The Right Side of History summary

In ancient Egypt, rulers were given the title Son of Ra; Ra being the preeminent Egyptian god of the sun. And in Rome, emperors were regarded as deities as late as the year 14 CE, when Emperor Augustus was declared a god as he died.

For centuries, the inequality of man was accepted. Sons of Ra were divine and could determine the outcome of their lives. But everybody else had to accept the lot in life that the gods had given them. It was the Bible that gave us the concept of human equality. This was one of the most influential developments in the history of mankind and civilization. As the Bible states, “God created man in his image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” All humans, not just rulers, were formed by God in his image.

The Bible taught us that God raised man above the level of animals by giving him a godly mission and moral purpose.

The philosophers of Athens, on the other hand, reinforced the idea of man’s elevation not by association with God, but through man’s own capabilities. The Athenian philosophers’ legacy to the West was to teach that we humans, alone and unique in the world, have the faculty of reason. We have the power to pursue knowledge, to think logically and to explore the world.

Science, and all the riches and wonders it has given the modern world, is perhaps the most celebrated of all the West’s legacies. It’s become fashionable to believe that religion has somehow been a restrictive force on science; that science has flourished despite Christianity. But that’s simply not the case.

In fact, before the age of Darwinism, pretty much every great scientist the world had ever seen was religious. Take Nicole Oresme, who in the fourteenth century discovered that the Earth rotates on its axis. He was a bishop of Lisieux in France. Or the famous Nicolaus Copernicus, who theorized that the Earth moves around the sun, rather than the other way round. Not only did he serve his church as a medical adviser, but his famous 1543 work On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres incorporated a letter to the pope at the time, Paul III.

The United States of America was the first country on earth to be explicitly grounded in philosophy.

Thomas Jefferson, a coauthor of the Declaration of Independence, even said that the document was an attempt to enshrine the brilliance of thinkers like Aristotle, Cicero and Locke.

At the heart of the French Revolution, and the thinking behind it, was an emphasis on the collective. Individuals were suddenly important not in and of themselves, but only in the sense that they were members of a group. It’s an idea which has proven dangerous time and time again, and yet it still remains seductive for some.

The experience of Russia under communism is a bleak warning of what can happen when the collective is elevated over individual rights.

Today, the author argues, the political left has abandoned truth, reason and the pursuit of virtue in favor of victimhood, as well as an angry tribalism that has turned normal political disagreements into something much more toxic.

We only have to look at the fashionable politics of intersectionality to see these forces at play.