"What has gone wrong in society as a whole?"

Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, attempts to answer the question:

I believe we have lost our traditional sense of morality. I do not mean that we are less moral than our grandparents. We care about things they hardly thought about: world poverty, inequality, global warming and the loss of biodiversity. We are more tolerant than they were.

But note this: the things we care about are vast, distant, global, remote. They are problems that require the co-ordinated action of millions, perhaps billions of people. The difference we as individuals can make to any one of them is minimal. That does not mean they are not important: they are. But they are issues of politics, not of morality in the conventional sense.

When it comes to personal behaviour we have now come to believe that there is no right and wrong. Instead, there are choices. The market facilitates those choices. The State handles the consequences, picking up the pieces when they go wrong.

The idea that there may be things we would like to do and can afford to do but which we should not do, because they are dishonourable and a betrayal of trust, has come to seem outmoded.

...

Concepts like duty, obligation, responsibility and honour have come to seem antiquated and irrelevant. Emotions like guilt, shame, contrition and remorse have been deleted from our vocabulary, for are we not all entitled to self-esteem? The still, small voice of conscience is rarely heard these days. Conscience has been outsourced, delegated away.

...

Two extraordinarily farsighted thinkers foresaw all this in the 1950s. The first was the American sociologist David Riesman, who argued that we were moving from an inner-directed society to an other-directed one.

An inner-directed society is one where people have an internalised sense of right and wrong. An other-directed society is one in which people take their cues from what other people do. Only in the latter can you have a situation in which people say: “If everyone else is doing it, it can’t be wrong.”

The second was the English philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe, who argued that morality had become incoherent because we had lost the foundation on which it was built. Words like obligation and ought belonged to a culture in which people believed that there was such a thing as a divine law: the belief shared by Jews, the Greek Stoics and Christians. Lose this and the words themselves lose their meaning. It is, she said, as if the word criminal remained when the criminal law had been abolished and forgotten.

Fascinating piece... and fodder for further exploration... for me, it certainly explains some of the idiocy that reigns...

You?

H/T to Father Tim by e-mail.

Comments

[Mommynator]

I've been saying this for the longest time, but this was better said.

People who will not be ruled by God will be ruled by someone or something else. People ruled by God are the ones you can trust for the most part - note the "ruled" part, not the people who spout god stuff and do something contrary.

[Jerry Peters]

I agree with you we have strayed so far from where we used to be. I just finished reading a book called America, a society gone wrong boy it was right on target this guy holds nothing back. A value system is one of the things he talks about. Good read