The West urgently needs moral rearmament to confront the challenge of aggressive autocrats

Christopher Garbowski

May 15, 2024 7 Reactions

Lack of a sense of community

Poland is Ukraine’s neighbour -- unsurprisingly the need for military rearmament is agreed upon by a broad political spectrum of the society. But the need for moral rearmament is mostly felt by those who intuitively realize where heroes come from: the strength of community.

In contemporary Europe this seems to be hardly understood.

Communities draw us from out of ourselves. Conversely, one of the moral degradations of modern societies in the West is the radical shift from the “We” to the “I”. As Jonathan Sacks puts it in his Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times (2020), “If we focus on the ‘I’ and lose the ‘We,’ if we act on self-interest without a commitment to the common good, if we focus on self-esteem and lose our care for others, we will lose much else.”

The late Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth goes on to categorize some of the results of the losses: the emergence of a market that will be inhuman, and politics that are divisive, among others. “Freedom itself will be at risk,” he warns, with “the far right dreaming of a golden age that never was, the far left dreaming of a utopia that will never be.”

Sacks points out the basic institutions necessary for all countries and cultures: an economy that creates opportunity for wealth; a state that fosters a just use of power; and, crucially, a moral system, “which is the voice of society within the self; the ‘We’ within the ‘I’; the common good that directs our pursuit of private gain.”

He warns of the moral havoc that is incurred when too much stress is placed on wealth and power. Society ceases to be free since a free society is a moral achievement, which paradoxically requires self-restraint: “without the capacity to defer the gratification of instinct, and without the habits of the heart that we call virtue, we will eventually lose our freedom.”

As culture-creating, meaning-seeking beings, people need moral community to support these endeavours. That is where religion comes in. Religiosity inspires altruism and empathy. “Religion creates community,” Sacks professes, “community creates altruism, and altruism turns us away from self and toward the common good.”

Returning to the problem of moral rearmament, the new Leviathans have their ways of tampering with the common good in the West.

Take the European Union. There is a rich literature on the democratic deficit of this organization. The EU has no “demos,” as constitutional expert Joseph Weiler has observed. Thus, possessing a loaned sovereignty, it often undemocratically absorbs the sovereignty of its member states to a greater extent than the accession treaties allow, likewise employing favouritism and double standards in the treatment of its members.

The “European values” trumpeted by Eurocrats hardly foster moral community and their hyper-liberalism smothers it. Perhaps this is why the citizens of many of its member states shudder at the thought of having to defend their national communities.

A related explanation for this state of affairs is the rise of meritocracies among the Eurocrats and among the political class of member states. In his 2020 book The Tyranny of Merit, political philosopher Michael Sandel argues that when a society develops a powerful meritocracy, the result is divisive politics. Many of its members will be highly individualistic and place little value on community and the common good. Sandel uses American examples, but his analysis applies to the Polish meritocracy, as well.

And so now in Poland, the meritocracy bows to a hyper-liberal Leviathan that continually undermines moral community and obstructs moral rearmament. Not rarely this is augmented by deference to the EU meritocracy. These people misunderstand or undervalue the rich resources of Poland’s history. As a result, in the event of a genuine military threat, those willing to fight may be outnumbered by those taking flight.

Like other countries in the West, many of the political and cultural elite of Poland barely understand the need for the common good of an enriched community and for moral rearmament. Meanwhile, Russia poses a mortal danger. Will Poland be prepared to fight? Will its Western allies? 

What do you think about the need for “moral rearmament”? Tell us in the comments below.  

Christopher Garbowski is a professor emeritus at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, Poland. He has been primarily interested in values and religion in literature and popular culture and is the author and co-editor of a number of books. He is also on the editorial board of “Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe” and was formerly a book review editor at “The Polish Review”. His most recent book is “The Problem of Moral Rearmament: Poland, the European Union, and the War in Ukraine” (2024). 

Image credits: Russian soldiers on parade / Bigstock