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76
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
88/100Critics
44/100Scholars
97/100Author:
Jonathan Sacks
Publisher:
Basic Books
Date:
September 1, 2020
With liberal democracy embattled, public discourse grown toxic, family life breaking down, and drug abuse and depression on the rise, many fear what the future holds. In Morality, respected faith leader and public intellectual Jonathan Sacks traces today's crisis to our loss of a strong, shared moral code and our elevation of self-interest over the common good.
What The Reviewers Say
Jonathan Sacks’s latest, and last, book, Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times, is an ethical will of sorts, in the form of a comprehensive, erudite survey of moral philosophy and a plea for a renewed commitment to a communal moral code.
Short, punchy chapters take us through the things Sacks approves of (marriage, family, truthfulness, civility, altruism) and those of which he disapproves (drugs, social media, censorship, public shaming, safe spaces, narcissism, identity politics and the 'culture of victimhood'). Unlike others who share his bugbears, Sacks offers more than the kids-these-days conservatism of the tabloid moralists. His complaints, unlike theirs, emerge out of a world-view that has more to it than petulance.
It has become a truism that the atomisation of society is responsible for the decline of community, the loss of trust, the rise of selfishness and an epidemic of loneliness. In Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times, former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks attempts to add more substance to this thesis.
The most interesting sections of Morality draw out the links between seemingly unrelated problems. Anxiety, narcissism and loneliness in the private sphere mirror ills that beset the public domain: demagoguery, uncivil discourse and growing inequality.
