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

by Ben Shapiro

Kepler (1571–1630), the discoverer of the laws of planetary motion, explained: “The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order and harmony which has been imposed on it by God and which He revealed to us in the language of mathematics.”5

“a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.”

Thus, Descartes stated, “Cogito, ergo sum”—I think, therefore I am. From this basis, he reintroduced a good God who would not create senses that lie to us.

“A shoemaker, a smith, a farmer, each has his manual occupation and work; and, yet, at the same time, all are eligible to act as priests and bishops.”

George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights, which was far more specific: “all men are born equally free and independent.”

James Madison summed up the sentiment well in Federalist #51: If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.40

The Constitution, as well as the Declaration of Independence, and the sentiments of the founders of the Republic, give us a platform broad enough, and strong enough, to support the most comprehensive plans for the freedom and elevation of all the people of this country, without regard to color, class, or clime.42

the founding philosophy was based on both secular reason and religious morality, that modernity was built on these twin poles, cultivated and perfected through the fires of religious warfare and secular argument.

5 If moral relativism began anywhere, it began in Hobbes.

The human heart, he said, had embedded within it a moral logic. And that moral logic relied on categorical imperatives: absolute truths.

And what is our purpose in this world? Not to indulge our appetites, but to render obedience to divine ordinance.15

According to Marcuse, “the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed.” Freedom, Marcuse said, was “serving the cause of oppression”; oppression, therefore, could serve the cause of freedom.

Feminist author Simone de Beauvoir, author of The Second Sex and existentialist partner of Sartre, went so far as to say that society should bar women from becoming mothers: “No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one. It is a way of forcing women in a certain direction.”22

Those who refuse to abide by tribal dictates of intersectionality—people who insist that they are not victims of American society simply by dint of their skin color—are deemed sell-outs, Uncle Toms. Thus Clarence Thomas is not legitimately black because he doesn’t vote Democrat; Nikki Haley isn’t legitimately a woman because she is a pro-life Republican. According to Ta-Nehisi Coates, when black people call for individualistic thinking that strays from traditional Democratic ideology, that means supporting “white freedom”: “freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant.”

That’s the argument of Donna Hughes in the Women’s Studies International Forum, who explains, “The scientific method is a tool for the construction and justification of dominance in the world . . . the new methodological techniques were invented by men who were interested in explaining the inheritance of traits in order to support their political ideology of natural human superiority and inferiority.”

As Heather Mac Donald points out, the American Astronomical Society has now asked PhD programs to stop using the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) in physics for applicants, since too few women were doing well. The same is happening in medicine, where schools have been encouraged to stop using the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) for ethnic minorities. The impact: “From 2013 to 2016, medical schools nationally admitted 57 percent of black applicants with a low MCAT of 24 to 26, but only 8 percent of whites and 6 percent of Asians with those same low scores, according to Claremont McKenna professor Frederick Lynch.” How it helps patients to have less qualified but more ethnically diverse heart surgeons remains unexplained.34

Better false statistics and bad social science than to violate someone’s sense of self-esteem.

The easiest way to evade responsibility is to avoid teaching our children our values.

As Ronald Reagan put it, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”2

And if society is acting to violate individual rights, it is your job to work to change it. You are a human being, made in the image of God, bound to the earth but with a soul that dreams of the eternal.

You did not create your freedoms or your definition of virtue, nor did they arise in a vacuum. Learn your history. Explore where the roots of your values lie: in Jerusalem and Athens. Be grateful for those roots. Then defend those roots, even as you grow to new heights.

As Abraham Lincoln said in his First Inaugural Address, “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”3

G. K. Chesterton did, “If you don’t see the use of [that wall], I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”