Monday, February 11, 2013

What’s the connection between the horsemeat hamburgers, the banking crisis and Lance Armstrong? Or why Judaism is the answer to all society’s problems


Some people really think that Judaism is the answer to all of society’s problems.  I once heard Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks argue that if everyone in the world kept Shabbat, the global warming crisis would be solved.  I don’t think he was entirely serious, and his audience of Jewish social activists certainly pulled no punches in taking apart his claim.  For me, Judaism is not a panacea.  The fact that every Jew makes something different of the tradition means ‘Judaism’ can never be imposed as a solution at all.  We read our own ideological predilections into Judaism to such an extent that solutions to problems are ‘Jewish’ only because Jews happen to have come up with them – not because they reflect some non-existent essence of Torah.

Having said that, I do think Torah has something of fundamental importance to say about perhaps the most pressing and deep-rooted problem our society faces.

There’s a connection between the behaviour of the people behind all the recent financial scandals, the horsemeat scandal, and the doping in sport scandal.  All three episodes illustrate what we all know – that in modern society, profit comes before ethics.  The quest for money and success has pushed all other values – professional ethics, pride in your job – to one side.

I recently read What Money Can’t Buy by Harvard philosophy professor Michael Sandel.  Sandel claims that economics and the values of the market have come to dominate our lives.  The principles of the free market have been applied to everything: children are given cash for achieving good grades, families are incentivised by governments to have a certain number of children, corporations are allowed to trade in carbon credits (essentially buying the right to pollute), and people have come to expect to pay for better healthcare, to drive on faster roads and to skip queues at the airport. 

This Saturday’s Guardian featured an article William Nicolson called ‘Because I’m worth it: the relationship economist’ which analysed dating – only slightly tongue in cheek – from the perspective of economics.  Should failure to get a girlfriend be understood as a lack of demand in the market, to be rectified by restricting supply by means of playing hard to get?  Or should it be solved using the Keynesian technique of boosting demand by displaying affection, thereby inspiring confidence?  The article ends: ‘Keynesian economics and love, it turns out, have rather a lot in common: they both work not by balancing budgets, or reducing supply to increase prices, but by inspiring trust. Economics did, in the end, provide me with an answer – just not the one I expected.’

Sandel writes that the marketization of everything is a problem not only because in an unequal society it discriminates against those who are unable to pay, but because it undermines the values traditionally associated with important activities.  Healthcare comes to be seen as a commodity and a source of profit.  Rather than reading or studying for the pleasure involved, children understand that learning is no more than a means to a financial end.  Ends get mixed up with means and pursuing profit at any cost – even corruption – becomes not only normal but good.

But there’s a deeper problem going on here.  Money is only a medium of exchange, by definition a means and not an end.  Seeing everything in economic terms, as a means to the end of money, implies not only that we’re mixing up means and ends but that ultimately there are no ends, no goals and no ultimate values.  In a world without goals, we’re reduced to chasing our tails.  In this context, banks and other businesses maximising profits at any cost – and for that matter students cheating to get better grades – acquires a logic of its own.

20th century left-wing philosophers like Hannah Arendt and Jurgen Habermas have critiqued this kind of ‘instrumental rationality,’ a mode of thinking which focuses on what is the most effective means to a given end, but fails to deliberate on what ends we should be pursuing.  They claim that instrumental rationality, which is intimately associated with western, capitalist modernity, leads us in particular to treat other people as objects to be manipulated in the pursuit of our goals (and where money is the goal, we end up exploiting others for no ultimate purpose at all).

Judaism makes an important distinction between performing a mitzvah lishma (‘for its own sake’) – because it’s inherently the right thing to do – and acting out of ulterior motives, for example the hope of reward or the fear of punishment – lo lishma.  But it’s not always clear whether lo lishma is always a bad thing or whether it can be a pathway to observance lishma.  To continue my habit of quoting Maimonides: in the Mishneh Torah, his code of Jewish law he says, ‘A person should not say: "I will fulfill the mitzvot of the Torah and occupy myself in its wisdom in order to receive all the blessings which are contained within it or in order to merit the life of the world to come…" It is not fitting to serve God in this manner’ (Laws of Repentance 10:1).  On the other hand, ‘A person should always occupy himself in Torah study, whether lishma or even lo lishma, for from lo lishma will come lishma’ (Laws of Torah Study 3:5).

I find the idea that we should order our lives not in purely instrumental terms but in line with ultimate goals, core values and a conception of what is right, to be one of Judaism’s most potent insights, and a valuable corrective to our profit-centred and outcome-driven market society.  It seems to me that we need to find ways of inducting ourselves into a purposeful, values-driven mode of existence without going down the dangerous lo lishma route.  In the Masorti movement we do this by trying to build communities whose role is not to further any practical or ideological agenda, but in which we learn to value our relationships with each other – as human beings created in the image of God – as the highest imaginable good.  I hope we’re making a small contribution.

THIS WEEK

We ran our annual Yom Masorti day of learning, with almost 300 people from 11 Masorti communities – and several Orthodox and Reform communities too.  It was an amazing day – thanks to all the staff and volunteers who took part.  Click here for a full report. 

Earlier in the week I participated in a fascinating Jewish-Muslim dialogue group, hosted by the Three Faiths Forum, where we discussed Zionism, Islamism and the place of Jews and Muslims in British society.  One conclusion: too much of the tension between our communities over Israel/Palestine has very little – if anything – to do with the Middle East, which several of the Muslim participants (all with origins on the Indian subcontinent) felt very little connection to.  Ironically, the clash has more to do with the common ground between us: it’s about Jewish and Muslim identity in Britain, specifically the need to defend and assert ourselves as minority groups.

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