The Second Corbishley
Memorial Lecture - 18th April 1978
Moral Imperatives in
Modern Society
by Dr Immanuel Jakobovits,
the Chief Rabbi
I feel doubly honoured in being invited to address this distinguished audience and in doing so in tribute to the memory of Fr. Corbishley who made such notable contributions to inaugurating a new era of inter-faith relations, and particularly also of Jewish-Christian understanding. In dedicating this lecture to his memory. I hope I may do some justice to the ideals to which he dedicated his life.
By speaking on Moral Imperatives in Modern Society, I clearly assume that the contemporary moral order has desiderata and deficiencies. Yet, in drawing up a kind of balance-sheet on moral advances and lapses in contemporary society, I find that the liabilities and losses are by no means the only significant feature. In fact, the assets and gains are also very considerable.
Moral Credits
In many ways, the moral and social conscience is far more pronounced now than in previous ages. We live in a more compassionate and caring society. Domestically, this finds expression in the welfare state, better education, and the more popular cultivation of arts and cultural pursuits. There is greater sensitivity for the tribulations of the poor, the sick, the disabled and the underprivileged. Universally these strides are shown in the human rights movements, the grant of national independence to numerous peoples previously living under foreign domination, and altogether in more equality being enjoyed by the human society. There is also the now almost world-wide emancipation of slaves and, through their enfranchisement, of women.
Within my own community, this increased concern for the welfare of others can be illustrated by contrasting the relatively muted response to the periodic pogroms in Czarist Russia at the turn of the century with the intensive campaigns among Jews throughout the world to alleviate the plight of Soviet Jewry to-day.
These moral advances become strikingly apparent when we remember that terms like "underprivileged" or "disadvantaged" or "developing nations", now commonplace, were entirely unknown only a few decades ago. They testified to a new dimension in human relations.
Even in international relations, the brotherhood of man has become a more realistic concept than ever before, as we begin to recognise, albeit largely through political and economic rather than moral pressures, our universal interdependence in which the prosperity and security of even the most powerful and affluent nations increasingly depend on others sharing these assets.
Equally significant on the credit side of the ledger are the revolutionary strides in inter-faith relations made in the post-war era. For the first time in millennia the great religions, after a sordid history of bitterness, intolerance and often violent strife, are now not only on speaking terms but frequently engage in friendly dialogues, common endeavours, and mutual respect and reconciliation.
Moral Debits
Yet, all these momentous advances are largely overshadowed by at least equally significant trends in the opposite direction. Whatever indicator we use to measure moral standards in public life or private conduct, the graphs show disturbingly uniform features of moral erosion and decline. There are alarmingly rising rates of crime, (especially juvenile delinquency), divorce, illegitimacy, vandalism, child pornography, truancy at school and at work, corruption in high places, dishonesty in business, and above all of violence, now rampant on a unprecedented scale.
Culturally, too, we seem to have retrogressed rather than progressed. True, literacy has greatly increased the world over. Education is far more widespread, and the appreciation of arts and sciences in some respects is cultivated on a more popular scale than ever, partly through the extension of schooling and the raising of the school-leaving age, and partly through the enormous educational influence of the mass-media, notably television.
But cultural tastes have been cheapened and sometimes prostituted. The long hair of males and short dresses of females, the blaring pots-and-pans instrumentation of modern music, the ‘spilt-ink-pot’ patterns of contemporary art, and the erotic contortions of modern dancing, not to mention the wife-swapping and baby-battering practices so prevalent to-day - all this may be but a temporary relapse to the life-style of primeval cave-dwellers, with their primitive art and social habits. But these aberrations or excesses certainly characterise the popular mini-culture of the present time.
However, all these manifestations of moral and cultural depreciation are but symptoms of a deteriorating social climate; they are hardly the cause or the intrinsic substance of it.
Moral imperatives require a moral authority to enforce them. It is the breakdown of moral authority which brings us closer to the heart of the moral crisis afflicting our age. Moral authority has broken down, or at least been impaired at all three levels: the autonomous authority of the individual conscience, the heteronomous authority of state or religion, and the self-regulatory authority of social consensus, public opinion or international solidarity.
Paradoxically, In each case some of the very Items I listed among our moral advances have helped to undermine the authority to sustain them.
Rights and Duties
The individual conscience, fickle as it is at any time, has been widely conditioned by the many rights campaigns - human rights, civil rights, workers’ rights, student rights, etc. - to think in terms of rights rather than duties; in other words, of what society owes us rather than what we owe society.
In classical Hebrew and the literary sources of Jewish law, by the way, we have no word for "rights". The Decalogue is not a Bill of Rights, but Ten Commandments, and the Bible legislates not on what the poor may demand from the rich, but what the rich are duty-bound to give for the relief of poverty.
By its emphasis on rights we are entitled to claim rather than on obligations we are to exact from ourselves, on demands from others rather than on debts to others, our society breeds a cult of selfishness. The individual conscience would be quite effective as an arbiter of right and wrong, and as an internal law enforcement agency, if it were trained to cultivate the virtues of self- discipline and self-restraint. But these virtues occupy a scant place in the ethos of our rights-orientated, pleasure-worshipping society. Leaving moral decisions to the whims of one’s conscience is usually a self-righteous cloak for the pursuit of convenience and selfish interest.
What else would determine the conduct of most people in an area like abortion, for instance, when we speak of submitting such capital Judgements to the dictates of one’s conscience, where plaintive, judge and jury on a life-and-death verdict are all the same interested party?
Waning Authority of Government and Religion
At the next level, the authority of political and religious leaders has likewise been eroded. This is partly because governments, legislatures and often even religions have increasingly abdicated their role as the enforcers of the moral law. Afraid to alienate public support in a climate of permissiveness, they no longer even claim the right or duty to legislate on moral matters. These - as the popular clamour would have it - are best left to the individual conscience or, in Biblical terms, to "every man doing what is right in his own eyes".
Moreover, here again the very advances on one front have led to retreats on another. The instant communications of our modern media, immeasurable as has been their role in mobilising widespread concern for the sufferings and injustices endured in the remotest parts of the world, have by the same means also tarnished the aura of reverence that used to invest leaders of men with authority. Zoom-lenses have brought not only distant scenes of squalor and oppression close to us: they have also made us intimate with our bearers of high office, thus exchanging the respect of distance for the contempt bred of familiarity.
Shifts in World Opinion
At the third level of moral authority - the consensus of international opinion - the damage to the exercise of moral controls or sanctions has been even more serious.
The same forces which won freedom and independence for scores of newly emergent nations previously under colonial bondage have also paradoxically shifted the centre of gravity in the world community from freedom and independence to suppression and insecurity.
Where in the old League of Nations the hegemony of the Judaeo-Christian heritage and its moral values prevailed, at least nominally, and democratic nations were in the great majority, the United Nations now comprises a majority of non-Christian nations, most of them governed by totalitarian regimes. As a result, the forces and values of Western civilisation, for so long dominant on the world scene, are now globally in retreat and virtually in a state of siege. They are challenged by the very interdependence among nations today which we otherwise hail as notable progress towards the ideals of human brotherhood - a brotherhood which now all too frequently prevents the world community from asserting its authority as a moral force or from generating pressures of public opinion to uphold moral laws and attitudes
Naturally, the first moral imperative of our times should be to restore the shattered moral authority at all three levels. But this is clearly a vain hope, beyond the powers of the most gifted statesman and most inspired religious leaders, even if we had them.
Let me therefore content myself with spelling out a few specific imperatives which are within reach. As examples I will take three critical areas, each of which threatens to cripple civilised life: industrial strife, the rise of terrorism, and the withdrawal of the individual from accountability for the welfare of society.
Social Justice in Industry
It is obviously a primary Imperative of social justice to redress the imbalance of the inequalities between the haves and the have-nots, or have-less. We surely ought not to wait for pickets and demonstrators to denounce and eliminate the injustices which still maintain an indefensible differential between the wages of some labourers and the incomparably higher earnings of those in management, or entertainment, or other recipients of rewards unrelated to output, training, skill and effort. But at the same time, we ought to be able to devise a more civilised and less damaging method for resolving industrial conflict than by paralysing strikes, which cause millions of innocent citizens, who are not a party to the dispute - not to mention the national economy - to suffer grievous harm, untold misery and hardship, the loss of their livelihood and sometimes even death.
My moral conscience, as determined by Jewish law and thought, would certainly affirm the right to strike as a weapon against unfair employers, so long as the parties hit are those responsible or guilty; in other words, provided consumers can find alternative supplies or services, or at least are exposed to nothing more than mere inconvenience.
But the imposition of real suffering or hardship on the whole community for gaining the rights of a section is immoral. A claim of one person or group against another, however justified, never entitles the claimant to hurt or damage a third party. When two individuals have a financial dispute, we would not expect them to resolve it by fighting it out until one has bloodied the other and, for good measure, given a black eye to all bystanders as well. A morally sensitive society ought not to tolerate such primitive methods to settle disputes, involving not just thousands of contestants but also millions of innocent bystanders. We ought to find an equitable system of adjudication or mediation which would render arguments between sections of industry amenable to the same orderly and fair process of resolution as we take for granted when individuals have conflicting claims.
Curbing the Freedom of Terror
On organised terror, too, it should not be beyond the resourcefulness of civilised society to prevent our world from turning into a jungle in which every citizen and every government is at risk of being taken hostage by political criminals.
Violence thrives and spreads by publicity which turns crime into a norm: by silence which makes the onlooker an accomplice of the criminal: by commercial or diplomatic dealings with countries which provide support or a haven to terrorists: by a false sense of justice which, often promoted by civil liberty movements, does not discriminate between the criminal and his victim in defending their right: and more generally by tolerating any attack on the infinite sanctity of all innocent human life, whether before birth by unwarranted abortion or before death by deliberate euthanasia.
All these are indispensable aids to terror, or to the acquiescence in terror, and they can be denied to its promoters, whether individuals or governments. Publicity can be curbed and controlled to distinguish between essential information and incitement, to deprive law-breakers of a public platform for the dissemination of their subversive views, and under no circumstances to take a neutral stance on evil. Silence can be overcome by protest, never allowing the public to accept violence as a fact of life. Terrorists can be hunted down by boycotting countries supplying or sheltering them. The deterrent to terror can be increased by treating its perpetrators as outside the pale of the law. The sanctity of life can be enhanced by eliminating any legislation which cheapens the respect for ft.
Far too little has so far been done to frustrate this evil and to create a climate of opinion in which the public reverence for life will effectively stifle the will and opportunity to destroy it.
The Individual and the State
My final example may be more intangible, but it is no less an urgent moral imperative. The welfare state has conferred invaluable blessings on society, both by helping the weak and by refining the rest. But it has also exacted a heavy price which could well be reduced. It has inevitably induced a socially complacent mentality in which the individual citizen all too readily transfers his responsibilities to the state. He finds it easy to opt out from his personal commitment to the community around him.
Moreover, with high unemployment and the increasing leisure enjoyed by those employed, the vacuum of the resultant idleness is bound to be filled with mischief, unless the vacant time is channelled into constructive work. Voluntary service, now largely displaced or but sparsely encouraged by the welfare state, thus achieves more than simply to fill important gaps in our social structure. It also gives the citizen a sense of involvement in the welfare of society, whilst at the same time preventing him from preying on his fellow citizens through sheer boredom and idleness.
A little while ago, at a conference on social services presided over by the Archbishop of Canterbury, I suggested the establishment of a government ministry of voluntary services. I made this suggestion not only for the better liaison between government and voluntary agencies, but above all to turn the partnership of the state and of the citizen in the service of society into an officially sanctioned relationship, designed to counter the welfare mentality of passivity, impotence and disinterest, fostered by the constant expansion of government in ordering our affairs and relieving us of our own social commitments.
The distinguished Memorial Lecturer who preceded me last year, Lord Hailsham, is today being widely acclaimed for a new book in which he is reported to have blamed government for being too oppressive and too ineffective. In a democratic society governments are only what we allow them to be and what we depute them to do. By encouraging citizens to assume social responsibilities now borne by the state, we will make government both less oppressive and more effective: and we will also promote the equation between giving and taking, between serving and being served.
I hope that in sharing with you these thoughts, provocative as some of them may have been, I may have done honour to a cherished memory and added hope for the realisation of the brotherhood of man under the Fatherhood of God in which every human being will be not only created in His image, but also live in His image.