Replacing the word 'I' with 'We'

How do we try to retain our common humanity and social capital? The very wise recommendation of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks in his most timely new book Morality: Restoring Common Good in Divided Times is simply, where you find the word "I" replace it with the word "other." So in place of self-esteem, "other-esteem"; instead of self-help, "other-help."

In his estimation we face nothing short of a loss of the sense of “we” as things around us fall apart.

Morality is a divisive word. It is a very long time since the notion of morality was universally accepted, if it ever was. It smacks of the Victorian era’s strict code of do’s and don’t’s that we were all forced to live by or break free of in a spectacular fashion.

Sacks acknowledges this: “The word itself now evokes all we distrust most: the intrusion of impersonal standards into our private lives, the presence of judgement where judgement does not belong, the substitution of authority for choice...We have come to share George Bernard Shaw’s conviction that morality is one person’s way of disrupting someone else’s innocent enjoyment, or as HG Wells called it, ‘jealousy with a halo.’”

Sacks is careful to point out that what he is trying to bring to our attention is the result of us losing sight as a society of the “we” – the common good – because we have been seduced by the “I” of individualism.

He believes that the word “morality” gets in the way of us accepting the fact that we do care passionately about concerns that are essentially moral, such as legal injustice, extreme economic inequality, destruction of the environment in pursuit of economic growth. He argues that we are not indifferent to the suffering of others, and it would seem that in this particular regard he is right about the people in the present world health crisis, if not about the some of the incumbent world leaders who continue their toxic rhetoric of "us" and "them."

In hard-hit Italy, hundreds of retired health professionals have returned to work to replace the dozens of their ill-prepared and unprotected fallen colleagues on the front line of caring for covid19 patients. Theirs are not individual acts of magnanimity but the people acting for the common good.

Everywhere, able neighbours have been looking after the less able even though they were previously unconscious of them except as potential trouble. It is what Sacks would have longed to see happen. Sadly, some politicians have done the opposite. See what Brazil and the USA are up to.

“Cultural climate change” is how Sacks describes the modern three-stage transfer of responsible human behaviour from us to the markets and the politicians. The state manages the worst excesses of the wealth-creating market, but we are still in the furrow of the 1980s “greed is good” era. He sees the current drift starting to happen with the 1960s’ social revolution and the rise of the counter-culture, progressing through the 1980s, and now we find ourselves in the throes of the all-pervasive social media revolution and its concern with self.

Jonathan Sacks, now Lord Sacks of Aldgate, is one of my very favourite public intellectuals. This very insightful thinker, on the liberal wing of the Jewish faith, is the award-winning author of over 30 books, including The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilisations and the bestselling Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence.

He was the chief rabbi of Great Britain and the Commonwealth for 22 years and during that time was the exemplar of how religion need not be about exclusivity. He has at time fallen foul of his fellow rabbis, but never fails to carry authority beyond the Jewish community, even among the non-religious.

It is hard not to agree with him that there is no freedom without responsibility. The question is, from where do we derive that sense of responsibility? He would say a sense of morality, but for many the answer has come from the most unexpected of sources, a pandemic.

The publication of his newest and elegantly argued book (full of cultural and historical references) accidentally just preceded the biggest global crisis we have faced since WWII, which had engulfed most of the world in direct combat and left few others unaffected by the upheaval of the subsequent change in the world order. Covid19 has now touched every continent and has yet to wreak ruination on Africa and India, where some of the world’s poorest people live.

At the end of 2020, the human population will have been culled by a common enemy that only rears its head intermittently. At the end of this particular pandemic much will have changed.

We can only hope that in line with Jonathan Sacks’ vision and our experience of covid19, the future will include the decline of selfishness and the end of the very deep inequality that has become the rot at the heart of the modern political and economic project.