A DIAGNOSIS FOR OUR ILLS

Lastmonth,RabbiLordJonathanSackswasawardedthe prestigious Templeton Prize for his contribution to spiritual life.Inhisacceptancespeech,publishedhere,heexplored themoraldecaybehindthecrisisinWesterncivilisation

I WANT to consider one phenomenon that has shaped the West, leading it at first to greatness, but now to crisis, and whose implications, I believe, we have not fully understood. I mean: outsourcing.

On the face of it, nothing could be more innocent or productive. It’s the basis of the modern economy. It’s Adam Smith’s division of labour and David Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage that says, even if you are better than me at everything, still we both gain if you do what you’re best at and I do what I’m best at and we trade. The question is: are there limits? Are there things we can’t or shouldn’t outsource?

The issue has arisen because of the new technologies and the birth of instantaneous global communication. So, instead of outsourcing within an economy, we do it between economies. We’ve seen the outsourcing of production to low-wage countries. We’ve seen the outsourcing of services,sothatyoucanbeinonetownin the US, booking a hotel in another, unawarethatyourcallisbeingtakeninIndia.

This seemed like a good idea at the time, as if the West was saying to the world: you do the producing and we’ll dotheconsuming.Butisthatsustainable in the long run?

Then banks began to outsource risk, lending far beyond their capacities in the belief that either property prices would go on rising forever or, more significantly, if they crashed, it would be someone else’s problem, not mine.

There is, though, one form of outsourcing that tends to be little noticed: the outsourcing of memory. Our computers and smartphones have developed larger and larger memories, from kilobytes to megabytes to gigabytes, while our memories, and those of our children have got smaller and smaller. In fact, why bother to remember anything these days if you can look it up in a microsecond on Google or Wikipedia?

But here, I think, we made a mistake. We confused history and memory, which are not the same thing at all. History is an answer to the question, “What happened?” Memory is an answer to the question, “Who am I?” History is about facts, memory is about identity. History is his-story. It happened to someone else, not me. Memory is my story, the past that made me who I am, of whose legacy I am the guardian for the sake of generations yet to come. Without memory, there is no identity. And without identity, we are mere dust on the surface of infinity.

Without identity we are dust on the surface of infinity