Ben Shapiro’s newest best-seller, The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great, is a confounding little book. Short, sharp, and impressively ambitious, Shapiro cavorts through 3,000 years of intellectual history in the span of about 250 pages, offering a perspicuous, “user-friendly” dive into some of our civilization’s biggest ideas. The book’s greatest strength is how it manages to pack so much, so approachably, in so little space; this is also its most vexing weakness.
Shapiro concerns himself with our big societal irony: In the greatest, safest, most prosperous time in history, why are we all so unhappy, so resentful of our institutions and of each other? Or, as he asks, “Why are things so good?” and “Why are we blowing it?” Waving aside answers of economics, racism, and polarization, Shapiro instead turns to something more existential, to questions of political philosophy. Our present decline and cultural ennui, he propounds, are because we’ve become unmoored from the religious and philosophical foundations upon which Western civilization was built. His solution is rediscovery of and recommitment to these foundations.
In taking up this question, and in this way, Shapiro is doing several things at once, some of which he does quite well, others less so. By arguing for a return to our founding precepts, he is also advancing a specific interpretation of those foundations — how to view ideas, thinkers, and elements of the tradition and their worth to the Western project. Aristotle, Locke, and the American founders, for example, are healthful contributions; Machiavelli, Nietzsche, and Rousseau, not so much. Shapiro is also adding his voice to a particular ongoing discussion that’s been enjoined by a swell of pundits, academics, and public intellectuals recently, including Jonah Goldberg, Steven Pinker, Patrick Deneen, Rod Dreher, and Yuval Levin, among others.
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And underneath it all, it seems, Shapiro is attempting to do this with an eye to an audience, his audience, that skews younger and more conservative. In form, length, and style, The Right Side of History reads as a SparkNotes introduction to our intellectual heritage, written for ideologically friendly readers who’ve likely never cracked the spine of a “great book.” Most of the book’s problems stem from the concomitant limitations of this purpose; concision and readability are favored over nuanced consideration and thorough analytical engagement, exacerbating its often acerbic tone. Shapiro concedes as much: “[W]e’ll inevitably be giving great philosophers shorter shrift than they deserve, and simplifying issues for the sake of brevity.” Nonetheless, it is a noble purpose, and while the book’s dialectics sag, as a field guide to the moral and philosophical underpinnings of human flourishing, it is a worthwhile effort.
The foundations of Western civilization were born in Jerusalem and Athens, Shapiro posits, with the “twin notions” of Judeo-Christian moral values and Greek natural law reasoning, respectively. The interplay of these two pillars enabled the West to rise, allowing the freedom and the tools for individuals to pursue happiness. Shapiro also provides a clean conceptual framework for happiness, asserting that it comprises four elements: “individual moral purpose, individual capacity, collective moral purpose, and collective capacity.” Each element is necessary for individual pursuit of happiness, which, in turn, fuels societal vitality.
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Stressing the importance of both Jerusalem and Athens sets Shapiro apart from others in this sphere. As Nic Rowan noted last month, books in this genre generally lament one of two developments — the decline of Judeo-Christian religious values and practice, or the degradation of the political tradition built in Athens and baptized in America and bolstered by Enlightenment reasoning — while largely ignoring, or blaming, the other. To his credit, Shapiro understands both pillars were necessary for the rise of the West, that both remain necessary, and that both are suffering existential erosion.
In one of the book’s more thorough sections, Shapiro tilts with the reason-centric case prominently put forth by Pinker in his 2018 best-seller, Enlightenment Now. While giving due credit to Pinker’s book, “a powerful ode to Enlightenment values,” Shapiro rightly raises the two biggest flaws in his argument: that the Enlightenment itself was an outgrowth of an intellectual milieu sowed in the fusionist soil of both Jerusalem and Athens, and that cold, scientific reason alone is insufficient for individual human happiness and for tempering the collective horrors that arise absent mediating religious morality (see: French Revolution, the).
By the same token, however, Shapiro fails to engage with the obverse argument against fusionist commitments, namely that the progeny of Athens chokes Jerusalem and social order. This charge is leveled most forcefully by Deneen in his bracing 2018 polemic, Why Liberalism Failed, which argues that liberalism has failed through succeeding, that the effectual truth of its inherent contradictions does not engender freedom or liberation but rather a self-corrupting force that destroys religion, hobbles communal ties, and keeps humanity shackled within Plato’s cave. Shapiro does acknowledge the “tension” between the pillars of Athens and Jerusalem — it would be disqualifying for any book that relies so heavily on Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey’s (miscited as “Joseph Crowley”) seminal History of Political Philosophy not to — but never really examines what that friction means for his project of civilization renewal.
One may forgive this fault due to the book’s length, but it remains a fundamental obstacle those of us who agree with Shapiro’s call for religious and philosophical revival must grapple with. Yet, while Shapiro never enters the discussion, his ambitious book is sufficient to bring a whole host of newcomers to the Western tradition up to the threshold. And that deserves praise.
J. Grant Addison is deputy editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.
