Morality: Restoring the Common
Good in Divided Times
JONATHAN SACKS
(HODDER & STOUGHTON, 384 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £16 • Tel 020 7799 4064
Imagine there is to be a debate at the Cambridge Union, or some similar locale. The motion: “This House believes in morality”. Who would you want as a proposer?
I doubt that you could do any better than Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks. He is a powerful debater. He has ready to hand a stock of authorities, old and new, to make his case on behalf of morality, lands some flashy blows on the chins of his opponents, and rounds it all off with whimsical humour. In support of morality, he assembles a notable array of witnesses – on a single page, George Washington, Alexis de Tocqueville and John F. Kennedy are lined up on behalf of the claim that religion is essential to the fabric of a free society. Against morality’s detractors, or supposed detractors, he doesn’t pull his punches – Marx, Nietzsche and Freud gave us postmodernism, which in turn has given us a post-truth world. And what’s the difference between the mafia and a postmodernist? “The mafia makes you an offer you can’t refuse; a postmodernist makes you an offer you can’t understand.”