I don’t know if Lord Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, has any connection with – or gives support to – the Alinskyian community organizing affiliates of Great Britain but his thought is certainly appreciated – and often quoted –by the Alinskyites.
A recent opinion piece by Rabbi Sacks appeared in the Wall Street Journal [“Reversing the Decay of London Undone: Britain’s chief rabbi on the moral disintegration since the 1960s and how to rebuild,” August 20, 2011]. It’s a meditation on recent youth riots in London.
[T]his 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.
What brought on this orgy of anarchy? Rabbi Sacks believes that the moral revolution of the 1960s, with its abandonment of the “traditional ethic of self-restraint,” particularly sex without the responsibility of marriage, spawned a generation of troubled children. Many of the rioting youth belong to a demographic of uninvolved fathers and overworked, unmarried mothers. Gangs fill up the vacuum of an absent family and bring with them drugs, crime, and violence.
The truth is, it is not their fault. They are the victims of the tsunami of wishful thinking that washed across the West saying that you can have 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.
This is all true. Children need to be raised, not merely spawned; a community needs enfranchised citizens. Rabbi Sacks then draws an interesting conclusion:
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.”
Religious institutions instilled good citizenship into society. They fostered the values of “moral character, self-discipline, willpower and personal responsibility.” So, for example, Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting the United States in 1831, found:
… 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.
The Alinskyites love Alexis de Tocqueville and quote him often. “Religious people… make better neighbors and citizens,” Rabbi Sacks quotes a contemporary author, Robert Putnam. Society “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.”
Rabbi Sacks closes with a particularly informative story:
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.
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.
No one is arguing the verity of this analysis. But it leads the Alinskyites, as it led the Communist Chinese, to put religion at the service of society. A well-oiled society is the goal; organized religions – religious institutions – are a means.
Marx said “religion is the opium of the people,” meaning that it took people’s attention from the work of creating a just society and focused it on pie-in-the-sky hopes. It dulled the pain of life on earth without addressing the root causes of that pain.
The Alinskyites and the Chinese Communists have turned this around. The opium of religion makes people better workers and better socialized. Give them their opium, then, but harness it. Keep attention focused on the earth.
The trouble with this way of thinking is that it kills the golden goose. True religion – religion for the sake of drawing Man closer to the Divine – does produce secondary benefits that serve society but religion for the sake of society isn’t authentic and will quickly lose its appeal. To the degree that secular organizations or the State tamper with religious institutions, attempting to direct their energies (more government money to Catholic Charities, say), is the degree to which those institutions become less effective at building good citizens.
The Alinskyian organizers and their trained clergy – like the Communist Chinese – keep searching for the perfect tools of social engineering and think they’ve found them in churches, synagogues, and mosques.
–Agencies