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

by Ben Shapiro

In World War II, all three of these prominent collectivist worldviews came into direct conflict—and somewhere between fifty and eighty million people died. Romantic nationalism engulfed Nazi Germany, along with a worship of centralized bureaucracy and “scientific” governance—and six million Jews were mowed down by German bullets or gassed in death camps. The Soviet Union saw its own population as fodder for the preservation of the state, sending its citizens to die on the front lines of Stalingrad with no guns in their hands but guns at their backs. The United States interned 117,000 Japanese. By the end of the war, the great hope of the telos-free, Godless Enlightenment had faded from view—or, more precisely, it had been buried under the mountains of corpses from World Wars I and II. The West was suddenly in crisis. Despite massive technological improvements—and, in part, because of such improvements—the human race had nearly wiped itself off the planet. Science had not solved the search for purpose. In fact, with the discovery of atomic weaponry, it seemed that the West had come to the brink of its own annihilation.