Morality – Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times

A free society is a moral achievement

Over the past fifty years in the West this truth has been forgotten, ignored or denied. That is why today liberal democracy is at risk

Societal freedom cannot be sustained by market economics and liberal democratic politics alone It needs a third element: morality, a concern for the welfare of others, an active commitment to justice and compassion, a willingness to ask not just what is good for me but what is good for all-of-us-together. It is about ‘Us’, not ‘Me’; about ‘We’, not ‘I’.

I believe that we are undergoing the cultural equivalent of climate change, and only when we realise this will we understand the strange things that have been happening in the twenty-first century in the realms of politics and economics, the deterioration of public standards of truth and civil debate, and the threat to freedom of speech at British and American universities It also underlies more personal phenomena like loneliness, depression and drug abuse All these things are related If we see this, we will already have taken the first step to a solution.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Introduction: Cultural Climate Change