‘The Right Side of History’: On the Loss of Western Values
A review of ‘The Right Side of History’, by Ben Shapiro; Broadside Books, 2019.
Why are people in the West so miserable? Why are we so angry? These and other questions animate Ben Shapiro’s thoroughly unfashionable book about the roots of our civilisation and the perceived connection between our current woes and loss of moral grounding. He surveys the deep past with the aim of showing how the unlikely marriage of Athens and Jerusalem – Ancient Greek philosophy and Judeo-Christian ethics – gave rise to what we call ‘the West’ – and how forgetting this fact has inspired our cultural confusion.
The book is neatly split in two: in the first, Shapiro sets out how reason and faith, two forces often seen to be at odds, came together to form the bedrock of the West. In Athens, thinkers like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle used logic to explore the nature of existence, value, knowledge, political life and the human person through rational inquiry. Athens, in other words, gave us reason: a belief in the power of the human mind to understand the world.
Thinkers like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle used logic to explore the nature of existence.
Jerusalem stands, in contrast, for the role of the divine in our affairs. The Hebrew Bible, a central theme of which is that God has formed a covenant with us, imparted to the West the sense of moral duty, divine justice and an ordered world governed by transcendental truths. God shapes history, according to tradition, and demands a moral response from His creation. Christianity then connected Jewish moral law with Greek metaphysical inquiry through people like St. Thomas Aquinas, so forming the basis of Western theology and ethics. Jerusalem, then, gave us faith: an awareness of divine purpose and moral order that transcends human comprehension.
Downstream of what may seem at first an unlikely dialectic are human rights, Enlightenment values and the Industrial Revolution. But the Western synthesis of reason and faith, Athens and Jerusalem, is not, for Shapiro, self-perpetuating. Indeed – and now we are in the second half of the book – these ideals are dying out. Modernism, postmodernism, secularism – these rival theories of how the world is or ought to be have stripped us of our shared sense of right and wrong. Without a faithful moral compass, says Shapiro, we find ourselves unmoored, drifting around seeking meaning in shallow pleasures or identitarian concerns, rather than in lasting, binding truths.
Of course Shapiro did not come up with the notion that the soul of the West is the marriage of reason and faith. But he is distinct from others who invoke that synthesis by stressing the latter over the former. Shapiro is insistent that meaning cannot spring from reason alone, and that without a moral grounding tied to the transcendent, cold rationalism can, or perhaps will, produce destructive ends. It is something that has been said quite often of the Nazi and Soviet regimes: whatever their shallow resemblance to religions, they were not sincerely religious. ‘Both Stalin and Hitler wanted a neutered religion, subservient to the state, while the slow programme of scientific revelation destroyed the foundation of religious myth,’ writes the historian Richard Overy.
Shapiro is insistent that meaning cannot spring from reason alone.
Shapiro writes like he talks. He is direct, impatient, highly logical, and quite happy to ruffle a few feathers. He is, for what it is worth, accessible, even if this comes at the price of depth and nuance. But then he is a provocateur; which is not to say he is insincere but merely that he wants to prompt and shock and jolt: he wants to get us thinking. One finds oneself wondering what life would be like if one were as sure of one’s view as Shapiro seems to be (and as his work requires him to be). Such certainty and consistency of thought is, in any case, compelling.
The Right Side of History is a war-cry of sorts: a call for a return to the principles that, for Shapiro, shaped Western success: the marriage of reason and faith. We may agree or not that these are indeed the keys to Western flourishing; we may agree or not that we have forgotten this, and that this forgetting is the root if our evident malaise. At any rate, for those interested in philosophy, history, politics or culture, Shapiro has given us a lively little polemic.
