Authors: Jonathan Sacks
There is, as I show in
chapter 5
, a way of thinking that we can trace back to a set of narratives in the book of Genesis, shared at least loosely by all three faiths. Here is where the problem was born. To ignore these narratives is impossible. But to reinterpret them is very possible indeed. We can go further:
the very texts that lie at the root of the problem, if properly interpreted, can provide a solution
. This, though, will require a radical re-reading of those texts, through an act of deep listening to the pristine voice of monotheism itself.
Part II
is that re-reading. I argue that these narratives are more profound than they have been taken to be, and that much religiously motivated violence throughout the centuries has been the result of a failure to understand these texts in their full depth and challenging complexity. Part III then looks at the other key challenges to Abrahamic monotheism in the global age. What will it take for the children of Abraham – Jews, Christians and Muslims – to live together in peace, and what is at stake if we fail?
What made this book possible is knowledge of the transformation that has taken place when Jews, Christians and Muslims face one another in their full humanity.
In the case of Judaism and Christianity it took the Holocaust for this to happen. The result has been dramatic. Today, after an estrangement that lasted almost two millennia, Jews and Christians meet much more often as friends – even (in the word selected by recent popes) ‘brothers’ – than as enemies.
Likewise with Islam. As I was writing this book an event happened that moved me greatly. On Friday 9 January 2015, an Islamist terrorist entered a kosher supermarket in Paris and killed four Jews buying food for the Sabbath. A Muslim employee, Lassana Bathily, saw what was happening and, out of sight of the gunmen, hid twenty Jewish customers in a cold storage room, saving their lives. Commended for his courage, he replied, ‘We are all brothers. It’s not a question of Jews, Christians or Muslims. We were all in the same boat, we had to help each other to get out of the crisis.’
Like Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani-Muslim girl who fought for women’s rights against the Taliban, surviving an attempted assassination and becoming in 2014 the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Prize, Lassana is one of the heroes of our time. What they and millions like them represent is the ability to let faith strengthen, not damage, our shared humanity. It sounds simple, but history tells us that it is not. Religious people in the grip of strong emotions – fear, pain, anxiety, confusion, a sense of loss and humiliation – often dehumanise their opponents with devastating results. Faith is God’s call to see his trace in the face of the Other. But that needs a theology of the Other, which is what I offer in this book.
There is nothing accidental about the spread of radical politicised religion in our time. It came about because of a series of decisions a half-century ago that led to the creation of an entire educational network of schools and seminaries dedicated to the proposition that loving God means hating the enemies of God. The end result has been a flood of chaos, violence and destruction that is drowning the innocent and guilty alike. We now have, with equal seriousness, to educate for peace, forgiveness and love.
Until our global institutions take a stand against the teaching and preaching of hate, all their efforts of diplomacy and military intervention will fail. Ultimately the responsibility is ours. Tomorrow’s world is born in what we teach our children today. That is what this book is about.
It begins with the simplest of questions: What makes people violent in the first place?
What a chimera, then, is man! What a novelty, what a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, repository of truth, sewer of uncertainty and error, the glory and the scum of the universe.
Blaise Pascal
Two friends are walking in the jungle when they hear the roar of a lion. The first starts thinking of places they can hide. The second puts on his running shoes. The first says, ‘What are you thinking of? You can’t possibly run faster than a lion.’ The second replies, ‘I don’t need to run faster than the lion. I just need to run faster than you.’
That is the joke told in the film
The Imitation Game
by Alan Turing, the mathematical genius who conceptualised the computer and helped break the German Enigma code during the Second World War. But it took an earlier figure, Charles Darwin, to see that this was more than a joke. It expresses one of the fundamental tensions in the human condition. It was the single biggest challenge to his theory of natural selection.
The first man seeks a collective solution. He tries to think of a way of saving both him and his friend. The second opts for natural selection. He thinks of a solution that will save him at the cost of his friend. He knows that, come what may, one of them will die and he prefers it not to be him.
This is, in essence, the human dilemma. Which comes first? Altruism or survival? The common good or individual self-interest? Are we, under the skin, saints or sinners, angels or demons, moralists or Machiavellians? The joke trades on the fact that we are both. It is the central ambiguity of the human situation.
Darwin’s problem was this: if natural selection is correct, if evolution is a competition for scarce resources such that only the best adapted survive and pass on their characteristics to the next generation, then we should expect to see the selfish survive. The altruists, those who take a risk for the safety of all, would on average die earlier and fail to pass their genes on. They are the ones who get eaten by the lion.
As Darwin put it, the bravest, most self-sacrificial individuals ‘would on average perish in larger numbers than other men’, and the noblest ‘would often leave no offspring to inherit his noble nature’.
1
So altruism should become extinct over time. It is a bad survival strategy. Let others take the risks. Make sure you, at least, are safe.
Yet Darwin knew that altruism was admired in every human society of which he was aware. Even animals take risks for the sake of the group. The one that emits a cry to warn of the presence of a predator helps the group escape while making its own detection more likely. In the language of today: how could selfish genes come together and produce selfless people?
We can arrive at the same problem from the opposite direction. Since Socrates, philosophers have asked: Why be moral? Plato thought it was knowledge. People do wrong only through ignorance. Aristotle thought this implausible. We often suffer from
akrasia
, weakness of will. So we become good people the way we become good tennis players or violinists, through practice until the behaviour we aspire to becomes natural and instinctive. Being moral means acquiring the habits of the heart we call virtue.
In the modern age Kant thought that what makes us moral is reason (understood in a particular way). An act is right if we can prescribe it as a universal rule. We should not tell lies because if everyone else did, no one would trust us and the practice of communication on which lying depends would be undermined. Immorality is a kind of self-contradiction. Reason allows us to think our way through to virtue.
David Hume and Adam Smith thought that reason alone
cannot provide our fundamental motives for action. Feelings or emotions (what Hume called ‘the passions’) do that. What make us moral are the feelings we have with and for others. As Adam Smith put it in the opening sentence of
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
, ‘How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.’ Whether through neuroscience or biochemistry, mirror neurons or oxytocin, we have a moral sense.
The obvious question, though, on all these theories is this: if being moral is so straightforward – if knowledge, habit, character, reason and emotion all point the way to the right and the good – how is it that people have, throughout the ages, lied, cheated, robbed, stolen, insulted, offended, oppressed, exploited and killed? This is Darwin’s question from the opposite direction. If we are so good, why are we so bad?
The third starting point, a religious one, is the one with which this book began. How is it that people kill in the name of the God of life, wage war in the name of the God of peace, hate in the name of the God of love and practise cruelty in the name of the God of compassion? How, if we are the image of God, do we so often harm the work of God, especially our fellow humans?
The answer in its essentials was given by Darwin himself. In
The Descent of Man
he wrote, ‘There can be no doubt that a tribe including many members who, from possessing in high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection.’
We are social animals. We hand on our genes as individuals, but we survive only in groups. Nor is this unique to humans. Ants,
bees and most mammals scout, feed and live in groups. In the wild the individual separated from the group is essentially dead. The lone individual is the one that gets eaten by the lion.
Supremely, this is the evolutionary advantage of Homo sapiens. We are the most effective of all life forms in creating and sustaining groups. We are the most social of animals. Indeed, according to many biologists it was for the sake of enhancing this ability that we developed language. It is also the reason for our prodigious brain size, a full 300 per cent larger than our evolutionary ancestors.
We co-operate and we compete. We co-operate in order to compete. One man will not survive against a lion. But ten or a hundred might, if they formed an effective team. Their greatest danger would then be posed not by a predator but by another human group in pursuit of the same scarce resources: food, shelter and territory. The stronger the group, the more chance it has against rivals. In the Darwinian struggle to survive, the most cohesive team, adept at co-ordinating its various talents and tasks, will live to fight another day.
It follows that we have two sets of instincts, honed and refined by many centuries of evolutionary history. One set – Darwin’s ‘patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage and sympathy’ – inclines us in the direction of altruism. We work for the good of the group because our very viability depends on it. The stronger the group, the greater our chances of surviving to beget further generations. As Darwin said, this would be natural selection.
The other set – our most basic reactions of aggression, fear, anger and combativeness, our willingness to fight and inflict injuries on others – shapes our relationship with rival groups competing with us for scarce resources. The speed and force of these reactions are vital to our success in the competitive arena of natural selection.
So we are angels
and
demons, angels to those on our side, demons to those on the other side. This follows from the human – and wider than human – instinct to form groups. Groups unite
and divide. They divide as they unite. Every group involves the coming together of multiple individuals to form a collective Us. But every Us is defined against a Them, the ones not like us. The one without the other is impossible. Inclusion and exclusion go hand in hand.
Here then is the source of both violence and altruism. Darwin’s question is answered. Altruism plays a major role in survival of the group. Whether natural selection operates at the level of the individual or whether there is such a thing as group selection has been and remains a hotly debated topic within biology. But there is no doubt that the survival of individuals depends on the willingness of members of the group to take risks and make sacrifices for the good of the group as a whole. That is the biological function of the better angels of our nature.
The same applies in the reverse direction, explaining why, when reason or emotion inclines us to morality, human evil exists. Our inclination to act well towards others, whatever its source, tends to be confined to those with whom we share a common identity. The Greeks, the world’s first philosophers and scientists, regarded anyone who was not Greek as a barbarian – a word derived from the sound of a sheep bleating. Our radius of moral concern has limits. The group may be small or large, but in practice as opposed to theory, we tend to see those not like us as less than fully human.
The same is true of religion. The world’s great faiths have said sublime things about love, compassion, sacrifice and charity. But these noble sentiments have often been confined to fellow believers, or at least potential fellow believers. Against non-believers – members of another faith or of none, and those of our own faith we deem to be heretics – religions can be brutal and pitiless.
We are potentially violent because, as social animals, we form groups to compete for resources and survive against other groups. Unlike non-human social animals, we can choose non-violent
ways of interacting with other groups, but sadly all too often we do not. There is such a thing as in-group violence, but for the most part it is contained (what counts as in-group and out-group depends on context: groups may fracture into schisms, sects, denominations, parties and factions that sometimes come together and at other times see each other as completely separate groups). The violence that leads to war and terror is between groups, and it is precisely this that leads to in-group solidarity and cohesion, and fear, suspicion and aggression towards out-groups. It is neither secularism nor religious belief that makes us what we are, the curious mixture of good and bad that can lead us to the moral heights or the savage depths. It is our groupishness.
What, though, allows us to form groups in the first place if we are genetically conditioned to seek our own survival before that of others? How could altruism emerge? The answer comes at three levels, very different from one another.
The first was indicated graphically by J.B.S. Haldane when he was asked whether he would jump into a river to save his brother. He replied, ‘No, but I would do so to save two brothers or eight cousins.’ On the face of it, it would never make sense to risk our own life to save someone in danger of drowning. Why endanger your posterity for the sake of others? Haldane’s point, elaborated in the 1960s by William Hamilton and others, is that it would make sense if the people you are trying to save are closely related to you. We share 50 per cent of our genes with our siblings, an eighth with our cousins, and so on. So by saving the lives of close relatives we would still be handing on our genes to the future. This is the logic of
kin selection
and it is determined by genetic similarity.
This makes intuitive sense. We know that the matrix of altruism is within the family. It is there that we hand on our genes to the next generation, there that we have our greatest chance of defeating mortality this side of heaven. It was Edmund Burke who said that ‘we begin our public affections in our families’, and Alexis de Tocqueville who wrote that ‘as long as family feeling
was kept alive, the antagonist of oppression was never alone’. Biology, morality and society coincide. Morality begins with kin.
How groups became wider – from kin to kith, from relatives to friends – was a major problem in evolutionary biology until the late 1970s. How would any animal, let alone a human being, come to form an association with non-related others if self-interest always defeats the common good? This was the starting point of Hobbes’s famous account of life in a state of nature, in which there was ‘continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’. What stops people fighting one another for long enough to create an association?
Some brilliant work in the late 1970s and 1980s provided the answer. It used a scenario drawn from Game Theory called the Prisoner’s Dilemma. This exercise imagines two criminals, suspected of a crime for which the police lack adequate evidence to secure a conviction. Their best chance of doing so is to interrogate the two men separately, giving each an incentive to inform on the other. This they both do, with the result that they end up in prison with a longer sentence than they would have received had they both stayed silent. This sounds like a minor curiosity, but it upset the major assumption on which economics had been based since Adam Smith’s
Wealth of Nations
, namely that division of labour combined with individual self-interest would result in collective gain. The Prisoner’s Dilemma shows that this is so only if we add one other ingredient: trust. What stops the two accused men from staying silent is that neither can trust the other to do likewise.
What mathematicians discovered was that the Prisoner’s Dilemma yields a negative outcome if played only once. If played many times, the two men eventually learn to trust each other because they learn that they gain if they do and lose if they don’t. A competition to find the most effective computer programme for survival in multiple encounters with strangers was won in 1979 by a simple programme, designed by Anatol Rapoport, a political
scientist with an interest in nuclear confrontation who had once been a concert pianist. He called it Tit-for-Tat. It said: on the first encounter be nice, and on subsequent encounters repeat the other person’s last move. If he is nice, so should you be, and if not, then respond in kind. This was the first moral principle whose survival value was shown by computer simulation. What it did was to show the gold in the Golden Rule. It said, in a world where people will probably do to you what you did to them, it pays to act to others as you would wish them to act to you – a basic principle of most cultures.