A Call for Re-Moralization Restoring one of the keystones of Western civilization.

• Author: Bailey, Norman A.

A review of Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times by Jonathan Sacks, Hodder & Stoughton, 2020

Even before coronavirus made everything worse, there has been a palpable sense that since the late 1960s, or let's say from Kent State to Minneapolis, the Judeo-Christian moral and the Greco-Roman civil underpinnings of Western civilization have been rapidly disintegrating. What had become since the fifteenth century the dominant social/political/economic paradigm was being increasingly questioned and often discarded as representing and justifying a civilization that was created and sustained by colonialism and slavery.

All the pillars of Western society were undermined, as well as some which predated Western society by millennia, such as the family. Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, former chief rabbi of the Commonwealth, has published a work which examines this process from the standpoint of the collapse of morality, that is, the predominance of the "we" over the "I," now rapidly being inverted. In so doing, Sacks has written nothing short of a masterpiece, a work of masterful analysis, synthesis, diagnosis, prognosis, and prescription, all written with his habitual grace and clarity. He sets the tone from the first page: "If we focus on the T and lose the 'we', if we act in self-interest and lose the common good, if we focus on self-esteem and lose our care for others, we will lose much else. Nations will cease to have societies and instead have identity groups. We will lose our feeling of collective responsibility and find in its place a culture of competitive victimhood. In an age of unprecedented possibilities, people will feel vulnerable and alone."

Much of the efforts of the great Western thinkers of the past six centuries have been directed toward prescribing for the state and the economy for the benefit of society as a whole, and not just for certain segments of it. Centered particularly in England, Scotland, and eventually America, the great traditions of Judeo-Christian morality and Greco-Roman civil society were applied to contemporary societies. The gradual spread of the market economy and political democracy throughout the Western world and eventually far beyond it characterized what became the universal paradigm: often partial, often perverted, often caricatured, to be sure, but still, what "men and women of good will" worked towards.

Sacks inventories the "decline of the west" into various categories: the perversion of...