The Great Partnership

Opening remarks

[17:37] Rabbi Sacks: Friends, it's such a privilege to be with you, to be sharing a platform with a man I admire so greatly, Gordon Brown, a man of principle and passion who is one of the great statesmen of our time. And to do so here in one of the great academic institutions of the world, NYU, which under the leadership, the inspired leadership of John Sexton, has achieved such greatness.

I do hope you will forgive me, I'm sure Gordon feels likewise, for an occasional jet lag. I feel exactly like the gentleman who dreamt he was giving a speech in the House of Lords and woke up to find he was. And please, I do not want you to misconstrue my presence here today because, you know, if a Chief Rabbi visits you in hospital, you know you're pretty ill.

And so, I wish the economy a speedy recovery. Friends, 180 years ago, in 1831, two men set out on journeys that would change their lives and ours, getting us to see the world differently and more deeply. They were in many ways quite similar.

Both of them were young, both came from well-established families, both were intensely curious about the world around them, both were superb observers who noticed what others missed. And they were both gifted with the ability to theorise and to ask searching questions about what they saw and come up with novel answers. Their names, for some reason, are never linked with one another, at least I have never seen their names linked with one another.

And yet I will argue that what they came up with was strikingly similar insights. Who were they? One was the young British naturalist on board the HMS Beagle, that would eventually take him to the Galapagos Islands, the young Charles Darwin. The other was a young French aristocrat who set sail for the United States to see how they handled politics, whose name was Alexis de Tocqueville.

They began their journeys in the same year. As I say, I've never seen them compared. After all, one was interested in wildlife, in the ruthless behaviour of animals in the jungle, and the other was interested in politics. And I'm sure there's absolutely no connection between those two things. 

However, I'm going to argue that they discovered essentially the same thing, namely the necessity, in any form of collective life, for both competition and cooperation. And that is harder than it sounds because they call for completely different instincts.

One calls for aggression, the other for altruism. And it is hard for somebody to be both at the same time, Michael Douglas in “Wall Street” and the Dalai Lama. So that is the challenge.

And that challenge will lead us into insights into civil society and what it takes to provide the moral basis of a market economy. It was Charles Darwin who saw, in his own mind, the single greatest challenge to Darwinism itself. He realised that if natural selection were true, if the evolution of species were determined by competition for scarce resources, then you would expect ruthless self-interest to prevail.

There seems to be no place for selflessness in the system, no place for altruism, no place for people who risk their own interests for the sake of the group. Those people who tended to risk their lives for the sake of others would tend, on average, to die young, before they had a chance of handing on their genes to the next generation. So natural selection would ensure that altruists would eventually become extinct.

However, what Darwin noticed is that in all human societies, altruism is valued. Those who do take risks for the sake of the group are highly admired - the Martin Luther Kings, the Mother Teresas and the Nelson Mandelas. And to his great credit, Charles Darwin saw the general form of the solution, which is in the language of today, we hand on our genes as individuals, but we only survive as members of groups, and groups can only survive on the basis of altruism.

In his words, “There can be no doubt that a tribe including many members who from possessing in high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage and sympathy were always ready to give aid to each other and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes. And this would be natural selection.” However, Darwin understood that how you got to that state was actually deeply mysterious.

He writes in “The Descent of Man,” the problem, however, of the first advance of savages towards civilisation, put it in contemporary terms, the first advance of corporate or national self-interest toward global cooperation, is at present much too difficult to be solved. He understood that there's a real tension in moving from here to there, from self-interest to the common good. Natural selection, however, he saw would, in a way he didn't understand, give rise to two mechanisms, not one.

Firstly, competition for scarce resources and secondly, cooperation, which is vital to the survival of the group, which in turn, is vital to the survival of the individual. The paradox is, in other words, that mystical process by which selfish genes get together to produce selfless people. That was Darwin's insight.

And of course, we now know how it actually works. It comes about through the application of games theory and something called the iterated prisoner's dilemma, which has led in recent years to a convergence of interest in one phenomenon, which is called in evolutionary psychology, reciprocal altruism, in sociology, trust, and economics called social capital. They are all different ways of talking about the same thing, namely that any extended biological or social or cultural process needs habits of cooperation as well as competition.

Now, as I say, at the same year Darwin began his journey to that discovery, Alexis de Tocqueville was beginning his own journey of discovery, into democracy in America. And what fascinated him was a paradox very similar to Darwin's. Darwin asked, how come altruism didn't become extinct? Tocqueville asked, how come religion didn't become extinct? 

After all, here was a nation which in the form of the First Amendment separated between Church and State, essentially depriving religion of power. And therefore it, like altruism, should have gone extinct. Instead it was in rude good health. To his amazement, he found in 1831 that all the Western European intellectuals were wrong.

He found that religion in America was in rude good health. 180 years later, to the intense disgruntlement of the angry atheists - the intellectual equivalent as I call it of road rage - religion still hasn't disappeared. In fact, according to John Micklethwait, editor of The Economist in his 2009 book, “God is Back.” And according to Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam in his 2010 book, “American Grace,” the percentage of people who weekly attend a house of worship in the United States of America is higher than the percentage of people who weekly attend a place of worship in the theocratic state of Iran. In America, 40%, in Iran, 39%. It's extraordinary, absolutely extraordinary.

And of course, what he discovered was it was precisely because of the separation of Church and State, that religion thrived. He started asking people, what was the secret? He says, in “Democracy in America” - “This led me to examine more attentively than I had hitherto the station which the American clergy occupy in political society. I learned with surprise that they filled no public appointments. Religion never got involved in politics.”

It never does, does it, right? And why? He was asking these clergymen, why do you stay out of politics? And the answer that the clergymen gave him was simple and profound. 

Here is the answer in Tocqueville's words:

“As long as a religion rests only on those sentiments which are the consolation of all affliction, it may attract the affections of all mankind. But if it be mixed up with the bitter passions of the world, it may be constrained to defend allies whom its interests, not the principle of love, have given to it.”

In other words, again, in his words, “The Church cannot share the temporal power of the State without being the object of a portion of that animosity which the latter excites.”

In other words, if religion were to get involved in politics, it would be a divisive power in society because politics is conflict, mediated conflict. And therefore, in order to be a unifying force in a society, in order to speak to the altruistic instincts of us all, it had to stay out of politics. And according to Tocqueville in his words, “In proportion as a nation assumes a democratic condition of society and as communities display democratic propensities, it becomes more and more dangerous to connect religion with political institutions.”

Why? Because democratic politics is competitive and you need in a society - as Darwin saw in biology - not just competition, but cooperation. And to be a force for global, national, local, national and global competition, you need something that is apart from the State. 

Something has to inspire people to a sense of the common good. It has to educate people into the habits of the heart necessary for democratic citizenship and give them, in his lovely phrase, “the apprenticeship of liberty.” Tocqueville realised the enormous weight in democratic societies where, if we want to preserve a sense of the common good, we have to have strong families, strong communities, strong local groups of all kinds that encourage us in the art of association, in which what matters is the ‘We,’ not the ‘I.’ 

And I'm afraid today, if I'm not mistaken, the ‘I’ does prevail. The Law having been given on Mount Sinai to the late Steve Jobs, who came down holding the two tablets, iPad One and iPad Two. And as a result, we have had this culture of iPad, iPhone, iTunes, iPod. It's an ‘I’ culture. Where do we get the ‘We’ culture? 

So de Tocqueville realised three things simultaneously.

Number one, this whole arena where we learn to cooperate is called civil society. And that is distinct from the State and it is absolutely vital for the health of democracy and the market economy, because that is where we learn cooperation, not just competition. Families and communities are where we do things for one another, not just for ourselves.

Therefore, they are the incubators of altruism. And of course, that for him was why religion was absolutely essential to democracy in America. Because it had no power, it had enormous influence.

Now, he realised also, and so in a strange way, Darwin and de Tocqueville came at the same time to the same conclusions. Namely, that although the struggle to survive involves competition, there must be protected space within the group in which we learn habits of cooperation, the habit of altruism, the good of all of us together, as opposed to the good of all of us separately. 

And now the question is, when is competition appropriate and when is cooperation appropriate? And the answer is very simple.

Where there are scarce goods, where there are zero-sum games, there will be competition. And we know of two areas where there are zero-sum games at any given moment. One is wealth, one is power. There is only so much wealth to go around at any given moment, so if I have more, you have less.

The result is a competition for wealth, which generates something called economics. Then there is only so much power at any given stage to go around, and if you are foolish enough to share it with others, then - as opposed of course to the synagogue president whose rule of procedure was “All those in favour say ‘I,’ all those against say ‘I resign’” - And if you share power with others, you have less yourselves. So the competition for power generates politics. 

So you have the market and the State, economics and politics, arenas of mediated competition. And you need a third sector, the sector of families, communities sustained by a common faith that generates the non-zero-sum goods that we need. Because if you think of love or fellowship or trust or friendship or even knowledge, the more I share, the more I have, not the less I have.

And it is those, what I call social goods, that a society needs if it is to sustain an economy and a liberal democratic politics. So you need that third sector, the arena of cooperation, which we call civil society, as opposed to the State and the market. And that is why religion, or something like religion, is part of the essential economy, ecology of liberty. And of a global economy. 

Now, that is why religion historically has been our greatest single source of renewable moral energy. And I think you can see this very simply indeed. If you take the merest glance at history, take the average life. What is the average shelf life of a superpower? 

I'm not very good at this. I'm sorry, I didn't do history. So you have to forgive me. But at a rough guess, I would say in the 15th century was Spain, in the 16th century, Venice, in the 17th century, Holland, in the 18th century, France, in the 19th century, Britain, in the 20th century, America. The average lifespan of a superpower is 100 years.

Judaism has been around for 4,000 years, Christianity for 2,000 years, Islam for 1,400 years. Somehow, religion has discovered a way of defeating the social equivalent of the second law of thermodynamics, otherwise known as entropy, the law that states that all systems lose energy over time. Somehow or other, religions discovered a way of defeating the law of entropy.

What is the sign of entropy? Well, Craig, where is Craig? Hi, Craig. Craig came up with three propositions which are challenges to those who say that an economy needs a moral base. 

Number one, ethics are merely personal.

Number two, ethical views divide more than they unite. 

And number three, we are hardwired more for egoism than for altruism. 

Now, those are not truths, but they are symptoms.

If you find any culture in which people say those three things, you are witnessing a culture beginning to decline, a culture beginning to move towards individualism against the sense of the common good. 

And what allowed religion to defeat entropy is that religion is our Bluetooth connection to something bigger than us, something bigger than everything. That if there is any global consciousness, the paradigm case of that is religion, because it focuses our attention on that which embraces all there is, that which, or that who, created us in love and asks us to live by the ethic of respect, of justice, of compassion, and love. 

Now, all of these remarks are highly general, and therefore, to have any bite at all, I should make them specific.

So let me be specific on this story, which I really didn't know about until I read it in Tom Friedman in yesterday's New York Times. Apparently - am I right - Citigroup has just had to pay a $285 million fine to settle a case in which with one hand, Citibank sold a package of toxic mortgage-backed securities to unsuspecting customers, securities that it knew were likely to go bust, and with the other hand, shorted the same securities, that is, bet millions of dollars that they would go bust. Tom Friedman says, “It doesn't get more immoral than this.”

I don't know if that's accurate. I stick with the power of prayer. I don't invest in Citigroup, thank goodness for that.

And therefore, the question is as follows. We know that Adam Smith and James Q. Wilson have reminded us that we have a moral sense. We know from Robert Axelrod and from, what's his name? Martin Novak's wonderful new book called “Supercooperators,” that we are, in fact, capable of cooperation.

And I have no doubt that the traders of Citigroup were good people, nice to their children, kind to animals, who gave to charity, and were, in all other respects, model citizens. So what leads a group of people to do something like that with the money of others? 

And the short answer is that is what happens when the maximum of temptation is combined with the maximum of opportunity. That is what happens when the gains are great, and you believe that the chances of being caught, found out, the great 11th commandment, ‘Thou shalt not be found out,’ are relatively small.

The Talmud says, “Adam bahul al mamono,” which means “The pursuit of wealth causes us to do crazy things.” And therefore, all the moral sense in the world, and all the supercooperators in the world, will not stop us doing crazy things unless there is an internalised voice that says, ‘Thou shalt not,’ and that voice has got nothing to do with what other people around you are doing, or what the culture is whispering to you with all its blandishments. You know that a decent person doesn't do such a thing, and you will be found out because that person who is greater than you, who created you, knows you better than you know yourself.

Sometimes you need that moral sense, deeply internalised by ritual, by narrative, by sacred texts, by years of training, and by a community of people who expect you to live by those standards. And all the evolutionary psychology in the world won't get you there, but going to church weekly just will. 

One of the great ironies of history is that three days before the financial crash of 2008, a British artist - has his name come to America? - called Damien Hirst, put for sale in Sotheby's a sculpture, which sold for 10 and a half million pounds. It was one of the highest prices ever achieved by a sculptor, by the work of a living artist, three days before the global financial crash.

You know what the sculpture was called? It was called “The Golden Calf.” 

Crashes happen when people turn gold, which is a medium of exchange, into an object of worship. That is when bad things happen, and religion is there to stop us worshipping golden calves.

We make a fundamental mistake when we rely, for instance, on the market alone to generate a morality that will control the worst excesses of the market. We make a big mistake when we think that mere human psychology and our capacity for altruism will stand up to the trials and temptations of easy gains. We make a big mistake when we rely on regulatory authorities to cure the world of sin.

And sometimes, the fact is that all systems fail when the going gets tough. We now know the neuroscience of this. When the going gets tough, the prefrontal cortex, which leads us to think about the consequences of our actions, gets sidelined, and the amygdala, the so-called reptile brain, the fight-or-flight reaction, which is only concerned with self-preservation, kicks in.

And when that happens, self-interest prevails, and the common good is devastated and destroyed. 

We need some way of making sure that louder than the blandishments of self-interest, there is the still, small voice of conscience. And that is why I think religion is not totally and utterly irrelevant to our global dilemma.

We are living in a time when we need, in addition to all the assembled wisdom of our politicians and economists, all of which I salute and admire profoundly, we also need the prophetic voice of an Amos or an Isaiah. We need visionaries who will speak truth to power, and we need statesmen and women who will turn power into the service of the truth. And the service of the truth states that the good of all of us must trump the good of each of us.

That is when you need to mobilise energies, be they religious or secular, it doesn't matter. But where we come together to say, ‘Friends, now is the time to work for the good of all of us, not just some of us. Not just for today or tomorrow's headlines, but for the sake of our grandchildren not yet born. Now is the time when altruism is no longer an option but a necessity of survival.’

If I believe, as I believe, religion has some small part to play in speaking to the better angels of our nature, then please count us as part of the team in what must be the great collective effort of our time. Thank you very much indeed.

Thank you. Should I stay here while we do questions? 

Moderator: If you'd like to take a seat here, it'd be great. Thank you very, very much. Thank you very, very much. We now have about five to 10 minutes for some questions. There are some microphones here. Could you walk over to the mic, please, and identify yourself and then ask the question. That'd be great. Yeah.

It is? It is. Yes, 

Questioner: Alan Sokal, NYU Physics Department. Lord Sacks, your rhetoric is wonderful, but I want to question some of your logic.

I'd like to just focus on one point. You argue that people need a conscience that goes beyond regulatory agencies. I totally agree with that. The question is, why should that conscience come from religion? Every religion has two parts. It makes factual claims about the world, and it makes ethical claims. The question is, what is the validity of a religious ethics over a secular ethics? What can religion contribute beyond what you get in the philosophy department? Seems to me there's one and only one reason why a religious ethics could have value over secular ethics, and that is if the factual claims of the religion are true.

But what is the evidence that the factual claims of any of the world's religions are true? Your religion, which by the way, is the religion of my own ancestors, is a bunch of stories written by tribespeople in Palestine 2,500 or 3,000 years ago, about what they claimed was the Creation of the universe. But what's the evidence that they knew anything about the Creation of the universe? 

Rabbi Sacks: Sorry, can I answer you straight away? First of all, I totally sympathise and empathise with everything you're saying. And if you get a chance to read the new book, you will see. I absolutely and categorically state that you do not have to be religious to be moral. My doctoral supervisor, the late Sir Bernard Williams, was a passionate atheist and probably the greatest moral philosopher of his time. So let's throw that out completely. Let us throw out completely the idea that you need an infrastructure of narrative to have a moral sense. I agree with you on all these things.

There is only one thing that I've been hinting at to try and get an 80,000-word thought out in 25 minutes. You have to cut some corners. 

Is this, that there is a profound belief that philosophers have. And I count myself as a philosopher. I was trained in secular philosophy long before I even thought of being a rabbi. And I still teach it and still gain from it. 

But there is that principle, which has been a mistake since Plato, that all you need to do, the only task of moral philosophy is to work out what is the right thing to do.

Actually, the most important thing is not knowing what the right thing is to do. 

Because on that, you and I will sit together and we'll work it out as best we can.

The most important thing is, what actually makes people do the right thing? What makes people do what they know they ought to do? 

And here I want to choose a rather strange source. Malcolm Gladwell's “Outliers.” Have you read that book on talent and gifted individuals? There have been at least a dozen books on the subject in the last two years. What makes a genius? And as the old New York joke used to put it, the lady who visited New York says to the taxi driver, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” And the answer is, “Practice, lady, practice.”

So Gladwell and the others point out that you need 10,000 hours of deep practice or 10 years of hard work before you naturally can hit a tennis ball the way that will get you to Wimbledon or play the violin like Yitzchak Perlman. Deep practice. It's not just knowing the music. It's not just knowing the rules of tennis. It's the deep practice. And that's what we forget in university philosophy departments.

And that's religion's speciality. We train kids from five years old or younger than that. The narratives, the rituals, the prayers, the mindset, and the habits of action that will lead them to make the right thing part of their instinctive behaviour, about which they don't have to think. They know they have to do. It's about how we get people to act morally. It's not moral epistemology. How do we know what is the right thing to do.

Is religion the only way of doing it? Absolutely not. Aristotle thought that was a standard part of education in citizenship. So there's an Aristotelian way of doing it as well.

But the problem is not knowing the right thing. The problem is, how do we cultivate the habits of virtue? Does that make sense? 

Moderator: Question? [inaudible]

Rabbi Sacks: I will tell you the following thing. That in Britain today, believe it or not, parents who have no religious beliefs whatsoever want to send their children to religious schools. I see that in my community. It's extraordinary. Why? Because they think in those schools, they will be taught habits of decency, integrity, and respect. So that is what people are saying.

And that is why in Britain, more and more people want to send their children to faith schools, despite the fact that Britain is a more secular society than America by a power of, I don't want to say what. 

Moderator: Question. 

Questioner: Lord Sacks, thank you so much for your very compelling comments. And I speak to you today as a fellow clergy person, as a former pastor. When you were talking about de Tocqueville in 1831, what came to my mind were the great tragedies. Much of my work as a Protestant pastor has been in conversation with Jewish communities.

How do we make sense of the Shoah and the Maafa, which is the key Swahili term for the great disaster of transatlantic slavery? 

So in 1831, religion was enormously robust in this country, at precisely the time that the peculiar institution of American chattel slavery was equally robust. Fast forward 100 or so years later, the tacit complicity of Christian congregations worldwide, and not speaking up that prophetic word in terms of the Shoah… fast forward several decades later, 2003, the way in which the American pulpit provided a sanctified justification, in many instances, for our incursion in Iraq. So I would just like for you to comment about that relationship between a religion on steroids at precisely the moment when our country, this particular country, was at its moral worst.

Rabbi Sacks: That is a seriously good question. I wish I had a seriously good answer, but I will tell you this. As far as I can see, I've tried to simplify into these three interlocking systems. My book is actually about the fourth system, which is science.

But there are these three interlocking systems - economics, the production and distribution of wealth, politics, the distribution of power, and civic space, in which religion is a key player, though not the only player by any means. And civic space operates from a logic differently to the State and the market. However, there is always a kind of porous barrier between those three domains.

And sometimes, religion can become the pursuit of power. And sometimes, religion can become the pursuit of wealth. And when those things happen, exactly the great sins that you speak of, which all of our faiths have been guilty of, happen.

And that is when you need religion to heal itself exactly as the market and the State must do. And that is why, although religion has forms of power, the king in biblical Israel and so on, and it had its own blessings for wealth, which the priest used to deliver, it had that third leader called the prophet, who was insulated from power and the pursuit of wealth. And that is why religion does tend to generate great sins, even great crimes.

But it has that almost inexhaustible supply of prophetic voices who can see that and can deliver the corrective. And that is why religions tend to renew themselves. And that is really what I think we need now.

And we need exactly voices like secular philosophers to tell us not to be guilty of hubris, not to think that we have all the answers. I think we are in a moment at which we need to come together in genuine fellowship from these three disciplines, plus the fourth, which is science, in genuine humility, and to say this problem is bigger than any of us can solve alone, even the totality of our domain can solve alone. Let us come together in humility, recognising the wrongs we have done, as well as the right to which we are called.

And then maybe we can cure ourselves and help cure the world.