The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great

by Ben Shapiro

In 1900, some 10 percent of all infants died before reaching their first birthday in the United States; in other countries, the number was far higher. Approximately one in every one hundred mothers could expect to die in childbirth.

an adult in the United States can go about his or her daily business with the expectation that she will not be arrested for espousing an unpopular viewpoint or worshipping the wrong god or no god at all.

Facts have been buried to make way for feelings; a society of essential oils and self-esteem has replaced a society of logic.

The only thing we still seem to trust is the military—which makes sense, since it provides for our common defense.7

The upper middle class in the United States grew from 12 percent of Americans in 1979 to 30 percent as of 2014.

In 1958, just 4 percent of Americans approved of black-white intermarriage; as of 2013, that statistic was 87 percent.16 In that year, 72 percent of white Americans thought race relations were good, and so did 66 percent of black Americans; that statistic had remained relatively stable from 2001 through 2013.

was pretty skeptical. After all, I’d never needed security for any event. This wasn’t Fallujah. This was a major college campus in the middle of my home city.

We believe freedom is built upon the twin notions that God created every human in His image, and that human beings are capable of investigating and exploring God’s world. Those notions were born in Jerusalem and Athens, respectively.

twin ideals of Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law reasoning built human rights. They built prosperity, peace, and artistic beauty. Jerusalem and Athens built America, ended slavery, defeated the Nazis and the Communists, lifted billions from poverty, and gave billions spiritual purpose. Jerusalem and Athens were the foundations of the Magna Carta and the Treaty of Westphalia; they were the foundations of the Declaration of Independence, Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail.

Sabbath is the high point of many Jews’ weeks. There’s an old saying in the Jewish community: the Jews didn’t keep the Sabbath, the Sabbath kept the Jews. It certainly kept us sane.

politics helps us establish the preconditions necessary for happiness, but can’t provide happiness in and of itself. The Founding Fathers knew that. That’s why Thomas Jefferson didn’t write that the government was granted power to grant you happiness: it was there to protect your pursuit of happiness.

Perhaps the problem is that what we’re pursuing isn’t happiness anymore. We’re instead pursuing other priorities: physical pleasure, emotional catharsis, monetary stability.

‘Come now, I will mix [wine] with joy and experience pleasure,’ and behold, this too was vanity.”

To Aristotle, “good” wasn’t a subjective term, something for each of us to define for ourselves; “good” was a statement of objective fact. Something was “good” if it fulfilled its purpose. A good watch tells time; a good dog defends its master. What does a good human being do? Acts in accordance with right reason.

“the consideration that human happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected, will always continue to prompt me to promote the progress of the former, by inculcating the practice of the latter.”

Happiness is the pursuit of purpose in our lives. If we have lived with moral purpose, even death becomes less painful.

“I believe that the pursuit of truth and right ideas through honest debate and rigorous argument is a noble undertaking. . . . I leave this life with no regrets.”

We need, in my estimate, four elements: individual moral purpose, individual capacity to pursue that purpose, communal moral purpose, and communal capacity to pursue that purpose.

The key phrase—the beginning of Western civilization—lies in Genesis 1:26: we are all made in God’s image.

We are endowed not merely with rights, but with duties.

Voltaire famously stated, “I want my lawyer, my tailor, my servants, even my wife to believe in God, because it means that I shall be cheated and robbed and cuckolded less often. . . . If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.”

Scientific materialists talk constantly about the power of reason, and why reason ought to reject religion. But the very notion of reason—the notion of a logical argument that drives my behavior—is foreign to scientific materialism. If we are a set of firing neurons and flowing hormones and nothing more, why appeal to reason? Why appeal to arguments? Reason is just an illusion, the same way free will is. Neurons fire, which cause other neurons to fire, generating a response from another set of neurons in another human body. Of course, to deny reason would be to end all human communication, destroy our politics, to tear down what it means to be a human being at the root. It would end science itself—we can only stab through the pasteboard mask at the nature of the universe by using our cognitive abilities. We must believe in reason to live productive lives.

if it were beneficial for us to calculate that 2+2=5, it would not make it true. But we care about both the moral and the true, and that requires a baseline assumption: that we can discover the moral and the true.

a massive longitudinal Harvard study found that the single best predictor of lifelong happiness was the presence of close relationships: satisfaction with relationships at age fifty was actually more predictive of long-term health than cholesterol level.23

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

The best countries—and the best societies—are those where citizens are virtuous enough to sacrifice for the common good but unwilling to be forced to sacrifice for the “greater” good.

First, Judaism claimed that God was unified, that a master plan stood behind everything. Second, Judaism stated that human beings were held to particular behavioral standards for moral, not utilitarian reasons—we were ordered to be moral at the behest of a higher power, even if God’s rules could benefit us in this life. Third, Judaism claimed that history progressed: that revelation was the beginning, but it was not the end, that man had a responsibility to pursue God and bring about a redemption of mankind, and that God could use a particular example—a chosen people—to act as a light unto the nations. Finally, Judaism claimed that God had endowed man with choice, that men were responsible for their choices, and that our choices mattered.

The gods were arbitrary. They were unchained to rules. This meant that human behavior wasn’t tied to divine behavior.

Now, that didn’t mean that every sin would be punished with a prompt and proportional consequence—God doesn’t play whack-a-mole with human sin.

Polytheism argued that the gods were holy, and thus human beings ought to serve them; Judaism argued that we ought to be holy in imitation of God.11

The Jewish creation story notes that God intervenes day by day to create new levels of complexity in the material world, and then He rests.

No people has ever insisted more firmly than the Jews that history has a purpose and humanity a destiny.

We are all created equal in our endowment with a certain level of free will.

Perhaps the most important sentence ever penned was this, from Genesis 1:27: “God created man in His image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.”

“Why are you annoyed, and why has your countenance fallen? Is it not so that if you improve, it will be forgiven you? If you do not improve, however, at the entrance, sin is lying, and to you is its longing, but you can rule over it.”24

“Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.”

The Bible states openly that we are free agents with the capacity to choose sin or holiness, and that we have the obligation to do so. We

The Bible also makes clear that our job is to use our minds to discover God—to seek Him out, to ask questions, to struggle with Him.

Judaism believes that power ought to exist in the first instance in the family; secondly, in the community of faith; and finally, in the government.

“I will not rule over you, nor shall my son rule over you, the Lord shall rule over you.”

there is ample basis in the Bible for the notion that various forms of state organization for purposes of enshrining both individual and collective purpose can work. That truth would become obvious during the pre-Enlightenment period, when widespread reading of the Bible would overturn centuries of theocratic power.

The value of an object lies in its capacity to achieve the purpose for which it was designed.

philosopher Leo Strauss suggests, no society can be built on a multiplicity of end goals.13

“Let us remember,” Aristotle says, “that we should not disregard the experience of ages.”21

Christianity’s focus on grace rather than works makes it a far more accessible religion than Judaism in a practical sense.

Hugh of Saint-Victor (1096–1141) famously stated, “Learn everything, later you will see that nothing is superfluous”;

As theology professor Ernest Fortin suggests, Aquinas believes that “between the truths of Revelation and the knowledge acquired by the sole use of reason and experience there is a distinction but there can be no fundamental disagreement.”23

Bacon was a devoted Aristotelian who suggested gathering facts before coming to conclusions. He

The age of scientific progress didn’t begin with the Enlightenment. It began in the monasteries of Europe.

“I say that as to the truth of the knowledge which is given by mathematical proofs, this is the same that Divine wisdom recognizes, [although] our understanding . . . is infinitely surpassed by the Divine. [Yet] when I consider what marvelous things and how many of them men have understood, inquired into, and contrived, I recognize and understand only too clearly that the human mind is a work of God’s, and one of the most excellent.”4