Cultural climate change
Cultural climate change

A selection of key phrases from Rabbi Sacks' enlightening lecture,hosted by The Chautauqua Institution,For the complete talk, see the video at the end of the article.

We are going through one of the most profound revolutions in all of human history … and I sum it up with a single phrase: cultural climate change... Just as literal climate change breaks down old patterns and radically changes weather conditions, this new cultural climate change is causing a series of storms in the West that will upend conventional notions of faith and the role religion plays in society.

Why is this happening?

The West had three master narratives, which we’ve held since the 17th or 18th century, and those three master narratives have functioned for all those centuries. And today they’ve all broken down.

The first narrative is the “secularization thesis,” or that the world is getting progressively more secular.

However, four centuries of secularization lead us to expect that the process will continue, but it isn’t continuing. Because in the 21st century, we’re seeing — at least in the Middle East and Africa and Asia — the world getting more religious, not less.

The second narrative is that of westernization, whereby an adoption of western norms is deemed necessary for success in the modern global ecosystem.

But with the rise of China, India, Russia and the Muslim world, this notion, too, seems outdated.

All four of those cultures believe tomorrow belongs to them, not to the West.

The third narrative is that of accommodation, or that religions need to adjust to the demands of secular society in order to survive.

Yet it’s not religion making its peace with the world, but religion opposing the world, challenging the world, or simply withdrawing from the world.

How does this affect us in the contemporary world? In three dimensions: first, family … second, community … and third, is what is happening to society.

Family: Having children and raising them involves enormous sac rifice … (and) religious people understand the concept of sacrifice, while throughout history, people in a secular, consumerist, individualist culture find it much harder to live by sacrifice.

From ancient Greece to imperial Rome to Renaissance Italy, a decline in faith precipitates a decline in birth rates.

Europe will die because it wasn’t mindful; it misread Charles Darwin, took him as the patron saint of atheism and failed to realize that actually he was the prophet of … having enough faith to bring a child into the world.

Community:  We handle our genes as individuals, but we only survive as members of groups. And the survival of the group relies on the self-sacrifice of altruists.

This phenomenon goes by different names in different fields: reciprocal altruism, trust, social capital. But as Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community author Robert Putnam argued, it can’t be found in modern American society.

Except, that is, in faith communities.

Religion is the great source of community in the contemporary world.

Society: Society is about relationships that don’t depend on wealth or power.

Western society used to have strong voluntary associations. In the United States, this was conceived of as a covenant — a powerful sense of collective responsibility embedded in phrases like “We the People,” bringing together immigrants from all different cultural backgrounds.

But as secularism rose, the covenant was replaced by the much more transactional, individualist idea of a social contract. The state grew bigger and bigger, and society grew smaller and smaller.

The winners win big and the losers lose big, and you don’t have the sense of shared identity … (and) half the people find themselves as strangers in their own land.

When a civilization loses its religion it also loses its families, communities and society.

Western freedom is not the default setting of the human condition, and the changing weather patterns of cultural climate change mean that a loss of religion spells a corresponding loss of things like the sanctity of marriage, the bonds of community and the social covenant.

Religion is not about to die … but the sanctity of the West is in real trouble,