This past weekend we had rioting in Milwaukee, ostensibly
because of racist violence by police. But it was a black criminal, running
from, and threatening police, being shot by a black police office. Racism isn’t
part of the equation, but rampages happened anyway.
How do we get back to civilization? The same, only way.
Today I’m re-posting a piece from October 2011, on The Way
Back Up to Civilization.
The Way Back Up to
Civilization
Over the weekend I was reminded of a piece
from August in the WSJ concerning recent riots in London. The editorial, by Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi
of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, addresses what has
happened there (and what to expect here for the same reasons), and what is the
way back.
Panos Pictures, from original editorial. A priest and imam joi with community in prayer for repair of society |
What caught my
attention was how well he was saying what I say at Spherical Model, only without the graphic model. So I’m
going to take his words and apply them to the model, in the hope that it will
make his words even more convincing.
First is a description
of the chaos, the anarchy of the southwestern quadrant on the sphere:
The world was watching London again
as hooded youths ran riot down high streets, smashing windows, looting shops,
setting fire to cars, attacking passersby and throwing rocks at the
police.
…This was no political uprising. People were
breaking into shops and making off with clothes, shoes, electronic gadgets and
flat-screen televisions. It was, as someone later called it, shopping with
violence, consumerism run rampage, an explosion of lawlessness made possible by
mobile phones as gangs discovered that by text messaging they could bring
crowds onto the streets where they became, for a while, impossible to control.
Much of the history of
the world has been the oscillation between the chaos of the southwestern
quadrant and the statist control of the southeastern quadrant. But we know,
particularly here in America, that there’s a whole northern [hemisphere]
to move to—with effort, and with principles to follow to get there. Rabbi Sachs
identifies those very principles. First comes the description of the movement
away from those principles:
In virtually every Western society in the
1960s there was a moral revolution, an abandonment of its entire traditional
ethic of self-restraint. All you need, sang the Beatles, is love. The
Judeo-Christian moral code was jettisoned. In its place came: whatever works
for you. The Ten Commandments were rewritten as the Ten Creative Suggestions.
In Britain today, more than 40% of
children are born outside marriage. This has led to new forms of child poverty
that serious government spending has failed to cure….
Whole communities are growing up without
fathers or male role models. Bringing up a family in the best of circumstances
is not easy. To try to do it by placing the entire burden on women—91% of
single-parent families in Britain are headed by the mother, according to census
data—is practically absurd and morally indefensible. By the time boys are in
their early teens they are physically stronger than their mothers. Having no
fathers, they are socialized in gangs. No one can control them: not parents,
teachers or even the local police. There are areas in Britain’s major
cities that have been no-go areas for years. Crime is rampant. So are drugs. It
is a recipe for violence and despair.
What is one of the
main principles for civilization: Family is the basic unit of civilization.
Married parents who raise their own children, inculcating in them the
principles necessary for living a civilized life, are necessary. There is no
guarantee that all children will turn out well, nor is there only hopelessness
for children in broken homes. There are exceptions both ways, but the critical
mass of society gives direction toward or away from civilization. Here is
Sachs’s summary of raising these children without the civilizing influence of
intact families:
They are the victims of the tsunami of wishful
thinking that washed across the West saying that you can have sex without the
responsibility of marriage, children without the responsibility of parenthood,
social order without the responsibility of citizenship, liberty without the
responsibility of morality and self-esteem without the responsibility of work
and earned achievement.
So when
responsibilities are ignored, civilization decays. At this point we can
probably summarize the other northward moving principles as moral principles.
Religion is key:
We have been spending our moral capital with
the same reckless abandon that we have been spending our financial
capital….
There are large parts of Britain, Europe
and even the United States where religion is a thing of the past and there
is no counter-voice to the culture of buy it, spend it, wear it, flaunt it,
because you’re worth it. The message is that morality is passé, conscience is
for wimps, and the single overriding command is “Thou shalt not be found
out.”
In the Spherical Model, I have said that, while not all religious
societies are civilized, every civilized society is a religious society. This
does not mean state-sponsored religion—the opposite. But the civilizing
principles hold true: Honor God, who is the giver of human rights, and to whom
we are held accountable for our choices in this life and the next. And beyond
honoring God, following these basic commandments makes it possible to live in
harmony with others:
·
Honor parents
·
Do not murder (take
innocent life)
·
Do not have sex
outside of marriage
·
Do not steal
·
Do not lie
·
Do not covet (want
what belongs to your neighbor)
These are the
principles families will pass along, so civilization can continue. So, if the
principles are true, it must be possible to move northward into civilization—and
that gives us hope. Sachs reminds us, savage chaos has happened before, and the
solution was to follow the principles that move us northward.
In the 1820s it was unsafe to walk the streets
of London because of pickpockets by day and “unruly ruffians” by
night.
What happened over the next 30 years was a
massive shift in public opinion. There was an unprecedented growth in
charities, friendly societies, working men’s institutes, temperance groups,
church and synagogue associations, Sunday schools, YMCA buildings and moral
campaigns of every shape and size, fighting slavery or child labor or inhuman
working conditions. The common factor was their focus on the building of moral
character, self-discipline, willpower and personal responsibility. It worked.
Within a single generation, crime rates came down and social order was
restored. What was achieved was nothing less than the re-moralization of
society—much of it driven by religion.
…[Toqueville, in Democracy in America,
found] a society in which religion was, he said, the first of its political (we
would now say “civil”) institutions. It did three things he saw as essential.
It strengthened the family. It taught morality. And it encouraged active
citizenship.
Yes. Of course. If you
apply the principles, you get civilization as a result. Sachs then turned to
observations for our day. He quoted Robert Putnam, in Amazing Grace,
saying,
Social capital… has not disappeared. It is
alive and well and can be found in churches, synagogues, and other places of
worship. Religious people, he discovered, make better neighbors and citizens.
They are more likely to give to charity, volunteer, assist a homeless person,
donate blood, spend time with someone feeling depressed, offer a seat to a
stranger, help someone find a job and take part in local civic life.
Affiliation to a religious community is the best predictor of altruism and
empathy: better than education, age, income, gender or race.
Religion, individually
lived, and extended generation to generation by families, can change people’s
lives in ways governments simply cannot do. Religion is “a shaper of behavior,
a tutor in morality, an ongoing seminar in self-restraint and pursuit of the
common good.”
What evidence do we
have that moving northward will work in our current world? How about China? Historian
Niall Ferguson, in Civilization,
…quotes a member of the Chinese Academy of
Social Sciences, tasked with finding out what gave the West its dominance. He
said: At first we thought it was your guns. Then we thought it was your
political system, democracy. Then we said it was your economic system,
capitalism. But for the last 20 years, we have known that it was your religion.
It was the Judeo-Christian heritage that gave
the West its restless pursuit of a tomorrow that would be better than today.
The Chinese have learned the lesson. Fifty years after Chairman Mao declared China a
religion-free zone, there are now more Chinese Christians than there are
members of the Communist Party.
I didn’t know that. A
civilized China may be a formidable economic foe, but if we move
northward as well, they will not be an enemy—they will be friendly trading
partners in a more peaceful civilized world. If we stop the southward decay and
make the necessary northward repairs.
No comments:
Post a Comment