his Tuesday, the Lawn at the University of Virginia was a portrait of early fall beauty. Inside the equally-magnificent Rotunda, Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks spoke on “Difference and Democracy in the Post-Secular World.”
Somehow I got on the mailing list of U.Va.’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. I don’t know why but suspect it was because I exchanged business cards with a young woman from the institute at a meeting on Kazakhstan in New York City in June.
Lord Jonathan Sacks in the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of British Commonwealth countries. He’s studied at Cambridge and Oxford and written 18 books, mostly on theology and political theory, plus pens a Sunday column for a London newspaper. He was knighted by the Queen in 2005.
His talk was fileld with insights especially pertinent during these days of Tea Parties and shock political radio heads like Limbaugh and Beck, constant misinformation about Barack Obama’s religion and heritage, a weak recovery, loss of faith and political blame.
Rabbi Sacks noted that about 1831, two young men started out on separate journeys and came up with crucial observations.
Charles Darwin set out on the HMS Beagle and came up with the survival of the fittest theory. But he noticed something else. If the theory was carried to its logical conclusion, then all the weaklings would be destroyed. Instead, in many natural species, there is a sense of altruism in which some members of a breed sacrifice themselves for the good of the group. Such groups emerge as the strongest and most sustainable, Darwin decided.
The other young man was Frenchman Alex de Tocqueville who went on an exploration of the young United States. Among his observations was that Americans were highly religious. Yet the U.S. was one country in the world of the time where religion and politics were kept separate. The greater the separation, the strong the religiousity. Curious.
Rabbi Sacks went on discussing how social institutions such as family and marriage have come under great assault in the last half century or so. The reason, he believes, is that too much of the concepts of state power and the (free) market have infiltrated marriage. Politics involves coercion or coopting to force a point of view. The market means that one is constantly on the lookout for something better.
Neither aspect works well for an institution that is supposed to be caring, loving and giving as is marriage. Since their infiltration, marriage has suffered from widespread divorce. That’s one reason why birth rates are so low in Europe, forcing coming demographic wars as immigrants become the only breeders, he says.
His last point had to do with the univesity. “If you politcize the university, you destroy the university,” Sacks said. The point of the institution is to have a place where one can have a robust debate about what is true, not propaganda. Keeping bias aside and giving all a respectful hearing are essential to create a “civil space” to exchange ideas. “The guardians of knowledge must defend and protect that civil space,” he said.
As I listened to the rabbi, I couldn’t help reflect on the irony of the venue. Here we were at U.Va. which is in the forefront of one of the most shameful, politicized attacks on university freedom in the U.S. today — Va. Atty. Gen. Kenneth Cuccinelli’s stubborn demands to probe the emails, articles, letters and reports of a legitimate former U.Va. global warming professor and his associates. A hard-right activist, Cuccinelli fits right in the radical conservative movement pushed by think tanks such as the Cato and American Enterprise Institutes to negate the human causes of climate change at all cost.
And when I thought about altruism, I remember all those Ayn Rand fanatics at Richmond’s Tea Party convention last weekend. I am not a Rand fan and the thought of reading 900 plus pages of her blather in “Atlas Shrugged” turns my stomach. A true hard ass, Rand believes that altruism is nonsense. Society functions best when people pursue strictly only their own self interest. So, bring on the free market!
Lastly, I thought about the religion separation argument and how many in the conservative movement wrap themself up in flag and cross, claiming that the U.S. was intended as a “Christian” nation. Inaccurate nonsense.
In any event, listening to Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks was a geat way to spend a fall afternoon.
Peter Galuszka