by Ben Shapiro
But the principles of the founding were indeed universal—just as universal as Nature and Nature’s God. Frederick Douglass, a former slave turned abolitionist, said it best in a speech decrying the thoroughly wrong, thoroughly evil Dred Scott decision, which suggested that black people were not men under the Constitution:
The Constitution, as well as the Declaration of Independence, and the sentiments of the founders of the Republic, give us a platform broad enough, and strong enough, to support the most comprehensive plans for the freedom and elevation of all the people of this country, without regard to color, class, or clime.42
The philosophy of the founders, made material in the creation of the United States and in the continuing quest to fulfill their ideals, has been the greatest blessing for mankind in human history. The United States has freed billions of people; it has enriched billions of people; it has opened minds and hearts.
But that founding philosophy—the crown jewel of the West—has not prevailed. It has, instead, been gradually decaying. With that decay, the foundations for human happiness have been eroding. We, in our day, may be watching them collapse completely.
How could such a collapse occur?
Gradually, slowly . . . and then all at once.
Chapter 6
Killing Purpose, Killing Capacity
Seemingly every year in the United States, a great debate breaks out regarding the separation of church and state. The headlines change, but the underlying conflict does not. It may be a court case about removing a Ten Commandments monument from a public space, or about prayer in the public schools, or about forcing a religious baker to create a custom cake for a same-sex wedding. The root conflict is always the same: Was America built on secular grounds, or religious grounds, or both? More important, will America be made better by curbing religion in the name of secularism, or vice versa?
Now, I have argued that the founding philosophy was based on both secular reason and religious morality, that modernity was built on these twin poles, cultivated and perfected through the fires of religious warfare and secular argument. We built a civilization that was practical and purposeful, religious and rational, virtuous and ambitious. Individual capacity and communal capacity had been brought into harmony: citizens had committed to Judeo-Christian values and individual rights, working to bolster one another. Individual purpose and communal purpose had been aligned: individuals were set free to cultivate virtue, and communities were built to set the framework for that pursuit of happiness.
But advocates for the so-called Enlightenment offer a different theory. They suggest that the philosophy of the modern West—the philosophy of individual rights, particularly—sprang from rejection of religion and embrace of reason. The proponents of the self-proclaimed age of reason flatter themselves that we live today in accordance with the thought of great Enlightenment thinkers, bold new minds who sprang forth from the ground, wholly formed, ready to do battle with, and triumph over, the ancients. In fact, the very term Enlightenment suggests a pre-Enlightenment era in which religion inhibited human development rather than fostering it—and by extension, suggests that belief in Judeo-Christian values and God Himself was at best an obstruction to modern Western civilization. Furthermore, the most ardent believers in the Enlightenment deride the Greek search for telos as misguided, resting as it does on the assumption of a reality lying behind material reality; they believe that Enlightenment thought could only progress by jettisoning teleology itself, and substituting materialism. They argue that the Enlightenment only became the Enlightenment by killing God and discarding the idea of an objectively discoverable purpose. The Enlightenment, they say, shed the vestigial organs of religion and Greek teleology, and took civilization to new, uncharted heights.
Unfortunately, these claims are manifestly false.
As we’ve seen, history is necessary. If it weren’t, Enlightenment could have sprung up anywhere, at any time; perhaps it should have arisen earlier in societies without the barriers of Greek telos and Judeo-Christian religion. It didn’t.
It didn’t, because the philosophy of individual rights, springing from the Biblical beliefs that individual human beings are created in God’s image and that individual virtue matters, were key to the Enlightenment. So was the search for knowledge—a search rooted in the belief that God had a master plan for the universe, that human beings were blessed with the free will and the reason to investigate that plan, and that we had a moral duty to seek God and to better our own stations materially and spiritually through that search. A devotion to progress in history began with Judeo-Christian religion as well. Most important, Judeo-Christian thought and Greek thought both held in common the belief in purpose.
But, advocates of the revisionist Enlightenment history say, what if the Judeo-Christian belief system and the Greek devotion to reason were necessary to build Western civilization, but later prevented Western civilization from fully realizing its potential? What if the ideas of Judeo-Christianity and Greece weren’t foundational? What if they were more like a scaffolding, to be removed from the structure as Western thought solidified? What if we could pick and choose our favorite ideas from the Enlightenment canon, and junk all the rest?
As we’ll see, we tried it. It failed.
In reality, just as with every other philosophical development in history, the Enlightenment had its upside—the glories of American founding philosophy and Western classical liberalism, both of which were direct outgrowths of Athens and Jerusalem—and it had its downside. What was that downside? That downside began with the purposeful destruction of Judeo-Christian values and Greek teleology. It turns out that those thinkers who maintained the wisdom of those twin foundations built the power and glory of the modern West. Those who sought to chip away at those foundations would eventually emerge victorious—and their victory would plant the seeds for an existential crisis of meaning from which the West suffers more deeply every day. And even their supposed devotion to reason itself would be consumed by their reflexive instinct to tear down the old, no matter how objectively good it was.
FROM VIRTUE TO MORAL RELATIVISM
The original drive to discard God in Western thought grew from three intertwined forces. First, the drive against religion sprang from the dissolution of Catholic dominance; that dissolution created religious schisms and vacuums that all too often invited brutal violence. Critics of Judeo-Christian faith saw in the internecine religious warfare proof that religious fundamentalism inhibited human freedom rather than deepening it. Second, atheism and agnosticism saw a dramatic upswing among intellectuals thanks to the rise in religious fundamentalism: both Lutheranism and Calvinism were, at least in part, responses to the perceived secularization of the Catholic Church. And the Catholic Church moved to mitigate such religious insurgencies by cracking down on its own tendencies toward secular learning. Religion did become more of an obstacle to secular learning as Catholic homogeneity receded. Finally, the fragmentation of control by the Catholic Church led to more room to breathe for dissenters. The Peace of Westphalia was explicitly designed to promote more religious freedom for minority religions—and that also allowed new, agnostic philosophies to flourish.
The earliest signs of a philosophical movement breaking with Judeo-Christian morality and Aristotelian virtue came from Machiavelli. An active and rigorous debate rages on about whether Machiavelli was a religious man or a covert atheist—but suffice it to say that his reverence for the Bible was questionable. In The Prince, he cites Moses as an example of a war leader (while jokingly calling him a “mere executor of the will of God”) and brazenly explaining, “It was necessary, therefore, to Moses that he should find the people of Israel in Egypt enslaved and oppressed by the Egyptians, in order that they should be disposed to follow him so as to be delivered out of bondage.”1
As to Greek allegiance to virtue, Machiavelli, in typical mocking fashion, hijacks the term itself. No longer should men be governed by virtue, he states—now, they should be g
overned by virtù, a combination of evil and good designed to achieve a certain end and overcome the chaos of fortune (fortuna). As Harvey Mansfield writes, “Machiavelli wants to give Renaissance humanism a hard face: to deflate its esteem for classical rhetoric, to attack its adherence to philosophical tradition, to unsettle its accommodation with Christianity, to refute its belief in the virtues of the classical gentleman, and to remind it of the value and glory of the military.”2
Machiavelli’s early iteration of a break from traditional purpose found its first open embrace in Hobbes. Hobbes applied the standards of rigorous logic to religious revelation itself—and found revelation wanting. “To say [God] hath spoken to him in a dream is no more than to say that he dreamed God spake to him, which is not of force to win belief from any man that knows dreams are for the most part natural and may proceed from former thoughts,” Hobbes wrote. “If one Prophet deceive another, what certainty is there of knowing the will of God, by other way than that of Reason?”3
Hobbes doesn’t merely dismiss the Judeo-Christian moral system as divine. He also discards the Aristotelian telos: “For there is no such Finis ultimus, (utmost aim,) nor Summum Bonum, (greatest Good,) as is spoken of in the Books of the old Moral Philosophers. . . . Felicity is a continual progress of the desire, from one object to another; the attaining of the former, being still but the way to the latter.”4 In other words, the search for meaning cannot be found in seeking final causes; nature contains no such information. Instead, morality must be boiled down to mere competition of interests, and the desire of human beings to avoid suffering and untimely death. In a state of nature, “nothing can be Unjust. The notions of Right and Wrong, Justice and Injustice have there no place. Where there is no common Power, there is no Law; where no Law, no Injustice.”5 If moral relativism began anywhere, it began in Hobbes.
Hobbes’s skepticism of Judeo-Christian morality and Aristotelian teleology found alliance in a most unlikely philosopher: a brilliant lapsed Jew named Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677). Spinoza grew up an Orthodox Jew in the Netherlands but was excommunicated for heresy in 1656. His crime involved his declarations that the Bible did not mention immortality, that God might take physical form in the universe, and that the immortal soul might not actually be immortal, but mere life-force.6 He proceeded to write some of the most well-read philosophical treatises in history—and his anti-religious thought took center stage.
Where Hobbes was playfully vague as to his views of the Bible, Spinoza took no prisoners: he blasted religious authorities for being close-minded. He encouraged the faithful to seek the message of the Bible only in their own hearts, and ripped the textualism of Biblical fundamentalists: “instead of God’s Word, they are beginning to worship likeness and images, that is, paper and ink.”7 He declared that Moses did not write the Torah; he stated that the Torah had been written centuries later by another figure. He dismissed miracles, the text of the Bible, and its commandments. As proof of the Bible’s non-divinity, Spinoza wrote in terms that would make Richard Dawkins proud: “religion is manifested not in charity, but in spreading contention among men and in fostering the bitterest hatred, under the false guise of zeal in God’s cause and a burning enthusiasm.”8 Spinoza believed that the Bible had been written for the foolish and carried forward by them—but he was also politically astute enough not to disparage the New Testament as he did the Old Testament.
Spinoza was similarly dismissive of the notion of a natural law. He turned his intense intellect to the very notion of final causes and dismissed them with relish. Humans, Spinoza argued, designed a God who had made the universe especially for mankind, and reasoned in circular fashion that God had crafted a human purpose. Like Hobbes, this leads Spinoza to disparage the very notion of “good” or “bad.”9 And like Hobbes, this led Spinoza to a sort of rational egotism as the nature of man: human beings want to avoid pain and seek pleasure. The best way to do this, according to Spinoza, is through a Stoic passivity—seeking knowledge of the universe and acknowledging that we are not at the center of it.
While Hobbes’s new morality led him to the foot of an all-encompassing state, Spinoza recommended the opposite: a minimal state designed merely to prevent insurrection from those whose rights are violated. Freedom of religion and speech, in this view, aren’t rights so much as spheres of privacy the state ought to avoid if it knows what’s good for it. This is a libertarianism based on practicality, not on principle per se: we don’t know what is right or good or virtuous, and therefore the decent man will not foist his opinion on others. But in order for that sort of freedom to prevail, the state must agree not to become the tool of the powerful to quash disagreement.10
The final step away from Judeo-Christian ethical monotheism and Greek teleology and toward outright atheism came courtesy of the jolly British empiricist David Hume (1711–1776). Like Hobbes and Spinoza before him, Hume discounted the possibility of miracles—he said that the laws of nature speak to us more frequently than any human testimony, and therefore the evidence for miracles was annihilated. He even argued that polytheism was as rational as monotheism. He also attempted to demolish classical proofs of God’s existence. He took on the cosmological argument by stating that it is quite possible for something to come from nothing, so the notion of an Unmoved Mover was unnecessary; he also attacked the idea that order requires design (he says that an acorn can grow an oak tree without design, for example). Most of all, Hume rejected the idea of a just God because of the presence of evil in the universe.
Like Hobbes and Spinoza, Hume totally dismissed the notion that human beings could discern purpose or virtue from the bare facts of the material world. Hume famously summed up this problem in his “is-ought” distinction: just because the natural world is a certain way doesn’t mean we ought to do a certain thing. Discoverable purpose disappeared in Hume’s philosophy.
BUILDING ON REASON ALONE
Hume’s atheism remained a minority position in his time; most philosophers still believed in at least a deist conception of the universe, though they increasingly rejected the tenets of Judaism and Christianity. Most philosophers were also unwilling to concede to Hobbesian positivism—the idea that good and bad are human constructions dependent on power relationships. Instead, philosophers increasingly focused on rebuilding universal morality in the absence of the Bible. Having dethroned God as an active moral arbiter for human behavior and instead redefined God as the Aristotelian Unmoved Mover alone, man was free to search for a moral system using reason alone. But these same philosophers could no longer rely on Aristotelian teleology—they could not look at the nature of the universe and determine moral ends.
New moral systems, therefore, had to be constructed from scratch. Human beings, these Enlightenment thinkers proposed, could construct systems to maximize human happiness. Now, in reality, most Enlightenment thinkers still operated off the moral assumptions of Judeo-Christian values as well as Aristotelian teleology—their intellectual engines were running on the fumes from a gas tank they had already purposefully emptied. It was only a matter of time until those fumes ran out. But the remnant vapors were responsible for some of humanity’s most fascinating and complex attempts at creating a God-free objective morality.
Leading the way was Voltaire (1694–1778). Voltaire was a deist—he famously stated, “It is perfectly evident to my mind that there exists a necessary, eternal, supreme and intelligent being. This is no matter of faith, but of reason.”11 Voltaire believed in the search for morality in reason; in his philosophical dictionary, he stated, “We cannot repeat too frequently that dogmas differ, but that morality is the same among all men who make use of their reason. Morality proceeds from God, like light; our superstitions are only darkness.”12 But Voltaire plainly considered Judeo-Christian tradition superstitious; his writings are filled with nasty asides against Jews in particular. Like an eighteenth-century Bill Maher, Voltaire delighted in ridiculing the most facially ridiculous statements of the Bible and declaring the Bible�
��s morality abhorrent on its face.13
How, then, could morality be constructed through reason? It couldn’t be done through Aristotelian teleology. Voltaire famously scoffed at the idea of a discoverable telos in nature, mocking the brilliant philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) on those grounds. Leibniz argued that since God was good, and since God had created but one world, the world He had created was by necessity the best possible world. Voltaire mercilessly skewered that perspective in Candide:
Pangloss taught metaphysico-theologico-cosmo-nigology. He could prove to wonderful effect that there was no effect without cause. . . . “It is demonstrable,” he would say, “that things cannot be other than as they are: for, since everything is made to serve an end, everything is necessarily for the best of ends. Observe how noses were formed to support spectacles, therefore we have spectacles. Legs are clearly devised for the wearing of breeches, therefore we wear breeches . . . those who have argued that all is well have been talking nonsense; they should have said that all is for the best.”14
Pangloss ends up contracting syphilis, loses an eye and an ear, and is hanged. So much for the best of all possible worlds, according to Voltaire. And so much for the notion that we can look at the nature of things and discover morality there. Voltaire scoffs at the idea of the Aristotelian “good”; noses obviously weren’t made for glasses.
So where did Voltaire find purpose and morality? Like Francis Bacon, one of his intellectual heroes, he found it in the betterment of the human condition materially. And this led him toward a hedonistic, materialist morality as well. For those capable of exercising reason properly, the maximization of pleasure and minimization of pain were the paramount goals of life. His poetry is filled with unambiguous condemnation of religious prudery, and embrace of the pleasures of the world: “Enjoying pleasure in each state and hour, / Mortals acknowledge God’s eternal power . . . The modern Stoic would each wish control, / And of its very essence rob my soul.”15