The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great Hardcover – March 19, 2019

This book is a diagnosis of the decline of the modern western world. We live in the greatest civilization that has ever existed; it is the safest, healthiest, and most prosperous society in history. Yet, we’re throwing it away. Depression, drug use, and conspiracy theories are rampant while marriage rates, community cohesion, and overall religiosity are fast declining. So, what happened?Here’s an appropriate metaphor: If a frog is put into a pot of boiling water, it will jump out immediately. If, however, a frog is put into a pot of room temperature water which is then slowly heated to a boil over time, the frog will cook to death. This is the argument for how we got to where we are today (and also for why global warming is such a threat, but that’s a different topic.) It has happened slowly, over the course of generations, and now it feels as though the water is suddenly boiling! Shapiro posits that when The United States was first founded, it was on the twin pillars of Judeo-Christian ethics and an Aristotelian belief in the use of human reason to understand the world around us. “The Bible and the Philosopher come to the same conclusion” he writes, “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.”The definition of the word virtue, similar to most words, has changed over the course of time. Whereas virtue was once associated with individual character development, it is now defined as “conformity of one’s life and conduct to moral and ethical principles” (taken from dictionary.com). This new definition is tricky, because who decides what is morally correct and ethical is important. Conforming to that which has been dictated as morally correct is often a recipe for disaster. This is exactly how the atrocities of communism and nazism happened, as the individual was sacrificed in service to the greater good of the nation.Shapiro says that a happy and prosperous society requires “four elements: individual moral purpose, individual capacity, collective moral purpose, and collective capacity.” I also believe this to be true. Human beings need to feel happy with themselves and their individual work towards the betterment of their own lives. They also need to feel content within their communities and to feel as though their contributions to the collective matter. Human beings exist on both planes, the individual and the communal, and must nurture both. In his book, Shapiro takes us on a ride through history, stopping along the way to visit the different philosophers and thinkers who got us to where we are today. It started in Athens, around 2500 years ago with Aristotle and the birth of human reason. This is where humanity first tried to understand the world through an objective lens. Then came Judaism, closely followed by Christianity, and the belief that human beings served a larger moral purpose. While these two pillars of thought were honed and redefined throughout the ages, the next biggest break was the Enlightenment (occurring in 17th and 18th century Europe) which placed the focus on the individual. Up until this point in history, societies had all been mostly constructed around the greater good of the whole. Now, all of a sudden, people began to value themselves. It is no coincidence that this is also around the same time that the industrial revolution occurred and capitalism began. Capitalism is focused on the individual and what that individual can produce. If you can make more than your neighbor, or make something better, than the quality of your life improves. That is how the United States, and by association the western world, grew to become to most advanced and prosperous country in the history of humanity, lifting billions of people out of poverty along the way.If you didn’t know, Ben Shapiro is a conservative political pundit here in the United States and spends a considerable amount of time and energy diagnosing the present political scene. Considering his biases towards the left, he makes a good point about the foundations of their current destructive nature. The Democrats, as they stand today, seem to be throwing away the importance of the individual for the importance of the whole. We can see this in the relentless ‘cancelling’ of people on social media, or how they don’t seem to have a good answer to the question of why there are gay and black people in the Republican Party. The damaging philosophy, as posited by Shapiro, is their dependance on their own subjectivity in relation to the world around them, as opposed to the objectivity of days long gone. “By focusing on self-esteem” he writes, “the New Left could kill three birds with one stone: they could overturn reliance on Judeo-Christian religion, Greek teleology, and capitalism.” When Shapiro says facts don’t care about your feelings, a sentiment often repeated by pundits on the right, this is what he means. He goes on to say how “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.” This, according to Shapiro, is how the left is destroying the America we all know. Meanwhile, modern Democrats assert that they are intent on dismantling the patriarchal hierarchy of the current system, fighting for justice for marginalized people, and doing away with a system that is unequal. The problem is that they are also correct in their beliefs. Is Shapiro right when he says that the Left is doing tremendous damage to the collective psyche of the country when they ignore the individual in preference of the community, and when they focus on subjectivity over objectivity? Yes. Is the Left right when they say the reason for this is because the community has been racist, sexist, and homophobic since the founding of the country? Also yes.Anyways, whether we like it or not, here we are, boiling. And whether we choose to accept it or not, the warning signs were there. We, as a society, have stopped focusing on individual character development as a route to a more harmonious society. Instead, we have everything we want at our fingertips and it will never be enough, because without virtue, without individual meaning to our lives, no amount of material stuff can make us happy. The same goes for collective meaning, which is equally important. The great Russian writer and thinker Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) once remarked that “materialist man is far more of a threat than religious man.” Regardless of whether you are on the political left or right, whether you live in the modern western world or not, the lessons here still apply. Society needs people who use their reason and their objectivity to be both virtuous individuals and valuable members of their communities. Whether we return to Judeo-Christian ethics and Aristotelian virtue remains to be seen. Without these things, however, society will surely continue to crumble.

If you come to this book expecting a political screed you will be disappointed. While Ben Shapiro is an effective conservative activist he is much more of an intellectual than a provocateur. This is a thoughtful book. It is not a scholarly book but it is a learned book, written for a broad audience.The thrust of the book is that our success as a civilization is due to two major influences—Judeo-Christian morality and Greek philosophy, particularly Aristotelian teleology. These two streams of thought/morality are now under attack. The central conundrum is posed at the outset, viz. Why are things so good? And why are we now blowing it? In other words, how did we achieve our successes and why are we now turning our backs on them? The book thus falls into two parts—(a) an intellectual history of the high points of western civilization; and (b) an intellectual history of the challenges to western civilization.These stories have been told before but they are complex stories, particularly the second one. By and large, BS's account is thoughtful, interesting and persuasive. It is, of course, all in the details. The overarching story is that antinomian elements of the French Enlightenment have significantly challenged the mainstream thrust of the Anglo-American Enlightenment and put the thought of individuals like Locke, Montesquieu, Burke, et al. on the ropes. I think this is true. The enlightenment was challenged by the French Nietzscheans, et al. not because it was wrong but because it was not perfect. I believe that this challenge was disingenuous and share the view that many of the intellectual challenges to reason, hard facts and common sense come because of the explicit and undeniable failures of Marxism. When the butcher's bill for the resulting slaughter is shown, the numbers sit there in clear black and white. Hence we see the anti-foundationalist relativism and radical subjectivism brought to the fore in order to divert us from the facts. In other words, the attack is epistemological but the ultimate goal is to defend Marxism by removing the tools for rational argument against it.I think BS is a little hard on Hume; I take a more generous approach to his skepticism and see it as a powerful reading of science. (BS's reading of Hume's notion of the 'passions' is also a little off the mark.) He is not a theist but he is reverent and that separates him significantly from the philosophes who would appropriate his thought to reinforce their atheism. I would also place more emphasis on the French Nietzscheans and postmodernists, whose influence on American higher education has been disastrous. They did a relatively fast fade in France, but they are still with us in America, particularly in the ways in which they reinforce the victimology which remains at the center of the humanities as well as at the center of leftist politics.His stress of 'self-esteem' is, I think, very important. Dr. Spock may have done as much damage as Foucault. Dewey is also a major force for cultural entropy and BS singles him out as a significant source for our problems. Fukuyama made much of the search for thymos among nations. That 'recognition' is, I believe, central to victimology. It is, ultimately, a search for power but it is also an outcry for recognition or, let us be honest, attention. BS hits this point hard and I think his analysis is spot on. Another high point for me was his attack on the canard that the church was opposed to science. Its opposition to some elements of science must be balanced with the omnipresent Renaissance notion that, as Milton put it, God revealed Himself through the book of His word and through the book of His work. The latter is the creation and this notion undergirds science, placing scientists at the forefront of attempting to understand God's work. This is a key bridge between proto-enlightenment thought and Greek thought.Bottom line: the second half of the book is a very wide-ranging, very well-informed account of our cultural devolution. Because it is such a complex story there will be a great deal of argument over details and nuances. This would be true of any intellectual history of this period/phenomena. BS provides us a thought-provoking and interesting account, one that is accessible to all serious readers.

I ususally do not write reviews on books that already have 1000+ of them but this time I find myself with a different view tham most of these so here it goes.This was a book that I was looking forward to reading. I am not an American nor a citizen of the UK and I have never read anything by Ben Shapiro before. Have never seen him more than a few minutes on Youtube. I knew he was a conservative American and that was about it. What made me read this book was that I expected to hear a conservative view on the world today. Considering that we live in times were conservative views are loosing ground it would be interesting to read one of the few modern conservatives in media today.It turned out to be a very strange experience and in the end the author did not answer his on fundamental question; How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great.To start with I was looking for his definition of "the West". What is it? Is it the USA? Is it USA and Western Europe? Is it Is it North America and all of Europe? Does Australia count? Is it all countries with Christian and Jewish faith? Do the former USSR belong to the West today? Is it all those places that Europeans have dominated? Unfortunately Ben Shapiro does not tell us and through the book I got a feeling that it is a question that has no answer. The Next question is when was "the West" created? Was there a "West" when Jesus lived? Was there a "West" before 1492? Was the "West" created when the US became the dominant country on the planet? No answer there either.If you start to read his book without these fundamental facts as a foundation it all becomes rather confusing.But maybe this is not such a big problem after all. The rest of the book is a long selection of quotations from one philosopher after another. In the end his answer to why the West is great is that about 200 philosophers discussed it and had some views on it. It is kind of stunning to read that these people made the West great. There has been and are today billions of people that have lived in the West and live here today. Who built the West? In my view it was the farmers, workers, soldiers, teachers, priests, kings and queens, politicians, scientists, engineers etc. etc. They built the West and made it great. These philosophers did not make the West. They are a product of the West. They might be interesting to read for some but ask yourself; how many of all the people who has made the West great has ever read the writings of these philosophers? Ben Shapiro tells us they were part of a classical education but most of the people who built the world we are living in never had any classic education at all.It was also kind of strange that the real powerful force behind the US and EU today is capitalism and it is hardly mentioned in the book. A book written by a conservative author!I would also like to add that the British Empire contributed far more to the greatness of the Western World than most people are aware of today.I wish that I had liked the book but I did not. It was a confusing read with a bombardment of names and quotations that just led to more names and more quotations but no real result.It is clear that Ben Shapiro himself is well educated and knows his philosophers. Some of his views on the World today are powerful and interesting to read and also it takes courage to have them today. But from my point of view his book did not bring clarity to the question who made the West great.

Shapiro covers the decline of Judeo-Christian values and classic Athenean reason, on to the rise of nihilistic hedonism in Western civilization of the modern day.On the journey we look at the human journey for the 'Pursuit of Happiness' and explore what that means specifically. We go through several historical Empires, movements and figures, Nazi Germany, Marxism and the fascism of toxic identity politics, bringing us up to the modern day.As expected he gets into his own experiences with the attacks on free speech by the modern day neo-Marxist postmodernist far-left (namely the California State University incident) in context of the history that he has explored throughout the book.Shapiro warns the reader of what the inevitable outcome will be, unless we can return to traditional values.

A brilliant history book on the foundation of morality and reason in western civilization. It is very lean and dense at the same time. As a non-western I have understood and learned how to articulate my appreciation of the western civilization and have definitely been well enlightened by the lessons of this history’s failures and success.

Ben Shapiro gives an excellent insight as to how Judeo-Christian values, Greek thought and the combination of logic, reason and faith are the foundations of Western Civilisation. It also speaks on how we on the verge of throwing all that is good about todays society down the drain.It is well written and accurate in its telling of philosophy and history.I Definitely recommend for those who are interested in religion, philosophy, politics and history or those who just want to learn something new.

Ben Shapiro ist für alle die ihn - nicht kennen – einer der rhetorisch begabtesten konservativen Kommentatoren der USA und mit Mitte 30 auch einer der jüngeren. Shapiro der seiner selbst Identifikation nach orthodoxem Juden ist (im deutschen Sprachraum würde man ihn wohl eher als gläubig oder praktizierend bezeichnen, das Wort orthodox weckt hier wohl bei den meisten andere Assoziationen) argumentiert immer von einem Standpunkt der seine Religiosität mit konservativ/freiheitsorientierten Werten verbindet. So auch in diesem Werk: Er sieht zwei Gründungsort des modernen Westens Jerusalem (für die jüdisch-christliche Tradition) und Athen (fü die rational logische Tradition) und untersucht wie von diesen aus „der Westen“ wie wir ihn heute kennen sich entwickelte.In „The right Side of History“ stellt er im Eilmarsch die wichtigsten Denker und Entwicklungen dieser beiden Tradition von ca 3500 vor Christus bis heute vor und argumentiert wo von Shapiros Standpunkt aus Fehler in der heutigen Rezeption und im Umgang mit diesen Werten und Ideen gemacht wurden. Man muss dabei beachten, dass Shapiro ein (intelligenter) politischer Kommentator ist und kein Philosoph oder Forscher. In seiner Darstellung geht es um Verständlichkeit und Lesbarkeit und die Darlegung seiner Sicht auf die Welt, nicht um akribische Offenlegung von Wurzeln und das Verfolgen von Gedankensträngen im Detail. Er bleibt daher meist eher an der Oberfläche, doch seine Ausführungen laden dazu ein sich mit den genannten Denken und Philosophen sowie Gedanken und Ideen näher zu befassen. Aus Sicht des Rezensenten mach dies das Buch zwar auf der einen Seite nicht unbedingt zum tiefschürfensten Werk zu dieser Thematik, aber gleichzeitig den Text extrem gut lesbar und auch für „Einsteiger“ geeignet.Shapiros Werk könnte man durchaus als Einladung zur Disputation sehen oder wohl eher noch zur Auseinandersetzung mit einer konservativ religiös fundierten Sicht auf die Welt wie sie größere Teile der Bevölkerung der USA durchaus noch pflegen. Aus dieser Perspektive mag das Werk auch für Menschen, die mit Shapiros Meinung und Standpunkt nicht übereinstimmen von Interesse sein. Der eine oder andere wird sich aber ohne Zweifel mit der Idee der USA als „der besten und entwickelten Gesellschaft die jemals existierte“, der Vorstellung „City on the hill“ Ausfluss des Gedankens des amerikanischen Exzeptionalismus sicher etwas schwerer anfreunden, da uns diese Art von Denken eher fremd geworden ist.