interesting op-ed

[Azazello1313]

Reversing the Decay of London Undone

Britain's chief rabbi on the moral disintegration since the 1960s and how to rebuild.

 

Britain is the latest country to pay the price for what happened half a century ago in one of the most radical transformations in the history of the West. 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. Or as Allan Bloom put it in "The Closing of the American Mind": "I am the Lord Your God: Relax!"

 

You do not have to be a Victorian sentimentalist to realize that something has gone badly wrong since. 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. In 2007, a Unicef report found that Britain's children are the unhappiest in the world. The 2011 riots are one result. But there are others.

 

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.

It was this that the young French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville saw on his visit to America in 1831. It astonished him. Tocqueville was expecting to see, in the land that had enacted the constitutional separation of church and state, a secular society. To his amazement he found something completely different: a secular state, to be sure, but also 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.

 

Nearly 200 years later, the Tocqueville of our time, Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam, made the same discovery. Mr. Putnam is famous for his diagnosis of the breakdown of social capital he called "bowling alone." More people were going bowling, but fewer were joining teams. It was a symbol of the loss of community in an age of rampant individualism. That was the bad news.

 

At the end of 2010, he published the good news. Social capital, he wrote in "American Grace," 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.

 

Much can and must be done by governments, but they cannot of themselves change lives. Governments cannot make marriages or turn feckless individuals into responsible citizens. That needs another kind of change agent. Alexis de Tocqueville saw it then, Robert Putnam is saying it now. It needs religion: not as doctrine but as a shaper of behavior, a tutor in morality, an ongoing seminar in self-restraint and pursuit of the common good.

 

One of our great British exports to America, Harvard historian Niall Ferguson, has a fascinating passage in his recent book "Civilization," in which he asks whether the West can maintain its primacy on the world stage or if it is a civilization in decline.

 

He 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.

 

fodder, in any case, for argument with those who assert that religion sucks and has brought nothing but war and strife to the world.

[detlef]

OK, I'll bite.

 

For starters, I don't think any of us claim that religion has done nothing but bring war and strife. Rather, that it undeniably has brought war and strife along for the ride in addition to whatever good it has done.

 

Perhaps the masses need it. Then again, the masses are generally stupid. And before anyone takes this as a shot off the bow, that is not meant to imply that, if you involve yourself with the church, you are stupid. Rather, if you're stupid, maybe you should involve yourself with the church because you could use all the help you can get. That, you need someone to tell you what to do at work, and at home. The more people tell you what to do, the better chance you have of being a productive member of society as opposed to drifting aimlessly around. I do respect those who maintain a healthy relationship with the church, and specifically are members of progressive churches, even if I wonder why they bother.

 

My issue is entirely with the notion that the religious can tend to claim a monopoly on morality. Which, btw, is a fair but flawed conclusion. If you draw your morality from religion, and someone doesn't have religion, where do they draw theirs? Of course, maybe we don't need to go to church to come to the same conclusions that church-goers do in order to get along with other people.

 

But, of course, and maybe I'm speaking for others, but maybe just for myself. But my main issue is that I don't have much choice but to align myself with a political party that represents some of my values but also often totally pisses me off. Because there is no party that doesn't do that. Thus, the only option is to avoid the political process entirely, and then I have no say at all. I do, however, have the option of not aligning myself with a group that may uphold values consistent with my own but also promotes agendas that I strongly oppose. Because I don't need them. I can figure out how to be a productive member of society and a good neighbor all on my own.

[Azazello1313]

well, I will state first-off that my first response to this is that while it is interesting and I agree with the basic premise that there is moral decline in the west and it is alarming, and while I agree that much of that moral decline can be traced to the decline of civil institutions like (but not exclusively) churches and synagogues, I have to say that this sort of rationale based on utilitarian competitiveness, on its own, is a rather hollow justification for spirituality and worship. a religion focused on these worldly justifications would be a meager religion indeed, IMO. I would not, for example, give any credence at all to a christian apologetic that implied that christianity was "true" because, for instance, western europe "won" the civilization race against china, the near-east, africa, etc.

 

in any case, I guess in response to moral ubermenschen detlef's bristling at the idea that the religious have some monopoly on morality, I would ask: OK, if you don't need to go to church to come to the same basic moral conclusions as churchgoers, what historical example would you hold up? what are the examples of great societies with strong ethical codes absent a religious framework? has there NOT been a great moral decline in the west coinciding with a decline in religiosity, or are these two trends not at all related? simply asserting that you feel it is possible for you to be ethical without being religious doesn't address the larger question.

[SEC=UGA]

well, I will state first-off that my first response to this is that while it is interesting and I agree with the basic premise that there is moral decline in the west and it is alarming, and while I agree that much of that moral decline can be traced to the decline of civil institutions like (but not exclusively) churches and synagogues, I have to say that this sort of rationale based on utilitarian competitiveness, on its own, is a rather hollow justification for spirituality and worship. a religion focused on these worldly justifications would be a meager religion indeed, IMO. I would not, for example, give any credence at all to a christian apologetic that implied that christianity was "true" because, for instance, western europe "won" the civilization race against china, the near-east, africa, etc.

 

in any case, I guess in response to moral ubermenschen detlef's bristling at the idea that the religious have some monopoly on morality, I would ask: OK, if you don't need to go to church to come to the same basic moral conclusions as churchgoers, what historical example would you hold up? what are the examples of great societies with strong ethical codes absent a religious framework? has there NOT been a great moral decline in the west coinciding with a decline in religiosity, or are these two trends not at all related? simply asserting that you feel it is possible for you to be ethical without being religious doesn't address the larger question.

 

Your question is morally relative. Your idea of morality is based on a Judeo Christian ethic, so many of the "ethics" that you may view as morally abhorent may not have been immoral to those other societies.

 

You ask about great societies without a religious frame work... Well, really there aren't too many. Even when you go back to Greece, the Myans/Aztec, or Egypt you had a religious framework, though, the tenets of the religions practiced by these societies differed greatly from the Judeo/Chrisitan ethic (as did the religions of China, Japan, the Mongol Empire, Indian and Persian empires.)

 

But, probably the most prevalent of laws, seemingly not based on religion would have been Athens/Greece under Draconian law, but one could still argue that there was a sort of religious frame work in that society.

 

You must recognize, however, that from the earliest of recorded times man did seem to adopt some sort of "religion" and recognized through this "religion" that there was a code to live by. In the earliest cultures the gods were mainly animal/nature gods. They respected the natural world and treid their dead level best to not destroy it, they lived in small groups and tried their best to support those within the group as they all had a shared interest, survival of the group. As societies got larger you had divergent interests of the masses and a different moral code had to be instituted. In instituting these laws it was much easier to derive order from a divine being/beings rather than from man.

[detlef]

well, I will state first-off that my first response to this is that while it is interesting and I agree with the basic premise that there is moral decline in the west and it is alarming, and while I agree that much of that moral decline can be traced to the decline of civil institutions like (but not exclusively) churches and synagogues, I have to say that this sort of rationale based on utilitarian competitiveness, on its own, is a rather hollow justification for spirituality and worship. a religion focused on these worldly justifications would be a meager religion indeed, IMO. I would not, for example, give any credence at all to a christian apologetic that implied that christianity was "true" because, for instance, western europe "won" the civilization race against china, the near-east, africa, etc.

 

in any case, I guess in response to moral ubermenschen detlef's bristling at the idea that the religious have some monopoly on morality, I would ask: OK, if you don't need to go to church to come to the same basic moral conclusions as churchgoers, what historical example would you hold up? what are the examples of great societies with strong ethical codes absent a religious framework? has there NOT been a great moral decline in the west coinciding with a decline in religiosity, or are these two trends not at all related? simply asserting that you feel it is possible for you to be ethical without being religious doesn't address the larger question.

What historical example would I hold up for why I don't need to go to church? Why do I need a historical example to explain what specifically works for me?

 

Frankly, this plays directly into my bit about religion being far more like a government than you're prepared to believe. Rules are good and the church if full of them. Only, unlike rules come up in Senate, these allegedly come from above, and are therefore rather absolute, so everyone's going to get in line. If the guys got together and simply came up with a list of things that we, as men, agreed would not subject one another to, it may or may not have had much effect because people could simply write them off as one man's opinion. "You're not the boss of me." But God is, so what he says (or rather what this dude says God says) goes.

 

So they don't sell us these rules as a list of compromises and agreements they arrived at, they came up with a list of "god-given rights" and you can't mess with "god-given rights", can you?

 

So, while I do bristle at the notion of men evoking divine authority for laws, I also do understand that it is sometimes done for noble reasons, like in the case of our founding fathers.

 

Mostly though, like I admitted, for society to be strong, everyone needs to be doing their part. And, perhaps many of these people need something like religion in order to do so. The thing is, there are a lot of things that people "should" do, but many of the same people who think that religion should be more important in government would argue against a nanny-state if other social guidelines be enforced. That we should be free to choose our own path.

[BeeR]

What historical example would I hold up for why I don't need to go to church? Why do I need a historical example to explain what specifically works for me?

Because the issue and point isn't what works for you or any single person, but a society/civilization as a whole.

 

That said, this is not a "religious issue." It is far broader.

 

And THAT said, it's all spitting into the wind, frankly. We have been on a gradual societal spin down the toilet for decades now and it isn't stopping any time soon. Still, nice to be reminded that there are a few out there who get it.

[detlef]

Because the issue and point isn't what works for you or any single person, but a society/civilization as a whole.

 

That said, this is not a "religious issue." It is far broader.

 

And THAT said, it's all spitting into the wind, frankly. We have been on a gradual societal spin down the toilet for decades now and it isn't stopping any time soon. Still, nice to be reminded that there are a few out there who get it.

Oh really?

 

So, is it safe to say that the difference between much of what many of you belly-ache about being the liberal-elite telling us how to live our lives and all the "nanny-state" policies and pushing for religion to be a bigger part of everyone's lives, whether, on an individual level, they need it or not basically comes down to the fact that you specifically agree with religion but not with some of the policies you feel the liberal fascists are pushing?

 

So, you're cool with making everyone do something whether or not they actually need it to be a good citizen, provided it's specifically consistent with what you're into.

 

For the sake of civility, I'm not going to touch the "few out there who get it" comment.

[matt770]

Religion is effective at using guilt and shame to persuade people to act in certain ways. When society started discarding those values, suddenly there was no incentive for men to stick around and help raise their kids. And the welfare state was happy to step in and help. What strikes me most is the death of shame in this country. It seems to have started with programs like Jerry Springer, and now all the reality shows where people are celebrated for acting like imbeciles. What is really scary is that those shows are so popular with teens, many of whom lack role models, so they look to Snooki and the Situation and see them basking in adulation and raking in money. I think the trends we are seeing now, especially the lack of civility and decorum and the breakdown of the family are going to look quaint in 20 years. It's only accelerating and I don't see what could possibly reverse it other than a major calamity that forces people to stick together in tight family units to survive.

[SEC=UGA]

Bottom line... We need more abortion and mass sterilization.

 

I'm not joking.

[detlef]

Religion is effective at using guilt and shame to persuade people to act in certain ways. When society started discarding those values, suddenly there was no incentive for men to stick around and help raise their kids. And the welfare state was happy to step in and help. What strikes me most is the death of shame in this country. It seems to have started with programs like Jerry Springer, and now all the reality shows where people are celebrated for acting like imbeciles. What is really scary is that those shows are so popular with teens, many of whom lack role models, so they look to Snooki and the Situation and see them basking in adulation and raking in money. I think the trends we are seeing now, especially the lack of civility and decorum and the breakdown of the family are going to look quaint in 20 years. It's only accelerating and I don't see what could possibly reverse it other than a major calamity that forces people to stick together in tight family units to survive.

I see a lot of people who I would imagine are far more into that crap pop culture than I am, wearing crosses on chains around their necks.

 

Here's a thought. Maybe we haven't failed because of a lack of religion. Maybe religion has failed. Over this same 20 some odd years where we've turned away from religion, the church's failures have been highly publicized. From the Bakers, to the pedophile priests, to the increase in televangelists and religiously motivated attacks on civil rights.

 

Can't we lay a bunch of the blame for the deterioration of society at the doors of some of these churches? The places that were selling morality and committing horrible sins? It's one thing when some random person commits a horrible act. It's another when someone held up as a moral pillar of society does. The effects are far worse because you've completely turned a lot of people's world upside down.

 

So, people turn to the church. The church lets them down. These people are effed up now because that was where they turned for their moral compass. Things go to chight. And the answer is more church?

[Jimmy Neutron]

And the answer is more church?

 

Maybe not more church, but more real spirituality - what should be the whole goal of any church. The moral decomp is occuring just as quickly within western churches as it is in society as a whole. The shallowness and hypocrisy of many touting religion as their cause is overtly evident.

 

While it is true that many in church leadership use shame and guilt to motivate, others do "get it" and help parishioners attain a degree of self efficacy through whatever brand of theology they prefer. The spiritual giants I see around me act not out of fear of an eternal hell or mortal punishment from a vengelful God, but because they do indeed "get it" and incorporate the universal truths of unconditional love, forgiveness and selfless service into their lives.

[bushwacked]

Moral Decline.

 

Audience at tea party debate cheers leaving uninsured to die.

 

I bet most of them go to church though.

[SEC=UGA]

Moral Decline.

 

Audience at tea party debate cheers leaving uninsured to die.

 

I bet most of them go to church though.

 

Funny stuff. Leaving the uninsured to die, really, how bout this, if you're uninsured you can pay for medical services with cash or credit. If you're uninsured, go to the ER, they can not let you die. Uninsured, cut some expenses elsewhere and get very basic coverage with a high dedudctible?

 

I'm gonna go surf porn, now.

Edited September 13, 2011 by SEC=UGA

[BeeR]

Oh really?

? Yes, really. You seriously don't get that this isn't all about you? Even I gave you more credit than that.

 

So, is it safe to say that the difference between much of what many of you belly-ache about being the liberal-elite telling us how to live our lives and all the "nanny-state" policies and pushing for religion to be a bigger part of everyone's lives, whether, on an individual level, they need it or not basically comes down to the fact that you specifically agree with religion but not with some of the policies you feel the liberal fascists are pushing?

However I am hardly surprised at the political/religion rants. Sorry, pass on that cat fight. More than enough of that going around as it is, to say the least.

 

So, you're cool with making everyone do something whether or not they actually need it to be a good citizen, provided it's specifically consistent with what you're into.

No. But congrats on another twisting of words and accusing me of saying things that I didn't.

 

For the sake of civility, I'm not going to touch the "few out there who get it" comment.

Thanks. I could've easily justified being less civil to someone trying to put words in my mouth as well. (I would normally assume trolling as well, but I do at least give you credit for tending to avoid that BS)

 

Can we just discuss this now or would you rather continue w/the well-worn anti-religion and/or left vs right BS? How about for a start you try noticing (perhaps for the first time) that I said this is NOT about religion and did not throw out some "the left sucks" routine?

Edited September 13, 2011 by BeeR

[bpwallace49]

Reversing the Decay of London Undone

Britain's chief rabbi on the moral disintegration since the 1960s and how to rebuild.

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424053111903639404576516252066723110-lMyQjAxMTAxMDIwMTEyNDEyWj.html' rel="external nofollow">

 

 

 

 

fodder, in any case, for argument with those who assert that religion sucks and has brought nothing but war and strife to the world.

 

Good articles.

 

Just like anything else that causes a bitchfest in the tailgate, it isnt the ideal of what is presented, but the abuse of power in the guise of the benevolent (fill in the blank) that people hate/have a problem with.

[bushwacked]

The moral decline!

[detlef]

? Yes, really. You seriously don't get that this isn't all about you? Even I gave you more credit than that.

 

However I am hardly surprised at the political/religion rants. Sorry, pass on that cat fight. More than enough of that going around as it is, to say the least.

 

No. But congrats on another twisting of words and accusing me of saying things that I didn't.

 

Thanks. I could've easily justified being less civil to someone trying to put words in my mouth as well. (I would normally assume trolling as well, but I do at least give you credit for tending to avoid that BS)

 

Can we just discuss this now or would you rather continue w/the well-worn anti-religion and/or left vs right BS? How about for a start you try noticing (perhaps for the first time) that I said this is NOT about religion and did not throw out some "the left sucks" routine?

Gee, why would I make the leap I did?

 

Could it be that I already recognized that religion may be needed for the masses and then was challenged to produce historical evidence for why I, specifically didn't need it? And then, when I explained that I didn't need historical examples for why I, specifically, didn't need it, you jumped in and said, it's not about what works for me, it's about what we all need.

 

But right, I'm just putting words in your mouth.

[Qdaddyo]

You should all read "The Grand Inquisitor" short story (also excerpt from "The Brothers Karamazov") by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

 

Brilliant stuff...

 

The Grand Inquisitor

[BeeR]

Gee, why would I make the leap I did?

Because when it comes to the topic of religion, you tend to start frothing at the mouth and your rationality tends to get spotty? Because you didn't realize Az was saying "you" in a plural/general sense, not you specifically? Because you couldn't differentiate between Az's replies and mine? I'd say the answer is all of the above.

 

Could it be that I already recognized that religion may be needed for the masses and then was challenged to produce historical evidence for why I, specifically didn't need it? And then, when I explained that I didn't need historical examples for why I, specifically, didn't need it, you jumped in and said, it's not about what works for me, it's about what we all need.

 

But right, I'm just putting words in your mouth.

Glad you saw the light.

 

Oh wait you were being sarcastic. Figures.

 

It also figures that you try to throw us "religion has failed" and point to an extremely small % of "men in cheap cloth" to "prove" it. I'm surprised you didn't throw the Spanish Inquisition in there as well.

 

But again, and I'll say this one more time:

 

The issue and point isn't what works for you or any single person, but a society/civilization as a whole.

 

This is not a "religious issue." It is far broader.

Edited September 15, 2011 by BeeR

[Chavez]

I am startled and surprised that a rabbi would come to the conclusion that RELIGION is what makes the difference in society.

[yo mama]

I am startled and surprised that a rabbi would come to the conclusion that RELIGION is what makes the difference in society.

Preposterous. The solution is more lawyers and more beer.