The turning of the year is always a time to refresh ourselves, even in a pandemic age that’s racked with personal fear and grief and unbearable political tension. It’s a time of reflection, of recommitting ourselves to what we hold dear, and of becoming more pointed and serious about the kind of world we want to live in and what we are willing to do to help bring it about.
If we’re lucky, friends have gifted us with books this season, books that help us dig deeper and think clearer. I was particularly fortunate. Under my tree appeared two powerful volumes — “Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times” by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom from 1991 to 2013, and “Madison’s Music: On Reading the First Amendment,” a book about James Madison and the composition of the Bill of Rights by Burt Neuborne.
Both have much to help us sort through the insane, armed chaos in the nation’s capital last week, a violent insurrection incited by a sitting, lame duck president and fanned by fright news, conspiracy demagogues and anti-social media. Both books also help us come to terms with the astonishing behavior of people — normally responsible, law abiding people — who defy public health wisdom on religious First Amendment grounds in the COVID pandemic and congregate in large crowds, or “super-spreader events,” and refuse to wear masks and to social distance, threatening everyone in their towns, countrysides and cities, with increased risk of exposure to this harrowing and all-too-often fatal disease.
Rabbi Sacks, in “Morality,” uncovers for us, once again, the moral spine of Judeo-Christian culture and the heart and of the worldview of American democracy as a utopian social experiment. The first sentence of his introduction states unambiguously that “a free society is a moral achievement.” But, the politics of liberty and an unfettered marketplace are not enough to sustain social freedom. A “third element” is needed, the Rabbi writes. And that’s “morality.”
Rabbi Sacks defines moral being and behavior as “a concern for the welfare of others, an active commitment to justice and compassion, a willingness to ask not just what is good for me but what is good for all of us together.”
It’s about, he says, “Us” not “Me”; about “We,” not “I.” If we “focus on self-interest without a commitment to the common good, if we focus on self-esteem and lose our care for others” people will “focus on promoting themselves instead of the one thing that will give them lasting happiness: making life better for others.”
In that case, the “market will be merciless. Politics will be deceiving, divisive, confrontational, and extreme. People will feel anxious, uncertain, fearful, aggressive, unstable, unrooted, and unloved.”
It would be hard to find a more accurate description than this of American culture today.
If a free society is a “moral achievement,” which I’m convinced it is, then the American blueprint for such a communitarian endeavor is laid out in part in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. In his book “Madison’s Music,” Burt Neuborne speaks of the First Amendment as a work of art, a poem with “a disciplined inside-to-outside axis,” a means of protecting individual freedoms by assuring they are protected for everyone.
First Amendment individualism, then, comes under the protection of First Amendment egalitarianism. Everyone’s freedom to believe, to speak, to assemble and be heard, is grounded in a universal, communitarian guarantee. In this sense, the First Amendment is the bedrock of a free society and therefore, indeed, “a moral achievement.”
When this moral achievement becomes corrupted, when propaganda undermines it and turns its virtues against themselves, or when individuals and groups use its communitarian freedoms maliciously to undermine the freedom of others and their protection of the common good, you have the moral quicksand of the present moment.
What I’ve come to call “fright news” — practiced skillfully by right wing, talk radio and Twitter conspiracy theorists — is one example. And, perhaps inadvertently, creating COVID congregations is another.
Fright news offends the First Amendment because it uses the protection of the First Amendment to employ methods of deceitful persuasion — commercial or political propaganda — that are designed not to inform but to limit and contort the free thinking of others. Free speech is nothing if it does not express free thought. Because of the egalitarian nature of the First Amendment, protected free speech must in turn promote and protect the free thought and free speech of others.
Behaving in such a way that the freedom of, and from, religion clauses of the First Amendment end up thwarting the freedoms of others, is a particularly grim kind of hypocrisy. Many people in our country have been taught since childhood never to argue about religion. But when so-called megachurches use the freedom of religion clauses in the First Amendment to defy public health measures designed to curtail the spread disease in a pandemic, then the egalitarian grounding of the freedom of religion is corrupted.
Public health measures, such as mask wearing and social distancing, have nothing to do with theology, with doctrine, dogma or revelation. They are not an assault on First Amendment protections. Public health measures are designed to protect the “public” health, not to suppress or counteract an individual’s right, and society’s right, to freedom of, and from, religion. But by undermining the health of the public by refusing to conform on religious grounds to behavioral strategies that reduce the risk of spreading infection, the First Amendment’s protection of everyone’s religious freedoms is offended. Such defiance could create a situation in which not only could we not be free from someone else’s religion, but we could not practice our own religion because, obviously, our health could be compromised, or we could be dead.
Both Rabbi Sacks and Burt Neuborne make it clear that both morality and basic human rights of expression are grounded in a deep and abiding respect for equality, or as the Supreme Court would have it “equal justice under law.” If all of us aren’t free in everyone’s eyes, then none of us can depend on our own freedoms being protected “under law.”
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
(Image by Robert Ashworth)
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