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by
Ben Shapiro
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February 10 - February 15, 2022
We don’t live in a perfect world, but we do live in the best world that has ever existed.
We’re spending more money on luxuries, and enjoying everything less.
We believe we can reject Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law and satisfy ourselves with intersectionality, or scientific materialism, or progressive politics, or authoritarian governance, or nationalistic solidarity. We can’t.
Instead of looking inward to find ways to better their lives, we’ve decided that the chief obstacle to our happiness is outside forces, even in the freest, richest country in the history of the world.
We seem dedicated to the proposition that if only we can change the political landscape—or at least attribute nasty motives to our political opponents—then we can achieve the happiness we crave. Instead of leaving each other alone, we seek to control one another—if only Bob would do what I want, I’d be happy! And if I elect the right guy, he’ll make Bob do what I want him to do!
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. All these things are important, of course, but they don’t bring lasting happiness.
it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.”
So, what do we need to generate the moral purpose that provides the foundation for happiness? 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.
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?
Darwinian evolution leaves no room for the true; it only leaves room for the evolutionarily beneficial.
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.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Happiness, then, comprises four elements: individual moral purpose, individual capacity, collective moral purpose, and collective capacity. If we lack one of these elements, the pursuit of happiness becomes impossible; if that pursuit is foreclosed, society crumbles.
God expects things of us—that He has standards for our behavior, that He demands our holiness, that He cares about our commitment. A human being on a desert island can find purpose in living the life God wants for Him, and it is laid out for Him through a series of rules to be found in His holy book.
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.”27 In doing so, Ecclesiastes says, we will find joy: “I know that there is nothing better for people than to rejoice and do good while they live . . . there is nothing better for a person than to rejoice in his work, because that is his lot.”28
If the universe were a random agglomeration of unrelated events, governed by no higher logic, the scientific search would be rather frustrating.
The secularist myth holds that religion held back science for millennia. The reverse is true. Without Judeo-Christian foundations, science simply would not exist as it does in the West.
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.”
“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.”
By cutting final causes from science, by separating God from the natural world, the modern scientific project would eventually remove religion and purpose from the domain of reason—a project that both Bacon and Descartes would have abhorred.
Smith posited that the government had but three fundamental duties: preservation of life; preservation of liberty through administration of justice; and funding for public goods.
And what is our purpose in this world? Not to indulge our appetites, but to render obedience to divine ordinance.
Proponents of state power quickly began to praise the rise of an expert bureaucracy that could do the people’s will—without, of course, consulting with the people, who were, after all, a bunch of rubes.
This isn’t much of an answer. It offers a smorgasbord of choices and then suggests that the smorgasbord itself provides meaning.
When the highest moral cause is material success, it looks a lot like having no morals at all.
Your Life Has Purpose. Life is not a bewildering, chaotic mess. It’s a struggle, but it’s a struggle guided by a higher meaning.
You were given the ability to choose your path in life—and you were born into the freest civilization in the history of mankind. Make the most of it. You are not a victim.
