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

by Ben Shapiro

I believe these two questions are intimately related. This book argues that Western civilization, including our modern notions of values and reason and science, was built on deep foundations. And this book argues that we’re tossing away what’s best about our civilization because we’ve forgotten that those foundations even exist.

This doesn’t mean that I believe philosophers changed history on their own. I don’t think Adam Smith invented capitalism any more than Immanuel Kant invented morality. But these philosophers and thinkers offer a window into the most important ideas of their time. Tolstoy famously asks in War and Peace what moves history, and concludes that history is merely the progression of all of the various forces at play in the universe, channeled into action in a particular moment. There’s truth to that, of course. But ideas matter, and important ideas—as best articulated by great thinkers—represent the motivational road along which humanity journeys. We act because we believe. In order to fix ourselves, then, we must reexamine what we believe. 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.

Those twin notions—those diamonds of spiritual genius—built our civilization, and built us as individuals. If you believe that life is more than materialistic pleasures and pain avoidance, you are a product of Jerusalem and Athens. If you believe that the government has no right to intrude upon the exercise of your individual will, and that you are bound by moral duty to pursue virtue, you are a product of Jerusalem and Athens. If you believe that human beings are capable of bettering our world through use of our reason, and are bound by higher purpose to do so, you are a product of Jerusalem and Athens. Jerusalem and Athens built science. The 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. Civilizations that rejected Jerusalem and Athens, and the tension between them, have collapsed into dust. The USSR rejected Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law, substituting the values of the collective and a new utopian vision of “social justice”—and they starved and slaughtered t...

In America, especially, with our unique history and success, we have long seen progress and prosperity as our birthright. The conflicts that tear apart other nations are not for us; we certainly don’t need to worry ab...

That sanguine view is utterly wrong. The fight against entropy is never over. Our way of life is never more than one g...

We are in the process of abandoning Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law, favoring moral subjectivism and the rule of passion.

And we are watching our civilization collapse into age-old tribalism, individualistic hedonism, and moral subjectivism. Make no mistake: we are still living off the prosperity of the world built by Jerusalem and Athens. 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. We’ve spent the last two centuries carving ourselves off from the roots of our civilization. Our civilization could survive and thrive—for a time. Then it began to die, from the inside out. Our civilization is riddled with internal contradictions, communities bereft of values, and individuals bereft of meaning.

Politics is about working to build the framework for the pursuit of happiness, not the achievement of it; 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. The government existed to protect your rights, to prevent those rights from being infringed upon. The government was there to stop someone from stealing your horse, from butchering you in your sleep, from letting his cow graze on your land. At no point did Jefferson suggest that government could achieve happiness. None of the Founders thought it could.

Yet more and more Americans are investing their happiness in politics.

Instead of looking inward to find ways to better their lives, we’ve decided that the chie...

country in the history of the world. This desire to silence—or subdue—those who disagree with us has been re...

To take a minor example, in September 2017, Republicans and Democrats clubbed each other savagely over the exact same policy: President Obama had issued an executive amnesty for certain children of illegal immigrants, the so-called DREAMers; President Trump had revoked that amnesty, but called on Congress to pass a legislative version that would protect the DREAMers. Democrats called Republicans cruel, inhumane; one congressman called Tru...

Why have we invested so much meaning, so much time, so much effort in brutal policy fights over seemingly minor matters, when none of it brings us closer to happiness? Why, overall, do the American people seem to be less and less optimistic? Why, by polling data, do nearly three-quarters of Americans say they aren’t confident “life for our children’s generation will be better than it has been for us”—the lowest number in decades?3 Why are a huge plurality of young Americans themselves more fearful than hopeful about the future?4 Why are suicide rates rising dramatically among some of the most materially prosperous segments of society, to rates not seen in thirty years?5 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.

HAPPINESS IS MORAL PURPOSE

Lasting happiness can only be achieved through cultivation of soul and mind. And cultivating our souls and minds requires us to live with moral purpose.

We might not think of binge-watching Stranger Things as an iron yoke on our neck, but if television is our best reason to live, we’re not really living.

Aristotelian eudaimonia similarly relies on living in accordance with moral purpose. Like the Bible, Aristotle didn’t define happiness as temporary joy. He saw happiness in a life well-lived. How could we live a good life? First, by determining what “good” means; second, by pursuing it. 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. What makes human beings unique, says Aristotle, is our capacity to reason, and to use that reason to investigate the nature of the world and our purpose in it:

So, in the end, the Bible and the Philosopher come to the same conclusion from opposite directions: the Bible commands us to serve God with happiness and identifies that moral purpose with happiness; Aristotle suggests that it is impossible to achieve happiness without virtue, which means acting in accordance with a moral purpose that rational human beings can discern from the nature of the universe—a universe Aristotle traced back to an Unmoved Mover. George Washington puts the synthesis well in his letter to the Protestant Episcopal Church on August 19, 1789: “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.”11

Happiness is the pursuit of purpose in our lives. If we have lived with moral purpose, even death becomes less painful. When Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer knew that his death was imminent, he wrote a letter in anticipation of his passing. Here’s what that great-souled man wrote: “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.” Only living with moral purpose can grant profound happiness.12

As Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl wrote in his stirring memoir about surviving the Holocaust, Man’s Search for Meaning, “Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost. . . . We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.”13

“Only about a quarter of Americans strongly endorse having a clear sense of purpose and of what makes their lives meaningful, while nearly 40 percent either feel neutral or say they don’t. This is both a social and public health problem.”15 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. These four elements are crucial; the only foundation for a successful civilization lies in a careful balance of these four elements.

. If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.” Without belief in our innate individual value, we collapse into animals incapable of seeking moral purpose, even though we feel the need for it beating in our chests.

It matters how we fill that need for individual moral purpose. Yet we’re continually drawn to false gods. We proselytize endlessly for everything from intersectionality to consumerism, from Instagram to organic food, from political protest to essential oils. How many of us truly feel that lifelong purpose is to be found in those transitory distractions?

It’s not enough to know our individual moral

purpose, to know that we must seek happiness through virtuous action.

as John Adams stated in a letter to the Massachusetts militia, “We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by . . . morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Gallantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”25 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. Flourishing societies require a functional social fabric, created by citizens working together—and yes, separately—toward a meaningful life.

Tyranny rarely begins with jackboots; it usually begins with ardent wishes for a better future, combined with an unfailing faith in the power of mass mobilization.

But we are losing that civilization. We are losing that civilization because we have spent generations undermining the two deepest sources of our own happiness—the sources that lie behind individual moral purpose, communal moral purpose, individual capacity, and communal capacity. Those two sources: Divine meaning and reason. There can be no individual or communal moral purpose without a foundation of Divine meaning; there can be no individual capacity or communal capacity without a constant, abiding belief in the nature of our reason.

The ancient belief that virtue was to be located in use of our reason necessitated the investigation of nature. The ancients believed that by studying the nature of things, we could discover the nature of being. While the Biblical worldview said that God had created nature, it didn’t have much to say about nature itself, or whether investigating nature would lead to God. The Bible didn’t even have a word for “nature”; the Hebrew word yetzer is the closest term, and that generally means “will.” But Greek philosophy was different: it suggested that the best way to investigate the nature of human purpose was to look at reality itself, and attempt to discover the systems behind it. This made it imperative to investigate our universe in order to find a higher meaning.

As God was the master of heaven and earth, His creation was evidence of Him, and knowledge of that creation would bring us closer to Him. But to know God meant first to believe in Him. God made man to know God.

Aquinas, like Maimonides and Muslim philosophers like Al-Farabi (872–950), concerned himself, therefore, with proofs of God’s existence. This was, in and of itself, somewhat revolutionary in the Christian world. Judaism offered no proof of God beyond revelation; God was simply the Creator. End of story. And Christianity offered no logical proofs for God’s existence; Jesus walked the earth and rose from the dead. End of story. But Aquinas sought to use reason to bolster faith. He offered several proofs of God’s existence, the most convincing of which was a form of the cosmological argument promoted by Aristotle. Essentially, Aquinas argued that all things in life are a combination of actual and potential—that a candle, for example, is a candle right now, and has the potential to become a pool of wax when operated on by fire.

The reason the candle is currently in its state is because of something acting upon it. That something, in turn, is dependent on something else. But, Aquinas argues, that chain cannot continue forever; in the end, there must be a final cause, an Unmoved Mover standing behind things as they are. That Unmoved Mover will not be a combination of actual and potential at all—it will be pure actuality, since if it had potential, that potential could only be actualized by another force, which would continue the regress. This final Unmoved Mover, says Aquinas, is what we call God. And t...

If reason suffices to bring us all this way, according to Aquinas, then why is revelation even necessary? Aquinas here borrows from Augustine: were we perfect, reasoning beings, revelation might be unnecessary. But we are not. Revelation thus bridges the gap.

The explosion of science in the West is perhaps the West’s best-known, most-celebrated legacy. The story of technological development has never changed—human beings want to live more comfortably in the world. But the story of science changed radically beginning with Thomas Aquinas and Franciscan friar William of Ockham and their successors: human beings sought the cosmos through science, and used that newfound knowledge to develop technologies that would later be thought to obviate the need for God Himself. The secularist myth holds that religion held back science for millennia. The reverse is true.

As with Bacon, the good of man lay not in the search for God or the pursuit of a virtuous telos, but in the quest to better the material state of man. Morality would surely follow in the wake of man’s technological progress and increased scientific knowledge.13 Such knowledge, Descartes believed, could not be pursued without radical skepticism of received wisdom: “I ought to reject as absolutely false all opinions in regard to which I could suppose the least ground for doubt, in order to ascertain whether after that there remained aught in my belief that was wholly indubitable.” This led Descartes to doubt all of his senses—except his knowledge of his own thinking. 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.14

Marsilius’s skepticism regarding the Church would be taken to the next level by Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527). Like Marsilius, Machiavelli saw oppression in the guise of the Catholic Church: in The Prince, Machiavelli openly mocked the Church.16 Machiavelli believed that those who proclaimed that the state could be governed in accordance with virtue were merely lying for the sake of convenience. His cynical suggestion: that states be governed in accordance with virtù, a mix of cruelty and kindness generating both fear and love. The goal of such governance: to prevent utopian schemes designed to instill virtue in the citizenry through the power of the sword. In The Prince, Machiavelli proposed that human beings are not driven by reason—thereby tacitly rejecting the ancient notion of Aristotelian virtue—but that they were instead

driven by passion. In his Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli suggested that we presuppose that “all men are bad and that they will use their malignity of mind every time they have the opportunity.” The best way to ensure the freedom of human beings, then, would be to check passion with passion: “The desires of free peoples are rarely harmful to liberty, because they arise either from oppression or from the suspicion that they will be oppressed . . . the people, although ignorant, can grasp the truth, and they readily yield when they are told the truth by a trustworthy man.”17 Machiavelli thus discarded the ancient search for a utopian republic and disdained the notion that a state can exist to make men virtuous. Naturally, as with Marsilius, the Catholic Church banned Machiavelli’s Prince in 1559.

Luther’s translation of the Bible into German also made practical his notion of individuals communing directly with God. As history professor Joseph Loconte of King’s College writes, “Luther offered more than a theory of individual empowerment. He delivered a spiritual bill of rights.”18

In the realm of government, Luther was no democrat. He believed that the state’s authority did not derive from the authority of the people, but from God Himself: “We must firmly establish secular law and the sword, that no one may doubt that it is in the world by God’s will and ordinance.”

He attempted to map out human behavior with the regularity of mathematics. In doing so, he rejected the philosophy of Aristotle as insufficiently realistic, and, following Machiavelli, suggested instead that human passions were the chief motivator for human conduct. And the chief passion, Hobbes believed, was the passion for saving your own skin. Forget the polis; forget the community. No longer was the goal of human life to fulfill the ends of reason—it was to prevent your own death, as shown by the so-called state of nature, in which men harmed one another so far as their self-interest dictated they should do so. “I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death,” Hobbes stated.22

Men’s first right, then, was the right to self-preservation. Hierarchies disappear in this regime of natural rights—large, small, smart, stupid, we are all equal in our right to survive. But in a state of nature, with no one to guarantee our safety, how do we survive? We don’t rely on the cultivation of virtue. Instead, we grant power to the state.

Hobbes, however, had opened a door that he could not close again: If human beings had individual rights, did those rights end merely with survival? Or, in a state of nature, did human beings enjoy inalienable rights beyond merely breathing and eating and not being murdered?

The philosopher who asked that question was John Locke (1632–1704). Following in Hobbes’s footsteps, Locke believed that sovereignty resided in the individual. Locke—a deeply religious Christian—believed in both natural law discoverable by reason and Hobbesian natural right inherent in human existence. Natural law, like the ancients supposed, could be discovered in nature: a law dictating through right reason both correct behavior and the purpose for life.

According to Locke, then, the formation of a government requires the exercise of consent—or, alternatively, the behavior of the government in accordance with natural law, for example a government’s willingness to protect natural rights. The goal of law is to preserve freedom, not to trade freedom away for security as Hobbes would have suggested: “the end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom: for in all the states of created beings capable of laws, where there is no law, there is no freedom.”25 Locke suggested a republic of checks and balances as the key to creating such a government. Government, he stated, required two separate powers: the legislative and the executive. Montesquieu (1689–1755) would later set down the more well-known balance of powers enshrined in the American Constitution: legislative, executive, and judicial.

Locke’s philosophy would not merely influence the Founding Fathers of the United States, as we will see—it would shape the foundations of free market enterprise. The vision of Adam Smith (1723–1790) of natural liberty almost precisely mirrors Locke’s vision of natural right:

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. His viewpoint would be deeply influential in the formation of the greatest economy in the history of mankind.27

The Declaration begins with a ringing statement of authority: that of “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” This isn’t the passivity of Hobbes or Augustine or Luther with regard to the value of the current regime. This is the unification of ancient natural law with the force of Biblical drive. It is an active statement that men can take power into their own hands so long as that power is utilized in pursuit of the natural law, and in accordance with the human right to liberty. Jefferson quickly makes that clear. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” he writes. But clearly such truths are not self-evident—they have not been self-evident for most of human history. Jefferson here references the “right reason” of the ancients: those who think properly, who look to the meanings behind nature, can discover fundamental truths that should undergird human life and human action.

The founding philosophy acknowledges the possibility of individual purpose. That purpose isn’t to be supplied by a government, or by molding individual citizens to the service of the polis. That purpose is supplied by a Judeo-Christian tradition of meaning and value, and a Greek tradition of reason. The founders thought that reason was paramount, and virtue worth pursuing. That virtue took the form of courage—willingness to sacrifice life, fortune, and sacred honor in pursuit of defending the rights necessary to pursue virtue itself. That virtue took the form of temperance—no better founding document has ever been penned than the Constitution of the United States, the product of compromise.

The founding philosophy also glorified the power of individual capacity. The founders were fully cognizant that human beings had the capacity for evil as well as good, for passion as well as reason. But they had immense faith in the power of reason to impel human beings toward proper thinking.