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

by Ben Shapiro

Now, I have argued that the founding philosophy was based on both secular reason and religious morality, that modernity was built on these twin poles, cultivated and perfected through the fires of religious warfare and secular argument. We built a civilization that was practical and purposeful, religious and rational, virtuous and ambitious. Individual capacity and communal capacity had been brought into harmony: citizens had committed to Judeo-Christian values and individual rights, working to bolster one another. Individual purpose and communal purpose had been aligned: individuals were set free to cultivate virtue, and communities were built to set the framework for that pursuit of happiness. But advocates for the so-called Enlightenment offer a different theory. They suggest that the philosophy of the modern West—the philosophy of individual rights, particularly—sprang from rejection of religion and embrace of reason. The proponents of the self-proclaimed age of reason flatter themselves that we live today in accordance with the thought of great Enlightenment thinkers, bold new minds who sprang forth from the ground, wholly formed, ready to do battle with, and

triumph over, the ancients.

It didn’t, because the philosophy of individual rights, springing from the Biblical beliefs that individual human beings are created in God’s image and that individual virtue matters, were key to the Enlightenment. So was the search for knowledge—a search rooted in the belief that God had a master plan for the universe, that human beings were blessed with the free will and the reason to investigate that plan, and that we had a moral duty to seek God and to better our own stations materially and spiritually through that search. A devotion to progress in history began with Judeo-Christian religion as well. Most important, Judeo-Christian thought and Greek thought both held in common the belief in purpose.

The original drive to discard God in Western thought grew from three intertwined forces. First, the drive against religion sprang from the dissolution of Catholic dominance; that dissolution created religious schisms and vacuums that all too often invited brutal violence. Critics of Judeo-Christian faith saw in the internecine religious warfare proof that religious fundamentalism inhibited human freedom rather than deepening it. Second, atheism and agnosticism saw a dramatic upswing among intellectuals thanks to the rise in religious fundamentalism: both Lutheranism and Calvinism were, at least in part, responses to the perceived secularization of the Catholic Church. And the Catholic Church moved to mitigate such religious insurgencies by cracking down on its own tendencies toward secular learning.

Machiavelli’s early iteration of a break from traditional purpose found its first open embrace in Hobbes. Hobbes applied the standards of rigorous logic to religious revelation itself—and found revelation wanting. “To say [God] hath spoken to him in a dream is no more than to say that he dreamed God spake to him, which is not of force to win belief from any man that knows dreams are for the most part natural and may proceed from former thoughts,” Hobbes wrote. “If one Prophet deceive another, what certainty is there of knowing the will of God, by other way than that of Reason?”3

Books of the old Moral Philosophers. . . . Felicity is a continual progress of the desire, from one object to another; the attaining of the former, being still but the way to the latter.”4 In other words, the search for meaning cannot be found in seeking final causes; nature contains no such information. Instead, morality must be boiled down to mere competition of interests, and the desire of human beings to avoid suffering and untimely death. In a state of nature, “nothing can be Unjust. The notions of Right and Wrong, Justice and Injustice have there no place. Where there is no common Power, there is no Law; where no Law, no Injustice.”5 If moral relativism began anywhere, it began in Hobbes.

Spinoza was similarly dismissive of the notion of a natural law. He turned his intense intellect to the very notion of final causes and dismissed them with relish. Humans, Spinoza argued, designed a God who had made the universe especially for mankind, and reasoned in circular fashion that God had crafted a human purpose. Like Hobbes, this leads Spinoza to disparage the very notion of “good” or “bad.”9 And like Hobbes, this led Spinoza to a sort of rational egotism as the nature of man: human beings want to avoid pain and seek pleasure. The best way to do this, according to Spinoza, is through a Stoic passivity—seeking knowledge of the universe and acknowledging that we are not at the center of it.

The final step away from Judeo-Christian ethical monotheism and Greek teleology and toward outright atheism came courtesy of the jolly British empiricist David Hume (1711–1776). Like Hobbes and Spinoza before him, Hume discounted the possibility of miracles—he said that the laws of nature speak to us more frequently than any human testimony, and therefore the evidence for miracles was annihilated. He even argued that polytheism was as rational as monotheism. He also attempted to demolish classical proofs of God’s existence. He took on the cosmological argument by stating that it is quite possible for something to come from nothing, so the notion of an Unmoved Mover was unnecessary; he also attacked the idea that order requires design (he says that an acorn can grow an oak tree without design, for example). Most of all, Hume rejected the idea of

just God because of the presence of evil in the universe. Like Hobbes and Spinoza, Hume totally dismissed the notion that human beings could discern purpose or virtue from the bare facts of the material world. Hume famously summed up this problem in his “is-ought” distinction: just because the natural world is a certain way doesn’t mean we ought to do a certain thing. Discoverable purpose disappeared in Hume’s philosophy.

Voltaire believed in the search for morality in reason; in his philosophical dictionary, he stated, “We cannot repeat too frequently that dogmas differ, but that morality is the same among all men who make use of their reason. Morality proceeds from God, like light; our superstitions are only darkness.”12 But Voltaire plainly considered Judeo-Christian tradition superstitious; his writings are filled with nasty asides against Jews in particular. Like an eighteenth-century Bill Maher, Voltaire delighted in ridiculing the most facially ridiculous statements of the Bible and declaring the Bible’s morality abhorrent on its face.13

So where did Voltaire find purpose and morality? Like Francis Bacon, one of his intellectual heroes, he found it in the betterment of the human condition materially. And this led him toward a hedonistic, materialist morality as well.

Voltaire’s morality tends toward the fully libertarian, then—freedom from control, liberty in behavior. But such a system, absent the virtue of a citizenry, quickly collapses. Voltaire knew that, which is why he wished that those of lesser rational capacity worship an omnipotent, omniscient God—God was necessary for others, but not for Voltaire. Unfortunately, he would be proven right in his estimation of human nature in short order. By removing the supposed shackles of virtue, Voltaire also removed the constraints preventing chaos and tyranny. When Voltaire’s version of freedom was mixed with the passion of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), the result was the guillotine.

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) appears a secular saint. Kant never left Königsberg, Prussia; he was certainly no hedonist. But like Voltaire and Locke, Kant was a devotee of reason above all, even if he explored its limits to the utmost. In his essay, “What Is Enlightenment?,” Kant spelled out the central philosophy of the era: “Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) ‘Have the courage to use your own understanding,’ is therefore the motto of the Enlightenment.”16 And what of morality? Kant thought that the search for virtue could be found not through reason applied to the universe, but through investigation of the moral instinct. We all have an instinct for morality, Kant believed. Reason was limited, as human perception was limited; Kant remained skeptical of the human capacity to know the world. By looking at our moral instinct, Kant believed we could derive a universal morality: Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.17

Kant thus embarked on an almost Platonic quest for knowledge beyond the material—but where Plato looked to the realm of Forms, Kant looked instead to the human heart. The human heart, he said, had embedded within it a moral logic. And that moral logic relied on categorical imperatives: absolute truths.

after all, philosophers had tossed out the Bible and Aristotle in the name of reason. But the Enlightenment did not merely involve utilizing reason to question Judeo-Christian values and telos. It involved turning reason in on itself, examining the human mind. It meant obliterating mankind as the jewel of the cosmos, bringing him low, returning him to the animals rather than allowing him to aspire to join the divine. By throwing God out of the kingdom of man, the Enlightenment also reduced man to a creature of flesh and blood, with no transcendent reason to guide the way.

Hobbes, who was deeply devoted to tearing down Greek teleology, attacked not only the idea that the universe had discoverable purpose, but that human beings were capable of exercising reason more broadly. “The Passions of men,” Hobbes writes, “are commonly more potent than their Reason.” Reason cannot bring happiness, nor can it be used as the goal of a philosophical life. There is no happiness. There is only striving and security and passion. Reason cannot save us from the war of all against all; only the Leviathan, the power of the state, can.21

“Such a stone, being conscious merely of its own endeavor and not at all indifferent, would believe itself to be completely free, and would think that it continued in motion solely because of its own wish. That is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined.”23 Through reason, human beings are capable of better understanding their plight, and this grants them some limited measure of freedom—but their freedom of action is heavily circumscribed.

In the beginning, Rousseau argued, man lived in harmony with nature, comfortable and “indolent,” until he formed societal bonds. Those societal bonds were formed in an attempt to perfect human nature—to develop human nature itself. Human beings gathered together and lived as communities in “the happiest and most stable of epochs” before greed came to the fore, pushing men to create surplus rather than surviving at subsistence levels. Property was the death of the natural man. “The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society,” Rousseau wrote.

This move away from reason and toward passion—the rejection of Judeo-Christian values and Greek teleology—may have been popular among philosophers, but it remained a rather fringy perspective. All that changed, however, with the rise of Darwinism. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) provided the first scientific grounding to the notion of a world without God, and a world beyond the mind of man.

With Darwin’s evolutionary biology, a unifying field theory of life could suddenly be proposed: accident. God did not create man in His image; man was merely the next step in a chain of evolution propelled forward by natural selection. There was no telos to the universe—there was merely nature, and man was part of it. Man was an animal. God was unnecessary. Reason itself disappeared into higher brain function designed for better environmental adaption.

Darwinism was seen by the intelligentsia of the time as a final permission to break with the ways of the ancients. Finally, at long last, the superstitions of religion could be put aside; finally, at long last, the legacy of the ancient Greeks could be escaped. Mankind, in joining the animals, had finally liberated himself from the chains of the divine. In fact, the excitement of Darwinism can still be felt today in the literature of atheists like Daniel Dennett, who writes, “Darwin’s idea is a universal solvent, capable of cutting right to the heart of everything in sight. The question is: what does it leave behind?” Dennett claims that “we are left with stronger, sounder versions of our most important ideas.”26 But were we?

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.

Dostoyevsky feared the materialism that had come to dominate European thought. In the famous “Grand Inquisitor” chapter of The Brothers Karamazov, in which Ivan Karamazov tells his tale of a Spanish inquisitor grilling Jesus, Dostoyevsky suggested that the day had come when human beings would give up on meaning in favor of worldly goods: “Dost Thou know that the ages will pass, and humanity will proclaim by the lips of their sages that there is no crime, and therefore no sin; there is only hunger?” Dostoyevsky suggested the cure for hunger would be the dictator—the man who satiates hunger will be worshipped as a deity. Human beings, Dostoyevsky suspected, were too frightened to use God-given freedom of will to seek God Himself; instead, they would retreat into infantilism, happy to follow leaders who will relieve them of their need for bread and provide them the comfort of conformity, promising them that their sins mean nothing: “We shall show them that they are weak, that they are only pitiful children, but that childlike happiness is the sweetest of all.”28

The dark side of the Enlightenment was no secret to Dostoyevsky, who saw the rumblings of a coming cataclysm looming through the mists of the future. He knew that reason alone, unmoored from God, could not hold back the tide; in fact, reason itself would provide the impetus for evil, he argued.

The search for meaning, untrammeled by Judeo-Christian values and Greek telos, freed from moral responsibility by scientific determinism, would burst forth in a conflagration that will set the whole world on fire, Dostoyevsky predicted. The result would be blood and suffering, a maelstrom of horror, followed by an epoch of emptiness. God’s death, Dostoyevsky thought, was man’s death as well.

Philosopher Russell Kirk writes of Burke’s worldview: Revelation, reason, and an assurance beyond the senses tell us that the Author of our being exists, and that He is omniscient; and man and the state are creations of God’s beneficence. . . . How are we to know God’s mind and will? Through the prejudices and traditions which millennia of human experience with divine means and judgments have implanted in the mind of the species. And what is our purpose in this world? Not to indulge our appetites, but to render obedience to divine ordinance.15

Yet that creed would provide the impetus for a century and a half of political utopianism and its disastrous aftermath. Liberty would collapse into moral relativism and then tyranny; fraternity would collapse into nationalistic tribalism; equality would collapse into a new caste system, with all-wise rulers

The appeal of such ideals may be confusing, but George Orwell brilliantly summed them up in a 1940 essay on Hitler’s Mein Kampf: “Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in

general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades.”47

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.

The great dream of redefining human beings, discovering transcendent values without reference to God or universal purpose, seemed to have died. While some still held out hope in the West for the eventual triumph of the Soviet experiment, with the revelation of Stalin’s crimes, that hope too faded. What would replace that hope now?

The world survived World War II, of course. Not only did the West survive—it got freer, richer, more prosperous than ever. Human wealth expanded exponentially. Life spans increased. But there remained a hole at the center of Western civilization: a meaning-shaped hole. That hole has grown larger and larger in the decades since—a cancer, eating away at our heart. We tried to fill it with the will to action; we tried to fill it with science; we tried to fill it with world-changing political activism. None of it provides us the meaning we seek.

Instead, Kierkegaard posited that human beings had to find meaning by looking within. The system by which one chooses to live is a leap of faith—but in that leap, man finds his individual meaning. “Subjectivity is the truth,” Kierkegaard wrote. “Objectively there is no infinite decision or commitment, and so it is objectively correct to annul the difference between good and evil as well as the law of noncontradiction and the difference between truth and untruth.” Truth can be found in ourselves.3 To Kierkegaard, this meant making the leap of faith to believe in a God beyond man-made ethics—his famous “teleological suspension of the ethical.” Kierkegaard focused on passion as opposed to reason—he deemed passion the most important driving force in life, and concluded, “The conclusions of passion are the only reliable ones.”4 He hoped, of course, that the passionate leap would be toward the Christian God. But his belief system would lead not to God, in the end, but to worship of subjectivity.

So Sartre writes: Nowhere is it written that the Good exists, that we must be honest, that we must not lie; because the fact is we are on a plane where there are only men. . . . If existence really does precede essence, there is no explaining things away by reference to a fixed and given human nature. In other words, there is no determinism, man is free, man is freedom. On the other hand, if God does not exist, we find no values or commands to turn to which legitimize our conduct. So, in the bright realm of values, we have no excuse behind us, nor justification before us. We are alone, with no excuses. That is the idea I shall try to convey when I say that man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet, in other respects is free; because, once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.10 This is a beautifully expressed idea—an idea replete with the tragedy of existence, but hopeful about man’s possibility of reaching within himself for something higher. But it also leaves human beings without a guidepost. It

promises no communal purpose or communal capacity; it focuses almost entirely on the individual, but leaves individuals without any guide other than the guide within. Furthermore, Sartre’s belief in an unfixed human nature opens the door to utopian schemes of all sorts—if we can merely change the system, as Marx argued, perhaps the New Man will arrive, cloaked in glory.

Dr. Benjamin Spock’s (1903–1998) Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946), which sold fifty million copies between its publication and Spock’s death in 1998, placed the same emphasis on self-esteem. Spock, a devotee of the New Left, had told parents to put aside the rigidity of old-school parenting, which could instill insecurity and anxiety. Instead, parents should follow their instincts and refrain from criticizing their children.

Now, Maslow and Spock and Branden may have argued that self-esteem still had to be earned—but that message was quickly shunted aside in favor of a simple headline version of their philosophy: elevating self-esteem had to be pursued at all costs. If fulfillment lay in self-esteem, then children had to be taught that they were special.

Politicians began to echo the idea that children were owed a culture of self-esteem; as Jesse Singal of The Cut writes, “The self-esteem craze changed how countless organizations were run, how an entire generation—millennials—was educated, and how that generation went on to perceive itself (quite favorably).” As Singal also points out, the social science to suggest that crime and suffering would be minimized with the maximization of self-esteem was junk—it

The true effect wasn’t to create generations of more fulfilled human beings, though—it was to create generations of more self-obsessed human beings. But society was quick to embrace the self-esteem movement, the notion that everyone’s feelings were to be honored in order to prevent crucial loss of self-esteem.

Natural law had become nature, and through reveling in their nature rather

than channeling it, human beings could finally find their bliss.

By focusing on self-esteem, however, the New Left could kill three birds with one stone: they could overturn reliance on Judeo-Christian religion, Greek teleology, and capitalism. Religion, Greek teleology, and capitalism all have something in common: none of them cares particularly much about “your bliss.” Religion suggests that your self-realization lies in consonance with God, and that any attempt to placate your ego through pursuit of personally defined happiness is bound to fail. Religion suggests that “your bliss” does not exist: only God’s bliss does. Greek teleology is utterly unconcerned with your personal definition of self-realization; the only thing that counts is whether you are acting virtuously in

accordance with right reason. And capitalism cares far less about how you’re feeling than about your ability to create products and services someone else wants.

Black Panther honorary prime minister Stokely Carmichael, along with Charles Hamilton, wrote in 1967 in Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, that institutional racism went far too deep for anything but total systemic change to abrogate it. “Racism is both overt and covert,” they wrote. “It takes two, closely related forms: individual whites acting against individual blacks, and acts by the total white community against the black community. We call these individual racism and institutional racism.” Institutional racism is vague and difficult to target—but we can tell it by its fruits. Wherever there is disparity, there is obviously discrimination. When black Americans lack “proper food, shelter and medical facilities, and thousands more are destroyed and maimed physically, emotionally and intellectually because of conditions of poverty and discrimination in the black community, that is a function of institutional racism.” White people may not be bombing churches anymore or stoning black families, but they are still “support[ing] political officials and institutions that would and do perpetuate institutionally racist policies.” Thus, political disagreement is merely a guise for covert racism.24

The only way for members of these victimized groups to restore their self-esteem would come by banding together to tear down the system. Feminist Gloria Steinem wrote that women and other victimized groups could not actually achieve self-esteem in the current system; to achieve self-esteem, victims would have to bond “with others who share similar experiences (from groups of variously abled people to conferences of indigenous nations) bonding with others in shared power . . . and taking one’s place in a circle of true selves.”25

Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw of Columbia University came up with a term to describe this coalition of victims: intersectionality. According to Crenshaw, human beings are members of various groups: racial groups, gender groups, religious groups, sexual orientation groups. And we can describe their “lived realities” by referring to the intersection between tho...

heterosexual Christian. Furthermore, we can identify the level of difficulty someone has experienced in life simply by referencing the various groups of which she is a member. The more minority groups to which you are a member, the more you have been victimized; the more you have been victimized, the more your opinio...

The actual goal, as Crenshaw acknowledges, is to bully those who aren’t members of these intersectional groups—to force them to “check their privilege.” Crenshaw explains, “Acknowledging privilege is hard—particularly for those who also experience discrimination and exclusion.” But acknowledge they must, or be accused of complicity in institutional racism.26 White citizens must recognize their white privilege or be cast out; males must recognize their “toxic masculinity”; identity politics becomes a pat...

Thus Clarence Thomas is not legitimately black because he doesn’t vote Democrat; Nikki Haley isn’t legitimately a woman because she is a pro-life Republican. According to Ta-Nehisi Coates, when black people call for individualistic thinking that strays from traditional Democratic ideology, that means supporting “white freedom”: “freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant.”27

If we wish for our civilization to survive, however, we must be willing to teach our children. The only way to protect their children is to make warriors of our own children. We must make of our children messengers for the truths that matter.