The Great Partnership

by Jonathan Sacks

  Consider the pattern of civilisation itself. One of the first historians to give a cyclical account of history, Giambattista Vico, argued that all civilisations were subject to a law of rise and decline. They are born in austerity. They rise to affluence and power. Then they become decadent and eventually decline. ‘People first sense what is necessary, then consider what is useful, next attend to comfort, later delight in pleasures, soon grow dissolute in luxury, and finally go mad squandering their estates.’ The only antidote to this, he argued, was religion, which motivates people to virtue and concern for the common good. Providence ‘renews the piety, faith and truth which are both the natural foundations of justice, and the grace and beauty of God’s eternal order’.10

  It is an argument that has been repeated in our time by figures like Vaclav Havel and Jürgen Habermas. Havel, protesting the materialist conception of human life, argues that such a view leads inevitably to ‘the gradual erosion of all moral standards, the breakdown of all criteria of decency, and the widespread destruction of confidence in the meaning of any such values as truth, adherence to principles, sincerity, altruism, dignity and honour’. He adds, ‘If democracy is not only to survive but to expand successfully … it must rediscover and renew its own transcendental origins. It must renew its respect for the non-material order that is not only above us but also in us and among us.’11

  Habermas, like Havel a secular intellectual, has nonetheless spoken of how ‘enlightened reason’ reaches a crisis when it discovers it no longer has sufficient strength ‘to awaken, and to keep awake, in the minds of secular subjects, an awareness of the violations of solidarity throughout the world, an awareness of what is missing, of what cries out to heaven’. His conclusion is that ‘Among modern societies, only those that are able to introduce into the secular domain the essential contents of their religious traditions which point beyond the merely human role will also be able to rescue the substance of the human.’12

  There have been many superpowers: Spain in the fifteenth century, Venice in the sixteenth, Holland in the seventeenth, France in the eighteenth, Britain in the nineteenth, the United States in the twentieth. Yet Judaism has existed in some form for the better part of four thousand years, Christianity for two thousand, and Islam for fourteen centuries. Religions survive. Superpowers do not. Spiritual systems have the capacity to defeat the law of entropy that governs the life of nations.

  We can trace this process in the present. Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam became famous in the late 1990s for a phrase he coined to describe the loss of social capital – networks of reciprocity and trust – in the liberal democracies of the West. He called it ‘bowling alone’. More people were going ten-pin bowling, but fewer were joining teams and leagues. This was his symbol of the West’s increasingly individualistic, atomistic, self-preoccupied culture. Things people once did together, we were now doing alone. Our bonds of belonging were growing thin.

  In 2010, in his book American Grace, Putnam set out the good news that a powerful store of social capital still exists. It is called religion: the churches, synagogues and other places of worship that still bring people together in shared belonging and mutual responsibility.

  An extensive survey carried out throughout the United States between 2004 and 2006 showed that frequent church- or synagogue-goers are more likely to give money to charity, regardless of whether the charity is religious or secular. They are also more likely to do voluntary work for a charity, give money to a homeless person, give excess change back to a shop assistant, donate blood, help a neighbour with housework, spend time with someone who is feeling depressed, allow another driver to cut in front of them, offer a seat to a stranger, or help someone find a job. Religious Americans are simply more likely than their secular counterparts to give of their time and money to others, not only within but also beyond their own communities.

  Their altruism goes further. Frequent worshippers are also significantly more active citizens. They are more likely to belong to community organisations. Within these organisations they are more likely to be officers or committee members. They take a more active part in local civic and political life, from local elections to town meetings to demonstrations. They are disproportionately represented among local activists for social and political reform. They get involved, turn up and lead. The margin of difference between them and the more secular is large.

  Tested on attitudes, religiosity as measured by church or synagogue attendance turns out to be the best predictor of altruism and empathy: better than education, age, income, gender or race. Religion creates community, community creates altruism, and altruism turns us away from self and towards the common good. Putnam goes so far as to speculate that an atheist who went regularly to church (perhaps because of a spouse) would be more likely to volunteer in a soup kitchen than a believer who prays alone. There is something about the tenor of relationships within a religious community that makes it an ongoing tutorial in citizenship and good neighbourliness.13

  This is path-breaking research by one of the world’s greatest sociologists, and it confirms what most members of religious congregations know, that they give rise to networks of support often breathtaking in their strength and moral beauty: visiting the sick, comforting the bereaved, helping individuals through personal crisis, supporting those in financial need, assisting people who have lost their jobs, caring for the elderly, and proving daily that troubles are halved and joys doubled when they are shared with others. Even today, religion still has the improbable power to renew the habits of the heart that drive civil society, defeating entropy and civilisational decline.

  The Argument from Happiness

  Thus far probability. But there was a second sentence adorning London buses courtesy of the British Humanist Association. In full the advertisement read, ‘There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.’

  I am perplexed by this non sequitur. To me, faith is about, in the Bible’s phrase, ‘rejoicing in all the good the Lord your God has given you’ (Deuteronomy 26:11). It is about celebration, gratitude, praise, thanksgiving and what Wordsworth and C. S. Lewis called being ‘surprised by joy’. For many people, religion is an essential part of the pursuit of happiness. A host of surveys show that people who have religious faith and regularly attend religious services report higher life satisfaction and live longer than those who do not.14

  For two generations, while Europe has secularised, it has witnessed the rise, especially among the young, of depressive illness, stress-related syndromes, drug and alcohol abuse, violent crime and attempted suicide. Stable families have been replaced by an almost open-ended range of variants, leaving in their wake troubled and disadvantaged children. Fewer people find themselves surrounded by the networks of support once provided by local communities. Robert Bellah and his co-authors, in Habits of the Heart, diagnosed the multiple ways in which our social ecology is being damaged ‘by the destruction of the subtle ties that bind human beings to one another, leaving them frightened and alone’.15

  The current preoccupation with happiness – a massive spate of books in recent years – testifies to a genuine questioning of whether we may not have taken a wrong turning in the unbridled pursuit of economic gain. The consumer society, directed at making us happy, achieves the opposite. It encourages us to spend money we do not have, to buy things we do not need, for the sake of a happiness that will not last. By constantly directing our attention to what we do not have, instead of making us thankful for what we do have, it becomes a highly efficient system for the production and distribution of unhappiness.

  What do we know about happiness? There are basic preconditions: food, clothing, shelter, health, what Abraham Maslow called the physiological and safety needs.16 Similarly, Moses Maimonides said that perfection of the body takes chronological precedence over perfection of the soul. It is impossible to focus on the higher reaches of spirituality if you are cold, hungry, homeless and sick. One of the things I respect about Judaism
is its refusal to romanticise poverty.

  But beyond a basic minimum, the relationship between income and happiness is slight. Research bears out Maslow’s analysis that the higher needs are love and belonging, esteem and self-actualisation. The most significant determinants of happiness are strong and rewarding personal relationships, a sense of belonging to a community, being valued by others and living a meaningful life. These are precisely the things in which religion specialises: sanctifying marriage, etching family life with the charisma of holiness, creating and sustaining strong communities in which people are valued for what they are, not for what they earn or own, and providing a framework within which our lives take on meaning, purpose, even blessedness. Even Karl Marx admitted that religion was ‘the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions’.

  Two British authors, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, have argued recently that societies that are more equal tend to have higher reported life satisfaction.17 Religious faith does not of itself create economic equality. But it does tell us that we are all equal in the sight of God. Each of us counts. A house of worship is one of the few places nowadays where rich and poor, young and old, meet on equal terms, where they are valued not for what they earn, but for what they are.

  It makes a difference to happiness to know that we are at home in the universe, that we are here because someone wanted us to be, and that something of us will live on. The practices of religion – prayer as an expression of gratitude, ritual as enactment of meaning, sacred narrative as a way of understanding the world and our place within it, rites of passage that locate our journey as a shared experience connecting us to past and future generations, deeds of reciprocal kindness that bind us to a group in bonds of faith, loyalty and trust – create structures of meaning and relationship within which our individuality can flourish. This is where, for many of us, happiness is to be found.

  ‘There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life’ is one of the less profound propositions to have been produced by the collective intelligence of people who pride themselves on their intelligence. It is at least as true as saying, ‘Exams don’t matter, work is a waste of time, love does not last, commitment only leads to disappointment. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.’ Nothing worth striving for is easy, and nothing not worth striving for brings happiness. Pleasure, maybe; fun, perhaps; but happiness in any meaningful sense, no. If I wanted to stop worrying, I would not choose a world blind to my existence, indifferent to my fate, with no solace in this life or any other. Nor would I put my trust in those who ridiculed my deepest commitments.

  The Greatest Improbability of All

  Writing in 1832, the young Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville made a mordant comment. ‘Eighteenth century philosophers’, he wrote, ‘had a very simple explanation for the gradual weakening of beliefs. Religious zeal, they said, was bound to die down as enlightenment and freedom spread. It is tiresome that the facts do not fit this theory at all.’18 Tocqueville was writing in the 1830s, in the full shock of his discovery that America – the very country that established the principle of separation of church and state – remained a deeply religious society. It still is. Today more Americans go weekly to a place of worship than do the people of Iran, a theocracy.19

  The survival of religion is the greatest improbability of all. The world has changed beyond recognition since the Middle Ages. Religion has lost many of the functions it once had. To explain the world, we have science. To control it, we have technology. To negotiate power, we have democratic politics. To achieve prosperity, we have a market economy. If we are ill, we go to a doctor, not a priest. If we feel guilty, we can go to a psychotherapist; we have no need of a confessor. If we are depressed, we can take Prozac; we do not need the book of Psalms. Schools and welfare services are provided by the state, not by the church. And if we seek salvation, we can visit the new cathedrals – the shopping malls – at which the consumer society pays homage to its gods.

  Faith would seem to be redundant in the contemporary world. And yet far from disappearing, it is alive and well and flourishing, in every part of the world except Europe. In America there are mega-churches with congregations in the tens of thousands. In China today there are more practising Christians than members of the Communist Party and almost as many Muslims as there are in Saudi Arabia. In Russia, where religion was exiled for seventy years, a poll in 2006 showed that 84 per cent of the population believed in God.20 And, as the editor of The Economist writes, whereas in the past religion was often associated with poverty, today ‘the growth in faith has coincided with a growth in prosperity’.21

  Why is this so? Because religion does what none of the great institutions of contemporary society does: not politics, not economics, not science and not technology. It answers the three great questions that any reflective human being will ask: Who am I? (the question of identity), Why am I here? (the question of purpose), and, How then shall I live? (the question of ethics and meaning).

  Today’s atheists – the neo-Darwinians, sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists – all too often engage in a sustained act of self-contradiction. For them, what works is what survives: genes biologically, and ‘memes’ culturally. But manifestly, religion survives. Faith lives on. The religious in most countries have more children than the non-religious.22 They are better at handing on their genes and memes to the next generation. Meanwhile, after three centuries of sometimes aggressive secularism, we have moved into what Jürgen Habermas calls a ‘post-secular age’. Yet in defiance of all the evidence on their own terms, the new atheists argue that religion is an epiphenomenon, an accidental by-product of something else: once functional, now dysfunctional. If this were so, it would have disappeared long ago. Its survival is the supreme improbability.

  The Defeat of Probability by the Power of Possibility

  So if probability were the measure, there would be no universe, no life, no sentience, no self-consciousness, no humanity, no art, no questions, no poetry, no Rembrandt, no sense of humour, no sanctity of life, no love. How probable is it that the most primitive bacterium would one day evolve into a humanity capable of decoding the genome itself? Or that small religious groups would outlive great empires, that one day people would hold these truths self-evident that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that slavery would be abolished, tyrannies would fall and apartheid would end?

  Faith is the defeat of probability by the power of possibility. The prophets dreamed the improbable and by doing so helped bring it about. All the great human achievements, in art and science as well as the life of the spirit, came through people who ignored the probable and had faith in the possible.

  How did this happen? It happened in the West because Abraham and his descendants believed in a God who stood outside the entire natural order, the domain of cause and effect and of probability itself. They believed in a God who defined himself in the phrase ‘I will be what I will be’, meaning, ‘I will be what, where and how I choose’ – hence, the God who defies predictability and probability. By setting his image on humanity, he gave us too the power to defy probability, to stand outside the taken-for-granted certainties of the age and live by another light. That belief gave the West its faith in the great duality charted by science and religion, the orderliness of the universe on the one hand, the freedom of humanity on the other.

  ‘Once you eliminate the impossible,’ said Sherlock Holmes, ‘whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.’ That is the left-brain way of putting the argument. The sheer cumulative weight of the evidence from cosmology, biology, history, the decline and fall of civilisations, the failure of secular revolutions, the forces making for altruism in an age of individualism, even the pursuit of happiness itself – all these point towards the presence of a vast intelligence at work in the universe that has revealed itself directly or obliquely to our ancestors and through them to us. Despite E. O. Wilson’s
noble effort at ‘consilience’, a scientific theory-of-everything, there is no hypothesis remotely as simple, elegant and all-encompassing as the idea that an intelligent Creator endowed creation with creativity. For those who seek proof, this is as close as we can come, given our present state of knowledge of the universe and ourselves.

  Speaking personally, however, as I have argued throughout, I believe that the demand for proof is misconceived. It came from the strange combination of events in the first century when two very different cultures, ancient Greece and ancient Israel, came together in the form of a synthesis that eventually encouraged people to believe that science and religion, explanation and interpretation, impersonal and personal knowledge, were the same sort of thing, part of the same world of thought. I have argued otherwise, that it is precisely because they are not the same sort of thing that the counterpoint between them gave and still gives human life its depth and pathos. We can no more dispense with either than we can with one of the two hemispheres of the brain.

  If so, then the improbabilities that have accumulated are not proof of the existence of God but a series of intimations. Science does not lead to religious conclusions; religion does not lead to scientific conclusions. Science is about explanation. Religion is about interpretation. Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean. They are different intellectual enterprises that engage different hemispheres of the brain. Science – linear, atomistic, analytical – is a typical left-brain activity. Religion – integrative, holistic, relational – is supremely a work of the right brain. This is meant only as a metaphor, but it is a powerful one.

  The mutual hostility between religion and science is one of the curses of our age, and it is damaging to religion and science in equal measure. The Bible is not proto-science, pseudo-science or myth masquerading as science. It is interested in other questions entirely. Who are we? Why are we here? How then shall we live? It is to answer those questions, not scientific ones, that we seek to know the mind of God. But there is more to wisdom than science. It cannot tell us why we are here or how we should live. Science masquerading as religion is as unseemly as religion masquerading as science.