liberal are you?’ I decline to comment further on that one but the fact that the schools I went to were confident in their Christian faith, meant that they understood that just as their faith was important to them, so my faith was important to me. And the end result was I learned from that school a far more tolerant experience than I think I would have done had I gone to a secular school that regarded all faiths as nonsense. 

In fact, I never met among Christian and Muslim friends, someone who was as intolerant as the new and very angry atheists.

Never tell a joke to an angry atheist, they simply don't have a sense of humour. So I think having a strong faith allows you to understand the significance of other faiths to other adherents, and indeed of great humanist traditions as well. And I think the Church of England has been a magnificent exemplar of that, because it did make space for Catholics, and Jews, and Sikhs, and Hindus, and Muslims. 

So that's number one. I don't think Judeo-Christian values are the only ones that there are and I respect Indian, Chinese, Russian and others. But they are who we are or who we historically were, and to have that confidence in those values is inclusive and embracing and not in any sense exclusive. 

The other point I want to make - and it's a really important one - is that as I have researched it, the first account I have ever found in religious writing for freedom of speech comes from the great Muslim thinker of the 12th century, Averroes.

Averroes is the first person who says that if you are confident in your faith, you need fear no opponent, therefore let them speak freely. Averroes as a Muslim is the first person I know who puts that view forward. It is then quoted by one of my ancestors, Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague, in the 16th century, in the name of Averroes.

So Judaism got it from Islam. A half-century later, John Milton makes the same point in his defence of free speech, “Areopagitica.” And then of course two centuries later on, a humanist, John Stuart Mill, makes the same case in “On Liberty.” So here is a lovely defence of tolerance and freedom begun in Islam, then communicated to Judaism, then Christianity, then to a great humanist tradition.

So I do think the Abrahamic faiths - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - are a family here, who should face the future confidently together in co-evolution. 

Other panellists

Charles: ...I wonder how you see so, in the end of the Communist era, is should we now see Islamism as a sort of a power political force as well as an ideological question?

Rabbi Sacks: Charles, I feel very very strongly about this issue, and I've written the strongest book I've ever written, called “Not in God's Name,” on this issue, directed at Jews, at Christians and Muslims, collectively and individually.

I think Anne's point is important, but it's important to understand that it was born as a religious idea. The separation of religion and power. One of the most radical statements of the Hebrew Bible is the separation of powers - between kings, priests, and prophets - which gets taken up by Montesquieu and then by the federalist papers.

A king cannot be a High Priest, a High Priest can't be a king. So you had separation of power, civil power from religion. Then along comes Christianity and says, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's.” So you have there a principled separation of religion and power. But that is theory. In practise, whenever a religion is offered power, it can never resist the temptation. 

And the end result is that if you look at history, it takes trauma to force religions to reconsider. And we, the Abrahamic faiths, have all gone through this trauma. Judaism went through it in the first century, when within besieged Jerusalem, with the Roman troops outside, the Jews were more busy killing one another than confronting the enemy outside. And as a result of which, Judaism became demilitarised, a pacific faith that depoliticised itself and saw peace as the highest value. That happened in the first century.

Christianity, which was born 15 centuries later, has its own crisis 15 centuries later, in the 16th century, when Europe is torn apart by wars of religion between Catholics and Protestants, starting in France, culminating in the 30 Years War. 

And that is when the Treaty of Westphalia is born in 1648, as an attempt to create countries in which Catholics and Protestants can live together in peace. And that is when Christianity learned to separate religion from power.

Today, the same thing is happening in the world of Islam, between Sunni and Shia, between radical and moderate, between all sorts of internal things. And we forget that the primary victims of Islamist violence are Muslims. 

And when Muslim thinkers reach the conclusion that the rabbis reached, or that Milton, Hobbes, and Locke and Spinoza reached in the 17th century, that whatever God wants, He doesn't want us killing other members of our own faith… When that happens, the separation of religion and power will occur within Islam.

At the moment, Islam is going through great turbulence and it's very important for us to feel this, not to simply condemn it blindly. But to remain strong in our own conviction, that as religious people we believe that religion should have influence but should never ever aspire to power. 

Other panellists

Rabbi Sacks: Well, I am slightly against the need for enemies. The person who intellectually made the case was a guy called Carl Schmitt, who was a fascist, and I have a problem with that. I have a problem with anyone who reduces humanity to a war of the children of light against the children of darkness. Because that always ends in tears.

Our greatest enemy is a simple failure of self-belief, to be true to ourself, to be true to our past and extraordinary historic traditions, by which we're surrounded here. And when we own our past, we can give that on - together with the gift of identity and self-confidence - to our children and generations yet unborn. 

We have a wonderful and magnificent country here, as does the United States, both of which managed to incorporate within their national ethos, huge ranges of immigrants and refugee seekers, each group of which added something to the total culture.

It's a very embracing culture.

If you have confidence in who you are you can face the future and all your potential - not enemies but friends - without fear.

Closing comments