The Right Side of History Buchzusammenfassung - das Wichtigste aus The Right Side of History

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Zusammenfassung von The Right Side of History

Name: The Right Side of History
Rating: 3.9 (174 reviews)
Author: Ben Shapiro

Ben Shapiro

How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great

3.9 (174 Bewertungen)

20 Min.

Kurz zusammengefasst

The Right Side of History by Ben Shapiro is a reflection on the Western civilization's greatest ideas and achievements, and how a defense of these values can help preserve and improve the future.

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The Right Side of History
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What’s in it for me? A conservative’s hymn to the West.

The typical Westerner enjoys both a comfortable life and the freedom of living in a democratic society – privileges which seemingly are taken for granted. Why are people so unhappy? Why does so much of modern life seem infused with anger? Why is it that Clinton and Trump supporters don’t just disagree but seem to actively distrust and hate each other? And why is there so much anger in public life that the author, an Orthodox Jew, is accused of being a neo-Nazi by some on the left, and is sent anti-semitic abuse by others?

Too many people seem to have bought into the idea that the West is something damaging or shameful, and not a huge force for good in the world. These blinks take a step back and explore the philosophical foundations of the West, and its focus on moral purpose, reason, scientific discovery and individual liberty.

The author reminds us that the West’s success is built on the twin foundations of Jerusalem and Athens – the Bible and the hugely influential thoughts of the ancient Athenian philosophers. He also argues that societies which stray from this dual philosophical legacy are not to be desired.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

how the Bible gave us the concepts of human equality and free will;
why true happiness is about moral purpose; and
why the French Revolution was a disaster.

True happiness is derived not from pleasure but from moral purpose.

Are you happy? If not, you certainly aren’t alone. Nearly three-quarters of Americans say they’re not confident that life for the next generation will be better than today, according to a 2014 story in the Washington Post.

Why are we so despondent? Well, perhaps it’s because we’ve lost sight of what happiness truly is. We associate it with pleasure – having sex, playing golf or watching our children grow. But the Bible and the philosophers of Athens tell us that true happiness comes from leading a life of moral purpose.

In the Hebrew Bible, the word used for happiness is simcha, meaning correct action in line with God’s will. It is commanded to live with simcha, and rejoice in the purpose that God has given humans. As Solomon says, “There is nothing better for a person than to rejoice in his work, because that is his lot.”

The philosophers of Athens took a similar view. Aristotle, for example, developed a concept of happiness that was also about living a good life. But a good life for Aristotle wasn’t a subjective concept that we can determine for ourselves. For him and his followers, something was good if it fulfilled its purpose. A good watch, to give a modern example, tells the time. And a good human acts in line with reason, because what makes humans unique is our capacity for reason, and our ability to use reason to explore the world.

So both the Bible and the Athenian philosophers arrived at similar conclusions. True happiness in life comes from moral purpose, whether that is serving God with joy, or following our moral duty as humans to pursue reason.

This may sound like hard work. Happiness, in this view, isn’t about frolicking at a festival, but instead about living a good, purposeful life. And this more serious approach is the only way to unlock true meaning in life.

The Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote in his memoir that those who saw no purpose in life were quickly lost. He argued that, in order to survive, those caught up in the terrible events of World War II had to quickly learn that what mattered was not what they expected from life. What mattered, rather, was what life expected of them.

So now that we understand the correlation between happiness and moral purpose, let’s take a look at what this means in practice.

To reject the Judeo-Christian basis of Western civilization is to reject the concepts of progress, equality and free will.

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 philosophers of Athens gave us reason.

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 the rights of the individual thrived under Christianity.

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.

In contrast to the leaders of the French Revolution, the Founding Fathers of America embraced the best of both Jerusalem and Athens.

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.

Efforts to prioritize the collective at the expense of individuals thrived in the twentieth century.

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.

The modern left has embraced tribal identity at the expense of Western civilization’s philosophical heritage.

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.

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Worum geht es in The Right Side of History?

The Right Side of History (2019) is both a rousing defense of Western civilization and a handy guide to the religious and philosophical thinking that underpins it. It explores the centuries of thought that have helped build and sustain the West, and seeks to understand and dispel more recent threats to that way of thinking.

Bestes Zitat aus The Right Side of History

Never were stronger foundations set for human happiness than in the founding philosophy.

—Ben Shapiro

Wer The Right Side of History lesen sollte

People interested in the history of philosophy
Those searching for a conservative guide to today’s world
People skeptical about contemporary left-of-center political thought

Über den Autor

Ben Shapiro is one of the leading conservative commentators in the United States today. His podcast, The Ben Shapiro Show, is the nation’s top conservative podcast. He is a New York Times best-selling author of titles including Primetime Propaganda and The People Vs. Barack Obama.

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