When people in a society share a strong moral code, there is greater trust and solidarity
by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks:
I am deeply sorry that illness prevents me from being present at the important House of Lords debate, initiated by the Archbishop of Canterbury, on the shared values underpinning our national life. Few subjects have been more neglected in recent decades, and the results are palpable, damaging and dangerous.
You cannot have a society without a shared moral code. The point was made eloquently by Lord Devlin: “If men and women try to create a society in which there is no fundamental agreement about good and evil they will fail; if, having based it on common agreement, the agreement goes, the society will disintegrate.”
Lord Devlin was speaking at a fateful moment in the history of the West, in 1958. Over the next ten years his argument was in effect rejected, and one after another of the moral principles we have come to call the Judeo-Christian heritage was abandoned, at least as far as the law was concerned. Since then most people have come to believe that we are entitled to do whatever we like so long as it is within the law, and that the law itself should be limited to the prevention of harm to others.
But what does harm others is not always immediately obvious. The breakdown of marriage and stable families has caused immense harm to several generations of children, psychologically, socially and economically. The breakdown of codes of honour and responsibility have led to appalling behaviour on the part of at least some senior figures in business and the financial sector, who have served themselves while those they were supposed to have served have born the cost. There has been a palpable collapse of trust in one institution after another – an inevitable consequence of our failure to teach the concepts of duty, obligation, altruism and the common good.
We have begun a journey down to the road to moral relativism and individualism, which no society in history has survived for long. It was the road taken in Greece in the third pre-Christian century and Rome in the first century CE: two great civilizations that shortly thereafter declined and died. Britain has begun along the same trajectory, and it is bad news for our children, and for our grandchildren worse still.
Read the Archbishop of Canterbury’s address to the House of Lords here
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