This week, we have been discussing Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ 1995 book Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence. Catch up on Monday-Thursday’s posts linked below and catch up on the entire Freedom under threat series starting here.
Today we ask the all-important question:
Where do we go from here?
- Political religious extremism – what is it and why is it happening now?
- What social and psychological processes lead to altruistic evil?
- What is the first warning sign of a world order in danger of collapse?
- What does “apocalyptic politics” mean and what causes it?
- Where do we go from here?
“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”
James Arthur Baldwin
Today the secular West has largely lost the values that used to be called the Judeo-Christian heritage. Instead, it has chosen to worship the idols of the self – the market, consumerism, individualism, autonomy, rights and ‘whatever works for you’ – while relinquishing the codes of loyalty, reverence and respect that once preserved marriages, communities and the subtle bonds that tie us to one another, moving us to work for the common good.
Losing its religious faith, the West is beginning to lose the ideals that once made it inspiring to the altruistic: reverence, loyalty, human dignity, the relief of poverty, public service, collective responsibility, national identity and respect for religious values while at the same time making space for liberty of conscience and the peaceable co-existence of more than one faith. Today Western politics often seem bereft of vision beyond the mantra of ‘freedom and democracy’ and cost-benefit calculations of maximum services for the minimum of tax.
Faced with a culture of individualism and hedonism, it is not surprising that young radicals, eager to change the world, turn elsewhere to express their altruism, even if it involves acts that are brutal and barbaric. Altruism misdirected can lead to evil: that has been the thesis of this book. That is why the West must recover its ideals.
Identity is based on narrative, the stories we tell about who we are, where we came from, and what is our relationship to others.
A large chunk of the book goes through some biblical texts very closely. Each narrative where there is an apparent “choice and rejection,” (Cain and Abel, Joseph and his brothers, etc.) Sacks gives a counter-narrative that subverts the surface story and provides a completely different viewpoint and understanding. It is so refreshing and brilliant!
At the core of the Bible’s value system is that cultures, like individuals, are judged by their willingness to extend care beyond the boundary of family, tribe, ethnicity and nation.
So what is a solution for hatred and violence?
Role reversal.
“To be cured of potential violence towards the Other, I must be able to imagine myself as the Other.“
A problem arises at times of change and disruption when people are anxious and afraid. We have to remember that we were once on the other side of the equation. We were once strangers: the oppressed, the victims. Remembering the Jewish past forces us to undergo role reversal.
A chosen people is the opposite of a master race, it is a servant community.
- It is not a race but a covenant
- It exists to serve God, not to master others
- A master race worships itself; a chosen people worships something beyond itself.
- A master race values power; a chosen people cares for the powerless.
- A master race believes it has rights; a chosen people knows only that it has responsibilities.
- The key virtues of a master race are pride, honor and fame. The key virtue of a chosen people is humility.
“The entire ethical-legal principle on which the Hebrew Bible is based is that we own nothing. Everything – the land, its produce, power, sovereignty, children, and life itself – belongs to God. We are mere trustees, guardians, on his behalf. We possess but we do not own. That is the basis of the infrastructure of social justice that made the Bible unique in its time and still transformative today.“
Monotheism and Dualism
“Different civilizations generate different character types. That is not because character is a matter of ethnicity: that is racism, and it is also untrue. Humans are culture-producing animals, and the way we act, even the way we feel, depends in no small measure on structures of the mind that we have internalized from our environment and habits of the heart we learned as children. Religions are culture-shaping institutions, and they include not just a theology, but also an anthropology. What we believe about God affects what we believe about ourselves. Monotheism internalizes conflict, whereas myth externalizes it.“
“Within religion, the most extreme, anti-modern or anti-Western movements will prevail.“
“That is the real difference between monotheism and dualism. When bad things happen to an individual or group, one can either ask, ‘Who did this to me?’ or, ‘Given that this has happened, what then shall I do?’ The first is the question a dualist asks, the second is the response of a consistent monotheist.
“So different are these questions that they generate two modes of being: respectively a blame culture and a penitential culture:”
| DUALISM: Blame culture | MONOTHEISM: Penitential culture |
| “Who did this to me?” | “What should I do about my situation?” |
| External cause | Internal response |
| Looks to the past | Looks to the future |
| Passive | Active |
| Victim mentality | Logic of responsibility |
“Defining yourself as a victim is ultimately a diminution of what makes us human. It teaches us to see ourselves as objects, not subjects. We become done-to, not doers; passive, not active. Blame bars the path to responsibility. The victim, ascribing his condition to others, locates the cause of his situation outside himself, thus rendering himself incapable of breaking free from his self-created trap. Because he attributes a real phenomenon (pain, poverty, illiteracy, disease) to a fictitious cause, he discovers that murdering the cause does not remove the symptom. Hence efforts must be redoubled. Blame cultures perpetuate every condition against which they are a protest.“
To be free, you have to let go of hate.
Further Reading: Gallup recently released poll results that found that when Americans were asked their religious affiliation, over half replied “None.” Mosaic’s February feature essay writes about how Europe may give us a picture of what’s to come. It cites the 2020 Foreign Affairs essay, “Giving Up on God: The Global Decline of Religion.”
