{"id":3307,"date":"2009-07-17T08:12:19","date_gmt":"2009-07-17T12:12:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/?p=3307"},"modified":"2009-07-17T12:15:43","modified_gmt":"2009-07-17T16:15:43","slug":"the-pope-the-rabbi-and-the-moral-economy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/2009\/07\/the-pope-the-rabbi-and-the-moral-economy\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pope, the Rabbi, and the Moral Economy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Acton Institute<\/a> | Samuel Gregg | July 15, 2009<\/p>\n

The pope and the rabbi had a similar message, which amounts to the following. Some of our contemporary economic problems reflect a deeper moral crisis within Western civilization. Until we acknowledge this, shifts in economic policy and business practice will only provide limited solutions.<\/p>\n

To be sure, it\u2019s not a message everyone will appreciate. But that doesn\u2019t diminish its accuracy. <\/p>\n

As individuals, there are many striking analogies between Pope Benedict and Rabbi Sacks. Both are widely recognized as formidable intellectuals in their own right. Each has unapologetically and directly challenged secularizing trends within his own faith-tradition. Neither is afraid to question the secularist zeitgeist which thoroughly intimidates so many rabbis and Christian clergy today.<\/p>\n

In their recent reflections, both rabbi and pope underlined what a morally-confused, even dysfunctional, world we live in. It\u2019s not that they consider the pre-1960s era as somehow morally superior. In Sacks\u2019 view, more people today genuinely do care about issues that received less attention from our grandparents, such as extreme poverty in developing nations.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut,\u201d Sacks writes, \u201cnote this: the things we care about are vast, distant, global, remote.\u201d When it comes to matters closer to us such as trust or simple truth-telling, Sacks says we have more or less abandoned notions of right and wrong. Instead the West has embraced a morality in which what ultimately matters, ethically-speaking, is whether we choose something.<\/p>\n

Choice has become its own justification and the only sin is to question anyone\u2019s moral choices. To do so is to be \u201cintolerant\u201d or \u201cjudgmental.\u201d Who are you to question my choice to lie on my mortgage-application or my choice to betray my wife?<\/p>\n

According to Sacks, one effect of this relativism is that we tacitly and increasingly rely upon the state to regulate our behavior. Nature abhors a vacuum, but especially moral voids. Thus instead of an all-seeing God to whom we must eventually account for all our choices, we have video surveillance. \u201cThe result,\u201d Sacks claims, \u201cis that we have created the most regulated, intrusive society ever known.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Caritas in Veritate<\/em>, Benedict XVI makes a similar point. It is good, he writes, that people care about the environment. But, Benedict comments, \u201cHuman beings interpret and shape the natural environment through culture, which in turn is given direction by the responsible use of freedom, in accordance with the dictates of the moral law.\u201d It follows that if we ignore this moral law, we are likely to treat nature as \u201ca heap of scattered refuse\u201d or, conversely, embrace \u201cattitudes of neo-paganism or a new pantheism.\u201d<\/p>\n

. . . more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Acton Institute | Samuel Gregg | July 15, 2009 The pope and the rabbi had a similar message, which amounts to the following. Some of our contemporary economic problems reflect a deeper moral crisis within Western civilization. Until we acknowledge this, shifts in economic policy and business practice will only provide limited solutions. To be … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":497,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15,58,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-moral-issues","category-roman-catholic","category-secularismculture-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/497"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3307"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3307\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}