by Ben Shapiro
So, what went wrong?
I found out later that a professor on campus had been telling her students that I was a white supremacist, that I was akin to a Ku Klux Klan member, that I was a Nazi (I’m just wearing the yarmulke as deep cover, apparently). The students had believed their professors, and they had reacted accordingly. The value of speech had been overthrown in favor of a subjective rage that had nothing to do with facts.
This, of course, was just the beginning. At the University of Wisconsin, my speech was nearly shut down by protesters who flooded the front of the stage. At Penn State, protesters gathered outside my speech and pounded on the doors. At DePaul University, the administration threatened to arrest me if I came to campus and called out a Cook County sheriff to do the honors. At Berkeley, the administration called out hundreds of police officers to protect law-abiding citizens from the rage of violent rioters.
That wasn’t the end of the 2016 circus, however.
During the election cycle, I was highly critical of both candidates. As a conservative, I’d been a lifelong critic of Hillary Clinton. But I was also highly critical of Donald Trump. Thanks to my criticisms of Trump—and thanks to my very public break with Breitbart News, an outlet I believed had become a propaganda tool for the Trump campaign—I quickly found myself targeted by a new breed of radical. In late March, the execrable Milo Yiannopoulos penned a story at Breitbart openly praising the alt-right, including odes to racist cretins like Richard Spencer. Egging on his alt-right followers, cheering on their “jolly trollery,” Milo sent me a picture of a black baby on the day of my son’s birth that May—the point being that I was a “cuck.”
Over the course of the 2016 campaign, I would become the top recipient of anti-Semitism among Jewish journalists on the internet. By a huge margin. According to the Anti-Defamation League, approximately 19,253 anti-Semitic tweets were directed at journalists during the August 2015 through July 2016 period. I received 7,400 of those tweets, or 38 percent of the total.23
I went through most of my adult life involved in public political conversations with others without threat of violence or racist slur. Now, I required hundreds of police officers to protect me while speaking at a variety of campuses, and my Twitter feed was flooded with images straight from the pages of Der Stürmer.
Something, obviously, had changed.
Something has changed.
We’ve lost something.
This book is my attempt to determine what we’ve lost and how we can find it.
To find what we’ve lost, we’re going to need to retrace our steps. This book is filled with old ideas—ideas from people we may dimly remember from our days in high school and college and Sunday school, but whose central importance we’ve essentially forgotten.
Those ideas, I’ll argue, are crucial. We must learn them anew.
This doesn’t mean that I believe philosophers changed history on their own. I don’t think Adam Smith invented capitalism any more than Immanuel Kant invented morality. But these philosophers and thinkers offer a window into the most important ideas of their time. Tolstoy famously asks in War and Peace what moves history, and concludes that history is merely the progression of all of the various forces at play in the universe, channeled into action in a particular moment. There’s truth to that, of course. But ideas matter, and important ideas—as best articulated by great thinkers—represent the motivational road along which humanity journeys. We act because we believe.
In order to fix ourselves, then, we must reexamine what we believe.
We believe freedom is built upon the twin notions that God created every human in His image, and that human beings are capable of investigating and exploring God’s world. Those notions were born in Jerusalem and Athens, respectively.
Those twin notions—those diamonds of spiritual genius—built our civilization, and built us as individuals. If you believe that life is more than materialistic pleasures and pain avoidance, you are a product of Jerusalem and Athens. If you believe that the government has no right to intrude upon the exercise of your individual will, and that you are bound by moral duty to pursue virtue, you are a product of Jerusalem and Athens. If you believe that human beings are capable of bettering our world through use of our reason, and are bound by higher purpose to do so, you are a product of Jerusalem and Athens.
Jerusalem and Athens built science. The twin ideals of Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law reasoning built human rights. They built prosperity, peace, and artistic beauty. Jerusalem and Athens built America, ended slavery, defeated the Nazis and the Communists, lifted billions from poverty, and gave billions spiritual purpose. Jerusalem and Athens were the foundations of the Magna Carta and the Treaty of Westphalia; they were the foundations of the Declaration of Independence, Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail.
Civilizations that rejected Jerusalem and Athens, and the tension between them, have collapsed into dust. The USSR rejected Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law, substituting the values of the collective and a new utopian vision of “social justice”—and they starved and slaughtered tens of millions of human beings. The Nazis rejected Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law, and they shoved children into gas chambers. Venezuela rejects Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law, and citizens of their oil-rich nation have been reduced to eating dogs.
In America, especially, with our unique history and success, we have long seen progress and prosperity as our birthright. The conflicts that tear apart other nations are not for us; we certainly don’t need to worry about revolution or collapse. We’re America. We’re different.
That sanguine view is utterly wrong. The fight against entropy is never over. Our way of life is never more than one generation away from the precipice. We have already begun to see a huge number of our citizens lose faith in free speech, in democracy, in economic freedom, in the idea of a shared morality or cause. That turn away from our values began when we lost faith in the path that brought us here in the first place.
We are in the process of abandoning Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law, favoring moral subjectivism and the rule of passion. And we are watching our civilization collapse into age-old tribalism, individualistic hedonism, and moral subjectivism. Make no mistake: we are still living off the prosperity of the world built by Jerusalem and Athens. We believe we can reject Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law and satisfy ourselves with intersectionality, or scientific materialism, or progressive politics, or authoritarian governance, or nationalistic solidarity. We can’t. We’ve spent the last two centuries carving ourselves off from the roots of our civilization. Our civilization could survive and thrive—for a time. Then it began to die, from the inside out. Our civilization is riddled with internal contradictions, communities bereft of values, and individuals bereft of meaning.
The economies of the West aren’t going to die overnight; stacking socialist programs atop capitalist infrastructures won’t immediately collapse the West. But we flatter ourselves to believe that we can abandon the values of the past and somehow survive indefinitely. Philosophically, the West has been running on fumes for generations. We are viewing birth rates plummet and government spending skyrocket across the West—and we are watching large swaths of immigrants unfamiliar with Western values imported to fill the gap, resulting in polarizing backlash. We are watching European politics devolve into a battle between far-left socialists who promise utopia and far-right nationalists who promise national restoration. Both are bound to fail. And though America lags behind, America is following the European path. The ties that bind us together are fraying.
Those ties were forged through fire and water, reason and prayer. The journey to modernity was a long road. That road wasn’t always pretty—often, it was violent. The tension between Jerusalem and Athens is real. But removing the tension by abandoning either Jerusalem or Athens collapses the bridge built between the two.
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To strengthen our civilization, then, we must examine how the bridge was built. It took Western civilization three thousand years to get here—we can lose it all in one generation, unless we begin shoring up our foundations. We must stop chipping away, and we must start retrofitting. That task requires us to reexamine those foundations, brick by brick.
In this book, we’ll reexamine those foundations. We’ll be moving through thousands of years of philosophy and history, which means we’ll inevitably be giving great philosophers shorter shrift than they deserve, and simplifying issues for the sake of brevity. This book won’t tell you all you need to know about any of these ideas and philosophers—not even close. That means you should pursue further the specific ideas that interest you, with people more expert than I, in more detail (and for my part, I’ve tried to restrict my philosophical synopses to points upon which there seems to be general agreement). But this book does represent my attempt to dive into those ideas in the most user-friendly way in pursuit of wisdom about the essential questions of our civilization.
So, let us begin at the beginning.
Chapter 1
The Pursuit of Happiness
Are you happy?”
It’s a question my wife asked me one day, a few years ago. We were going through a stressful period—my wife is a doctor, and she was working brutal hours; our youngest child, Gabriel, was waking us up at all hours of the night; our eldest, Leeya, was going through a stretch in which she’d burst into tears at the tiniest provocation. And work was trying, too: my business partners and I were working to get our website, The Daily Wire, functioning at top level; we were building out my podcast; I was traveling to various campuses, each a security challenge and a test of wills with sometimes violent students and obstructive administrators.
“Sure,” I said. “Of course I am.”
Like a lot of other people who answer that question from a spouse, I knew there was a correct answer; you never want to say no, lest your spouse think it’s his or her fault.
But this question is the most crucial one.
So, was I happy?
Or, more precisely, when was I most happy?
Formulated like that, the question became easy: on Sabbath.
Every week, I drop everything for twenty-five hours. As an Orthodox Jew, I celebrate the Sabbath, which means that my phone and television are off-limits. No work. No computer. No news. No politics. A full day, plus an hour, to spend with my wife and children and parents, with my community. The outside world disappears. It’s the high point of my life. There is no greater happiness than sitting with my wife, watching the kids play with (and occasionally fight with) each other, a book open on my lap.
I’m not alone. Sabbath is the high point of many Jews’ weeks. There’s an old saying in the Jewish community: the Jews didn’t keep the Sabbath, the Sabbath kept the Jews. It certainly kept us sane.
Now, I cover politics for a living. And I’m happy doing it—it’s purposeful and important, and working to understand and convey ideas can be thrilling. But politics isn’t the root of happiness for me. Politics is about working to build the framework for the pursuit of happiness, not the achievement of it; politics helps us establish the preconditions necessary for happiness, but can’t provide happiness in and of itself. The Founding Fathers knew that. That’s why Thomas Jefferson didn’t write that the government was granted power to grant you happiness: it was there to protect your pursuit of happiness. The government existed to protect your rights, to prevent those rights from being infringed upon. The government was there to stop someone from stealing your horse, from butchering you in your sleep, from letting his cow graze on your land.
At no point did Jefferson suggest that government could achieve happiness. None of the Founders thought it could.
Yet more and more Americans are investing their happiness in politics. Instead of looking inward to find ways to better their lives, we’ve decided that the chief obstacle to our happiness is outside forces, even in the freest, richest country in the history of the world. This desire to silence—or subdue—those who disagree with us has been reaching new, terrifying heights.
To take a minor example, in September 2017, Republicans and Democrats clubbed each other savagely over the exact same policy: President Obama had issued an executive amnesty for certain children of illegal immigrants, the so-called DREAMers; President Trump had revoked that amnesty, but called on Congress to pass a legislative version that would protect the DREAMers. Democrats called Republicans cruel, inhumane; one congressman called Trump “Pontius Pilate.” Meanwhile, Republicans called Democrats lawless and irresponsible.
Over the exact same policy.
And it’s getting uglier. We seem dedicated to the proposition that if only we can change the political landscape—or at least attribute nasty motives to our political opponents—then we can achieve the happiness we crave. Instead of leaving each other alone, we seek to control one another—if only Bob would do what I want, I’d be happy! And if I elect the right guy, he’ll make Bob do what I want him to do!
Our politicians know that we seek happiness through them, and they capitalize off that misguided quest. In 2008, Michelle Obama said that Americans should back her husband because he could help us “fix our souls.” How, exactly? She explained: “Barack Obama . . . is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. . . . That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you go to back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.”1 In May 2016, then candidate Trump openly stated, “I will give you everything. I will give you what you’ve been looking for for 50 years. I’m the only one.”2
We’re fools to believe them. And what’s more, we know we’re fools to believe them. Polls show that we don’t trust our politicians. We think they’re lying to us, and we’re right. They pander to us. They fib to us. They tell us promises specifically designed to garner our support, then make excuses to break those promises. And yet we eagerly invest them with more and more authority, and browbeat those who oppose our favorite candidates.
Why have we invested so much meaning, so much time, so much effort in brutal policy fights over seemingly minor matters, when none of it brings us closer to happiness? Why, overall, do the American people seem to be less and less optimistic? Why, by polling data, do nearly three-quarters of Americans say they aren’t confident “life for our children’s generation will be better than it has been for us”—the lowest number in decades?3 Why are a huge plurality of young Americans themselves more fearful than hopeful about the future?4 Why are suicide rates rising dramatically among some of the most materially prosperous segments of society, to rates not seen in thirty years?5
Perhaps the problem is that what we’re pursuing isn’t happiness anymore. We’re instead pursuing other priorities: physical pleasure, emotional catharsis, monetary stability. All these things are important, of course, but they don’t bring lasting happiness. At best, they’re means necessary to the pursuit of happiness. But we’ve mixed up the means with the end. And in doing so, we’ve left our souls in desperate need of sustenance.
HAPPINESS IS MORAL PURPOSE
Pleasure can be gained from a variety of activities: golf, fishing, playing with your children, sex. Amoral activities can bring us pleasure—that temporary high, that feeling of forgetting our cares. However, that pleasure is never enough. Lasting happiness can only be achieved through cultivation of soul and mind. And cultivating our souls and minds requires us to live with moral purpose.
This has been clear since the dawn of Western civilization. The very terminology for happiness is imbued with such meaning in both the Judeo-Christian and the Greek context. The Hebrew Bible calls happiness simcha; Aristotle called happiness eudaimonia. What does the Bible mean by simcha? It means right action in accordance with God’s will. In Ecclesiastes, Solomon laments, “I said to myself: ‘Come now, I will mix [wine] with joy and experience pleasure,’ and beh
old, this too was vanity.”6 The Bible doesn’t seem to care very much about what we want. Instead, God commands us to live in simcha. How can He command an emotion? He can’t—he can only command our enthusiastic pursuit of an ideal He sets forth for us. If we do not pursue that purpose, we pay a price: we serve foreign gods, which cannot provide us any sort of true fulfillment.
Because you did not serve the Lord your God joyfully and gladly in the time of prosperity, therefore in hunger and thirst, in nakedness and dire poverty, you will serve the enemies the Lord sends against you. He will put an iron yoke on your neck until he has destroyed you.7
We might not think of binge-watching Stranger Things as an iron yoke on our neck, but if television is our best reason to live, we’re not really living. Rejoice in the purpose God gives you. Here’s Solomon again: “There is nothing better for a person than to rejoice in his work, because that is his lot.”8 He’s not talking about finding your “why” at a software start-up. He means the work of serving God and following Him. As Rabbi Tarfon says in Ethics of the Fathers, “The day is short, the work is great, the workers are lazy, but the reward is great, and the Master of the house is knocking at your door.” And what if you don’t want to work? Well, tough: “It is not upon you to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.”9
Aristotelian eudaimonia similarly relies on living in accordance with moral purpose. Like the Bible, Aristotle didn’t define happiness as temporary joy. He saw happiness in a life well-lived. How could we live a good life? First, by determining what “good” means; second, by pursuing it. To Aristotle, “good” wasn’t a subjective term, something for each of us to define for ourselves; “good” was a statement of objective fact. Something was “good” if it fulfilled its purpose. A good watch tells time; a good dog defends its master. What does a good human being do? Acts in accordance with right reason. What makes human beings unique, says Aristotle, is our capacity to reason, and to use that reason to investigate the nature of the world and our purpose in it: