Moral Dilemmas in the Age of Social Media.

Larissa Farquhar: You, Rabbi Sacks, have talked about returning to a Judeo-Christian heritage as a way of restoring a sense of responsibility. You, Professor Haidt, have talked about the way that college students have been encouraged to think of themselves as traumatised victims, or at least potentially traumatised victims. But, of course, some things are outside your control.

Racism, sexual abuse, poverty, many things do impinge on people that they cannot control. And it's been one of the political projects of the past few decades to recognise that. And I was wondering how you guide - you've both been teachers - how you guide your students to tell the difference between things that they should take responsibility for and things that they should not.

Jonathan Haidt: Okay, well, so I'd like to, before I answer that, I'd like to back up and put a very important piece of psychology on the table about the point of, your point about resilience. There's an extremely useful concept called anti-fragility. There's a great book by Nassim Taleb, who's actually on the faculty here at NYU.

He wrote “The Black Swan,” he wrote this book, “Antifragile.” And he's on this crusade to stop people from talking about resilience. He says, let's distinguish between, there are some things in the world that are fragile, so like a China tea cup is fragile, and you should not let toddlers play with them.

Then some things are resilient, like plastic cups are resilient, and if you drop them, they're not going to break. But other things, he says, are anti-fragile, which means that they actually need to be banged around in order to develop. 

And so the preeminent example of this is the immune system. We all try to keep our kids safe. A lot of parents try to use bacterial wipes. And if you keep your kids safe from bacteria, you're crippling his immune system.

This is the reason why peanut allergies keep going up. They were very, very rare in the 90s, but because a few kids had peanut allergies, we tried to keep our kids safe from peanuts. And what happened was, lots of kids now develop allergies to peanuts because they weren't exposed to these harmless proteins.

The same thing happens with being insulted or excluded. So the anti-bullying policies that came in after Columbine are so severe. Now, bullying's a terrible thing, we have to do something about it, but you get concept creep.

My kids, in elementary school, teasing is considered a form of bullying. Exclusion is considered a form of bullying. Some schools ban best friends, or they try not to let there be best friends, because that's exclusive.

And so if you keep your kids safe from exclusion, insult, humiliation, and teasing, you're crippling them. Then they're going to come to college, and what's going to happen when they hear someone say something that they deem hateful, or even just something that challenges things that they dearly believe? 

So I think what we need to talk about is, what has happened in American child-rearing that our universities changed so radically between, say, May of 2013, when nobody talked about safe spaces, to May of 2017, when we were having riots and violence. In four years, everything changed in major American universities.

And I think we need to talk about that before we can talk about fine-tuned guidance about what to take offence at. 

Rabbi Sacks: I mentioned to Jonathan and Larissa before that it's fascinating that very, very few Israeli kids have peanut allergies, because the favourite kiddie’s snack in Israel, which they all eat from a very young age, is made from peanuts. So they all develop their immunity to it.

And of course, Judaism is a way of developing an immune system, an anti-fragile system, in just that way. So for me, the biggest shock, culture shock in my life, was to leave Cambridge University, where if you actually coughed in the university library, you felt you were consigned to the outermost hell, you know, absolute, total silence. 

And then to go to yeshiva in Israel, to, you know, a Talmudic Academy, where there are a thousand students in an enormous hall, all in groups of two, shouting at each other at the tops of their voices, re-enacting the arguments on the page of the Talmud, making that page come alive.

And the Talmud is an extended argument. So therefore, you are completely immune to taking offence if somebody disagrees with you. In fact, the Talmud in Eruvin says that the views of the school of Hillel were given priority over those of Shammai, because Hillel taught the views of their opponents as well as their own, and they taught the views of their opponents before their own.

And in fact, if you look in the Mishna, the views of Shammai are always presented before those of Hillel. So, you know, for me, that whole educational system is anti-fragile. And the end result is Jews became so anti-fragile that I find it almost miraculous, because don't forget, for 2,000 years, they were, in Max Weber's words, “the pariah people.”

The Adversus Judeus literature of early Christianity had Jews out there as agents of Satan. They were the Antichrist. They were the infidel. They poisoned wells. They spread the plague. You know, the blood libel, and so on.

And they, you know, this would have destroyed the spirit, I think, of almost any other people. But because Jews knew that you can listen to a lot of voices that are opposed to your own, they knew - as Michal said when she said Abraham was on one side and the whole world on the other side - what it is to be a cognitive minority, and yet to uphold your views even when everyone around you is saying the opposite. And I think in a very, very difficult world, we have to make our students and our kids precisely that, anti-fragile.

Jonathan Haidt: Let me just do, to build on that, thank you. Let me just do a little check here, because I actually have very little contact with NYU undergrads. I teach at Stern, and all my students are MBA students.

So, raise your hand if you're an NYU undergrad or any sort of undergraduate. Please raise your hand high in this room. Okay, we have a few dozen.

So I just, first I want to just take the temperature here. So you've all been here for, you know, one to three years. In your classes, do you feel as though you can speak up openly and honestly and you can say if you want to disagree with the consensus, you can raise your hand and challenge it? Or do you feel that you're very careful, you self-censor, you're a little afraid that if you say something, your honest opinion, there could be blowback? 

So just those of you who raised your hand, raise your hand if you say it's open, it's honest, you don't feel constrained.

Please raise your hand high. Okay, one, two, three, four, five. And please raise your hand if you know you self-censor, you're a little more concerned.

Okay, so slightly more, but roughly split. Okay, so that's good. That's good that it's not a complete consensus.

I asked this at the University of Virginia on Friday, where I used to teach, and I was down there to give a talk, and all the students there said that they self-censor. But anyway, alright, so we think the problem does seem to be fairly widespread in this country. And then the second question I'd like to ask the students is, what do you think about, are you generally sympathetic to the idea of safe spaces? And let's just say, especially in academic settings, that there should be a notion of safety, that you should approach issues and people speaking, people coming to campus to speak through the lens of safety and not safety, that speech is sometimes dangerous and even violence.

So students here, raise your hand if you agree that speech is sometimes dangerous and even sometimes violence. Raise your hand high. Okay, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, or nine.

And raise your hand if you disagree with that, that speech is, no, speech is not violence. Speech is speech and violence is violence. One, two, three.

All right, so the students here are split, so I don't really know what the story is for NYU. 

But these are the norms, okay, but these are the norms that are changing. These are the, if we went back five years, we would have found the idea that giving your opinion is violence would have struck everybody as strange, and now it's much more common.

Larissa: But I wonder if that's right. I mean, I hear where you're going with this, that you want there to be as much argument in free speech as possible, but it seems to me that if you don't grant the possibility that speech is violence, you're denigrating actually the importance of speech. Speech does things, and that's why we value it, right? So if someone gives a powerful speech, it makes people angry, and it should have that power.

Rabbi Sacks: There must be something that we're missing here, because Judaism holds that bad speech, lashon hara, is a form of violence. It holds that… [Jonathan and Larissa try to comment] It holds, no, listen, listen, listen.

Hang on, I've got to, I'm in my little, I'm in my little safe space here for a moment. It holds that speaking evilly of people, denigratingly of people, is as bad as idolatry, murder, and sexual whatever. And lashon hara is very destructive of community, when you speak maliciously and malevolently about people.

At the same time, there is one of the most powerful passages in the Bible ever, and I want to explain it to you because it has never, to my knowledge, been correctly translated. And here it goes. It's in Genesis 4. It's about the first two human children, Cain and Abel.

And both offer an offering, and God accepts Abel's but not Cain's. And Cain gets very angry, potentially violent, and God visits Cain and says, be careful because, you know, you have to control yourself here. And then the verse says, “Vayomer Kayin el Hevel achiv,” Cain said to Abel his brother, “Vayehi b’hiyotam baSadeh,” and it came to pass when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against his brother and killed him.

Now, you can't translate that into English because it is not a grammatically well-formed sentence, so every translation fudges it. So you'll have things like, ‘And Cain said to his brother Abel, let's go out to the field.’ Or, ‘And Cain spoke to his brother Abel,’ rather than said to his brother, all of which are mistranslations.

What the Bible is doing in this dramatically fractured syntax is to show a fractured relationship. And it is telling us that when words fail, violence begins. 

So what I'm really saying is, Judaism holds that speech is therapeutic and cathartic and prevents violence, but malicious speech is a kind of assault on the person.

And the difference between them is civil speech and maligned speech. Lashon hara does not mean just bad speech, it's kind of gossip. Do you know what I mean? What do you call it? Fake news, spreading rumours on the internet, that's lashon hara.

And thanks to modern technology, thanks to Facebook, you can now talk lashon hara to two billion people at once. So this is a major technological leap forward. So Judaism is saying, if it's in pursuit of truth, it's an honest argument, it's robust - that is fine and it is anti-fragile and anti-violence.

But doing someone down.... 

Jonathan: Okay, so all of this, the claim that Judaism says that speech is violence hinges on your use of the word assault. Of course, with words we can assault each other. Of course, we can attack each other. We can criticise each other. Of course, with words we can hurt each other more sometimes than physical violence.

But there is a very, very bright line in a civil society, and it is at violence. And the instant we allow people to cross that line, that is a giant step on the road to hell. And that is the step that we've taken in 2017 in this country, especially on campus.

So I've been studying political polarisation for a long time. And until two years ago, I said, now, here's my story, here's what's happening, it's all terrible, the trends are terrible, but there's been no violence. And compared to, say, the 60s, when there was a lot of violence, like, we're doing great.

But that line is eroding now. And on campus, we are beginning to see some actual violence and a lot of physical intimidation with regard to people whose views are deemed something that we want to exclude. This is incredibly dangerous.

The argument was made by a well-known psychologist in the New York Times that speech is violence because speech can cause stress and stress hormones, and stress hormones can damage your body, and therefore speech can damage your body, therefore speech is violence. 

But, you know, lots of things affect your body. I mean, to cross that line, to say, you know, if I give my students an exam, I'm giving them stress. And if stress is bad, then I'm committing violence. I better not give them exams anymore. If you blur the line between speech and violence, you're opening up a space of argument which says, if I let you speak, your speech is violence. Therefore, if I punch you in the nose or threaten to destroy you physically or kill you, well, I'm just doing self-defence. And that's what the students at Berkeley said after using violence to shut down Milo Yiannopolous. They literally said that was just self-defence. Violence is appropriate. We must not cross that line.

Rabbi Sacks: I do actually want to just add in brackets here the history of ideas that led to this.

Until relatively recently, people thought that when you speak, you're just conveying facts, assertions, information. But then, in the wake of Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis, there arose something which is called - Paul Ricoeur, I think, gave it its name - the hermeneutics of suspicion. That what really is happening is when I say something, I am exercising power over you, whether it's the ruling class over the working class or some kind of primal drives of one kind or another.

So we're not really speaking. The speech is just a mask for a naked confrontation of power. And that led to this failure to recognise that speech actually is communication, the opening of soul to soul, mind to mind.

And it is that that is genuinely destructive. Because if we can't speak trustfully to one another, if we are all suspicious, that anyone who disagrees with us is a member of the hegemonic class trying to keep us down, then that really leads to totalitarianism. 

Jonathan: I love that phrase. I just want to comment that we had a conversation on the phone a few weeks ago when I first learned that phrase, the hermeneutics of suspicion. It's a way of interpreting interactions in which you analyse the motives of the other through the worst possible. You attribute to them the worst possible motives. You assume that they are making a play for power. Everything is power. And this is antithetical to what we're supposed to be doing at a university.

I've been in the academy. I started graduate school in 1987. I became a professor at UVA in 1995. And there's always a level of trust that develops very rapidly between professors and students. And sometimes you say things not quite correctly, but people give you the benefit of the doubt. You're all engaged in a common project. You trust in each other's decency. 

And that's what has changed since 2013. There's been the arrival of some new ideas on campus, a level of suspicion, a level of many more students are interpreting everything in terms of power, prejudice, white supremacy, racism.

And when you don't give people the benefit of the doubt, then suddenly you have to think about everything you say. And for every word you have to think, might this offend someone in the room? And so I'm actually being very careful right now as I speak, because if I offend anyone, the number is in every bathroom at NYU. You'll find the number to report me, and you can file charges against me.

So I'm always very careful when I speak at NYU, not because NYU students are more sensitive, but because here I could be charged very easily, and I won't be fired. I've got tenure. But I could be drawn into, but it's really unpleasant to be drawn in, to be accused of things, and to have to go through all sorts of bureaucratic procedures.

So this is what has changed in the last few years, is the hermeneutics of suspicion has become relatively pervasive on campus. And I think all of your education, for those of your students, your education suffers because your professors are being careful. Your professors are trying to avoid provocation.

From the 4th century BC until 2014, professors were supposed to be provocative, but not anymore. I just read all the wisdom literatures that I could, and took out every psychological claim that I could, and evaluated. It turns out that the ancients were just miserable at chemistry and physics.

They really knew nothing that we need to attend to. But when it comes to how to control your mind, how to live in a world that is always going to disappoint you and insult you, how to get along with others, they were just brilliant. And so I wrote a book on that, and showed how psychological wisdom comports with it, and I thought it might be relevant for us to begin with this, because my feeling nowadays is that the way things are going, especially on campus, but also nationally, we're doing just about everything wrong.

We're doing just about everything the opposite of what the ancients would advise us. And so just as one example, the things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the colour of your thoughts.

And what we're doing now on campus in particular, is we're focussing on microaggressions. We're training people basically to take more offence, to not give people the benefit of the doubt. So just in a lot of ways, I'm finding that we're just leaving ancient ideas behind and going off into a brave new world that doesn't seem to work.

Rabbi Sacks: Hypersensitivity to this new concept of microaggression, which I always thought just meant being rude, you know. And we had a stunning example of this two or three weeks ago in Britain. Balliol College, Oxford - which has produced Adam Smith, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Aldous Huxley, and three British Prime Ministers - banned the Christian Union from setting up a stall for undergraduates together with all the other societies, because the presence, in the students’ midst, of a Christian, constituted a microaggression. Because people would be terribly scared that he or she might quote the Bible. 

Let me give you the two precedents here. Number one, in 1927, when the same thing was happening in universities across Europe, a French intellectual called Julien Benda wrote a famous book called “La Trahison des Clercs,” The Treason of the Intellectuals.

And what was their treason? He says that universities which had been about the pursuit of truth have become homes for, and this was his phrase, “the intellectual organisation of political hatreds.” And that is where we're getting very close to. 

And it was only six years from 1927 to 1933. Hitler's rise to power in 1935, Nuremberg decrees every Jew removed from university, with no protest from the academic community. 

The second thing that scares me even more is that we know of a concept of safe space. Until around 1810, in Frankfurt, for example, where the first Rothschild lived, there was a ghetto. Jews were confined to the ghetto. They were allowed out at certain times. They were not allowed in the public parks.

No Jews and dogs, which appeared in the Nazi era, had appeared already in the early 19th century. On Sunday, Jews were not allowed out of the ghetto, in case the sight of a Jew on the street would upset Christians on their way to or from church. That was the original safe space.

It was safe for Christians, but not for Jews. And I'm afraid a space that is safe for some, but not for all, is a perversion of safety. 

I have to tell you a story.

Do you have a Fitbit? Do you have a Fitbit? Do you know what these things are? So I wear this Fitbit here, and it tells me how much I sleep. And it was telling me, day after day after day, that I was only getting two and a half hours' sleep. This so petrified me that I became an insomniac, which, of course, helped me, at least in one way, imitate the Almighty, because as Psalm 121 says, “The Guardian of Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps.”

However, after months of this, I actually went online. I'm not terribly literate in these online communities, but I wanted to know if anyone else suffered from the same thing. And they said, well, actually, if you've got this problem, go back to the settings of your Fitbit and have a look.

Is it set to ‘Sensitive’? If so, every time you toss and turn in bed, it assumes you're wide awake. So move it from ‘Sensitive’ to ‘Normal,’ and you find you're getting more sleep. Suddenly, my sleep doubled, and I was so relaxed that I could get to sleep again. I think we all need that resetting right now in the West, from sensitive back to normal. 

Larissa: One term that has been used a lot since the election, in particular, is empathy. The idea that we should empathise, one side should empathise with another side, that people should try to empathise and feel what it feels to be like people who hold opposing political views.

And that strikes me as relatively new. Before, we were arguing about positions, not empathising about feelings, and I was wondering what you thought about that development. If you think it's a good thing that we should endeavour to empathise with those who oppose us, or is that... 

Rabbi Sacks: To empathise, I mean, we don't yet know fully the scientific explanation of it. There was recently a theory that we have these mirror neurones that allow us to feel pain when we see somebody else in pain. But the classic text on empathy is Exodus Chapter 22, Verse 21: “Do not afflict a stranger.” “V’atem yadatem et nefesh haGer.” Because you know what it feels like to be a stranger. You were once strangers in the land of Egypt.

That's the first known reference to empathy in literature. And it's an essential part of our humanity, but it cannot cloud out everything else because we have to disagree. We have to listen to the views opposed to our own, if we are to reach either the pursuit of truth or the pursuit of justice.

And if you actually look at what has happened in the last few years, you would have thought with all these speech codes and all this empathising going around, we would have become more polite. Well, have you ever actually looked at the comments column on any Facebook video or YouTube video? We've become ruder than any generation I have ever known. 

The Internet has this disinhibition effect. So all the natural, you know, exchange and the cut and thrust of argument is being suppressed. But it's all coming out somewhere else. And it's coming out so nastily that the rudeness that is out there really is dangerous and could, in the fullness of time, I think, lead to violence.

So we are in a law of unintended consequences here. And I think people should think again at this whole issue because it has made life monumentally worse and not the tiniest bit better. 

Jonathan: This might be a good time for us to segue into this issue about the Internet and social media because I think it is at the root.

I mean, so how many of you out there are basically every day asking what the hell is going on? Raise your hand if that's a question you ask yourself on a daily basis. So to build on what Rabbi Sacks was just saying, I think a lot of us have a sense that somehow social media, the Internet, is somehow implicated in this. It's been very hard to prove.

But I'll just give you the metaphor that I've been working on. So first, I'll start by saying, Rabbi, I don't think that you should make absolute statements like it has not done a whit of good. Obviously, the Internet has done a lot of good.

But you're saying it's also done some bad things. And on net, it's been a negative force. Is that correct? 

Rabbi Sacks: That's a really splendid way of putting it. Exactly as Siri would put it if I asked it that question. Siri is the last bit of politeness left in society. I don't know if the American Siri is as polite as the English one.

Jonathan: I'd love to see the Israeli Siri. 

Rabbi Sacks: The Israeli Siri argues back. Don't even think of asking it a question.

Jonathan: So the metaphor that I've been thinking is this. There's a theory in cosmology called the fine-tuned universe, which is that starting earlier in the last century, some physicists noticed that there's like 25 constants of physics. And if a few of them, like the charge of the electron and the ratio of certain, if a few of them had been changed by 1%, then matter would never have congealed after the Big Bang and there'd be no life.

And so some have observed like, wow, it's as though the universe, the physical universe was set up with just the right settings that we could be here. And so maybe, maybe God created the universe, set all those constants and started it running. That's actually what Thomas Jefferson believed.

Okay. I'm not taking any view on that, but it's a great metaphor for what's happening to us now, because the founding fathers, in a sense, believed in what you might call the fine-tuned liberal democracy. They'd read their Plato, they'd studied history, and they knew that democracies  - there's a quote from Madison, “they're always spectacular in their death” - and the founding fathers knew that democracies always burn out fairly quickly in a lot of violence. Plato thought that democracy is the second worst form of government because it always descends into tyranny. But they gave it a try. A republic, they put in all sorts of things. 

So if you think about it, human beings evolved as group living tribal primates. We're really good at living in small groups that compete against other groups with violence, with actual physical violence.

And that's very stable and that's the way it's been for a hundred thousand or more years. And then some things happen, we develop these very large societies, and then just in the last couple hundred years, a few areas develop actual functioning democracies. And they worked pretty well in the late 20th century.

So we know that it's possible. We're not doomed to tribal violence. It can work.

But only if you get the settings exactly right. There may not be a lot of margin of error. I think this is what we're finding out now.

So let's suppose we had functioning liberal democracies in North America, in Europe, and then increasingly in all other continents, actually. We had that. And then someone kind of reaches in and they change one of the most important physical constants, which is, we'll call it the connectivity constant.

It's the degree to which I am connected to everybody by one, two, or three steps, let's say. And let's suppose it has a value of three. And then we get telephones and it goes up to six.

And then, you know, whatever. And then we get the Internet and it goes up to 30. And then we get social media and it goes up to 500.

This, I think, is why everything is blowing up. And not just here, but in many other liberal democracies. Because we've changed the connectivity, but we haven't adapted either our minds or our institutions.

And we are all now so immersed in the most powerful, emotionally powerful outrage stories about the other side, complete with video. And when you see, you know, I used to come across stories about how terrible the Republicans were. Like once a week, I'd come across some story about, you know, bad things that Ronald Reagan did or something like that.

But that was just like a story. It wasn't, it didn't go through hundreds of iterations to make it more and more potent. It didn't have video.

And it was just one a week. And now there's 20 or 30 a day and they've gone through an evolutionary process to make me maximally outraged. So I think this is a lot of what's going on, is that we're blowing apart because we're all furious all the time. Because social media is essentially waterboarding us with outrageous stimuli. 

Rabbi Sacks: There's, in terms of this fine-tuning of the universe, I don't know if you saw the item in today's news. Fascinating item. That scientists are now extremely puzzled that the universe exists at all. Because the proportions of matter and antimatter are absolutely identical. Therefore, the universe should have ceased to be one moment after it came to be.

So scientists are back to square one on this one. 

But it did remind me of one of the most Jewish remarks I ever heard. Because, you know, Leibniz famously, his proof of God's existence was, why is there something rather than nothing? And the late Sidney Morgenbesser memorably said, from Columbia, “And if there were nothing, you'd also complain.”

Sorry, that's a philosopher's joke. Anyway, it's like the Jewish joke that W. H. Auden loved so much. You know, maybe looking at the state of the universe, it would have been better not to have been born. But how many are so lucky? Not one in a thousand. 

Anyway, so I think actually the untuning, “Hark! Untune that string…” You know, Shakespeare's wonderful thing on the fine-tuning of the universe in Ulysses, in Timon of Athens, or where is it? I've forgotten where - Is that electronic communication is not only linked to many more people, it has divorced verbal communication from physical presence.

And that is a massive piece of climate change. 

It was Bronislaw Malinowski, back in 1916 or thereabouts, who went off to study the Trobriand Islanders. And he came up with this extraordinary discovery that Trobriand Islanders talked to each other a lot of the time, but only a tiny percentage of that is exchange of information.

What they were really doing was bonding, affirming one another's presence. He called it “phatic communion.” 

Robin Dunbar, the Oxford anthropologist, has come up with this extraordinary theory. You know how groups of chimpanzees maintain the peace by stroking or grooming one another? And Dunbar holds that that was what language was. It was a form of grooming that allowed you to groom more than one person at a time. So, you cuddle them with words.

And all of this demanded physical I-Thou presence. And when you remove that presence, but you still allow people to talk to one another through the social media, you are removing possibly the major function of conversation, which is just affirming one another's presence. That is why you can be ruder on the Internet than otherwise.

It's called the disinhibition effect. Because you are, as it were, prevented from doing so when you're sitting next to somebody and you realise that they may be totally different from you, but they are human just as you are human. And that is, I think, where we have untuned this fine tuning.

And it really is quite dangerous. 

Larissa: So, I was wondering if you've seen so much of this coming, both of you, what has surprised you in the past year? What did you not see coming? What were you not at all expecting to happen? 

Rabbi Sacks: You know, Larissa, I'm going to answer your question, but I want to identify here one real prophet who is never mentioned in this context. And that was somebody called Nathan Glazer, together with some colleagues in Harvard, who put together a book called “The Lonely Crowd” in 1950.

And they put forward an unbelievably profound hypothesis. And here it is. That the types of character you encounter depend on the stage that the culture happens to be in.

And they identified three primary types of culture. Number one, a culture where death rates are high, life expectancy is low, your biggest - I mean, ie, Europe in the Middle Ages, where your biggest worry is staying alive. And they called those tradition-oriented cultures.

The thing that kept you going was to do what the people before you did, seeing, as Jonathan has done, that the great wisdom of the past is a pretty good guide for the present and the future. And they were tradition-directed cultures. 

Then come the cultures that are growing. They're getting more affluent. Life expectancy rises. But new challenges are constantly occurring.

And they call those inner-directed cultures. Because you have so many new challenges that you need a kind of internal GPS, which you've completely internalised. And you're not following, doing something because it's always been done. You're doing it because you have an internalised set of rules. Those are inner-directed cultures. 

Then they said, there's a culture which happens when you've reached the peak of prosperity, and you are now beginning to decline.

And those cultures are other-directed cultures. And they give rise to different character types and different kinds of emotion. 

So the key emotion in tradition-directed cultures is shame.

The key emotion in inner-directed cultures is guilt. 

The key emotion in other-directed cultures is anxiety. 

And if you want to see all the surveys about the effect of social media on kids, you will see their anxiety levels have gone sky high.

The Facebook culture is an other-directed culture. There's your persona, and you are judged by how many people out there like you. And it is the ultimate other-directed culture.

Now, people forget this history of ideas and think we're in some brave new world. But I say that Glazer and his colleagues, Reuel Denney and I've forgotten the third one, saw this coming. 

Larissa: Riesman.

Rabbi Sacks: Riesman, yes, David Riesman. They saw this coming back in 1950, and that's really prophetic. 

What has surprised me? That no one has risen above the fray and explained to people what's happening.

Everyone's acting as if they're in the arena. But I think political leadership, political statesmanship, and the kind of thing you expect from a university, which is wisdom, they've been in short supply. So we haven't heard the voices step back and say, guys, this is what is happening. We've been here before. 

Richard Weaver said, “The trouble with humanity is it forgets to read the minutes of the last meeting.” You know, so people should be guiding us through this.

And this is what surprises me, absence and the silence of the voices of wisdom today. 

Larissa: Professor Haidt? 

Jonathan: Oh, boy. So I've been studying political polarisation and the decline of political effectiveness and trust in the United States since 2008. And I was writing and doing research. I have all these explanations about what's happening in America. And I go to Europe, and I'd say, oh, you guys are so much better off. You've got multi-party systems. You've got a political class that's more concentrated. They know each other.

What surprised me, so it's not that, so America's decline into political dysfunction, distrust didn't surprise me at all, just that I didn't expect it to come this quickly. What surprised me is that it's affecting so many other countries - not all, but it is affecting many, many other democracies. And so I think what I didn't fully appreciate, I think what a lot of people just begin to appreciate now, is that there are a couple of global forces that are affecting all of us together at the same time.

Social media affects us all in the same way. It leads to massive distrust in institutions and leaders. And so social media is a global phenomenon, of course.

Globalisation is a global phenomenon, which greatly increases the winner-take-all nature of economies. Robert Frank wrote about this before the Internet, about how Michael Jackson couldn't, in the 80s, Michael Jackson can now make vast sums of money, and all the other musicians don't make any more than they used to, and that was before the Internet. It's much worse now.

And the third, which I've only just learned about, only come to appreciate when I travelled through Asia in 2015, is so many countries have adopted a model - it's not necessarily a Western model because the Chinese had it a thousand years ago - of competitive exams to get into the top schools, which are the gateway to the top jobs. And so you get, in many countries, you get a test-taking elite. And this elite, the problem isn't just that you get this cognitive class that dominates everything. The problem is that they think they earned it. 

So, and I'm talking about us, all of us here probably in this room, who did well on tests. When you have a whole country funnelled, it was especially true in Korea, where it's so competitive and there's only three top schools they all try to get into. So you get this elite out of touch, and you get incredible resentment in the majority of people against that elite. 

So those are three things that are happening all over the world. We're basically all in this together. And so maybe this would be a good time for people all over the world to begin saying, okay, let's turn the anger metre down 90%. Given that we're all encountering 200 times more, whatever, 20 times more outrage stuff, if we turn the metre down 90%, I think I did the math right, that we'll all just be twice as outraged as we used to be. And twice would probably be okay.

Let's turn the anger metre down, and let's realise, like, we're on a giant ship together. In a sense, now all the democracies, maybe all the world is like a giant ship. And we're all fighting each other so much. And we don't really notice that the ship is sinking. And at a certain point, yeah, we have to, our statesmen have to stand up and say, okay, look, time out, time out on the fighting, we'll get back to it in a minute. But let's take a moment to attend to the ship.

Rabbi Sacks: You know, there was… I love the story told by Isaiah Berlin, the great Oxford philosopher. 

He once said to me, he said, “I was in a taxi, and the taxi driver said to me, ‘You're Isaiah Berlin, aren't you?’ 

And he said, ‘Yes, I am.’

And the taxi driver said, ‘You're a philosopher, aren't you?’

Isaiah Berlin said yes.

‘Well, I think philosophers are useless,’ said the taxi driver. ‘I had that Bertrand Russell in the back of my cab the other day. And I said, ‘But Lord Russell, you're a philosopher. What's it all about then?’ And you know, he couldn't tell me.’ 

So with that caveat, I think what I have to say is, just to back Jonathan here, the scale of the problems we are about to face is immense. 

And we may have messed up on income inequalities. We may have messed up on a very narrow concept of meritocracy. And we may have failed completely to listen to the prophet here, Howard Gardner at Harvard, who developed this theory of multiple intelligences, that everyone is gifted, but at different things. And we've just taken a very narrow view.

But we are going to hit issues of artificial intelligence, which are going to fundamentally shape patterns of employment and render whole areas, from lawyers to Goldman Sachs, who already replaced 20% of their hedge fund managers with computers. We are going to raise, as Yuval Harari has told us to think about this, the very question of what makes us human. Is it intelligence or consciousness? Because if it's intelligence, we've lost already.

And really, really serious questions like, what do you do in a world where all effective structures of communication are global, but the only effective political institutions are at best national? 

We are in the midst of the most horrendous problems that are going to come at us at speed. And everyone's thinking of tomorrow, not 10 years ahead. 

So I think the ability, which you are standing up for so courageously, to, in Isaiah's words, “reason together,” instead of banning views we don't agree with or shouting at one another or getting angry, we will need this civil space. And we will need to listen to multiple voices. And out of that will not only come solutions to the problems, but will come the respect for difference that will allow us to actually implement those solutions. 

Larissa: Well, on that note, I want to open up the floor for questions. I'm not sure, how will it work? 

Questioner: The question I have is, I was reading today in the paper about China, and kind of reinforcing their culture and reinforcing their leader. And, you know, they are not so open to social media, they are not, you know, allowing the people in a lot of ways to be as vocal as we would be here. And is there something right about that possibly, compared to what we have here? 

Rabbi Sacks: Well, you know, read the writings of Vaclav Havel, of what it was like to live in Czechoslovakia under Soviet rule, in which no one was able to say what they really felt.

So you were living a lie. And you have to read Havel, because you and I don't know what it feels like to live under a totalitarian system. But that is the ultimate crushing of the human spirit.

Jonathan: So I would just add that I read, I read an essay called “The Doctrine of Fascism,” officially by Mussolini, although it was written by an Italian philosopher, Gentile or something. But it's basically, it's basically a treatise on the weakness of democracy, the problems of democracies. They're so… they're inefficient, they're stupid, they, you know, if you have a, if you have strong leadership, if you have, you know, manly virtues, then you know, you can get things done.

And so, so democracies have always been punching bags for autocrats. They don't say, of course democracy is better, but we have the power. No, they say democracy is terrible. Our way is actually the right way. 

And we're in one of those periods now, you know, in the 1990s, we, you know, that phrase the end of history, we thought that it clearly, you know, the big battles are over, liberal democracy is the only way. And, you know, in a way, we were all able to take that for granted kind of coast on it.

Now, it's clear, no, if we, you know, if we think that the American experiment is a worthy one, and is one worth continuing, and not just saying, well, you know, we had a good run of it, what's next? We're gonna have to, we have to really think about, think about government, think about how to get our democracy working better, thinking about electoral reform, congressional reform, we need a total overhaul here. I shouldn't say total overhaul. We need some serious work. And so I think the challenge of authoritarian capitalism to democratic capitalism is that right now authoritarian capitalism is more successful.

Now, in general, authoritarian capitalism is more successful at going from poor to middle. It doesn't have a very good record of going from middle to wealthy. So I still think we're going to win in the long run. But we can't take it for granted the way we did in the 90s.

Rabbi Sacks: I just want to give a little biblical quick lesson here. Because we're just about as Michal reminded us to read Genesis 12 in our synagogues, the beginning of the Jewish story. So what are the first 11 chapters there for, if Abraham doesn't come on until Act 12? 

And the answer is very simple. And it's a very simple way of thinking about things. 

God creates order. He then creates us. He then gives us freedom. We then create chaos. 

And you have two extreme examples in the Bible, which lead up to the story of Abraham. You have the generation before the Flood, which is freedom without order, a world full of violence, major parts of the world today, Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Libya, etc.

Or you have the Tower of Babel, when everyone has to think and speak the same way, where you have order, but no freedom. So those are the two extremes - the totalitarian extreme, order, but no freedom, and the libertarian extreme, freedom, but no order. To keep freedom and order together is, according to the Bible, our constant human challenge.

And that is what makes democracy magnificent, because somehow, it maximises freedom consistently with order. You don't need to assassinate anyone to change a government, you have elections instead. You don't have to rob anyone to get what you want, you have market exchange. That's why the market economy and liberal democratic politics are the best things we've come up with, to have both freedom and order at the same time. 

But Jonathan is absolutely right to say, there's real fine tuning here. And if it gets out of key, we either lapse into chaos, or we lapse into tyranny. 

Questioner: Hi, I'm Doria. Sorry to single out Rabbi Sacks, but I got the privilege of working on your book last year for Koren Publishers, selecting quotes, and it was awesome.

Rabbi Sacks: You know it better than I do. You read it, I only wrote it. 

Questioner: Although all three of you have proven to be impressive in your own right through this panel, I just wanted to address a question that I've noticed through my growing up in this generation of Jews, increasing precarious position both on the extreme left and the extreme right. 

On the extreme left, we're viewed as superiorly privileged, and having no place even in this safe space conversation. On the extreme right, as noticed in Charlottesville and other unfortunate incidents, we're clearly not viewed as white or privileged in any way and still as inferior.

If we're not really included in either sphere, how should we be aligning ourselves? How should we be presenting ourselves to make sure we're heard in a world of increased polarisation where I fear that Jews don't fit in either camp? 

Rabbi Sacks: That is a very powerful question. Let's hear it. 

I want to be absolutely clear on this.

Number one, what makes anti-Semitism significant is that the hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews. It's always the early warning sign of the breakdown of a civilisation. Always.

Why so? Well, look, I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of books have been written about anti-Semitism, but let's get it down to its simplest. The first clearly anti-Semitic statement in literature, Haman in the book of Esther, saying, there is a certain people dispersed and scattered throughout your majesty's kingdom, and their laws are different from those of any other people. 

Jews were hated because they were different.

For a thousand years, they were the most conspicuous non-Christian minority in a Christian Europe. Today, they are the most significant non-Muslim presence in an Islamic Middle East. So Jews were hated because they were different.

But the fact that we are different is what constitutes our humanity. 

Every one of us is unique. Even genetically identical twins only share 50% of their characteristics.

The fact that we are each unique means that we can't be substituted for by anyone else, which is what makes life, our life, sacred. What makes us, as it were, in the image of God. As the rabbis said, “When human beings mint many coins in one mint, they all come out the same. God makes us all in the same image, his image, and we're all different.”

So difference is what constitutes our humanity. So what begins as an assault on Jews is ultimately an assault on humanity.

That is why we must not be allowed to stand alone when anti-Semitism appears. Jews cannot be left to fight anti-Semitism alone. 

The victim cannot cure the crime.

The hated cannot cure the hate. 

And therefore, we have to stand up and make this absolutely clear to the governments and the societies in which we live that anti-Semitism is really about all of us. And therefore, we need to stand together - Jews, Christians, Muslims, people of other faiths, secular humanists, and my beloved angry atheists - all together here in the defence of human dignity and human freedom.

Britain was the first country where the fight against anti-Semitism - I insisted on this as Chief Rabbi - where the fight against anti-Semitism was led by non-Jews. I refused to allow us to fight this battle alone. And it was led by the three Prime Ministers who've been in power since anti-Semitism reappeared big time around 2001, 2002, though it had never really gone away, but that's when it began.

So Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, and David Cameron all got up in public as a matter of record, Jews will never be left to fight anti-Semitism alone. Theresa May, similarly. So that is how we have to do it.

We have to communicate this to people. And we have to win allies. We have to stand together.

In March 2002, when I knew a tsunami of anti-Semitism was going to emerge over the next few years, people thought I was exaggerating. I was actually understating, because I could see it coming a long way off. I called in the leaders of the Union of Jewish Students.

I told them a lot of anti-Semitism is going to come your way, and I want you to know for a fact you will not be left alone. I will be there on the front line with you, and so will all the leaders of our community. That was terribly important that I had to be there and actually stand with the students when they were facing this.

But I said, I want you to do the most unexpected thing. I want you to lead the fight against Islamophobia. It's what in psychotherapy you call “paradoxical intervention.”

Do the unexpected thing. And they did. And out of that, from that student world, came an organisation called Coexist, Jews and Muslims fighting anti-Semitism and Islamophobia together.

My work here in the States, with Robbie George at Princeton, with the Templeton Foundation, and so on, is to win allies in the cause of freedom and human dignity. Because if Jews are allowed to stand on their own, history, God forbid, we will have learned nothing from history. So we stand together on this, we fight, and we will win.

Closing comments