CAN WE restore what has been lost?
Are we destined to live with ever more divisive politics and ever more divided societies, growing inequalities and increasing loneliness, less public regard for truth and ever more determined efforts to ban and demonize the voices with which we disagree? Can we restore the trust and civility of public life and private relationships, or are the only institutions that matter the market and the state, the relentless pursuit of wealth and power? Can we change? My argument is that we can. There is one idea that whenever it has been applied has had the power to change the world. Cultures can shift from “I” to “We.”
We can change society for the future because people have done so in the past. James Q. Wilson argued, in Crime and Human Nature, that this is what happened in America in the first half of the nineteenth century.1 People had long been moving from villages to towns to cities, but often whole families had moved together. They had a basis of social stability even in their new environment. In America in the 1820s and 1830s, however, there were large concentrations of single men, and a significant rise in drunkenness and crime. What followed by way of response was a massive re-moralization of society, often led by religious groups, in a phenomenon known as the Second Great Awakening. A powerful set of moral concerns came to the fore—the abolition of slavery, the spread of temperance, the establishment of public schools, and the drive to eliminate corporal and capital punishment. There was widespread public involvement in all these movements. Social dislocation was answered by social reintegration. An “I” society became a “We” society.
In our conversation for the BBC radio series on morality, Robert Putnam told me that something similar happened in the first half of the twentieth century. In the late nineteenth century, during the last Gilded Age, America was “highly individualistic, starkly unequal, fiercely polarised, and deeply fragmented.” Following the Progressive Era at the beginning of the twentieth century, America became more equal, more cohesive, and more focused on responsibilities than rights. It moved from being an “I” society to being a “We” society.
In my book The Politics of Hope, I argued that a parallel process took place in Britain in the nineteenth century. “There is no community in England,” wrote Benjamin Disraeli in 1845 in his novel Sybil, or The Two Nations. His concerns in the book sound uncannily contemporary. He was alarmed not only by the growing gap between rich and poor but also by the loneliness he sensed beneath the bustle of urban life. People, he wrote, “are not in a state of cooperation, but of isolation.” The public response, already taking shape as he wrote those words, was an extraordinary proliferation of charitable groups, religiously based associations, public schools, and Sunday schools, driven by, as well as educating for, social responsibility. Britain, too, moved from an “I” to a “We” society.2
It can be done in the future because it has been done in the past. And it begins with us, each of us as individuals. The moment we turn outward and concern ourselves with the welfare of others no less than with our own, we begin to change the world in the only way we can, one act at a time, one day at a time, one life at a time.
I HAVE CALLED the move from “We” to “I” cultural climate change. But there is a difference between this and environmental climate change. For us to make a significant difference to environmental climate change, billions of people must change the ways they act. That is because the environment is global. But culture is more local, especially when it concerns the tone and tenor of our relationships. To begin to make a difference, all we need to do is to change ourselves. To act morally. To be concerned with the welfare of others. To be someone people trust. To give. To volunteer. To listen. To smile. To be sensitive, generous, caring. To do any of these things is to make an immediate difference, not only to our own life but to those whose lives we touch. Morality is about us each of us in our own sphere of interaction, taking responsibility. We don’t have to wait for the world to change for our lives to change.
In The Road to Character, David Brooks distinguishes between résumé virtues and eulogy virtues.3 The former focus on achievement, the latter on character. The former tend to be about the self—the qualifications we acquired, the skills we have, our careers and successes. The latter are about the impact we have had on the lives of others. It is the eulogy virtues, the ones we are remembered for, that tend to invest a life with deeper meaning. To know that we have made things better for other people is a source of deep satisfaction. It seems that we have evolved to care about others, to have generous instincts, and to come to the aid of those in need.
Doing good to others is, as I have already indicated, good for our health, physical and psychological. Giving makes us happier. In experiments in which people are given a sum of money, and half are told to spend it on themselves while the other half are told to give it to charity, those who gave it received more pleasure than those who spent it on themselves. A 2010 survey of people in 136 countries found that in 122 of them, people who had donated money to charity in the previous month were happier than those who had not. The positive psychological impact of giving money to charity was, on average, equivalent to receiving a doubling of household income.4
We have also noted the health benefits of volunteering. The Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, continues to publish research findings on the health benefits of altruism.5 A 2019 research study showed that acts of kindness of many different kinds, whether performed for family, friends, or strangers, had positive effects for those who performed them, on both physical and emotional health.6 Lifting others, we ourselves are lifted.
Taking pleasure in, and deriving strength from, altruism seems to be deeply embedded in our nature. Even children as young as eighteen months old show empathy for other children and adults in whom they see signs of distress. They will give a blanket to an adult who is cold or a toy to a child who is sad. Our capacity to feel and be moved by the pain of others is an undeniable fact of our nature. In short, as soon as we exercise our moral sense, in terms of helping others in particular, we gain enormous benefits, not just psychological but physical.
It is as if we realign ourselves with deeply engraved instincts that have somehow become underused in a world of self-esteem, self-satisfaction, and self-preoccupation. The benefits are real, measurable, and lasting. We have material needs and they are important. But we also have psychological, spiritual, and moral needs, and they, too, are important. Once our basic needs for sustenance and security have been met, we are more enriched by what we give than by what we receive. There is something deep within us that yearns for connection with others, and that has been denied expression by much that has happened over the past half-century, and with particular acceleration in the past decade. In the liberal democracies of the West, there has been too much “I,” and too little “We.” There has been too much individualism and too little of the moral bonds that lie at the heart of friendship, family, and community.
Friendship, family, and community exist in virtue of moral bonds. That is why they make us larger than we would be if we focused on self-interest alone. As I write these words, Elaine and I are looking forward to our golden wedding anniversary. In the TED Talk I gave in 2017, I spoke about our first meeting. It took place in Cambridge, England, where I was a philosophy student and Elaine was working at the hospital. I had read my Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Sartre and Camus. I knew ontological loneliness, existential angst, and epistemic doubt. I was self-preoccupied to a fault.
One day early in my final year I saw, across a college courtyard, a girl who was everything I was not. She smiled, she radiated sunshine, she was full of joy. It took me three weeks to put aside metaphysics and say, “Let’s get married.” Forty-nine years, three children, and nine grandchildren later, I know it was the best decision of my life, because it’s the people not like us who make us grow. Marriage is the supreme embodiment of openness to otherness.
Google’s intelligent search, Facebook friends, and reading the news via Twitter’s narrowcasting effect rather than traditional broadcast media means that we are surrounded to a considerable extent by people like us whose opinions and prejudices are similar to ours. As I have mentioned, Cass Sunstein of Harvard has shown that if we surround ourselves with people with the same views as us, we get more extreme.7 We need to renew those face-to-face encounters with the people not like us, 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. 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.
AT VARIOUS points I have referred to a concept that has immense and transformative power. The concept is covenant, and I want here to explain why it is so significant.
Recall that one of the fundamental questions of the Enlightenment was how society could be preserved once dogmatic religious belief had been weakened. Could you keep society’s mechanisms going on the basis of self-interest alone? That was when two powerful theories emerged, one about politics and the state, the other about economics and the market.
The political theory was formulated by Thomas Hobbes. In a state of nature, he said, where there were no laws, or at least none that could be enforced, there would be violence and constant fear of death. Life would be, in his memorable phrase, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” In such an environment, it would be in everyone’s self-interest to hand over some of their powers to a central body, the Leviathan of the state, charged with maintaining the rule of law within and the defense of the realm from without. This was his version of the social contract, entered into on the basis of self-interest alone: namely, the fear of violent death that would exist if there were no Leviathan to keep the peace.
Adam Smith made much the same argument about economics. As mentioned earlier, in one of the most famous sentences from The Wealth of Nations, he said, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” An “invisible hand” would turn the pursuit of self-interest into the actualization of the common good. Self-interest, in other words, would sustain the market and the state.
Self-interest generates contracts. In a contract, two or more individuals, each pursuing their own advantage, come together to make an exchange for mutual benefit. I pay my garage mechanic to mend my car. I and others pay our taxes to ensure that we have the social services we need. So there is the commercial contract that creates the market, and the social contract that creates the state. But in both cases, the motivating factor is self-interest. Contracts are about “I.”
A covenant generates a different kind of relationship altogether. Recall that what makes it different is that in a covenant, two or more individuals, each respecting the dignity and integrity of the other, come together in a bond of love and trust, to share their interests, sometimes even to share their lives, by pledging their faithfulness to one another, to do together what neither can achieve alone. Unlike contracts, which are entered into for the sake of advantage, covenants are moral commitments sustained by loyalty and fidelity, even when they call for sacrifice. They are about you and I coming together to form a “We.”
A contract is a transaction. A covenant is a relationship. A contract is about interests. A covenant is about identity. That is why contracts benefit, but covenants transform.
A covenant creates a moral community. It binds people together in a bond of mutual responsibility and care. It can be vast: there is, I believe, a covenant of human solidarity that binds all seven billion of us alive today to act responsibly toward the environment, human rights, and the alleviation of poverty for the sake of generations not yet born. A covenant can also be small and personal: the simplest instance is a marriage when husband and wife pledge themselves to one another in an open-ended commitment to share a life.
What matters in a covenant is not how big or small is the group thereby included, but the commitment. It is the undertaking of responsibility for others, knowing that they, too, undertake responsibility for us. In a covenant, what matters is not wealth or power but the transformation that takes place when I embrace a world larger than the self. Covenants heal what markets and states sometimes harm.
HOW MIGHT covenantal thinking—the move from “I” to “We”—lead to a new approach to business, the market, and economics? Contracts invite us to think about what we gain. Covenants ask us to think about the impact we have on others. In the case of business, this means not only shareholders and employees but also the wider society.
Something like a covenantal approach has recently been advocated by former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund and governor of the Reserve Bank of India, Raghuram Rajan. In The Third Pillar (2019)8 he argues that the state and the market have grown in the West at the cost of community, which is where many of our most important interactions take place. It has happened because of the disruptive effects of technological revolution since the 1970s. Great swathes of the population have lost their previous forms of employment, and this has had a devastating effect on them, their families, and their communities. This is economically wasteful, politically dangerous, and humanly tragic.
But communities can be rebuilt. Rajan gives the example of the Pilsen neighborhood in Chicago. In the 1970s, it was an area of low education, low incomes, high unemployment, drugs, alcohol, and crime. Then community activists, determined to reverse the slide, slowly but steadily cleaned up the neighborhood, clamped down on crime, improved schools, gave job training to former gang members, brought new businesses into the area, and built affordable housing. This was a “We” project par excellence: its success depended on active grassroots involvement. As one of the leading activists now tells newcomers when they buy a house, “You are not buying a piece of property. You are buying a piece of the community.”9
Rajan’s proposal is that economics must shift from profit maximization to value maximization; in other words, corporations should consider not only shareholders but also employees, and possibly other constituencies. Otherwise, he says, we are in great danger from populism and the disruptive politics of the far left or the far right. Ways must be found of harnessing the market and technology to strengthen communities, the essential “third pillar” of a free society.
A not dissimilar approach has been advocated by Sir Ronald Cohen, one of Britain’s first and most successful venture capitalists. In 2000, he was invited by the Treasury to become chairman of the Social Investment Task Force. In 2002, he helped found Bridges Ventures, an investment company that focused not on short-term profits but on long-term sustainability and social and environmental benefits. In 2011, at the request of the then prime minister, David Cameron, he became the chairman of Big Society Capital, the first social investment bank in Britain.
Sir Ronald has recently spearheaded a movement toward what he calls impact economics, that is, the evaluation of a company’s performance not only by its profits but also by its social and environmental impact, believing this to be as important as making money.10 One way of doing so is through Social Impact Bonds, otherwise known as pay-for-success schemes, which invite organizations to deliver specific social outcomes in return for payment. Such funding has been used to reduce reoffending rates of prisoners in Peterborough, England, to educate girls in Rajasthan, to improve maternal and infant health in South Carolina, to help unemployed youth in the UK, to integrate the immigrant population in Massachusetts into the workforce, and to rehabilitate people affected by conflict in Africa. Impact economics reconceptualizes the relationship between governments, entrepreneurs, philanthropists, for-profit companies, and not-for-profit organizations. What makes it covenantal, not just contractual, economics is that it sees us all as part of a single moral community. It is about conceptualizing business and investment not just for private gain, though this is important, but also for the common good.
Young people, Cohen says, are more likely to work for and invest in companies that have a positive impact on society. By choosing to invest in such companies, each of us, as shareholders, pension savers, or holders of insurance policies, can have an influence on the way corporations act and make their decisions. The idea that there is a choice between making money and helping others is, he says, dangerous and wrong. You can do good and do well at the same time.
A third example comes from an entrepreneur, Daniel Lubetzky, founder of the health food company KIND. I came to know Daniel through his efforts for peace in the Middle East. Daniel entered business in the first place as a side project while engaged in research about legislative means to foster economic relationships between Israelis and Palestinians. While doing his research, he started a business, PeaceWorks, that brought together Israelis, Palestinians, Turks, and Egyptians to make food based on local specialties, encouraging, through economic cooperation, friendships between groups of people who would not normally mix. Its success led him to go on to do something similar in Mexico, Sri Lanka, South Africa, and Indonesia. He believed that when different ethnic and religious groups form businesses together, they are more likely to make peace because of the friendships and interdependencies joint enterprises create.11
Subsequently, his concern with obesity in the United States and the unhealthiness of many snacks led him to create a new business based on a series of snack bars with pure natural ingredients, under the label KIND. What makes Daniel a new kind of entrepreneur is the way he conceptualizes business as a force for social and moral transformation. In his head offices in New York, for-profit and not-for-profit enterprises work side by side in the same space. Among other initiatives, he has been working on ways of getting children to learn about the shared values that bring us together in common humanity. One of his initiatives, Empatico, is a platform involving video conferencing and digital learning, connecting classrooms and helping children to make friends with others across the world.
He believes that a strong sense of mission gives a company and its workforce the resilience to survive difficult times, the focus to stay true to its core values, and the sense of team spirit that make people respect one another and create a strong corporate culture.
This is, admittedly, controversial territory. There are those who believe, with Milton Friedman and the “Chicago School” of economists, that the social responsibility of business is simply to make as much profit as possible. Business is one thing, they say, philanthropy another. But Raghuram Rajan today teaches at the University of Chicago: a sign that Chicago School orthodoxy may be changing. Rajan, Cohen, and Lubetzky—an economist, a venture capitalist, and an entrepreneur, each a leader in his field—are showing us a new direction: an economics of “We,” not just of “I.”
WE HAVE seen how covenant has had a significant role in the political culture of the United States. How might it be reinvoked in order to heal some of the deep divisions in the politics of contemporary America and Europe? Here we have a remarkable historical example of how covenantal thinking can help mend a shattered nation.
In September 1862, America was in the depths of the Civil War, more bitterly divided than any Western democracy today. The Union forces had suffered a second defeat at Bull Run. Victory for the North seemed a remote possibility, and Union itself a distant and receding dream. It was then that Abraham Lincoln wrote a note in his diary, meant—one of his secretaries later said—for his eyes alone. He headed it “A Meditation on the Divine Will.” It contained the following paragraph:
The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present Civil War it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party.…
An exceptional idea was taking shape in the mind of one of the greatest leaders of the modern age. Convinced as he was that ending slavery was the right and morally necessary thing to do, nonetheless Lincoln in this note to himself refused to blame the other side for the war. None of us, he intimates, can fully understand the divine will or the purposes of history. Even if we are sure that our opponents are wrong, they may be serving some necessary role in the moral drama. Far from this leading him into indecisiveness, it moved him to something quite different: humility and a refusal to demonize his opponents.
Evidently the thought stayed with him, because on October 3, 1863, with the Civil War still at its height, Lincoln issued a Thanksgiving Proclamation. There had been Thanksgiving celebrations since the earliest settlers in the 1620s, but this was the first time a specific day had been set aside for the entire nation. Lincoln urged people to thank God because although the nation was at war with itself, there were still blessings for which both sides could express gratitude: a fruitful harvest, no foreign invasion, and so on. He also asked them to express “humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience,” and commend to God’s tender care “all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.”
Note the various elements of this proclamation. Lincoln does not urge his side against the other. He speaks of national perverseness, encouraging everyone to look within their own hearts and find there the strength to engage in self-criticism, atonement, and humility. He asks all to think of the dead and the bereaved. He asks each to be thankful for what they have, and he asks divine help to heal the wounds of a lacerated nation. It was this that allowed Lincoln, in his second inaugural address, to deliver one of the great unifying political speeches of all time: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan.…”
It is possible to unite a divided nation. It takes time. Like some other peacemakers, Lincoln paid a heavy price, assassinated only a few weeks after this second inaugural. Yet he left an indelible lesson in what it is to speak to what he called “the better angels of our nature.” He showed how to begin healing political wounds and rescuing a nation from division and confrontation.
Lincoln was driven throughout by his idea of the United States as a moral community. Although he did not explicitly use the word “covenant,” it clearly underlay his conception of the nation. This is how John Schaar sums up his political beliefs:
We are a nation formed by a covenant, by dedication to a set of principles and by an exchange of promises to uphold and advance certain commitments among ourselves and throughout the world. Those principles and commitments are the core of American identity, the soul of the body politic. They make the American nation unique, and uniquely valuable, among and to the other nations. But the other side of the conception contains a warning very like the warnings spoken by the prophets to Israel: if we fail in our promises to each other, and lose the principles of the covenant, then we lose everything, for they are we.12
Ultimately, Lincoln was driven by a moral conviction, inspired by the Judeo-Christian ethic and enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. He restated it in the opening sentence of the Gettysburg Address when he spoke of “a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Covenant is about what we have in common despite our differences. It speaks to us as active citizens sharing collective responsibility. It is not the politics of “Us” against “Them”; it is the politics of “all of us together.” This cannot be the whole of politics, because much is inevitably about the clash of interests and the pursuit of power. But it can bring an underlying sense of moral community that holds a society together at times of stress, which is why Lincoln seems to have thought about it so deeply during the crisis years of the Civil War. For although he was deeply committed to the abolition of slavery, he was equally committed to the preservation of the Union. Only by shifting his thought to a higher plane could he reach an understanding of what it would take to achieve both, by speaking to the deepest moral commitments of Americans rather than by demonizing the South.
WE NEED to restore the covenant dimension to politics. Britain and America are today deeply divided societies, and the politics of recent years has played on those divisions. There are winners and losers from the new globalized economy. They live in different parts of the country. They have different attitudes to identity. They have significantly different approaches to family. They live in neighborhoods with radically divergent levels of social capital. Many of those whose incomes have remained static for long periods, or declined, feel that the political and economic elites are simply not interested in their welfare.
This is not, however, the first time that divides have opened up in societies on the basis of economic or geographical stratification. What makes the present moment different is the radical changes that have taken place in Western societies in recent years. Nations used to be held together by a single dominant religion or family of religions, and by a shared culture. That is not the case today. Partly it has to do with immigration. In part it is because of the abandonment, in the name of multiculturalism, of the idea of a national culture into which newcomers—like my father and grandparents, who were all immigrants to Britain—were expected to integrate. Partly also it has to do with the fragmentation of the media, so that people’s attention is only occasionally focused on the same events at the same time. In a global age, the very idea of a national identity has become problematic.
We can no longer build national identity on religion or ethnicity or culture. But we can build it on covenant. A covenantal politics would speak of how, as a polity, an economy, and a culture, our fates are bound together. We benefit from each other. And because this is so, we should feel bound to benefit one another. It would speak about the best of our traditions, and how they are a heritage we are charged with honoring and handing on to future generations. It would be warmly inclusive. A nation is enlarged by its new arrivals who carry with them gifts from other places and other traditions. It would acknowledge that, yes, we have differences of opinion and interest, and sometimes that means favoring one side over another. But we will never do so without giving every side a voice and a respectful hearing. The politics of covenant does not demean or ridicule opponents. It honors the process of reasoning together. It gives special concern to those who most need help, and special honor to those who most give help.
A covenantal politics would emphasize our responsibilities to one another. Depressed areas need to be supported and local communities strengthened. Every individual has to be able to feel that he or she has a chance to fulfill their potential. Ways have to be found to encourage the successful to play their part in developing opportunities for those whom the modern economy has passed by. Covenant does not, in and of itself, suggest a larger or smaller state. It is not on the right or left of politics. It is, rather, a way of thinking about what politics actually represents.
Social contract theories see politics in terms of individual or collective self-interest. Covenant—the classic language of Milton and Locke, the early American settlers, and the Declaration of Independence—is not about interests but about responsibilities. It is about free individuals governing themselves for the sake of the common good, and about the free society as a moral project in which we all play our part, recognizing that our destinies are interwoven.
That vision, which made Britain and America the great defenders of liberty in the twentieth century, has been out of fashion for a long time—for as long, indeed, as the “We” has given way to the “I.” Politics has regressed from covenant to contract: we pay our taxes, the government delivers services, and we search for the deal that is most advantageous to us. That is a diminished view of politics, which can work for a while, but which cannot hold together divided societies. We need to recover the covenant dimension of politics, to ensure that those who guide our destinies do so for the benefit of all.
Today’s politics, which has seen a rise in populism, is often about division and confrontation. It is about dividing a nation into “Us” and “Them.” It is about resentment and fear and allocation of blame. It is about anger and a sense of betrayal. It is oppositional. It proposes handing power to the strong leader who assures his or her followers that, in return for their loyalty, he or she will fight their battles for them.
Covenantal politics, by contrast, is about “We, the people,” bound by a sense of shared belonging and collective responsibility; about strong local communities, active citizens, and the devolution of responsibility. It is about reminding those who have more than they need of their responsibilities to those who have less than they need. It is about ensuring that everyone has a fair chance to make the most of their capacities and their lives.
One of the great historical lessons is that societies become strong when they care for the weak. They become rich when they care for the poor. They become invulnerable when they care for the vulnerable. That is the beating heart of the politics of covenant.
My firm belief is that the concept of covenant has the power to transform the world. It sees relationships in terms not of interests but of moral commitment. It changes everything it touches, from marriage to friendship to economics and politics, by turning self-interested individuals into a community in pursuit of the common good.
There is nothing inevitable about the division, fragmentation, extremism, isolation, economics of inequality, or politics of anger that have been the mood of Britain and America in recent years. They have been the legacy of the misplaced belief that societies can function without a moral bond. They cannot, or at least not for long. That is why we are where we are.
But we can change. Societies have moved from “I” to “We” in the past. They did so in the nineteenth century. They did so in the twentieth century. They can do so in the future.
And it begins with us.