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

by Ben Shapiro

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) worried deeply about mankind unbound from moral obligation. He saw in the rise of an atheistic world the face of the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), the famed French sadist, rapist, and pedophile who embraced passion, discounted human responsibility, and saw in his own pleasure the highest good. De Sade infamously dismissed God and added, “We rail against the passions, but never think that it is from their flame that philosophy lights its torch.”27 Dostoyevsky saw the Sade-ian perspective as the logical endpoint of a system without God, theorizing that without immortality, all constraints on human behavior would disappear. He foresaw that materialist man was far more of a threat than religious man—that human beings who think themselves mere agglomerations of matter, without the responsibility of choice, will throw decency aside.