The Right Side of History

How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great

Ben Shapiro

• Publisher: Broadside e-books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780062857927
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology of Religion
• Index: Social Sciences

A #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!

Human beings have never had it better than we have it now in the West. So why are we on the verge of throwing it all away?

In 2016, New York Times bestselling author Ben Shapiro spoke at the University of California–Berkeley. Hundreds of police officers were required to protect his speech. What was so frightening about Shapiro? He came to argue that Western civilization is in the midst of a crisis of purpose and ideas; that we have let grievances replace our sense of community and political expediency limit our individual rights; that we are teaching our kids that their emotions matter more than rational debate; and that the only meaning in life is arbitrary and subjective.

As a society, we are forgetting that almost everything great that has ever happened in history happened because of people who believed in both Judeo-Christian values and in the Greek-born power of reason. In The Right Side of History, Shapiro sprints through more than 3, 500 years, dozens of philosophers, and the thicket of modern politics to show how our freedoms are built upon the twin notions that every human being is made in God's image and that human beings were created with reason capable of exploring God's world.

We can thank these values for the birth of science, the dream of progress, human rights, prosperity, peace, and artistic beauty. Jerusalem and Athens built America, ended slavery, defeated the Nazis and the Communists, lifted billions from poverty, and gave billions morespiritual purpose.

Yet we are in the process of abandoning Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law, watching our civilization collapse into age-old tribalism, individualistic hedonism, and moral subjectivism. We believe we can satisfy ourselves with intersectionality, scientific materialism, progressive politics, authoritarian governance, or nationalistic solidarity.

We can't.

The West is special, and in The Right Side of History, Ben Shapiro bravely explains how we have lost sight of the moral purpose that drives each of us to be better, the sacred duty to work together for the greater good,.

Chapter 1

The Pursuit of Happiness

Are you happy?”

It’s a question my wife asked me one day, a few years ago. We were going through a stressful period—my wife is a doctor, and she was working brutal hours; our youngest child, Gabriel, was waking us up at all hours of the night; our eldest, Leeya, was going through a stretch in which she’d burst into tears at the tiniest provocation. And work was trying, too: my business partners and I were working to get our website, The Daily Wire, functioning at top level; we were building out my podcast; I was traveling to various campuses, each a security challenge and a test of wills with sometimes violent students and obstructive administrators.

“Sure,” I said. “Of course I am.”

Like a lot of other people who answer that question from a spouse, I knew there was a correct answer; you never want to say no, lest your spouse think it’s his or her fault.

But this question is the most crucial one.

So, was I happy?

Or, more precisely, when was I most happy?

Formulated like that, the question became easy: on Sabbath.

Every week, I drop everything for twenty-five hours. As an Orthodox Jew, I celebrate the Sabbath, which means that my phone and television are off-limits. No work. No computer. No news. No politics. A full day, plus an hour, to spend with my wife and children and parents, with my community. The outside world disappears. It’s the high point of my life. There is no greater happiness than sitting with my wife, watching the kids play with (and occasionally fight with) each other, a book open on my lap.

I’m not alone. Sabbath is the high point of many Jews’ weeks. There’s an old saying in the Jewish community: the Jews didn’t keep the Sabbath, the Sabbath kept the Jews. It certainly kept us sane.

Now, I cover politics for a living. And I’m happy doing it—it’s purposeful and important, and working to understand and convey ideas can be thrilling. But politics isn’t the root of happiness for me. 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. The Founding Fathers knew that. That’s why Thomas Jefferson didn’t write that the government was granted power to grant you happiness: it was there to protect your pursuit of happiness. The government existed to protect your rights, to prevent those rights from being infringed upon. The government was there to stop someone from stealing your horse, from butchering you in your sleep, from letting his cow graze on your land.

At no point did Jefferson suggest that government could achieve happiness. None of the Founders thought it could.

Yet more and more Americans are investing their happiness in politics. Instead of looking inward to find ways to better their lives, we’ve decided that the chief obstacle to our happiness is outside forces, even in the freest, richest country in the history of the world. This desire to silence—or subdue—those who disagree with us has been reaching new, terrifying heights.

To take a minor example, in September 2017, Republicans and Democrats clubbed each other savagely over the exact same policy: President Obama had issued an executive amnesty for certain children of illegal immigrants, the so-called DREAMers; President Trump had revoked that amnesty, but called on Congress to pass a legislative version that would protect the DREAMers. Democrats called Republicans cruel, inhumane; one congressman called Trump “Pontius Pilate.” Meanwhile, Republicans called Democrats lawless and irresponsible.

Over the exact same policy.

And it’s getting uglier. We seem dedicated to the proposition that if only we can change the political landscape—or at least attribute nasty motives to our political opponents—then we can achieve the happiness we crave. Instead of leaving each other alone, we seek to control one another—if only Bob would do what I want, I’d be happy! And if I elect the right guy, he’ll make Bob do what I want him to do!

Our politicians know that we seek happiness through them, and they capitalize off that misguided quest. In 2008, Michelle Obama said that Americans should back her husband because he could help us “fix our souls.” How, exactly? She explained: “Barack Obama . . . is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. . . . That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you go to back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.”¹ In May 2016, then candidate Trump openly stated, “I will give you everything. I will give you what you’ve been looking for for 50 years. I’m the only one.”²

We’re fools to believe them. And what’s more, we know we’re fools to believe them. Polls show that we don’t trust our politicians. We think they’re lying to us, and we’re right. They pander to us. They fib to us. They tell us promises specifically designed to garner our support, then make excuses to break those promises. And yet we eagerly invest them with more and more authority, and browbeat those who oppose our favorite candidates.

Why have we invested so much meaning, so much time, so much effort in brutal policy fights over seemingly minor matters, when none of it brings us closer to happiness? Why, overall, do the American people seem to be less and less optimistic? Why, by polling data, do nearly three-quarters of Americans say they aren’t confident “life for our children’s generation will be better than it has been for us”—the lowest number in decades?³ Why are a huge plurality of young Americans themselves more fearful than hopeful about the future?⁴ Why are suicide rates rising dramatically among some of the most materially prosperous segments of society, to rates not seen in thirty years?⁵

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.

HAPPINESS IS MORAL PURPOSE

Pleasure can be gained from a variety of activities: golf, fishing, playing with your children, sex. Amoral activities can bring us pleasure—that temporary high, that feeling of forgetting our cares. However, that pleasure is never enough. 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.

This has been clear since the dawn of Western civilization. The very terminology for happiness is imbued with such meaning in both the Judeo-Christian and the Greek context. The Hebrew Bible calls happiness simcha; Aristotle called happiness eudaimonia. What does the Bible mean by simcha? It means right action in accordance with God’s will. In Ecclesiastes, Solomon laments, “I said to myself: ‘Come now, I will mix [wine] with joy and experience pleasure,’ and behold, this too was vanity.”⁶ The Bible doesn’t seem to care very much about what we want. Instead, God commands us to live in simcha. How can He command an emotion? He can’t—he can only command our enthusiastic pursuit of an ideal He sets forth for us. If we do not pursue that purpose, we pay a price: we serve foreign gods, which cannot provide us any sort of true fulfillment.

Because you did not serve the Lord your God joyfully and gladly in the time of prosperity, therefore in hunger and thirst, in nakedness and dire poverty, you will serve the enemies the Lord sends against you. He will put an iron yoke on your neck until he has destroyed you.⁷

We might not think of binge-watching Stranger Things as an iron yoke on our neck, but if television is our best reason to live, we’re not really living. Rejoice in the purpose God gives you. Here’s Solomon again: “There is nothing better for a person than to rejoice in his work, because that is his lot.”⁸ He’s not talking about finding your “why” at a software start-up. He means the work of serving God and following Him. As Rabbi Tarfon says in Ethics of the Fathers, “The day is short, the work is great, the workers are lazy, but the reward is great, and the Master of the house is knocking at your door.” And what if you don’t want to work? Well, tough: “It is not upon you to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.”⁹

Aristotelian eudaimonia similarly relies on living in accordance with moral purpose. Like the Bible, Aristotle didn’t define happiness as temporary joy. He saw happiness in a life well-lived. How could we live a good life? First, by determining what “good” means; second, by pursuing it. To Aristotle, “good” wasn’t a subjective term, something for each of us to define for ourselves; “good” was a statement of objective fact. Something was “good” if it fulfilled its purpose. A good watch tells time; a good dog defends its master. 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:

What, then, prevents one from calling happy someone who is active in accord with complete virtue and who is adequately equipped with external goods, not for any chance time but in a complete life?¹⁰

Act well, and in accordance with your value as a rational being, and you will be happy. We find moral purpose in cultivating our reason, and using that reason to act virtuously; pursuing moral purpose makes us “great-souled.”

So, in the end, the Bible and the Philosopher come to the same conclusion from opposite directions: 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. George Washington puts the synthesis well in his letter to the Protestant Episcopal Church on August 19, 1789: “the consideration that human happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected, will always continue to prompt me to promote the progress of the former, by inculcating the practice of the latter.”¹¹

If all this sounds like a more restrictive version of happiness than we’re used to, that’s because it is. Happiness isn’t rolling around in the mud at Woodstock, nor is it a nice golf game after a rough week at work. Happiness is the pursuit of purpose in our lives. If we have lived with moral purpose, even death becomes less painful. When Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer knew that his death was imminent, he wrote a letter in anticipation of his passing. Here’s what that great-souled man wrote: “I believe that the pursuit of truth and right ideas through honest debate and rigorous argument is a noble undertaking. . . . I leave this life with no regrets.” Only living with moral purpose can grant profound happiness.¹²

As Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl wrote in his stirring memoir about surviving the Holocaust, Man’s Search for Meaning, “Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost. . . . We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.”¹³

Frankl’s feeling isn’t anecdotal. According to a fourteen-year longitudinal study from the University of Carleton in Canada, those who reported strong purpose in life at the outset of the study were 15 percent more likely to still be alive than those who did not. That statistic held true for every age group. Another similar study from the University College London found that for those above retirement age, a sense of purpose correlated with a 30 percent decrease in chances of death over an eight-and-a-half-year period. Overall, as Professor Steve Taylor of Leeds Beckett University states, “Those who reported the highest level of fulfillment lived, on average, two years longer.”¹⁴ A study of 951 patients with dementia found that those who said they felt a sense of purpose were 2.4 times less likely to develop Alzheimer’s than others. Cancer patients given “meaning-centered” therapy rather than “support-focused” therapy were more motivated to keep living—and even felt better than their colleagues. A study of teenagers found that those who increased their empathy and altruism most also saw the greatest drop in cardiovascular risk. As Dr. Dhruv Khullar, researcher at the Weill Cornell Department of Healthcare Policy and Research writes in the New York Times, “Only about a quarter of Americans strongly endorse having a clear sense of purpose and of what makes their lives meaningful, while nearly 40 percent either feel neutral or say they don’t. This is both a social and public health problem.”¹⁵

So, what do we need to generate the moral purpose that provides the foundation for happiness?

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 only foundation for a successful civilization lies in a careful bala...