7 July 2011: Having pride in Britain protects all cultures (published in The Times)

Having pride in Britain protects all cultures (published in The Times)

 An Article By The Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks in The London  Times 7 July 2011

David Cameron was right to say that multiculturalism has failed, echoing similar statements by Nicholas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel. It was undertaken for the highest of motives. It was intended to create a more tolerant society, one in which everyone, regardless of colour, creed or culture, felt at home. Its effect has been precisely the opposite.

Last week the Community Security Trust, the body that monitors antisemitic incidents, published its annual report, showing that the figures for 2010 were the second highest since record-keeping began. Jews especially in London and Manchester have found themselves attacked on their way to and from synagogue, or abused by passers-by. Jewish students feel themselves so intimidated on campuses throughout the country that last week they were in Westminster lobbying their MPs, something I cannot recall happening before.

The Jewish community in Britain is small, and antisemitism only one form of hatred among many. But the Jewish story is worth telling if only because the re-emergence of antisemitism in a culture is always an early warning signal of wider breakdown. The alarm has been sounding loudly for some time.

Many Jews of my parents’ generation owed their lives to this country. It took them in when they faced persecution elsewhere. They loved Britain and deeply internalized its values. The inscription on the tombstone of a former President of the United Synagogue summed up the entire Anglo-Jewish experience. It read, “A proud Englishman and a proud Jew.”

The role model was Sir Moses Montefiore, the Victorian philanthropist and president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews. The Times, in an editorial written on his hundredth birthday in 1884, said that he had shown that “fervent Judaism and patriotic citizenship are absolutely compatible with one another”. That might sound condescending now, but considering what was happening to Jews elsewhere in Europe, it was a lifeline.

My parents lived those values and taught them to us. They became the first Jews in their families for perhaps a thousand years not to teach their children Yiddish because they wanted us to be English and identify with the wider society.

They were not naive. They remembered vividly when Mosley and the British Union of Fascists marched through London’s East End. They knew the genteel anti-Semitism that was almost ubiquitous in certain literary and social circles. They knew that England was a class bound society with many faults.

But they admired the British for their tolerance and decency, their sense of fair play and their understated but indomitable courage. They were proud to be English because the English were proud to be English. Indeed in the absence of pride there can be no identity at all. They integrated and encouraged us to go further because there was something to integrate into.

At some time that pride disintegrated, to be replaced by what Kate Fox amusingly calls “one-downmanship.” TheBritish started seeing their own history as an irredeemable narrative of class, snobbery, imperialism, racism and social exclusion. It was in this atmosphere that, in the 1970s, multiculturalism was born. It said: there is no need to integrate.

The first people to try multiculturalism, the Dutch, were also the first people to regret it. The Princeton sociologists Paul Sniderman and Louk Hagendoorn found that the Dutch favoured tolerance and opposed multiculturalism. When asked what the difference was, they replied that tolerance ignores differences; multiculturalism makes an issue of them at every point.

Multiculturalism is part of the wider European phenomenon of moral relativism, a doctrine that became influential as a response to the Holocaust. It was argued that taking a stand on moral issues was a sign of an “authoritarian personality”. Moral judgment was seen as the first step down the road to fanaticism. But moral relativism is the deathknell of a civilization. In a relativist culture, there is no moral consensus, only a clash of conflicting views in which the loudest voice wins.

That is where we are today. The extremists command attention and capture the headlines, and they become the role models for the young. Since there is no national identity to claim their allegiance, there is no contest. Hence the phenomenon, widespread throughout Europe today but rare in the past, that the children of immigrants are more hostile to the host society than their parents were, and feel themselves more alien to its values.

I have never known the British Jewish community, especially its university students, more anxious about the future than they are today. But I have heard the same from many Hindus and Sikhs. They feel that the more they seek to integrate, the less attention is paid to them by the government and the media. They are no problem, therefore they can be ignored. That too is terribly dangerous for the British future.

Multiculturalism, entered into for the noblest of reasons, has suffered from the law of unintended consequences. By dissolving national identity it makes it impossible for groups to integrate because there is nothing to integrate into, and by failing to offer people pride in being British, it forces them to find sources of pride elsewhere.

Without shared values and a sense of collective identity, no society can sustain itself for long. I fear the extremism that is slowly but surely becoming, throughout the world, the siren song of the twenty-first century. We have to fight it here before we can convincingly oppose it elsewhere.

Sacks to House of Commons on Multiculturalism 8 sept 2011

Sacks on 8 Sept 2011House of Commons dvd here

Improving Interfaith Dialogue in Multicultural Britain – House of Lords Debate (8 Sept 2011)

House of Lords 1 Response »

Sep082011

 

1

“My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Mitchell, for initiating this important and necessary debate. I go back to words said by an expert on the subject 2,600 years ago. His name was Jeremiah and he became known as a prophet of gloom. Were he to return to life today, doubtless he would be an economist. He was the first person to analyse the situation many find themselves in today of being a minority in a culture whose beliefs are not their own.

Jeremiah wrote a letter to the Jewish exiles in Babylon in which he said:

“Seek the welfare of the city to which you have gone and pray to God on its behalf, for in its peace and prosperity you will find peace and prosperity”.

He told them in effect: “Maintain your identity while contributing to the common good. Be true to your faith while being a blessing to others regardless of their faith”. That is the challenge today. The good news about religion is that it creates communities based on altruism and trust. It teaches people to make sacrifices for the sake of others. It builds social capital. The bad news is that every community divides as it unites, because for every “us” there is a “them”-the people not like us.

The best way to improve interfaith dialogue in multicultural Britain is to create a sense of national identity so strong that it brings different ethnic and religious communities together in pursuit of the common good-not just the good for “my” group, but the good for all of us together. A nation should respect its faiths, and faiths should respect the nation. That is the only way we will achieve integrated diversity and the dignity of difference, in which we see our differences as contributions that we bring to the common good.

In yesterday’s Times, Daniel Finkelstein wrote a moving tribute to his late father, who came to Britain as a Jewish refugee in World War II. He wrote:

“He lived here proud of the nation that let him live, let him learn, let him teach, let him practise his religion. And ultimately let him die in bed, loved by his family”.

That is what Britain means to us in the Jewish community, and surely to the vast majority in all our faith communities. It is vital that we teach all our children, whether in faith schools or not, to honour this country, respect its traditions, contribute to its welfare and show the same respect to others as we ask others to show to us.

Therefore I have a simple proposal. I believe that all Britain’s faith communities should be invited to make a voluntary covenant with Britain articulating our responsibilities to others and to the nation as a whole, so that we can be true to our faith while being a blessing to others regardless of theirs.”

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Having pride in Britain protects all cultures (published in The Times)

Articles, Writings & Speeches No Responses »

Feb072011

 

David Cameron was right to say that multiculturalism has failed, echoing similar statements by Nicholas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel. It was undertaken for the highest of motives. It was intended to create a more tolerant society, one in which everyone, regardless of colour, creed or culture, felt at home. Its effect has been precisely the opposite.

Last week the Community Security Trust, the body that monitors antisemitic incidents, published its annual report, showing that the figures for 2010 were the second highest since record-keeping began. Jews especially in London and Manchester have found themselves attacked on their way to and from synagogue, or abused by passers-by. Jewish students feel themselves so intimidated on campuses throughout the country that last week they were in Westminster lobbying their MPs, something I cannot recall happening before.

The Jewish community in Britain is small, and antisemitism only one form of hatred among many. But the Jewish story is worth telling if only because the re-emergence of antisemitism in a culture is always an early warning signal of wider breakdown. The alarm has been sounding loudly for some time.

Many Jews of my parents’ generation owed their lives to this country. It took them in when they faced persecution elsewhere. They loved Britain and deeply internalized its values. The inscription on the tombstone of a former President of the United Synagogue summed up the entire Anglo-Jewish experience. It read, “A proud Englishman and a proud Jew.”

The role model was Sir Moses Montefiore, the Victorian philanthropist and president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews. The Times, in an editorial written on his hundredth birthday in 1884, said that he had shown that “fervent Judaism and patriotic citizenship are absolutely compatible with one another”. That might sound condescending now, but considering what was happening to Jews elsewhere in Europe, it was a lifeline.

My parents lived those values and taught them to us. They became the first Jews in their families for perhaps a thousand years not to teach their children Yiddish because they wanted us to be English and identify with the wider society.

They were not naive. They remembered vividly when Mosley and the British Union of Fascists marched through London’s East End. They knew the genteel anti-Semitism that was almost ubiquitous in certain literary and social circles. They knew that England was a class bound society with many faults.

But they admired the British for their tolerance and decency, their sense of fair play and their understated but indomitable courage. They were proud to be English because the English were proud to be English. Indeed in the absence of pride there can be no identity at all. They integrated and encouraged us to go further because there was something to integrate into.

At some time that pride disintegrated, to be replaced by what Kate Fox amusingly calls “one-downmanship.” TheBritish started seeing their own history as an irredeemable narrative of class, snobbery, imperialism, racism and social exclusion. It was in this atmosphere that, in the 1970s, multiculturalism was born. It said: there is no need to integrate.

The first people to try multiculturalism, the Dutch, were also the first people to regret it. The Princeton sociologists Paul Sniderman and Louk Hagendoorn found that the Dutch favoured tolerance and opposed multiculturalism. When asked what the difference was, they replied that tolerance ignores differences; multiculturalism makes an issue of them at every point.

Multiculturalism is part of the wider European phenomenon of moral relativism, a doctrine that became influential as a response to the Holocaust. It was argued that taking a stand on moral issues was a sign of an “authoritarian personality”. Moral judgment was seen as the first step down the road to fanaticism. But moral relativism is the deathknell of a civilization. In a relativist culture, there is no moral consensus, only a clash of conflicting views in which the loudest voice wins.

That is where we are today. The extremists command attention and capture the headlines, and they become the role models for the young. Since there is no national identity to claim their allegiance, there is no contest. Hence the phenomenon, widespread throughout Europe today but rare in the past, that the children of immigrants are more hostile to the host society than their parents were, and feel themselves more alien to its values.

I have never known the British Jewish community, especially its university students, more anxious about the future than they are today. But I have heard the same from many Hindus and Sikhs. They feel that the more they seek to integrate, the less attention is paid to them by the government and the media. They are no problem, therefore they can be ignored. That too is terribly dangerous for the British future.

Multiculturalism, entered into for the noblest of reasons, has suffered from the law of unintended consequences. By dissolving national identity it makes it impossible for groups to integrate because there is nothing to integrate into, and by failing to offer people pride in being British, it forces them to find sources of pride elsewhere.

Without shared values and a sense of collective identity, no society can sustain itself for long. I fear the extremism that is slowly but surely becoming, throughout the world, the siren song of the twenty-first century. We have to fight it here before we can convincingly oppose it elsewhere.

Giving and Belonging: The Lesson Jews Can Offer New Immigrants (published in The Times)

Articles, Writings & Speeches No Responses »

Oct012005

 

In the course of the new Jewish year, which begins on Monday evening, we will be celebrating the 350th anniversary of British Jewry. The story of our community has some relevance to the current debate about multiculturalism.

The Jews who came here were asylum-seekers from successive waves of persecution. The first were descendants of the victims of the Spanish and Portuguese expulsions. My late father came to find refuge from anti-Semitism in Poland. Some came through Kindertransport, the British effort to save Jewish children from Nazi Germany. Others arrived as survivors of the Holocaust.

It wasn’t always easy to be Jewish in Britain. It took 200 years before Jews were permitted to enter universities or be elected to Parliament. Jewish immigrants — poor, concentrated in ghettoes, barely able to speak English — were caricatured as alien elements in British life. Jews who remember those days can readily sympathise with Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims today.

Within an astonishingly short time, they were full participants in British society. There were philosophers such as Sir A. J. Ayer and Sir Isaiah Berlin, intellectuals from Jacob Bronowski to Elias Canetti and historians such as Sir Martin Gilbert and Simon Schama. There were businessmen from Michael Marks of Marks & Spencer to Sir Alan Sugar, and politicians such as Sir Malcolm Rifkind and Michael Howard. Anglo-Jewry provided two of the last three Lord Chief Justices.

There is a message of hope here for other ethnic and religious minorities. Integration and acceptance don’t happen overnight. And yes, there were conflicts between immigrant parents and their British-born and educated children. There was a long struggle to define an identity both British and Jewish. But these are pains of adjustment, not permanent conditions.

The Jewish experience challenges the received wisdom about minorities. Jews did not seek multiculturalism. They sought to integrate, adapt and belong. Jewish schools focused on turning Jews into British citizens, at home in the nation’s language, culture and history. Sermons were spiced with quotations from Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth. The role model was Sir Moses Montefiore, whom The Times praised on his 100th birthday in 1884 for his “ determination to show, by his life, that fervent Judaism and patriotic citizenship are absolutely consistent with one another”.

Britain was different in those days. It knew who and what it was. It had the quiet confidence of a nation secure in its own identity. It remembered what it is now beginning to forget, that for minorities to integrate there must be something for them to integrate into. Subtly and with a certain grace, Britain reminded Jews that there were rules, things you did and didn’t do. I remember Bertha Leverton, one of the children saved from Germany in 1939, telling of how she was taught, on her first day in England, that it was polite to leave some food uneaten on the side of your plate. She was starving and traumatised, yet the gesture helped to make her feel at home. She appreciated the hidden message: from here on, you are one of us.

Our postmodern culture — moral relativism, multiculturalism, the right to self-esteem — entered into with the highest motives, has by the law of unintended consequences made it almost impossible for minorities to integrate. The result is not more tolerance but less. For the first time in my life, Jews feel uncomfortable in Britain. They have heard public figures making crude gibes about Jews. They have seen Holocaust Memorial Day — dedicated to all victims of man’s inhum- anity to man — misrepresented and politicised. Throughout Europe, Jewish students are harassed, synagogues vandalised and cemeteries desecrated.

These things matter not because of the threat they pose to Jews, but because anti-Semitism is always an advance warning of a wider crisis. Today religious groups are in danger of becoming pressure groups instead of thinking what is in the best interests of Britain as a whole. That is not good for some of us: it is bad for all of us.

Jews also learnt, through 20 centuries of dispersion, a principle almost forgotten in contemporary debates: the connection between giving and belonging. They remembered the advice given by Jeremiah: “Seek the welfare of the city to which I have exiled you and pray to God on its behalf, for in its peace and prosperity you will find peace and prosperity.” They recalled God’s words to Abraham, to be a blessing to “all the families on earth”. To be true to your faith while being a blessing to others, regardless of their faith, is the best formula I know for a multifaith environment.

Recently we have thought of society as a hotel where you pay money in return for services and you are then free to do what you like so long as you don’t disturb the other guests. Hotels are fine, but they do not generate a sense of belonging. Society is not a hotel. It is the home we build together. It is the place to which we bring our distinctive contributions to the common good. The Jewish plea to Britain is: don’t forget who you are, for that is who we aspire to be.

Sacks: The Times: It is the end of a dangerous moral experiment

July 7 2012

The Times: It is the end of a dangerous moral experiment

Articles, Writings & Speeches

The banking scandals, rate fixing and resignations may have a silver lining if they awaken us to a fact about which we have been in denial for decades.

Morality matters. Not just laws, regulations, supervisory authorities, committees of inquiry, courts, fines and punishments, but morality: the inner voice of self-restraint that tells us not to do something even when it is to our advantage, even though it may be legal, and even if there is a fair chance it won’t be found out. Because it’s wrong. Because it’s dishonourable. Because it is a breach of trust.

We are reaching the endgame of a great experiment that didn’t work: society’s attempt to live without a shared moral code. The 1960s applied this to private life. The 1980s applied it to the market. It was the age of deregulation and faith in the power of exchange. Hadn’t Adam Smith convincingly shown that the market, by the alchemy of “the invisible hand,” turned the pursuit of self-interest into collective gain? Smith never said that greed is good, but some of his followers did.

To which, after a succession of scandals that has shaken the financial system and brought the economy to its knees, we are entitled to say, “Up to a point.” Actually, with little fanfare, a discovery in the early 1950s had already refuted this central premise of classical economics.

It emerged from one of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century, John von Neumann. Neumann was a mathematician and physicist, but was also the son of a banker who had a habit of discussing the day’s business over the dinner table. This was enough to tell Neumann that key decisions in banking and finance didn’t work the way economic theory said they did. They didn’t follow abstract computations of profit and loss. Whether a decision was good or bad depended on how others responded to it, and you could not predict that in advance. To help make decisions under conditions of uncertainty Neumann invented a new discipline, Games Theory.

This gave rise to a famous puzzle known as the Prisoner’s Dilemma. This showed that two or more rational agents, each acting in their own self interest, will produce an outcome that is bad for both, individually and collectively. This was to classical economics what Einstein was to Newton. It proved that there are things the invisible hand can’t handle.

The key variable turns out to be trust. With it, the market economy works. Without it, it fails. The choice is simple. Either you have a trust economy or a risk economy. In the first, you can rely on people to act with due regard to the interests of those they serve. In the second, you depend instead on a structure of laws, regulations, supervisory authorities, contracts, courts, punishments and fines. Transaction costs are high. Even so, ingenious people will find ways of outwitting the most elaborate regulations. Without trust, self-interest defeats regulations, undermines institutions and eventually causes systems to collapse.

But aren’t most people trustworthy? Not according to research published by behavioural economist Dan Ariely in his recent book, The (Honest) Truth about Dishonesty. His essential finding is that most of us are willing to cheat, given the temptation and opportunity. We’re just not willing to admit that we do. We cheat just a little, enough to pass unnoticed and to convince ourselves that we aren’t really being dishonest. After all, we say, everyone would do likewise given the chance.

The key, says Ariely, is the “fudge factor.” We want to benefit from cheating, but we also want to view ourselves as honest, honourable people. We resolve the conflict by “our amazing cognitive flexibility” – academic-speak for self-deception. He illustrates it by a simple story. Eight year old Jimmy comes home from school with a note from his teacher saying, “Jimmy stole a pencil from the student sitting next to him.” His father is furious. “If you needed a pencil, why didn’t you ask? I could have brought you dozens back from work.” We notice other people’s dishonesty, blind to our own.

Ariely and his academic colleagues found that the “fudge factor” is greatest when there is a distance between act and consequence, where there are grey areas, and where we have financial incentives to act against the interests of clients. We are more likely to cheat when stressed or exhausted. The more creative we are, the greater our ability to find self-justifying reasons for bad behaviour. We believe our own fictions (Harvard sociologist David Riesman once defined sincerity as “believing your own propaganda”). Dishonesty is contagious. Seeing colleagues cheat makes us more likely to do so. Most tempting of all, says Ariely, is “altruistic” cheating. If we can persuade ourselves that an act of dishonesty is for the good of our colleagues, even the best can go bad. Many of these factors were present in the Libor rate-fixing affair.

How do you change a corporate culture? You need to go beyond codes of conduct, says Ariely. He and his team tested students from two universities. The first were asked at the outset to sign an agreement that they would abide by their university’s code of honour. The second weren’t. Predictably, the second group cheated, the first did not. The irony is that the first university didn’t have a code of honour, while the second did. What matters, says Ariely, is not the code but the constant reminder.

The vast rewards, skewed incentives, high pressure and extreme opacity of modern finance combine the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity. We have, it seems, an impressive capacity for bending the rules in our favour while telling ourselves we are doing nothing wrong. But the market economy needs trust, and without it, it will fail. Essential though legislation and regulation are, they are not enough. Trust depends on virtues of self-restraint, embedded in a culture, embodied by its leaders and embraced by individuals. Until morality returns to the market, we will continue to pay a heavy price.

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