Home We Build Together

The Home We Build Together: Recreating Society by Jonathan Sacks, 240 pages

In The Home We Build Together, Lord Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth for over twenty years and a noted British commentator on religious and cultural matters before, during, and after his service in that office, presents a penetrating analysis of the successes and failures of liberal democracy.  In his view, liberal democracy in the Anglo-American mold is predicated on the realization that government is secondary in importance to a thriving civil society.  Part of the tragedy of the last fifty years, then, has been the increasing politicization of so much of life, accelerating the social fragmentation set into motion by consumerism and new communications technologies.  The result has been the nearly complete disappearance of the kind of narrative that builds and sustains communities.

Sacks begins with the basic understanding that communities are primarily moral in nature.  With traditional, inherited moral narratives in decline, the future belongs to deliberate, intentional communities, united in a network of shared values by the ecumenism of the trenches.  It is the chief virtue of liberal democracy that it allows room for civil society, embodied in such networks, to thrive.  Sacks' vision, then, is a profoundly optimistic one - the dissolution of the old social order, while creating the danger of total social collapse, also allows for the possibility of the growth of a more diverse, inclusive society.  Simultaneously, he is adamant that this new civil society can only be built from the ground up, and attempts to orchestrate its growth by political means will only exacerbate the conflicts that fatally undermined the old order.  For this dose of sanity alone - the recognition that political activism, however worthy the cause, is among the least important reasons why human beings associate and form relationships, and among the least effective means of achieving anything worthwhile - The Home We Build Together is a vitally important book.