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

by Ben Shapiro

The

development of Western science was rooted in the notion that man’s task was to celebrate God through knowledge of His creation.

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.

own hands so long as that power is utilized in pursuit of the natural law, and in accordance with the human right to liberty.

If

men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

Stoic passivity—seeking knowledge of the universe and acknowledging that we are not at the center of it.

New moral systems, therefore, had to be constructed from scratch. Human beings, these Enlightenment thinkers proposed, could construct systems to maximize human happiness.

heroes, he

found it in the betterment of the human condition materially.

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:

Voltaire, Kant, Bentham—all assumed that reason could construct morality from scratch.

If reason could not construct objective systems

of morality, what could? What if faith in reason was misplaced—and something darker actually motivated human beings?

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.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) worried deeply about mankind unbound from moral obligation.

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.

He saw that man would find in his search for p...

far darker than the Judeo-Christian tradition and Greek teleology ...

w...

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

God’s

death, Dostoyevsky thought, was man’s death as well.

Reason and passion are both aspects of something deeper, something primordial, Nietzsche stated: the will to power.

French Revolution had failed because it had ignored the lessons of human nature, the morality of Christianity, and the traditions of the past.

And what is our purpose in this world? Not to indulge our appetites, but to render obedience to divine ordinance.

19 But nationalism can also be a force for evil. Nationalism turns toxic when it fails to reach that moral minimum—when it tyrannizes its own citizens, or locks people out based on immutable characteristics. Nationalism turns poisonous when it becomes imperialism—when

The Bible contended that man could not live by bread alone; the French Revolution contended that without bread, nothing else mattered.

The great dream of redefining human beings, discovering transcendent values without reference to God or universal purpose, seemed to have died.

the notion that a universal ethical system could be discerned by human beings was a fool’s errand, the idea that history was an unerring unfolding of Hegelian dialectics far too simplistic.

If truth lay in the self, then all moral truth automatically became a matter of subjective interpretation.

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

Even Enlightenment philosophers who opposed slavery did so because they were steeped in a Judeo-Christian tradition stemming from the basic notion of imago dei and natural rights.

“The moral system by which you suggest that that portion of the Bible should be removed is built on the moral system of the Bible, developed over two thousand years.”

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.