19. Friedrich A. Von Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1960; J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, New York, Praeger, 1960.
20. Oliver Goldsmith, ‘The Traveller’, in The Poems and Plays of Oliver Goldsmith, London, 1841, p. 4.
21. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, p. 35.
8. Morality
1. Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1996, p. 51.
2. Martin Buber, Good and Evil, Two Interpretations, Gloucester, MA, Peter Smith, 1992, p. 142.
3. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Oxford, Clarendon, 1976, opening.
4. Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society, New York, Harmony, 2009, p. 79.
5. Dacher Keltner, Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life, New York, W. W. Norton & Co., 2009, p. 232.
6. Robert Wright, The Moral Animal: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology, New York, Pantheon, 1994.
7. Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy, p. 91; Dacher Keltner, Jason Marsh and Jeremy Adam Smith, The Compassionate Instinct: The Science of Human Goodness, New York, W. W. Norton & Co., 2010, p. 19.
8. That animals are capable of compassion is taken for granted by Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, Book III, 48.
9. Voltaire, Political Writings, ed. David Williams, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 190.
10. Rousseau, The Social Contract, New York, Penguin, 2006.
11. Quoted in Robert Horwitz, The Moral Foundations of the American Republic, Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 1986, p. 213.
12. Leo Tolstoy and Jane Kentish, A Confession and Other Religious Writings, London, Penguin, 1987, p. 150.
13. A. N. Wilson, God’s Funeral, New York, W. W. Norton & Co., 1999.
14. Elizabeth Anscombe, ‘Modern moral philosophy’, reprinted in G. E. M. Anscombe, Mary Geach and Luke Gormally, Human Life, Action, and Ethics: Essays, Exeter, UK, Imprint Academic, 2005, pp. 169–94.
15. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, London, Duckworth, 1981.
16. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1987.
17. David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1961.
18. Plato, The Republic, Book 2, 2.359a–360d.
19. Edmund Burke, ‘Letter to a member of the French assembly’, The Works and Correspondence of Edmund Burke, London, F. & J. Rivington, 1852, vol. 4, p. 319.
20. Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1948.
21. Epicurus, The Essential Epicurus: Letters, Principal Doctrines, Vatican Sayings, and Fragments, ed. Eugene Michael O’Connor, Buffalo, NY, Prometheus, 1993; Carus Titus Lucretius and A. E. Stallings, The Nature of Things, London, Penguin, 2007.
22. Herschel Baker, The Image of Man: A Study of the Idea of Human Dignity in Classical Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, New York, Harper & Row, 1961, pp. 84–8.
23. Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1972, p. 258.
24. Michael Tooley, Abortion and Infanticide, Oxford, Clarendon, 1983.
25. Ian Dowbiggin, A Concise History of Euthanasia: Life, Death, God, and Medicine, Lanham, UK, Rowman & Littlefield, 2005; Anthony Gottlieb, The Dream of Reason: A History of Western Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance, New York, W. W. Norton & Co., 2000.
26. Peter Singer, Rethinking Life and Death: the Collapse of Our Traditional Ethics, New York, St Martin’s Griffin, 1996.
27. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1981, pp. 158–84.
28. Ibid., p. 166.
29. David Sloan Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2002.
30. Darwin, The Descent of Man, p. 162.
31. Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1987, p. 6.
32. So, it should be said, did Darwin. See Adrian J. Desmond and James R. Moore, Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution, Boston, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009.
33. John Stuart Mill, On the Logic of the Moral Sciences, Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill, 1965, p. 111.
34. Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, p. 19.
35. Plato, The Republic, 560–4.
9. Relationships
1. Genesis Rabbah 68:4.
2. Babylonian Talmud, Sotah 17a.
3. Quoted in Ferdinand Mount, The Subversive Family: An Alternative History of Love and Marriage, New York, Free Press, 1992, p. 2.
4. David Martin, The Religious and the Secular: Studies in Secularization, New York, Schocken, 1969; David Martin, A General Theory of Secularization, New York, Harper & Row, 1979; Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2007.
5. Jill Kirby, Broken Hearts: Family Decline and the Consequences for Society, London, Centre for Policy Studies, 2002; David Popenoe, War over the Family, New Brunswick, NJ, Transaction, 2005.
6. Oliver James, Britain on the Couch: Why We’re Unhappier Compared with 1950 Despite Being Richer: A Treatment for the Low-Serotonin Society, London, Arrow, 1998.
7. Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 7a.
8. Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, All Things Shining, New York, Free Press, 2011.
9. Buddhism values love, but in a somewhat different sense.
10. See James Barr, Biblical Faith and Natural Theology: The Gifford Lectures for 1991, Delivered in the University of Edinburgh, Oxford, Clarendon, 1993, p. 59.
11. Jeremiah 31:29–30; Ezekiel 18:2–4.
12. See Joshua Berman, The Temple: Its Symbolism and Meaning Then and Now, Northvale, NJ, Jason Aronson, 1995.
13. Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Earth Is the Lord’s, and the Sabbath, New York, Harper Torch, 1966.
14. I have written more on this in Jonathan Sacks, Covenant and Conversation, a Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible: Genesis, the Book of Beginnings, New Milford, NJ, Maggid & The Orthodox Union, 2009.
15. Midrash Tanhuma, Genesis 25.
16. Midrash Tehillim (Buber), to Psalm 92.
17. The roots ch-v-h and ch-b-a are semantically linked. The root ch-b-a is used earlier in the passage when the couple ‘hide’ from God (Genesis 3:8, 10).
18. Edmund Leach, A Runaway World? New York, Oxford University Press, 1968.
19. Robert Frost, ‘Death of the Hired Man’, in Birches and Other Poems, Mineola, NY, Dover Publications, 2001.
10. A Meaningful Life
1. Wallace Stevens, ‘The Plain Sense of Things’, in Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, New York, Literary Classics of the United States, 1997, p. 428.
2. Rebecca Goldstein, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, New York, Pantheon, 2010, p. 308.
3. Leo Tolstoy, A Confession, trans. Jane Kentish, London, Penguin, 2008, p. 29.
4. Ibid., pp. 31–2.
5. Ibid., p. 54.
6. ‘Religious faith and superstition are quite different. One of them results from fear and is a sort of false science. The other is a trusting.’ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1980, p. 72e.
7. Shakespeare, King Lear, Act IV, scene 1.
8. Dylan Thomas, ‘And Death Shall Have No Dominion’, in Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems 1934–1952, London, Dent, 1952.
9. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, London, Penguin Books, 2005, p. 1.
10. Ibid., p. 58.
11. Ibid., p. 119.
12. Ibid., p. 117.
13. Philip Rieff, My Life among the Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority, Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2006.<
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14. This is the worldview associated with Richard Rorty and the postmodernists. See, for example, Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991; Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
15. Roy A. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 107–38.
16. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970, p. 84.
17. William Wordsworth, ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’, The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, edited by Thomas Hutchinson, London, Henry Frowde, 1904, p. 206.
18. Vico’s thesis is that we can only fully understand what we have made. Since we did not make nature, we can never achieve a full knowledge of it. We can, however, achieve a full knowledge of culture. Giambattista Vico, New Science: Principles of the New Science Concerning the Common Nature of Nations, trans. David Marsh, London, Penguin Classics, 1999. Maimonides articulated the same principle several centuries earlier, in Guide for the Perplexed, Book III, 21.
19. See the section ‘For Further Reading’, pp. 339–341 of this book, for the key books on happiness from which this section is drawn.
20. William Wordsworth, ‘The World Is Too Much With Us’, The Poetical Works, Hutchinson, ed, p. 259.
21. Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land, London, Allen Lane, 2010, p. 1.
22. See http://www.civitas.org.uk/hwu/cohabitation.php.
23. Viktor Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul, New York, Vintage, 1986, p. 32.
24. Mishneh, Avot 1:14.
25. Ideas and Opinions by Albert Einstein, New York, Dell, 1954, p. 11.
26. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, New York, W. W. Norton & Co., 2005, p. 76.
27. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914–1916, 2nd ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1979, 74e, 8.7.16.
28. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York, Vintage, 1974, Book V, para. 373, p. 336.
11. Darwin
1. William P. Brown, The Seven Pillars of Creation: The Bible, Science, and the Ecology of Wonder, New York, Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 240.
2. Voltaire, The Philosophical Dictionary, selected and trans. H. I. Woolf, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1924.
3. Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1974, p. 405.
4. Max Planck, Where Is Science Going? trans. J. Murphy, London, Allen and Unwin, 1933.
5. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York, Vintage, 1974, para. 125.
6. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, London, Routledge, 2001.
7. For a similar view about poetry, see Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, New York, Oxford Univeristy Press, 1973.
8. Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, Book I, 2.
9. Babylonian Talmud, Pesachim 54a; Genesis Rabbah 11:2.
10. George Gaylord Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution, A Study of the History of Life and of Its Significance for Man, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1949.
11. Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, London, Penguin, 1988, p. 6.
12. Steven J. Gould, ‘Non-overlapping magisteria’, Natural History, March 1997.
13. Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 32a.
14. Albert Einstein, Out of My Later Years (Essays), New York, Philosophical Library, 1950, p. 25.
15. Genesis Rabbah 10:8.
16. Timothy Ferris, The Whole Shebang: A State-of-the-universe(s) Report, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1997, p. 311.
17. Matt Ridley, Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters, New York, HarperCollins, 1999, p. 21.
18. Francis Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, New York, Free Press, 2006.
19. Joseph Dov Soloveitchik and Michael S. Berger, The Emergence of Ethical Man, Hoboken, NJ, KTAV Publishing House, 2005.
20. Ecclesiastes Rabbah 7:13.
21. Genesis Rabbah 3:7; Rabbi Abraham Kook, Iggrot Re’iyah, vol. 1, 105–7.
22. Nahmanides, Commentary to Genesis 37:15, literally, ‘an unwitting emissary of the Holy One’.
23. Charles Darwin, Autobiographies, London, Penguin, 2002, p. 50.
24. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Oxford, Oxford Paperbacks, 2008, Book I, II, 19.
25. Ibid., Book IV, II, 9.
26. Steven Johnson, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, New York, Scribner, 2001.
27. Ibid., p. 59.
28. Simon Conway Morris, Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 283–4.
29. This – the nature of divine foreknowledge and its compatibility or otherwise with human freedom – is a huge subject. See Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, Book III, 21, and the argument between Maimonides and Raavad, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Teshuvah 5:5.
30. Roy Baumeister, The Cultural Animal: Human Nature, Meaning, and Social Life, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005.
31. Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind, Oxford, Blackwell, 1953.
32. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 200–1.
33. Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works, London, Penguin, 1997, p. 52.
12. The Problem of Evil
1. Herbert N. Schneidau, Sacred Discontent, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1977, p. 2.
2. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2008, p. 138.
3. See John Bowker, The Meanings of Death, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991.
4. John Keats, letter to George and Georgiana Keats, Sunday 14 February 1819. ‘Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways!’
5. Mishneh Torah, Mattenot Ani’im 10:7.
6. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, trans., with introduction and commentary, R. J. Hollingdale, London, Penguin, 1968, pp. 80–1.
7. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, Second Essay, p. 11.
8. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Oxford, UK, Oxford World’s Classics, 2008, ch. 1.
9. Genesis Rabbah 84:21.
10. Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, Book III, 12.
11. Nikolai Berdyaev, The Meaning of History, New Brunswick, NJ, Transaction, 2006, pp. 86–107.
12. John Cottingham, The Spiritual Dimension, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 23.
13. Christopher Dawson, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, New York, Doubleday, 1991, p. 15.
13. When Religion Goes Wrong
1. Willam Blake, ‘The Everlasting Gospel’, c. 1818.
2. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer, London, Penguin, 1995, no. 813.
3. Quoted by Joseph Addison in The Spectator, vol. 6, p. 249.
4. C. S. Lewis, letter to Bede Griffiths, 20 December 1961.
5. Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, London, Jonathan Cape, 1999.
6. For a comprehensive statement of this argument, see David Berlinski, The Devil’s Delusion, New York, Crown Forum, 2008.
7. Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, London, Secker and Warburg, 1951.
8. Scott Atran, Talking to the Enemy, London, Allen Lane, 2010.
9. Babylonian Talmud, Kiddushin 49a.
10. See Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, Notre Dame, IN, Notre Dame University Press, 1964.
11. Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Melakhim 5:4.
13. See Avi Sagi, ‘The punishment of Amalek in Jewish tradition: coping with the moral problem’, Harvard Theological Review 87, pp. 323–46; Avi Sagi, Yahadut: ben dat le-musar, Israel, ha-Kibuts ha-me’uhad be-shituf Mekhon Shalom Hartman u-Merkaz Ya’akov Hertsog, 1998, pp. 199–219.
14. Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev, Kedushat Levi, Jerusalem, 2001, section on Purim; Gerald Cromer, ‘Amalek as Other, Other as Amalek: Interpreting a Violent Narrative’, Qualitative Sociology, 24:2, 2001, pp. 191–202.
15. Islam has a similar reinterpretation of the word jihad. See David Cook, Understanding Jihad, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2005.
16. Babylonian Talmud, Kiddushin 30b.
17. Babylonian Talmud, Megillah 10b.
18. The classic work is Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews, the Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Antisemitism, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1943.
19. The best account is Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, New York, Harper & Row, 1967.
20. Roy F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Cruelty and Violence, New York, W. H. Freeman, 1997; Aaron T. Beck, Prisoners of Hate: The Cognitive Basis of Anger, Hostility and Violence, New York, HarperCollins, 1999; Vamik Volkan, The Need to Have Enemies and Allies: From Clinical Practice to International Relationships, Northvale, NJ, J. Aronson, 1988; Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
21. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, London, Paladin, 1970.
22. Ibid., pp. 285–6.
23. Ibid., p. 285.
24. Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution, New York, Basic, 1985, pp. 135, 145.
25. Flavius Josephus, G. A. Williamson and E. Mary Smallwood, The Jewish War, London, Penguin, 1981, p. 264.
26. For a balanced survey of the subject, see David Biale, Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History, New York, Schocken Books, 1986.
27. Abraham Lincoln, ‘Second Inaugural Address’, in Andrew Delbanco (ed.), The Portable Abraham Lincoln, New York, Viking, 1992, p. 321.
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