Credo

Chief Rabbi Professor Jonathan Sacks

It may seem bizarre to suggest a connection between the tragedy of 11 September and a Greek philosopher who lived almost 2,500 years ago, yet that is what I am going to claim. I call it Plato's ghost, and it has haunted the Western imagination ever since.

Plato, one of the greatest thinkers who ever lived, was driven by the search for knowledge and truth. How, in this world of chance and change, can we arrive at knowledge that is beyond chance and change? His answer was that reality is not the chaotic profusion of things we see, feel and touch: the thousands of different kinds of chairs, houses or trees. It lies in what is common to each: the form of a chair, house or tree. Things are particular; truth is universal. That was Plato's profound idea. I believe it to be profoundly wrong.

It led to the belief - superficially compelling but quite false - that the more universal a culture is, the closer to truth it comes. After all, if truth is the same for everyone at all times, then if I am right, you are wrong. If I care about truth I must convert you to my point of view, and if you refuse to be converted, beware. From this flowed some of the great crimes of history and much human blood.

Western civilisation has known five great universalist cultures: ancient Greece, ancient Rome, medieval Christianity and Islam, and the Enlightenment. Three were secular, two religious. They brought inestimable gifts to the world, but they also brought great suffering, most notably though not exclusively to Jews. Like a tidal wave they swept away local customs, ancient traditions and different ways of doing things. They were to cultural diversity what industrialisation is to bio-diversity. They extinguished weaker forms of life. They diminished difference.

Today we are living through the sixth universal order: global capitalism. It is the first to be driven not by a set of ideas but by a series of institutions, among them the market, the media and the Internet. But its effect is no less profound. It threatens all things local, traditional and particular. September 11th happened when two univeralist cultures - each profoundly threatening to the other - met and clashed.

It is time we exorcised Plato's ghost. Let me say it clearly and unequivocally: universalism is the cultural counterpart of imperialism. Not all truth is universal. Scientific truth is. Spiritual, religious and at least some moral truth is not. The glory of the human world is its diversity: the six thousand different languages, the hundreds of faiths, the multiplicity of cultures, the sheer variety of the imaginative expressions of mankind, in most of which, if we listen carefully, we will hear the voice of God telling us something we need to know.

The true moral universals are few and exist to protect cultural and religious difference: the sanctity of human life, the dignity of the human person, and the freedom we need to be true to ourselves while being a blessing to others. To put it another way, there is a fundamental difference between God and religion. God is universal, religion is particular. We serve God, author of diversity, by respecting diversity. God no more wants all faiths and cultures to be the same than a loving parent wants his or her children to be the same.

When universal civilisations clash, the world shakes, and lives are lost. We will make peace in this troubled world only when we learn that God loves difference and so, at last, must we.

© Copyright Office of the Chief Rabbi 2001 - all rights reserved. Reproduction of this Web site, in whole or in part, in any form or medium without express written permission from the Office of the Chief Rabbi is prohibited.