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

by Ben Shapiro

less. Conspiracies have replaced reason and subjective perceptions have replaced objective observation.

And you and your family and your community have but one job: to direct that ship toward the God that made you, the God that cares about you.

This is the Jewish and Christian God.

In particular, Judaism (and later, as we’ll see, Christianity) granted individual purpose and communal purpose.

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 particula...

Finally, Judaism claimed that God had endowed man with choice, that men were responsible for their choices,...

Christianity took the messages of Judaism and broadened them: it focused more heavily on grace, and successfully spread the fundamental principles of Judaism, as emended by Christiani...

Those same leaders suggest that we live in a world of destructive chaos—that there is no plan, no progress, no personal accountability. They’ve argued that we are nothing more than victims of the systems into which we are born—we are inescapably earthbound.

“Accepting a polytheistic view of life, the ancients were under no pressure to deny the existence of the gods of other peoples. . . . Difficulties only surfaced when one group assertively denied the very existence of other gods. This was the case with the Jews, who in consequence became the least tolerant of all ancient peoples.”1

mover—a singular God instead of myriad gods—would require that logic govern the universe, a predictable set of rules discernible by the human mind.

The plethora of gods were created to explain a world without rules. In that way, polytheism is more pessimistic and more cynical than Judeo-Christian monotheism.

polytheism is rooted in a hardheaded belief in that which we can

God—a pantheistic notion that continues to resonate down until today in “spiritual but not religious” circles, as well as in many Eastern religions.

Judaism claimed that God was now singular.

Furthermore, Judaism claimed that God had rules—and that He abided by those rules.

In a chaotic world with no master moral values, the story of Abraham would make no sense.

The notion of a moral universe is a Judaic creation.

Finally, Judaism rebuked the notion of a corporeal god in ringing fashion. Judaism is antimaterialism; it specifically rejects the idea that what we can see is all there is, or that the spiritual must be made physically manifest.

It requires us to reach beyond that which our senses perceive. We must think beyond our physical limits—and we must recognize our own limited thinking, since any description of God is bound to be physical, and thus homonymic rather than literal.

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

A singular God meant a singular standard for behavior. Consequences couldn’t merely be attributed to the interplay between the various self-interested gods; instead, consequences were life lessons, meant to teach us to be moral.

Because Biblical sacrifices aren’t designed merely to appease a higher power. They’re designed to change us, to teach us something.

Reason can teach us how not to be bad—how not to harm others, for example.

But revelation teaches how to be good: it teaches us which values we ought to hold dear, which characteristics we ought to cultivate. Revelation is necessary to raise us beyond the realm of the mediocre.

God exists outside of time, but He is intimately involved in creating progress.

When God intervenes in the world, it is to better the lot of mankind, or to teach lessons. God inserts Himself in history by preserving Noah and his family;

The story of humanity is a story of the romance between an honorable God and a straying nation—a nation that knows better, but must learn and relearn to love God once more, and a God who occasionally turns away His face but waits patiently for His people to return to Him.

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

The creation story itself is designed to demonstrate how the first man, Adam, used his innate power of choice wrongly—and we are all Adam’s descendants.

God lays out the importance of choice—of proper exercise of free will—in Deuteronomy: See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. For I command you today to love the Lord, your God, to walk in obedience to him, and to keep his commands, decrees and laws. . . . Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.25 Because we choose, we are God’s partners in creation.

Let’s return to our original standard for happiness: individual purpose, individual capacity, communal purpose, and communal capacity. What does Judaism alone have to say about these necessary elements?

As King Solomon concludes in Ecclesiastes, the purpose of human existence is simple: “Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.”

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. We believe that God abides by certain rules morally, and that he has set out certain rules for the world He created—that life is not an arbitrary scheme of chaotic last-minute decisions made by a variety of gods fighting for supremacy.

The notion of a search for truth outside of God is foreign to Biblical thought.

But King himself only thought the moral arc existed in the context of a religious narrative of history.

“Evil may so shape events that Caesar will occupy a palace and Christ a cross, but that same Christ will rise up and split history into A.D. and B.C., so that even the life of Caesar must be dated by his name. Yes, ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’”

Judaism has a healthy suspicion of centralized power.

And revelation alone is not enough. The soul with which God endowed man seeks the Divine through reason—the uniquely human quality that lifts human beings above animals, and places us at the foot of God’s throne.

Or is it a place to inculcate the basic thought underpinning Western civilization?

In 1900, half of all American public high school students were obligated to take Latin classes.

Jesse Jackson famously marched at Stanford in the 1980s, arm in arm with students, chanting, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go.”

Western civilization, in the view of many on the radical Left, was a bastion of imperialism and racism; students should be devoted to learning about those shortcomings, rather than about the glories of ancient philosophy.

But to ignore the legacy of the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition is to perpetuate the lie that Western civilization brought us more exploitation than liberty.

Western civilization is responsible for the economic betterment of the global population, and for the rise in human rights and democracy.

Athens teaches us what we are capable of doing as human beings.

I’ve argued that without Jerusalem, there could be no West; without Athens, the same holds

But religious faith also requires us to acknowledge the inherent limits on human capacity—it requires us to say that there are things we will never understand, that we are earthly creatures bounded by dust.

Plato paints a picture of men chained to a wall in a cave, prevented from seeing the source of light outside the cave; their ignorance restricts them to the belief that “the truth is nothing other than the shadows of artificial things.”