Saturday 26 June 2010

Sacks (2 of 5) : On Responsibility

“There have been five universalist cultures in the history of the West –cultures that imposed their way of life on others through conquest, conversion… They were the empires of ancient Greece and Rome, medieval Christianity and Islam, and the European Enlightenment. Globalisation is the sixth, the first to be driven not by power or ideology but by the neutral, impersonal forces of the market.

There is a personal dimension to existence. We are not powerless in the face of fate. Every technological advance can be used for good or evil. There is nothing inevitably benign or malign in our increasing powers. It depends on the use we make of them. What we can create, we can control. What we initiate, we can direct. With every new power come control, responsibility, and exercise of the moral imagination. Global capitalism is not a juggernaut that no one can steer. It can be turned this way or that by collective consent. Our aim must be to maximize human dignity and hand on to future generations a more gracious, less capricious world."

(from Jonathan Sacks 'A Jewish Perspective' contribution to "Making Globalisation Good", Oxford, Dunning, 2003)

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