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

by Ben Shapiro

Utilizing human reason to escape the cave, and bringing knowledge of the light, that was the task of ancient Athens—a task uniting Plato (428–348 BCE) and Aristotle (384–322 BCE).

first, that we could discover our purpose in life from looking at the nature of the world; second, that in order to learn about the nature of the world, we had to study the world around us by utilizing our reason;

finally, that reason could help us construct the best collective systems for ...

Jerusalem brought the heavens down to earth; Athens’s elevation of reason would launch mankind toward the stars.

Nature was merely nature; ethics takes a backseat.

Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics thought differently. Plato and Aristotle rejected Democritus’s atomic theory. In their view, the human mind was freely capable of deciphering nature’s rules—and they believed that those rules did, in fact, exist. We could determine rules and values from nature itself. Nature had a purpose—or the God behind it did.

The value of an object lies in its capacity to achieve the purpose for which it was designed. Facts and values aren’t separate things—values are embedded within facts.

What does this mean for human beings? What makes a man virtuous is his capacity to engage in the activities that make him a man, not an animal—man has a telos, too. What is our telos? Our end, according to both Plato and Aristotle, is to reason, judge, and deliberate. Plato put it this way in The

So, according to both Plato and Aristotle, what makes us “virtuous” is doing our job: look at the world with our reason,

Part of fulfilling that telos was the cultivation of those aspects of character that made you most human. Ancient systems of thought carried one significant difference from modern thought with regard to virtue: they focused on virtue in terms of character development.

Now, this still leaves us with a problem: in order for us to share a community, we have to agree on our telos. As philosopher Leo Strauss suggests, no society can be built on a multiplicity of end goals.

But if a grand plan stands behind all of creation, our job is merely to investigate that plan—to uncover the natural law that governs the universe.

The ancients realized that any theory of telos had to rely on the presence of a designer.

Heraclitus (535–475 BCE) was the first known philosopher to use the term Logos to describe the system of unified reason behind the world we see and experience.

the Logos was a divine revelatory principle, simultaneously operative within the human mind and the natural world.”

philosophers were tasked with uncovering this Logos; by doing so, they would be fulfilling both their own telos and discovering the telos of mankind more broadly.

The ancients believed that by studying the nature of things, we could discover the nature of being.

Pythagoras (570–495 BCE) led this quest—he believed that human beings could achieve consonance with the universe by seeking to understand that universe.

Based on the notion of virtue—use of reason to act in accordance with nature—Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics developed ethical systems.

That means that those who govern must be the best and wisest among us—that we must rigorously condition a class of philosophers to rule.

In Plato’s view, conflict within the state lies in failure of people to recognize their own station.

He tore into Plato’s suggested regime, calling it unrealistic and stating that it would rend apart the society itself. “Let us remember,” Aristotle says, “that we should not disregard the experience of ages.”21 Aristotle instead said that a regime combining aspects of democracy with aspects of aristocracy would be best—a clear philosophical iteration of a system of checks and balances.

There will not be different laws at Rome and at Athens, or different laws now and in the future, but one eternal and unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and all times, and there will be one master and ruler, that is, God, over us all, for he is the author of this law, its promulgator, and its enforcing judge.

The college students who fulminate against them are undercutting the very foundations upon which they stand—they’re ignoring reason, science, and democracy.

Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics would have all rejected such a division as counterproductive and fruitless: individual purpose lay in acting virtuously—fulfilling our telos by pursuing right reason in accordance with nature.

if the goal of the individual was to find happiness through virtuous citizenry, the goal of the community had to be promotion of that virtue. In this communitarian vision, individual freedom in the modern sense completely disappears.

freedom merely meant self-control, the very opposite of what we often mean by freedom today.

The community was tasked with two separate functions: instilling virtue in the citizenry, and protecting the citizens from the violation of natural law.

The first conflict surrounded the nature of God: the God of Moses and the God of Aristotle were not identical.

Judaism believed, as Greek thought did, in a God who stood behind creation; but unlike Greek reason, Judaism also saw God’s presence in human events, not merely nature. God was intimately involved, in this view, with man’s action. The Greeks believed far more in fate than in a divine presence with a moral sense.

Second, Greek reason sought universality in all things; revelation found universality through the specific communication between God and man at Sinai.

Jewish revelation, by contrast, suggested that human beings were not fully capable of discovering all universals—that

Third, Greek commitment to the polis contradicted Jewish commitment to the divine.

Judaism, however, had another commitment: the commitment to individual and collective service to Divine law. These two notions came into direct conflict in 167 BCE, when the Greek king Antiochus IV attempted to defile the Jewish Temple on behalf of the Greek religion and banned many Jewish practices. He used as his proxy Hellenized Jews, who saw traditional Judaism as an obstacle

The birth of Christianity represented the first serious attempt to merge Jewish thought with Greek thought.

“That supreme Light, the true source of reality shining forth outside Plato’s cave of shadows, was now recognized as the light of Christ. As Clement of Alexandria announced, ‘By the Logos, the whole world is now become Athens and Greece.’”

This key Christian concept—the notion of faith in one personal redeemer, the representative of God’s logic in the universe—broadened the appeal of Judaism to billions of people over history in a way Judaism never would have: Christianity’s focus on grace rather than works makes it a far more accessible religion than Judaism in a practical sense.

Augustine was not a full opponent of reason; if not for original sin, Augustine said, reason alone could have connected man with God. But grace had to fill the gap between man and God after the Fall; reason couldn’t be the primary fuel for crossing that boundary.

Paul morphed the Jewish belief in a political messiah who would usher in an age of worldly peace to the Christian belief in a spiritual messiah who had to die to atone for human sins.

This dichotomy suggested that the existing governments need not feel threatened by Christianity, which, after all, just sought the hearts of men in worship. Christianity was beyond politics; citizenship was to be governed by the City of Man.

First, concurrent historians suggested that Christianity’s rise had been driven by admiration for its system of care for the poor: the emperor Julian, a committed opponent of the Church, spoke of pagan shortcomings when compared with the “moral character, even if pretended,” of the Christians, including their “benevolence toward strangers and care of the graves of the dead.”

Because Christianity proposed both universal salvation and exclusive salvation, furthermore, it drew adherents from Roman society—it’s easier to evangelize those of foreign religion if they are barred from eternity by failure to join.

Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV walked barefoot in the snow to earn back the approval of Pope Gregory VII; Henry II of England (1133–1189) had himself flogged in order to win back the approval of his Christian population after accidentally ordering the death of Archbishop Thomas Becket.

reason had been made secondary to faith; while collective capacity was bolstered by the presence of a strong social fabric, the all-encompassing power of the Catholic Church and the rule of monarchs meant that individual choice was heavily circumscribed.

During the twelfth century, Aristotle’s works, long buried, were rediscovered in the West. They had been maintained in the Arabic-speaking world for generations, but they were only retransmitted in Europe over the course of that century, breaking anew and with massive impact in the thirteenth century.

The basic idea was a merger of Aristotelianism and Christianity—a commitment to reason and logic, as well as to revelation. Aquinas stated, “They hold a plainly false opinion who say that in regard to the truth of religion it does not matter what a person thinks about creation so long as he has the correct opinion concerning God.

This final Unmoved Mover, says Aquinas, is what we call God. And that Unmoved Mover must exist immaterially, exist outside of time and space, and be perfect—otherwise, the Unmoved Mover would not be pure actuality.

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

Augustine would have preached that belief in Jesus provided that sole window to knowing God; Aquinas, while not rejecting that New Testament ordinance, found another window through the use of reason.

Augustine sought to defend religion against the predations of a secular state but would have preferred a Christian monarch to a secular one; Aquinas, like Aristotle, believed that the promotion of the common good through the state was worthwhile, even if he demoted that promotion to secondary status behind the promotion of spiritual salvation.