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

by Ben Shapiro

We fight harder and more viciously over smaller and smaller matters—the more frivolous the topic, the harsher the battles. What in the world happened?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. At best, they’re means necessary to the pursuit of happiness. But we’ve mixed up the means with the end. And in doing so, we’ve left our souls in desperate need of sustenance.

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.

simcha? It means right action in accordance with God’s will.

In Ecclesiastes,

First, by determining what “good” means; second, by pursuing

it. To Aristotle, “good” wasn’t a subjective term, something

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:

accordance with your value as a rational being,

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.

Happiness is the pursuit of purpose in our lives. If we have lived with moral purpose, even death becomes less painful.

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 beginning of Western civilization—lies in Genesis 1:26: we are all made in God’s image. All of us, not just kings or potentates. That means we all have inherent value, and that our mission in life is to draw close to something beyond ourselves.

We must believe that even in the direst circumstances, we have the capacity to better ourselves.

“Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into the form of the typical inmate.”

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.

Happiness, then, comprises four elements: individual moral purpose, individual capacity, collective moral purpose, and collective capacity.

Instead, the Bible lays forth, for the first time, an argument for the internal logic of the universe. God, according to the Bible, worked through a singular, unified system; nature operated according to a set of predictable rules from which God could stray if He so chose.

This metaphor is God’s way of saying that we humans cannot completely understand God.

We must think beyond our physical limits—and we must recognize our own limited thinking, since any description of God is bound to be physical, and thus homonymic rather than literal.

following God’s commandments would usually lead to better life results than doing the opposite.

Polytheism argued that the gods were holy, and thus human beings ought to serve them; Judaism argued that we ought to be holy in imitation of God.

According to Maimonides, sacrifices are intended to remind us that we ought to pay for our sins ourselves, and that only the mercy of God allows us to escape that accountability.

The Bible also makes clear that our job is to use our minds to discover God—to seek Him out, to ask questions,

to struggle with Him.

family; secondly, in the community of faith; and finally, in the government.

The Bible makes God accessible; it brings God down to earth. In doing so, it offers man the opportunity to raise himself.

The soul with which God endowed man seeks the Divine through reason—the uniquely human quality that lifts human beings above animals, and places us at the foot of God’s throne.

But Western civilization has freed more people than any other, by a long shot; it has reduced poverty, conquered disease, and minimized war.

Athens teaches us what we are capable of doing as human beings. Athens teaches us that we have the ability to use our reason to reach beyond ourselves.

Religion doesn’t discount the capacity of mankind, of course, but that capacity is always secondary to God’s will; Athens elevates man’s capacity and makes it primary.

uniting Plato (428–348 BCE) and Aristotle (384–322 BCE). The ancient Greeks gave us three foundational principles: first, that we could discover our purpose in life from looking at the nature of the world; second, that in order to learn about the nature of the world, we had to study the world around us by utilizing our reason; and finally, that reason could help us construct the best collective systems for cultivating that reason.

the Greeks gave us natural law, science, the basis of secularly constructed government. Jerusalem brought the heavens down to earth; Athens’s elevation of reason would launch mankind toward the stars.

The value of an object lies in its capacity to achieve the purpose for which it was designed.

What makes a man virtuous is his capacity to engage in the activities that make him a man, not an animal—man has a telos, too.

And our final cause is the use of reason: “the work of a human being is an activity of soul in accord with reason.”

no society can be built on a multiplicity of end goals.

The ancients believed that by studying the nature of things, we could discover the nature of being.

True law is right reason in agreement with nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrongdoing by its prohibitions. . . . There will not be different laws at Rome and at Athens, or different laws now and in the future, but one eternal and unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and all times, and there will be one master and ruler, that is, God, over us all, for he is the author of this law, its promulgator, and its enforcing judge.22

freedom merely meant self-control, the very opposite of what we often mean by freedom today. Freedom in the modern notion is explicitly rejected by Plato, who felt it would lead to anarchy; according to Aristotle, freedom only exists in the individual context when you are involved in philosophical pursuits.

The

birth of Christianity represented the first serious attempt to merge Jewish thought with Greek thought.