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.