Moderator Emily Maitlis, opening remarks
Other speakers
Emily: Let me bring in Lord Sacks. Bad luck, you're both called Jonathan, so you get Jonathan tonight and you get Lord Sacks, just to make it easier.
Rabbi Sacks: Do a swap.
Emily: You swap at half-time.
Rabbi Sacks: Lord doesn't get you anywhere in New York, I have to say. They'll say, how do you do, Mr. Lord?
Emily: But Eleanor raises a really critical point there, which is, when you look at the university, is it a platform, is it an open platform in which any idea can be shared or rejected or explored or whatever, or is it a community that has its own identity? And you have to be careful, as a university, what signals you are sending out, who you welcome and how seriously those words of people who might be undesirables are taken.
Rabbi Sacks: To me, a university, I was the first member of my family to go to university. It was a huge culture shock. My dad, bless him, left school at the age of 14. And we felt, his four boys, that we were getting the education he wished he'd had. So, I mean... And I found something in the university.
I grew up as a Jewish pupil at a school called Christ College, so I knew I was a cognitive minority. But that didn't bother me because I've often argued that Judaism is a civilisation all of whose canonical texts are anthologies of arguments. And I think that's all God actually does in the Bible, is argue with people.
And the people He loves arguing with - people like Abraham, Moses, Jeremiah and Job - these are the heroes of faith. There's no such thing. There's no Hebrew word for obedience. Now, just work that out. There's a religion with a lot of commandments, but no word for obedience. So, Jews always develop this kind of intellectual anti-fragility because we are used to being a cognitive minority.
Now, I didn't know what on earth was going to happen in university. I found it very, very disorienting at first. Meeting people of a kind that I'd never met before, public school kids, all sorts of attitudes that were very alien to me.
But I found myself studying philosophy with one of the world's great philosophers, the late Sir Bernard Williams. And he was a very principled atheist, a lapsed Catholic. And I was a lot more pious than I am now.
And I wondered, what's going to happen here? And the fact is that we had the most extraordinary conversation, but he never once made fun of my faith, never once ridiculed it, only challenged me to make a coherent argument, a lucid argument, and challenged me at every point.
But the fact that a guy like that was willing to listen to somebody like me, gave me the courage, gave me the anti-fragility that I was able to do stuff that not all that many Orthodox rabbis had done before, which is take a Jewish voice into the public domain through broadcasting, through the Press, knowing that most people who will hear my message won't know where I'm coming from and will probably disagree. But saying society is a symphony score, a choral symphony scored for many voices. And that to me is the beauty of the university.
And why it becomes so important when we are disaggregating our societies into non-communicating sects of the like-minded. Now, all the cries of pain that come from excluded, marginalised groups have to be heard, but they have to be heard by all of us. I'm in favour of free speech because only out of that conversation, that democratic conversation, do we arrive at a society where we can all feel we have a share, we are heard.
So that for me is the importance of the university and why I'm so bothered the way the university has gone the way of rest of society, whereas it ought to be a safe space in which we are willing to give a respectful hearing to views opposed to our own. Knowing that our own views will be given a respectful hearing, despite the fact that many of those doing the hearing don't agree with a word I say.
Now, out of that democratic conversation come real solutions and real listening to other people's pain. Otherwise, if you disaggregate society into little silos and little boxes of Google filters and Facebook likes, then you get non-communicating groups who can only feel towards other groups fear and anxiety.
And that's just bad for all of us.
Other speakers
Emily: OK, so if it is just about the use of language, the use of kindness, of compassion, there is nothing for Chief Rabbi to disagree with there, is there?
Rabbi Sacks: Well, you know, I'm always willing to disagree.
Jonathan Haidt: That's how you get to be Chief.
Rabbi Sacks: But, I mean, you know, I just want to step back and put it in a slightly larger frame. One thing has bothered me. For the last 50 years, we have focused on two institutions, one favoured by the left, one favoured by the right, namely the State and the market. The State is about the creation and distribution of power, market about the creation and distribution of wealth.
And the right tends to find market-based solutions, the left tends to find state-based solutions. I don't let anything hang on that. But it seems to me that we have always historically had healthy societies when we had a third arena.
Because the State and the market are both about competition. They're about what in the short term is zero-sum games. The more power I give away, the less I have. The more money I give away, the less I have. There has to be a third arena, which we sometimes call civil society. A key arena of which is the university, which is not about competition. It's about collaboration and cooperation.
And we need to learn how to cooperate as well as how to compete. What I object to and what is very dangerous is if you turn the university into a version of the market, i.e. you get privilege according to how you can pay, or you turn it into a version of the State, where what's really at stake is relationships of power. And, Kehinde, you've said that universities are to be understood as relationships of power, and that to me is an allegation that needs to be taken terribly seriously.
Are people using power to impose their views on others or silence views they don't want to hear?
Universities have to stand aside as a third sector. We will learn to trust one another, listen to one another, respect one another's differences. And I think we're losing that.
Emily: Can I ask you one question? Bear with me. Let me take your imagination for a walk. If you replace the word university with ‘gentlemen's club,’ which is what it may sound like if you come from a minority that does not expect you in it, does that change? If instead of saying university, you say ‘In this gentlemen's club, we have to push back against the rule that doesn't allow women, we have to push back against the law that makes black men feel uncomfortable,’ does it then change?
Rabbi Sacks: Look, as the son of a guy who sold schmattes in Commercial Road, i.e. Lower East Side sort of stuff, that's exactly what university looked like to me. I've wandered into this gentlemen's club where clearly I don't belong. And it was a scary experience, I have to say this. And then I suddenly discover that all these very, very well-off and aristocratic and public school guys are willing to sit down and argue.
And when we're talking seriously from the heart, with passion but with lucidity, all of a sudden those distinctions of class and privilege just disappeared. And for a moment, that was for me an epiphany.
That said to me, this isn't a gentlemen's club. Here is a place where I, as a Jew - a cognitive minority representing less than one half of 1% of the population of this country - I have a voice here, I have a place here. And the same must apply to blacks, it must apply to LGBT, it must apply to any minority. They have to feel this is not a club that excludes me and therefore I won't exclude the other voices in this club.
Other speakers
Rabbi Sacks: I agree with you, hate speech is out. But it does seem to me that... I mean, what Kehinde is saying is that the university today is not the one I went to. And I agree with you. I agree with you. Let me be blunt.
If I were today a member of Gen Z, I couldn't afford to go to university. None of my family could have afforded. We went with no tuition fees and with a government grant. And if I found myself having to go to university, pay an enormous sum, burden myself with debt, I could never have had the career that I've had. I could never have become the person I became.
And therefore, if I were sitting where you're sitting, I'd also feel very angry. And I think there are a lot of groups in society today who have justified reasons for feeling very angry. And I really hear that anger. And I'm saying, if I'd been born 40 years later or whatever, I would also feel angry.
The question is, what do you do with that anger?
And number one, I think it's terribly important to be able to speak from that anger, to actually persuade people to listen to you and take you seriously. And that is obviously, forgive the cliche, but that's what Martin Luther King did. He spoke to the better angels of our nature.
There was a lot of anger in that man, but he nonetheless spoke in ways that evoked not anger, but a sense that, you know what, we have not lived up to our ideals.
I think of James Baldwin, for instance, who was doubly marginal in being both black and gay, who said one of the truest things about hate, which we really have to listen to today, where there's a lot of hate sloshing around. He said, “I think people cling on to their hate because they're afraid that if they let go of their hate, they will have to confront pain.”
So when there's a lot of pain going around that isn't able to be expressed, it generates hate. So I hope I've said to you, I think I hear where you're coming from, but I still ask, how can we take that anger and do the anti-fragile thing, turn those negative energies into positive ones? And I think open conversation and reasoning together is the best way of taking negative energies and turning them into constructive ones.
Other speakers
Audience questions
Rabbi Sacks: Oh, you're starting with me.
Emily: Do you want to talk about where you draw the line? Does your need to step in override your need to hear speech of all kinds?
The important thing that happened with Deborah Lipstadt and Denial is that it wasn't Deborah who brought the case against Irving. It was David Irving who brought the case against her. I think Deborah believes, as we believe, that free speech gets us beyond prejudice and hatred because in the end there is such a thing as historical fact.
So, she never sought to deprive him of his freedom to speak. I think there are some European countries, obviously Germany, but others likewise, who have such searing experiences, what went on during the Holocaust years, that they did enact laws banning Holocaust denial and so on. And that's got to do with their own inner history. They needed time to heal those wounds.
But Deborah never sought to do that. And if you really have confidence that you are right, then you never seek to silence your opponents.
There's a very interesting argument, given that where we are today in the world, and religions are turning inward, and ethnic groups are turning inward, and we're all a little more fearful of one another. It's just worth remembering the history of this free speech argument. I think it was the 12th century Muslim thinker, Islamic thinker, Averroes, who developed the first case that I know of of a religious defence of free speech. Saying that if you're confident in your truth, then you welcome opponents who are as strong as they possibly can be, because you know you're right.
And that is picked up in the 16th century by one of my ancestors, Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague. It is then picked up in the 17th century by John Milton in Areopagitica, and it is then picked up in the 19th century by the secular thinker, John Stuart Mill, in his tract “On Liberty.” So, it seems to me that if you really have confidence in what you believe, you do not seek to limit speech, because you believe that truth will win in the end.
Other speakers and audience questions
