How we can face the future without fear, together | Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

"These are the times,"

said Thomas Paine,

"that try men's souls."

And they're trying ours now.

This is a fateful moment in the history of the West.

We've seen divisive elections and divided societies.

We've seen a growth of extremism

in politics and religion,

all of it fueled by anxiety, uncertainty and fear,

of a world that's changing almost faster than we can bear,

and the sure knowledge that it's going to change faster still.

I have a friend in Washington.

I asked him, what was it like being in America

during the recent presidential election?

He said to me, "Well,

it was like the man

sitting on the deck of the Titanic

with a glass of whiskey in his hand

and he's saying, 'I know I asked for ice --

(Laughter)

but this is ridiculous.'"

So is there something we can do,

each of us,

to be able to face the future without fear?

I think there is.

And one way into it is to see

that perhaps the most simple way into a culture and into an age

is to ask: What do people worship?

People have worshipped so many different things --

the sun, the stars, the storm.

Some people worship many gods, some one, some none.

In the 19th and 20th centuries,

people worshipped the nation,

the Aryan race, the communist state.

What do we worship?

I think future anthropologists

will take a look at the books we read

on self-help, self-realization,

self-esteem.

They'll look at the way we talk about morality

as being true to oneself,

the way we talk about politics

as a matter of individual rights,

and they'll look at this wonderful new religious ritual we have created.

You know the one?

Called the "selfie."

And I think they'll conclude that what we worship in our time

is the self, the me, the I.

And this is great.

It's liberating. It's empowering. It's wonderful.

But don't forget that biologically, we're social animals.

We've spent most of our evolutionary history

in small groups.

We need those face-to-face interactions

where we learn the choreography of altruism

and where we create those spiritual goods

like friendship and trust and loyalty and love

that redeem our solitude.

When we have too much of the "I" and too little of the "we,"

we can find ourselves vulnerable,

fearful and alone.

It was no accident that Sherry Turkle of MIT

called the book she wrote on the impact of social media

"Alone Together."

So I think the simplest way of safeguarding the future "you"

is to strengthen the future "us"

in three dimensions:

the us of relationship,

the us of identity

and the us of responsibility.

So let me first take the us of relationship.

And here, forgive me if I get personal.

Once upon a time,

a very long time ago,

I was a 20-year-old undergraduate

studying philosophy.

I was into Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and Sartre and Camus.

I was full of ontological uncertainty

and existential angst.

It was terrific.

(Laughter)

I was self-obsessed and thoroughly unpleasant to know,

until one day I saw

across the courtyard

a girl

who was everything that I wasn't.

She radiated sunshine.

She emanated joy.

I found out her name was Elaine.

We met. We talked.

We married.

And 47 years, three children and eight grandchildren later,

I can safely say

it was the best decision I ever took in my life,

because it's the people not like us

that make us grow.

And that is why I think

we have to do just that.

The trouble with Google filters,

Facebook friends

and reading the news by narrowcasting rather than broadcasting

means that we're surrounded almost entirely by people like us

whose views, whose opinions, whose prejudices, even,

are just like ours.

And Cass Sunstein of Harvard has shown

that if we surround ourselves with people with the same views as us,

we get more extreme.

I think we need to renew those face-to-face encounters

with the people not like us.

I think we need to do that

in order to realize that we can disagree strongly

and yet still stay friends.

It's in those face-to-face encounters

that we discover that the people not like us

are just people, like us.

And actually, every time

we hold out the hand of friendship

to somebody not like us,

whose class or creed or color are different from ours,

we heal

one of the fractures

of our wounded world.

That is the us of relationship.

Second is the us of identity.

Let me give you a thought experiment.

Have you been to Washington? Have you seen the memorials?

Absolutely fascinating.

There's the Lincoln Memorial:

Gettysburg Address on one side, Second Inaugural on the other.

You go to the Jefferson Memorial,

screeds of text.

Martin Luther King Memorial,

more than a dozen quotes from his speeches.

I didn't realize, in America you read memorials.

Now go to the equivalent in London in Parliament Square

and you will see that the monument to David Lloyd George

contains three words:

David Lloyd George.

(Laughter)

Nelson Mandela gets two.

Churchill gets just one:

Churchill.

(Laughter)

Why the difference? I'll tell you why the difference.

Because America was from the outset a nation of wave after wave of immigrants,

so it had to create an identity

which it did by telling a story

which you learned at school, you read on memorials

and you heard repeated in presidential inaugural addresses.

Britain until recently wasn't a nation of immigrants,

so it could take identity for granted.

The trouble is now

that two things have happened which shouldn't have happened together.

The first thing is in the West we've stopped telling this story

of who we are and why,

even in America.

And at the same time,

immigration is higher than it's ever been before.

So when you tell a story and your identity is strong,

you can welcome the stranger,

but when you stop telling the story,

your identity gets weak

and you feel threatened by the stranger.

And that's bad.

I tell you, Jews have been scattered and dispersed and exiled for 2,000 years.

We never lost our identity.

Why? Because at least once a year,

on the festival of Passover,

we told our story and we taught it to our children

and we ate the unleavened bread of affliction

and tasted the bitter herbs of slavery.

So we never lost our identity.

I think collectively

we've got to get back to telling our story,

who we are, where we came from,

what ideals by which we live.

And if that happens,

we will become strong enough

to welcome the stranger and say,

"Come and share our lives,

share our stories,

share our aspirations and dreams."

That is the us of identity.

And finally, the us of responsibility.

Do you know something?

My favorite phrase in all of politics,

very American phrase,

is: "We the people."

Why "we the people?"

Because it says that we all share collective responsibility

for our collective future.

And that's how things really are and should be.

Have you noticed how magical thinking

has taken over our politics?

So we say, all you've got to do is elect this strong leader

and he or she will solve all our problems for us.

Believe me, that is magical thinking.

And then we get the extremes:

the far right, the far left,

the extreme religious and the extreme anti-religious,

the far right dreaming of a golden age that never was,

the far left dreaming of a utopia that never will be

and the religious and anti-religious equally convinced

that all it takes is God or the absence of God

to save us from ourselves.

That, too, is magical thinking,

because the only people who will save us from ourselves

is we the people,

all of us together.

And when we do that,

and when we move from the politics of me

to the politics of all of us together,

we rediscover those beautiful, counterintuitive truths:

that a nation is strong

when it cares for the weak,

that it becomes rich

when it cares for the poor,

it becomes invulnerable when it cares about the vulnerable.

That is what makes great nations.

(Applause)

So here is my simple suggestion.

It might just change your life,

and it might just help to begin to change the world.

Do a search and replace operation

on the text of your mind,

and wherever you encounter the word "self,"

substitute the word "other."

So instead of self-help, other-help;

instead of self-esteem, other-esteem.

And if you do that,

you will begin to feel the power

of what for me is one of the most moving sentences

in all of religious literature.

"Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

I will fear no evil,

for you are with me."

We can face any future without fear

so long as we know

we will not face it alone.

So for the sake of the future "you,"

together let us strengthen

the future "us."

Thank you.

(Applause)