A Tortoise ThinkIn with Jonathan Sacks

James Harding, Co-Founder of Tortoise: introductory comments 

Before I turn to you, Rabbi, I actually was going to just reflect on the conversation we were having just before we came in here. Because the question I was asking Lord Sacks was, well, who today are the moral leaders? Who are the people from whom we get, if you like, our day-to-day morality? I just wanted to start by asking the room, if you were thinking, is it my friends? Is it my teachers? Is it my politicians? Is it somehow the figures in public? Like, no sniggering, please. Just going to put them in as well. Is it public figures? 

Who are the people who you think are the holders of the flame of modern morality, or certainly your morality today? If I were to ask you, for example, is it, do you think, your friends? Who would say your friends are probably your best guide to some moral judgments that you make? A smattering of friends. 

Who here thinks it is teachers? Thinks that teachers are the people probably you look for? One extremely well-taught, one and a half well-taught people over here.

Who thinks that it is actually public figures? I'm not saying necessarily politicians, but public figures, figures with a public following. We were talking about whether it's David Attenborough or J.K. Rowling or the Prince of Wales. Who thinks public figures are the sort of moral holders of the flame? 

Who here thinks, just out of interest, it's politicians? Generous of you to ask.

Who here thinks that it is religious leaders? Who thinks it still is religious leaders? I'm going to say I'm really struggling here, because we're about at least two-thirds of the way through my list. Sorry? Parents and family? Parents and family. All right, well, why don't I go to you on this, Lord Sacks, given that we've got, this I suppose is at the heart of the book, this sense that we're very unclear where our morality comes from.

And if you can, actually, I'd love you just to set out the core argument that we've outsourced morality to the markets and the state. 

Rabbi Sacks: James, thank you. I think the show of hands is very interesting, because until we mentioned parents and family, we were really searching.

And I remember, for instance, maybe 20 years ago, going around and asking everyone I knew for a period of some weeks, ‘Who is a sage?’ And almost everyone I asked replied, ‘Isaiah Berlin.’ And then I said, ‘OK, who's number two?’ And nobody could give me a number two. So it was clear that we had a problem with sagacity.

And I suspect that's why you created Tortoise, because we're all running so fast. We're not stopping to see the view, or as Matthew Arnold said, “To see it steadily and see it whole.” So we are short of sages, and that's what makes someone like James and Matt d’Ancona to found something like this.

I think we're short of moral role models, with the exception of parents, where in my case, exactly the same. My parents were my moral role models, very much so. 

Why are we short of this? My argument in the book is because we thought we could outsource morality. We thought we could outsource lots of stuff. We thought we could outsource production to China, to Southeast Asia, and we could. Trouble is, we didn't think what impact it would have on people here.

We thought we could outsource memory to Wikipedia. I mean, why need to remember anything when you can look it up in a microsecond on your phone? The only trouble is, there's a difference between history and memory. 

History is an answer to what happened.

Memory is an answer to who am I. 

And those are very different things. And you can't delegate identity to a computer. You can delegate facts, but not identity.

So likewise, people felt you could outsource morality to two institutions. The market and the state. Because morality is a matter of two things. The choices we make and the consequences of those choices. 

The choices we make are represented by the market. And that fitted a certain view of morality, which is, whatever works for you, so long as it's legal and you can afford it. So the market became our metaphor for moral choices. 

And our responsibility for the consequences of bad choices, we delegated away, we outsourced to the state. 

What happens when marriages fail? What happens when education fails? And so we delegated to the state.

And we said, you could run a free society on the basis of economics and politics alone. The trouble is, you can't. You can't for one simple reason.

Politics and economics are arenas of competition. 

One is a competition for wealth. The other is a competition for power.

You need something else in a society other than competition. The classic moment - did you see “The Imitation Game” about Alan Turing?... You remember Benedict Cumberbatch looking lugubrious and Keira Knightley says, “Tell them a joke.”

And he tells them a joke. You remember? Two explorers in the jungle. They hear a lion roaring. One of them starts looking for a place where the two of them can hide and escape. The other one puts his running shoes on.

The first one says to the second one, “What are you doing?”

“Running shoes.”

“You can't run faster than the lion.”

And the second one says, “I don't need to run faster than the lion. I just need to run faster than you.”

This summarises Charles Darwin's dilemma. Darwin understood that every society that he knew of valued altruism. But if you look at the joke story, it is the altruist who gets killed by the lion. And it's the person who puts his own survival first who survives. 

So Darwin actually said that anyone who took risks for the sake of others would die disproportionately young. And therefore, over time, the gene for altruism - I mean, he didn't use this language - the gene for altruism should go extinct. So why didn't it? And this puzzled him. And he didn't find an answer during the whole of “The Origin of Species.” Later, he found the answer and wrote it in “The Descent of Man.”

He said, any group whose members are willing to take risks and be altruistic for the sake of the group will be stronger than any group, all of whose members are only interested in their self-interest. And that has been shown to be true since the late 1970s in a whole series of disciplines - evolutionary psychology, sociobiology, evolutionary neuroscience, and game theory. So it all comes down to this conclusion, that for any group to survive, you need competition and cooperation.

You need both, and you need the institutions that teach you to practice cooperation. And those institutions are families, communities, congregations, voluntary associations, charities, and they are places where we care for all of us together. 

So the difference between that and morality, the state and market and morality, is the difference between competition and cooperation, between self-interest and the common good, between ‘I’ and ‘We.’

And the argument of the book is we have got to bring back morality and the institutions that sustain it, because we have got to bring back the ‘We’ into this age of excessive individualism. 

James: And Rabbi, the thing that's very interesting, and even in the way you just described it, what's really interesting to me is how much in this book, you talk forcefully about community, about family, about congregations, but you tiptoe about the institutions of religion, which given you're a rabbi, you don't need to be shy about the argument that actually those institutions, religion, are perhaps, religions are the ones that have informed our common sense of morality, the common sense of morality of our parents and grandparents. So why, when you frame it today, do you think you're looking beyond religion to try and inform our understanding of morality? 

Rabbi Sacks: I'm trying to say to everyone, guys, you don't have to be religious to come and join our little tortoise ramble together.

Religion today is in such bad grace as far as people are concerned. They see it as a force that is exclusive, that is intolerant, that is capable of generating hatred and conflict, which was my previous book. They see it as tied to outmoded visions of what constitutes humanity.

And therefore, I said, look, I'm going to put religion into this book, I have to. But I want to put it towards the end. I want to use the common language that I have because I was trained as an economist and as a moral philosopher before I was trained as a rabbi. That allows me to have common language with lots of people. I find that terribly, terribly important. 

Religion today hides behind its own self-erected ghetto walls and speaks to the believers, but not to all of us together.

This book is about all of us together. 

It's about really embracing people who don't agree with one word of the fundamental beliefs that I live by. But at least we're part of the same society and we have a collective responsibility to try to make the world better for all of us and all of our children.

James: If anyone's got a view, please just catch my eye because we're obviously now into quite a profound argument about the role of religion and the nature of morality. I'm just going to, if I may, read a paragraph, though, if I can, just very early, or if you want to, if you're a rabbi. There's just a very interesting line that very early on you say, “Being Jewish, I'm disinclined to pessimism. I prefer hope.” And then in one paragraph, there is, if you like, and I loved it, I have to say. I loved it because it was in one paragraph, a morality that I found inspiring.

It said this: “Love your neighbour, love the stranger, hear the cry of the otherwise unheard, liberate the poor from their poverty, care for the dignity of all, let those who have more than they need share their blessings with those who have less, feed the hungry, house the homeless, and heal the sick in body and mind. Fight injustice, whoever it is done by and whoever it is done against, and do these things because being human, we are bound by a covenant of human solidarity, whatever our culture, or colour, class, or creed.”

Now that is, you don't get encapsulations of morality like that very often. Certainly not in newsrooms, you don't. And I guess one of the questions that strikes me is whether or not you think, Rabbi, that distillation is born of a religious life, or whether or not that's as available and equally available to people who are not just non-religious, but anti-religious. 

Rabbi Sacks: I actually believe that that paragraph, which is kind of contemporary summary of what all the Prophets said, and they were just, I mean, their words are so incredibly fresh today.

Amos and Hosea and Isaiah and Jeremiah saying… has lost none of its power in all the intervening 26, 28 centuries. And I just kind of sort of summed up what they have to say. And I think that that flowed from extremely concrete historical experiences.

Being slaves in Egypt is clearly one of them. Being a small country surrounded by big empires is clearly another. This need for a society to have high morale - it's not accidental that the word moral and the word morale are almost the same, because a moral country is one where you know that other people have your back.

If you're going to be in trouble, they're going to come and help you. That creates enormous morale. And the Jewish people was always a very tiny group, whether in their country or in Diaspora, and they depended on this high morale. So they depended on this capacity to join together for action. So I think it came from very, very specific and concrete things. 

And I think it spoke, we know it spoke to the West in the 17th century, when England made that leap through revolution to the settlement in 1688.

John Milton and John Locke, two of the biggest theories of liberalism, were devout Christians. They could not have said what they wanted to say without being devout Christians. And in the end, even Thomas Jefferson, who everyone thinks of as a deist, when Thomas Jefferson gets up and writes the first draft of the American Declaration of Independence and says, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.” They didn't have women in those days for some reason. But you know, so when he says that, I mean, Jefferson must have known that that sentence is utterly untrue. Those truths are not self-evident.

Plato thought there were human beings made of gold, of silver, and of bronze. Aristotle thought some were born to rule and others to be ruled. It is only self-evident to somebody brought up in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

And even Jefferson, in his second inaugural in 1805, I think, says, I too shall need the help of that Providence which led our ancestors as led the Israelites of yore through the wilderness to the Promised Land, et cetera, et cetera. Bill Clinton, in his second inaugural, talks about the Promised Land. So if you read presidential inaugurals, they're woven through with this stuff.

I think probably Winston Churchill was probably the last British politician who could use that language. 

James: And do you think, I guess that's what I'm trying to tease out, is do you think that the divorce of, you know, the fact that it became anathema for politicians to say they had any relationship with religion, particularly in this country, has cemented this idea that politics is a space away from morality? 

Rabbi Sacks: Well, look, it didn't become anathema to politicians. Margaret Thatcher said it to the Church, the Scottish Methodists, and she was eviscerated… I mean, she really was. Then… is Matthew here? Matthew, do you remember the interview that - was it the Observer? - gave of Tony Blair before….? The interview between Blair… you and Blair, and the front page headline was “Moral Crusade,” do you remember? 

Matthew d’Ancona:... I was at The Sunday Telegraph.

James: So this is Matthew d’Ancona, my fellow editor. 

Matthew: I work here, but then, many years ago, I worked for Sunday Telegraph and did an interview with Tony Blair about his religion. He was obviously going to be Prime Minister, so there was an interest, and it was known that he was very committed to Christianity. And the headline on the front page said, ‘Blair: some people think that the Tories are too selfish to be Christian,’ or something along those lines. Great row, it was a huge row.

James: I just want to make sure we just sort of start getting some views from the room, if I may, because they're beginning to put some hands up. Sir. Would you say your name? 

Steve: Yes, Steve Clowes[?].

James: Steve. 

Steve: It's been a fascinating, fascinating discussion so far. What then just goes through my mind instantaneously is that we appear to have a breakdown of common ground, if you like, in society.

So we no longer have the concept of broadcasting, we have narrowcasting. Nobody has ever convinced anybody of an argument on Twitter. People just continually shout in echo chambers.

I guess my hypothesis is that everybody would claim to have a level of morality, but actually what has happened is the common ground has completely broken down. So nobody's going to say, ‘I'm an immoral person.’ They just have a completely different set of values that they consider to be moral, to values others might have.

I'm just interested to understand your reflection on that, Rabbi, in terms of just the complete breakdown of commonality or centre ground. 

Rabbi Sacks: I think that is true and very, very profound. It's exactly what has happened.

And people tend to think the moral ground is just there, or it just isn't there. Truth is, common ground has to be created. People have to think common ground.

So for instance, Jewish festivals - we’re coming up to one called Purim, we'll all relive the story of the Book of Esther. Four weeks after that, we come to Passover, and we really relive, family by family, that narrative. Every family gives their own interpretation to it, but it's all our story.

Now, the question is, how can you bring Britain together around one story? Now, I mean, this is something that actually I discussed at considerable length with John Major when he was Prime Minister and with Gordon Brown when he was Prime Minister. And both of them felt that we were losing this common ground. This is before the fragmentation of new electronic media.

And I came up with the suggestion, based on what works within the Jewish community, of taking Remembrance Sunday, which is already a day written out of the diary, and everyone is there. I mean, the Royal Family is there, Prime Minister, all previous prime ministers, all the other party leaders, and just divide it in two. Because Remembrance Sunday is about war in the past. So I said, let it be from up to midday about war in the past, and from midday onwards about peace in the future.

And bring the generations together, you know, in the Albert Hall or wherever. You know, we do this on Holocaust Day. The Holocaust survivor lights a candle and hands it to her child, who hands it to her grandchild, who hands it to her great-grandchild.

And there's a very clear handing on of memory, and there are ways of telling the story. 

Now, the person who got this, the story right, was Danny Boyle, Danny Boyle, in the 2012 opening ceremony of the Olympics. You know, we had this thing, oh, you can't tell, nobody knows the story. I mean, there are a million ways of telling the story. Well, Danny Boyle showed how it could be done. 

And we have failed to do this.

It is so doable. It needs a narrative. It needs a narrative that can be interpreted afresh every single year.

It needs a ceremony. It needs a date in the calendar. And if we can do this, for heaven's sake, we have Jan 27 is Holocaust Memorial Day. If you can do that for the Holocaust, for heaven's sake, let's do it for Britain in the future. 

So, you can create common ground, but you have to make a decision to do just that, because as you say, without that, we are just a bunch of noise right now. There's no signal, there's only noise.

James: I think there's someone over here, and I'm gonna come to you, yeah. 

John Alexander: So, I just wanna, sorry, yeah, my name's John Alexander. I began my career in advertising, but don't anymore.

So, I'm just battling in my head a little bit with something you said right at the beginning about the kind of idea that politics and economics are sort of essentially spaces for competition, and that family and community are then sort of balancing spaces of cooperation. And I'm partly remembering my relationship with my brother as a child, and that not necessarily was… but more seriously thinking, like, actually, isn't it that, sorry, isn't it that politics and economics both ought to be spaces of balance between competition and cooperation as well, and have maybe become, so my work is all about what is consumerism, and what does the idea of the consumer do to everything? So, the consumerization of politics, the consumerization of economics, the consumerization of religion, I would argue, is part of the problem. So, I just, I wasn't sure, yeah, I was just fighting with that kind of idea that it's not about balance within each, rather than balance between those spaces.

Rabbi Sacks: Let me just very, very simply give an example. The book does really deal with this seriously. What is an ‘I’-economics, and what is a ‘We’-economics? So, you know, I just tell a story, because it made a huge impact on me.

There's a man called Lord Arnold Weinstock. Arnold Weinstock was the head of GEC, Britain's leading industrialist for 40 years. The person whom all the business textbooks chose as their textbook example of what it is to, what did they call it in “In Search of Excellence”? Simultaneous loose type properties, all this stuff.

You know, he was very creative on the one hand, and very financially cautious on the other, and he built this enormous, enormous corporation. And he came to see me - he asked to come and see me - three months before he died, and he told me this. He said, tell me how much money he paid himself as CEO.

And he believed in the J.P. Morgan principle of the ratio of CEO pay to the lowest pay which would be 20 to one, not more. Today that ratio is 312 to one, but Bob Iger, who just stepped down, or was forced to step down, from Head of Disney, in 2018 had a remuneration package that was 1,424 times the median salary of a Disney employee, and the great-granddaughter of Walt Disney regarded, called that, “obscene.” 

Now, what Arnold Weinstock was concerned about - and I knew this because we discussed it on several occasions - was the ‘We,’ his responsibility to other employees, to his suppliers, to his customers, to his shareholders, to the communities where his factory was set, and he knew he had to set a moral example. This isn't just about him, this is about the people he serves.

And he said - and this is what brought him to me - he said, ‘My successor is paying himself 10 times as much as I did, and is destroying everything I built.’ And if you look up GEC, you will see his successor did indeed destroy everything he built. And that was an ‘I’- economics, you know, what is best for me? And as you know, what is best for a CEO is not always best for the company or the country, full stop.

So, and where did he get his ‘We’ ethos from? Well, actually it was a, there was a religious element to it. Our local synagogue was the one he didn't come to. But he had a very strong religious ethic that business is actually a moral enterprise. 

James: But he said, can I just pick up on the point John makes? Is there a way that you can, so we are seeing, I think, a new consumerism, there is an intersection of activism, certainly if you think about on climate, but increasingly on these issues of inequality, identity, that does inform the way consumers are making decisions.

But there's not, I think, what you would describe as if you like a covenant on the way in which we behave as individuals, as consumers in the marketplace. Who sensibly is going to write that covenant about the way in which consumers and capitalism can work? 

Rabbi Sacks: Well, I mentioned in the book that two very successful, major - one economist and one very successful venture capitalist - have begun this. You have - and this was while I was writing the book - Sir Ronald Cohen, who created a company called Apax, which was one of Britain's first and most successful venture capital companies.

Ronald Cohen is now going the rounds of G7 and G20, persuading countries to adopt what he calls impact economics, according to which a company will be judged not only by its profit or loss account, but also by its quantifiable impact on the social environment. And this is not a vague idea. He's got economists around the world putting those algorithms together.

The other one is Raghuram Rajan, former Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund, now Professor of Economics at Chicago - where Milton Friedman is probably turning in his grave - and arguing for something called social economics, where again, he's saying the economy of the future must pay account, serious account, held to account on its impact on communities and on society. 

There is a consumer element in this, because consumers do have the power to say, we will not buy from a company that is, you know, who's contracting out to companies that use slave labour or child labour or what have you. 

This may be a major axis of change.

John: Can I just check in? Yeah, go ahead. I'm sorry, because there's, so I won't go into laser depth, because others, and oxygen and so forth, but the word consumer, just to put this out there, is in itself a serious problem. So there's plenty of social psychology evidence, so forth. 

I've been involved in a bunch of experiments on this, so where even the, one example, you give, we gave 2,000 people a water resource scenario. You're one of four households depending on the well of your water supply. The well starting to run dry. You're asked two questions. To what extent are you prepared to use less water? To what extent do you trust the other three households to use less water? 

For half the respondents, we put the word consumer instead of the word household. They're less likely to trust each other and less likely to be willing to use less themselves.

So please don't use the word consumer for it. 

James: Okay, good, right. 

John: Well, there's a normal, there's a whole thing beyond that, but just before you even get it, this is not about consumers, this, because even when we use that language about ourselves, we're telling ourselves a story about who we are.

James: Very good point. We'll go with people, so then I'll come to you. Yes, sir, and then I'll come to you, sir.

Richard Angel: I'm somebody who's worried that… 

James: What's your name? 

Richard: My name's Richard Angel. The more people talk about morality, often the less moral they seem to be. So as somebody who was young and gay in the 90s and coming out, it was, there were people who were kind of actively homophobic in the name of morality. That was how they justified their actions. And I partly hope that was a thing of the past, but I am a member of an immoral organisation. I'm a member of the Labour Party, and I believe it is institutionally anti-Semitic, and that's been a real problem, and a moral question about whether you stay a member and the role you can take in it when you're trying to fight people.

But what has been most amazing is that you have seen a situation where a leader that people have looked to and drawn hope from has defined themselves as an anti-racist and been able to then, I believe, get away with doing things that I would see as racist. I'm sure you have views on these matters yourself. And it worries me that there seems to be a group of people in the public that are looking for moral leaders out there, but in finding them and seeing that this person can be it, they often then can excuse what I see as very immoral acts.

And you see that whether it's the fact the leader of the Catholic Church can get away with some of their behaviours for so long, with children and other things. The more moral people seem to be, the more that actually becomes a cloak and a source of power and control rather than an exhortation of what should be moral outcomes. 

Rabbi Sacks: Well, that is very true and very deep.

Because to be honest with you, you know, it is a problem when you use the word morality. It looks as if you're suggesting to people that we best confront the problems of the 21st century by marching boldly back to the 19th. And none of us would want to go back to the intolerances of the past.

Which is really why I, really, what I'm doing in this book is not giving you a moral code. Quite, you know, James wants a moral code. I'm going to give you a moral code, James, but not for the next five years, okay? Because I'm really using the word covenant, which covenant means we together deliberate on how we would like to construct a society for ourselves and those who come after us. And we thereby pledge ourselves to do what we can to work towards it. 

It's a very flexible notion of morality and it suggests that morality is not necessarily one and the same thing all the way through time. Although certain concepts clearly are.

Justice was and remains relevant. Compassion was and remains relevant. But some others don't.

And some others, so you are right, there's a huge problem of street credibility today among all the institutionalised forms of moral leadership. Huge problem. And I'm saying let us simply move our thinking from ‘I’ to ‘We,’ from simply cooperation to also cooperation, to also cooperation.

You know, if we did no more to address climate change by shifting from thinking short to thinking long. If we did no more than what James once taught us to do, from thinking fast to thinking slow, then we would have made that change. And what I want to do in the book is make the case for moving from thinking ‘I’ to thinking ‘We.’ 

James: So I'm coming…

Josh Nagley: Hi, my name is Josh Nagley. I'm really grateful to hear all this stuff because I think… 

James: Josh, will you just speak up? 

Josh: Yeah, sorry. So I think it's all extremely, extremely valid, particularly for today.

But what I worry about is that a lot of what we've discussed is very good in theory. But in practice, a lot of this theory requires will, will from people. But when we talk about institutions, it requires political will.

And in this day and age, particularly looking back over the last five to 10 years, that political will for any kind of sweeping change in society, just hasn't been there. And therefore, it leads me to question whether, to some extent, we've got a lost generation of morality. 

And I have a feeling that that is mostly part of my generation, your millennials and below, I think, where we've been given technology that our parents didn't have, that have led to us taking actions that our parents wouldn't have even envisaged.

So I think that there's a lot of questions in my mind whether any of these things are even possible. 

Rabbi Sacks: I think you're right in thinking that this is generational. And what's really interested me was the following experience.

BBC asked me to do a series, which I did, on morality about 15 months ago, something five-part series. And on that series, we had some of the world's top experts on all these issues. Steven Pinker and Mike Sandel and Robert Putnam from Harvard and Jordan Peterson from Toronto and Mustafa Suleyman of DeepMind, you know, Nick Bostrom on superintelligence. Fabulous, fabulous people. 

And to make these programmes a bit more interesting, we got 17 and 18-year-olds from four different schools, two in Manchester and two in London. And I sat in the studio with the kids and we bounced back the interviews on them.

According to everyone, they stole the show. They were the absolute stars. And these were what the Americans called Gen Z, what we call Generation Z, what Jean Twenge calls iGen. These were the 17 and 18-year-olds who grew up with social media. And I have to tell you, they were morally articulate, morally engaged, they had a lot of humour, they had a lot of insight. But above all, they had a lot of seriousness to them.

And I think this new generation is going to surprise all of us. They actually are very moral indeed. That's why I felt this is a message whose time has come.

Otherwise, I wouldn't have wasted my time on it. 

James: Who was it, Ellie? Did you have your hand up? 

Spinny Witter: No. Can I respond? 

James: Yeah, sure, go ahead.

Spinny: No, I have three teenage daughters. 

James: Sorry, could you say your name? 

Spinny: Spinny Witter. 

James: Spinny.

Spinny: Hello. I have three teenage daughters who are 14, 16 and 18 and they are so morally aware. I mean, they want to create positive change in the planet.

What they're not taught is, so all the social media side of things in life makes them very externally focused. What they're not taught is how to generate compassion for themselves. They're not taught how to be kind to themselves.

And I've just done a course in neuroscience and we're not hardwired for self-compassion. We're hardwired for compassion for the group because that was contingent on our survival when we were around the campfire or we were in the cave and the other parts of our group were looking after us and protecting us from predators. So we are not neurologically wired to be kind to self.

And I think that's something that we could teach in schools. There's a lot of talk about the top-down, how do we create institutional morality and compassion. I think there's a huge amount we can do bottom-up.

And I think we can teach our kids compassion for all sentient beings, including themselves. 

Rabbi Sacks: There is, of course, I don't know whether you liked it or you hated it, but there is a film about this that just came out called “A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood.” Have you seen that? Tom Hanks proving what relentless goodness can do for a journalist who has no compassion for himself whatsoever, which is causing him to have a horrendous row with his father and not a terribly good relationship with his wife and young child.

And Tom Hanks does this in a very clever way because this is not a naive, gooey sort of film. But it's extremely powerful. And I think it came at just the right time because I don't want the only testaments to our time to be “Parasite” on the one hand or “Joker” on the other hand. You know, very black films indeed. 

So that is a good role model. In my view, and I had this conversation with three consecutive secretaries of state for education. You can teach five-year-old children, by game playing, the following techniques: Number one, praising. Number two, listening. Number three, collaborative problem-solving.

And number four, what's number four? 

Spinny: Is gratitude in there?

Rabbi Sacks: Yeah, gratitude and I've forgotten. Anyway, I learned these things, believe it or not, from a speech therapist, no longer alive. I was doing a documentary for the BBC on the state of the family in Britain.

And I had been doing some research on the speech therapist who was teaching kids, five-year-old kids, how to cure themselves of a stammer. But she was not at all like the speech therapist in “The King's Speech,” which was basically a speech therapist who was teaching technique. She did more than that.

She believed that every stammer was an answer to a dysfunction in the family. And in order to cure a child from its stammer, they had to renegotiate all the relationships in the family. 

Now, how do you renegotiate relationships in the family without being scary? Because, you know, you're comfortable with the way things are, especially at home.

And she discovered that praise is the first thing you do. If every single member of the family praises every other member of the family once a day, for one tiny thing they did, you know, ‘Oh, you passed me the salt, that was really kind of you.’ Whatever it is, doesn't matter what, okay? So she had to train the kids, but she had to train the siblings, she had to train the parents.

So I took a film crew. I was working with a dysfunctional film crew. I don't know what got into them, but they just weren't getting on with one another. And I took them, in the middle of this documentary, to film this speech therapist teaching parents, you know, in a circle, how to give praise and receive praise.

Giving praise was pretty damn hard, you know? Receiving praise turned out to be even harder, you know? ‘Oh, it was nothing, ah, it was nothing,’ you know? Oh, you threw it away, you see, you threw it away. They filmed this thing for an hour. The next day, they started praising one another.

All the dysfunctions of this thing disappeared. It was magical, just watching this happen. And I was seeing this happening to five-year-old kids, I thought, what she is teaching them is not to lose their stammer, she's teaching them how to make and sustain relationships. This is world-changing, and it's got no moral content to it because it's just done by game-playing.

So don't tell me marriage and the family is a religious… it's got nothing to do with that. It's just got to do with how to make and sustain relationships. 

And I sat time after time with every Secretary of State for Education, saying, you know, just do a pilot project, I'm thinking about your big thing, just try it out.

I'm telling you, it will change these kids' lives. It will be lifelong. And I did not get one piece of interest.

So when you say you can teach children these things, you really, really can. And if you want to change the world, change what you teach children. 

James: Now, I'm going to ask for a bunch of people, there are a bunch of people, there's a gentleman here who's had his hand up, and there are others as well.

So you can just, you first want to take a clutch of a run. 

Robert Mindell: My name is Robert Mindell. 

James: Is it, sorry, is it Robert did you say? 

Robert: Robert, yeah. You made a fascinating point earlier about inequality by citing the Disney CEO, Bob Iger's, remuneration and CEO pay ratio in excess of 1,000 to one of the median. But obviously the reality of that is that there are a huge portion that is deferred show options and long-term incentive plans. So I'm not here to defend a pay ratio that's definitely in excess of that J.P. Morgan ratio you cited, but isn't that evidence? And the audible gasp in this room, hearing that was even more fascinating because it shows how the nuance in arguments can be lost.

We are in search of morality and in search of justice. Campaigners are, in a sense, we are seeing too much distortion of facts, distortion of truth, distortion of what is the reality. We are losing that nuance, whether it's that campaign group trying to seek workers' rights among large employers, whether it's seeking for environmental justice among large companies that are polluting.

But as an individual - and I'm not going to say consumer - you get lost in what you trust because whoever shouts loudest, whoever makes the most scaremongering argument ends up being the one that is most forceful. And is that not danger for morality in society? 

Rabbi Sacks: Yeah, of course. I'll tell you exactly how I write books. See, when I was a kid, I learned to speak in public. And in those days, I mean, not anymore, but in those days, I could do it quite well. I could really move a crowd.

And I thought that was the most dangerous thing I knew. Because you can move them to truth, but you can move them to falsehood. You can move them to love, but it is a lot easier to move them to hate.

You can move them to feel threatened. You can move them to paranoia. I cannot begin to tell you how easy it is.

And it made me ill. I still speak publicly, it's what I do. But I thought I'm not going to do this any longer as the carrier of what I have to say to people.

I'm going to set it out in print, with sources, with footnotes, with qualifications, wherever I feel it appropriate, and say, here it is. Now, I'm not trying to persuade you of anything. Just read it on your own and tear my argument to shreds.

That's why I wrote the book. And that is the difference between what the Greeks used to call philosophy and sophistry. And that's why I write books.

James: I'm just going to ask about this for a bit. A couple of, and you, sir, have a view as well. 

Pete Flynn: I'm interested in your views on moral courage and the ability now to be able to display moral courage. Because it seems to me that it's not that there are less rewards because there should be rewards, but there are more downsides. If a church has fallen from grace, if politicians have become more polarised, then calling things out and trying to do or say the right thing is now attacked from, because of where you belong or your tribe or your political persuasion, rather than the facts of the matter and that you did the right thing and made a moral call. 

So that seems to me that sort of, you know, I'm an ex-military guy and we all really knew that moral courage is far harder than physical courage.

It just seems at this moment in time, it's far harder to display moral courage. 

James: This gentleman in the audience, go ahead…Oh, Seb. 

Seb: In terms of this whole talk, consumerism and individuality has been raised quite a few times. Individualism, sorry. And it's just quite interesting because I don't feel individualism is something that is actually going to go anywhere. I feel now Pandora's kind of out of the box with it. People don't really want to lose their sense of who they are and I just want to kind of get your opinions on what you actually feel in terms of morality. If we are going to have this individualistic self in the future, where do you think that will actually go? 

James: And there's a lady over there who wants to say something. 

Tali: Hi, my name's Tali. I was one of the Mancunian teenagers in the States.

[Rabbi Sacks acknowledges]

And back then, I probably described myself as a kind of non-believing Jew. And I kind of want to get more in touch with the morality from my religion, not necessarily going back to practising, but just getting in touch with the morality that comes from Judaism.

And I was wondering how you can do that. 

James: And I'm just going to do one thing, Tali, if I may, because there are two rows behind you. There's this one there and the one here. You're right in the back, yes. Red head or red band.

Ellie: My name's Ellie, I'm a Master's student. Just touching on an equality of things, how, obviously we're gathered here today because we're all interested, but for the people, I know a lot of people like my age, kind of, what do you say to people that kind of feel that they're chasing a concept of morality when there may not be one? And in this increasingly individualistic world, can we get one back when there are so many injustices every day? And yeah, are we sort of fighting a lost cause? 

James: Of course, all right. And before, Rabbi, I'll give you another, there's this gentleman I'll set up on to you, so yes. 

Danny: My name's Danny. We talk about the shift from five to a week, but isn't there a fundamental risk with that that we are susceptible to groupthink? Some of the greatest moral thinkers, moral leaders have been what you might term, ‘I people,’ people who haven't been afraid to sort of stand out from the group, haven't been afraid to stand out from the sort of normal thinking. So, that's it. I think so too, right? 

David Nash: Well, I pick up Pete's point.

James: Would you introduce yourself?

David: Yeah. David Nash. I picked up Pete's point about moral courage, and I think that is correct. You have to be very brave to speak up nowadays. We talked about children. I feel sorry for people of my age, right? Because if you carry on thinking about the world, you see so much which is nonsense.

And there are so few people. This is why I joined James's organisation when he set it up. Let me give you one, Rabbi, one example, and it's called the “Me Too” movement. I am appalled by what Weinstein et al does. But why? Why call it Me Too? It's me as well.

It should be “We Too.” 

Now, that's the point, and I got really criticised for it. People saying, oh, you know, you're supporting Weinstein.

That wasn't true. What I was trying to say is engage. Bring people together. We all feel offended by this. Now, isn't that symptomatic of our time? That a wonderful movement, which has got honourable motives, has become sort of ambushed or something by selfishness. 

James: David, thank you. I'm gonna try to, because actually they all come together, these ideas about where does individualism end up? What happens to, is the risk of losing the individual is that you end up with groupthink? Are we suffocating moral courage? Do we reach for the world of me? Is there a way that you can actually see us moving from an ‘I’ society to a ‘We’ society that doesn't lose the power, if you like, of heretical thinking, of challenging establishments? How do you see even, to Seb's point, where individualism sort of ends up? 

Rabbi Sacks: Okay, let's go through number one, moral courage. You're absolutely right. You say one thing out of turn today and the whole world dumps on you. And that is terrifying, really, really terrifying. 

And, and, I don't know, there's this thing in Exodus chapter 15. The Israelites are fighting a war against the Amalekites and Moses is trying to inspire them. I mean, he lifts his hands up and they look up and they win, but he gets tired. And Aaron and Hur stand either side of him and they hold his hands up. 

So, the only way you get moral courage is having a couple of friends who are willing to hold your hands up.

And I have to give you a principle which will save all of you a lot of anguish if you haven't thought of it for yourself already. But, you know, because I used to come in for a fair amount of it myself once upon a time. 

And the principle is win the respect of people you respect.

And the rest, that's their problem, not yours. Right, that's moral courage. 

Number two, individualism.

Sorry, who was next? 

James: Seb, yeah. How do we, how do we, I mean, yeah. So where does it go? Where does individualism end up if it's essentially a busted flush? 

Rabbi Sacks: Individual, understand this quite clearly.

I do not want us to go back to ‘We’ exclusively. I want us to hold the ‘I’ and the ‘We’ in balance because every good ‘We’ makes space for every individual ‘I.’

I was just reminded of this on Saturday because I was at my old stamping ground in St. John's Wood Synagogue. St. John's Wood Synagogue is just next to - and I used to cross it every day I went to synagogue for 22 years - the most famous zebra crossing in the world. The Abbey Road zebra crossing. So, you know, I don't know, can I talk Beatles or is this, that must be Jurassic. 

Here's a little exercise, okay? Google “Images, Beatles, 1963.”

Right? You will see a lot of photographs and they all show four people with the same jacket, the same shirt, the same suit, the same haircut, the same smile. It radiates ’We.’ 

“Google images, Beatles' last photo shoot, 1969.” They're all dressed differently. Nobody is looking at any other. They're all looking miserable and the think bubble over all of their heads says ‘What am I doing here?’ And this ‘We’ has turned in six years into a series of four ‘I’s.

Now, anyone know what the last song they ever recorded together was? George Harrison, “All through the Day” - I, me, mine, I, me, mine, I, me, mine. That was, they'd moved from this ‘We’ society to this society of individuals. As individuals, I don't think they quite replicated their brilliance and creativity.

So I did a quick search. According to the general consensus, what was the best song each of them did after their split up? The answer came back, Paul McCartney, “Maybe I'm Amazed,” George Harrison, “My Sweet Lord,” John Lennon, “Imagine.” Then I looked up the dates for those three songs.

“Maybe I'm Amazed,” 1969, “My Sweet Lord,” 1970, “Imagine,” 1971. So the momentum of the ‘We’ lasted for two years, and then all you had was the same individuals, but you had individualism trumping that collective creative spirit. 

So that's when you begin to realise that individualism leads nowhere, and people begin to search for something else and something deeper, called relationship.

And that is what is going to happen. I just wanted to give it a bit of a kickstart. 

Tali, morality of Judaism. Could I, without seeking to advertise, tell you? 

James: This is going to be difficult. How are you going to do that?

Rabbi Sacks: Sorry about that. But I wrote a book called “To Heal a Fractured World,” which will be the book that you want.

James: Okay. Ellie. Sorry, Ellie. What did you want? Sorry, chasing…?

Ellie:  Just, yeah, can we really get lost back in the idea of morality of people, people feeling really lost in this world and kind of so hard on each other? 

Rabbi Sacks: We can because we will continue to respect people who have integrity, who have loyalty, who treat us like grownups instead of politics by tweet, who are clearly seen to be acting in our collective interest. And you will find them here and there, and whoever thought that the first name that would come to my mind as a moral role model would be David Attenborough. I mean, it's not where I thought of looking, but it seems to me this guy is just so special that he will not say something that is not deeply considered and deeply significant for our collective future. 

J.K. Rowling has shown she's not just a brilliant novelist, which she is in spades, but she's taken a little stand here and there and there, which required moral courage, on anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, for instance, as did John le Carré. So these are people who show by their willingness to put their head above the parapet.

You will search and you will find. I promise you. 

James: On that note, because I'm afraid, Rabbi, that you'll have seen Agatha has marched through, smashing the finish line.

I want to just ask you to do one thing to put it together for us. 

Rabbi Sacks: Yes. 

James: In the very last chapter of this book, you make the argument for covenant thinking, that we can actually move beyond the sort of the competition in some marketplaces of ideas and we can create covenants together.

Just in an unabashed and constructive way, how do we frame those covenants together? 

Rabbi Sacks: A covenant is morals by agreement. They are not handed down by divine word. They're not engraved on tablets of stone. They are agreements. 

The very first covenant, Exodus chapter 19, you will see that God did not order the Israelites. He said, would you agree to this thing? And they all said yes.

And he said, ‘Okay, here are the 10 commandments. Sorry, I couldn't get them down to eight, but you know, what can you do?’ And et cetera. 

But that was an unforced agreement between God and the people.

This is unusual. People don't think in these terms. Can we come together as a society? Now, you find the people who would do that. I don't know who they are. They may well be, one would wish they were religious leaders. It may well be that, I don't know, somebody like Prince William would step forward and say something like that. I don't know who. 

But say, look, this is what we believe in, as citizens of this country. We know we do not share a religion or an ethnicity or a colour or even in some respects, a culture. We don't share sexual orientation, but we are all equally citizens of this country, equally entitled to dignity, to justice and compassion. And we call on those, as you read from me, who have more than they need to share with those who have less than they need. The role models here are Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett.

They, you know, once you have that number of billion dollars, you know, you don't need every single one of those dollars. And if you're not minded to stand for President of the United States, you don't need to spend all that money on political advertising either. So all you do is you bring people together.

You do this quietly to begin with, and then you make sure. But you can do this in any company. 

Let me tell you a story. I'm sorry, I know the tortoise is tortoised all the way to the end. But there is a school in New York, in the Upper West Side. It's a Christian school. It's called Trinity School. It is, Forbes Magazine called it the best private school in America. And it is one of the oldest schools in America, founded in 1707.

Three years ago, the Head Teacher of that school wrote to all the parents and said, I want to change our relationship. He said, until now, you have had a contract with us. You know, you pay the fees, we produce the grades.

I would now like to propose that you have a covenant with us. 

That we recognise we are part of a single moral community. That we recognise that for the good of this country and your children, we want them not only to get educated, to get their grades, but also to learn to be moral individuals as well.

And the school and the parents did agree. 

So you can move from a contract society to a covenant society, from a society of self-interest to a society of the common good, even within a little group, whatever group it is - a corporation, a company, a charity, what have you. Covenants happen when we come together to pledge ourselves to a shared future. And that is the way forward. 

James: Rabbi Sacks, thank you very much indeed. 

I'm going to say, if you'll allow me, three things very quickly.

One, and most importantly, is that no conversation should really ever end. And if you wanted to continue, and if you also want to get a copy of Rabbi Sacks' book, I'm gonna squirm him out in a moment and he's gonna be in the Green Room and will be signing copies of the book. So please come and do that.

The second thing is to say that I think that you rarely get a conversation like this and it shouldn't end in another sense, which is thinking about actually how do you take such things forward? 

And if I may, the thing that was really striking for me about today was actually the solidity of the ideas, the ability to say actually, to Steve's point earlier on, that there is a question about common ground, but there are ways that we can create common ground. We can create common ground through the telling of stories, through your idea about Remembrance Sunday. We can create common ground in response to Spinny's point about the way in which we teach children with a kind of set of ideas around that.

There are, it seems, two very, very big unanswered questions. 

One is how do you deal with this issue about institutions that are, in your phrase, “in bad grace,” particularly religious ones, when they have clearly a big moral role? 

And how do you deal with the point that Richard made, which is if you do stick your hand up to be moral, actually, the result of that is it can make it harder for you to take that position of moral leadership. 

Closing comments