by Ben Shapiro
The same holds true of the movement against Jim Crow. Martin Luther King Jr. quoted the Bible far more than he quoted David Hume—and with good reason. It was the prophet Amos’s dream that animated King’s: “I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; ‘and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.’”
Yes, religious people have been on both sides of those movements. Of course they have, since we live in a world shaped by the Bible. But that’s precisely the point: those arguments have taken place in a common context in which Biblical values are held up against other Biblical values, in which Greek teleological reason is held up against itself. The traditions of individual liberty didn’t spring into being in the West miraculously, from nothing. They sprang from the tension between Jerusalem and Athens. Western civilization is a bridge suspended over the waters of chaos. Removing that tension collapses that bridge into the roiling river below.
Carving off the roots of the Western tree while hoping to maintain the integrity of the trunk amidst high winds is an exercise in wishful thinking. In December 2017, I discussed this issue precisely with Harris, who was arguing that the Bible was a rotten text filled with awful lessons: I told him, “The moral system by which you suggest that that portion of the Bible should be removed is built on the moral system of the Bible, developed over two thousand years.” When Harris protested that his most considered view of ethics came from a broader framework of studies, I answered, “I’m not talking about your browsing in world literature. I’m talking about the fundamental moral precepts that you took to be moral from the time you were a child arise from a Western civilization predicated on Judeo-Christian notions of good and bad.”27
Enlightenment ideals didn’t arise in a vacuum, and treating them as though they can survive and thrive without the water and oxygen that nourished them for thousands of years—revelation and reason, telos and purpose, free will and responsibility—isn’t likely to sustain those ideals beyond those who read the neo-Enlightenment philosophers and scientists. The neo-Enlightenment isn’t teachable; attempt to transplant it to the soil of other cultures, and it withers.
Don’t get me wrong—I think what Harris and Pinker and Shermer are doing in reviving Enlightenment ideals is spectacular. I agree with a lot of Enlightenment ideals, particularly regarding individual liberty and natural rights, as we’ve discussed. But the new scientific Athenians will have to make common cause with the devotees of Jerusalem, rather than making war on them. The same holds true in reverse. For, as it turns out, there are larger philosophical threats to Western civilization that require our attention.
Chapter 9
The Return to Paganism
In 2015, I appeared on CNN HLN’s Dr. Drew Show. The topic was ESPN’s decision to award Caitlyn Jenner their Arthur Ashe Courage Award for his decision to announce his transgenderism. Caitlyn Jenner is, of course, a biological male. Several different people comprised the panel for Dr. Drew’s show; one of them was Zoey Tur, a transgender female and biological male. The conversation began with a unanimous vote of approval for ESPN’s decision . . . until I was asked about the situation. I explained that I didn’t understand why society ought to engage in the mass delusion that Jenner was in fact a woman. Jenner may call himself a transwoman; Jenner may change his name. But Jenner is not, by any biological metric, a woman. And a society that refuses to acknowledge the biological differences between men and women is engaging in knowing falsehood.
This rather simple statement drew Tur’s ire. Tur proceeded to berate and belittle me for my perspective, calling me an ignorant “little boy.” I responded by reiterating that Jenner is a biological male, and that believing you are a member of the opposite sex is a mental disorder—that men cannot magically become women and women cannot magically become men. After Tur responded again with insults, I finally asked Tur, “What are your genetics, sir?”
The question wasn’t meant as a provocation—it was meant to make a point. Biology matters. Facts matter. Reason matters.
But at this point, all hell broke loose. Tur grabbed me by the back of the neck on national television, and threatened to send me home in an ambulance (an odd offer, since you don’t usually go home in an ambulance). Other members of the panel reacted with horror to my “insulting the pronouns.”
Needless to say, none of this had to do with reason.
Unfortunately, reason is no longer in vogue. That’s why when I visited Berkeley to speak, protesters outside chanted “SPEECH IS VIOLENCE!” It’s why I—an Orthodox Jew, and the leading antagonist of the racist alt-right—have been routinely castigated as a Nazi. Subjectivity rules the day.
Reason, in fact, is insulting. Reason suggests that one person can know better than another, that one person’s perspective can be more correct than someone else’s. Reason is intolerant. Reason demands standards. Better to destroy reason than to abide by its dictates.
After the enormous human developments brought about by the exercise of reason, all this should seem bizarre. But the death of reason could have been predicted once reason alone failed to provide us with meaning. The existentialist philosophy of Jaspers, Heidegger, and Sartre left man alone at the edge of the cosmos—an odd conglomeration of stardust, sentient but purposeless, incapable of making sense of the chaotic universe around him. All logic could be deconstructed into interplay of social forces; all individual decision-making could be degraded to the level of reactionary biology.
None of this was new, of course. It was merely a return to a very old way of thinking—a pagan way of thinking. Where the Greeks had insisted on a telos discoverable in the universe by way of investigating nature and thereby piercing through to the Unmoved Mover’s design, the post–World War II West discarded telos altogether. Where Judeo-Christian values had insisted on a unified master plan, an objective moral standard, a progression in history, and the inescapable importance of free choice, the post–World War II West substituted chaos and subjectivism.
For the Enlightenment thinkers, science had ripped man from his place at the center of the universe, but reason could restore him to the center of meaning. However, this was no longer true, thanks to the new knowledge of science. God was dead at the hands of man; now man was dead at his own hands. There was no grand design behind the confusion of everyday life. Human morality was just that: a construct created by some at the expense of others. History was not a story of progress, but a story of oppression and suffering—as Voltaire wrote in “Jeannot et Colin,” “all ancient histories, as one of our wits has observed, are only fables that men have agreed to admit as true; with regard to modern history, it is a mere chaos, a confusion which it is impossible to make anything of.”1 And individual human beings had no power of choice—they were corks bobbing on the eddies of time.
The story of humanity was over; human beings were animals once again.
Unless.
Unless purveyors of Athens and Jerusalem had been wrong all along.
What if those purveyors of Athens and Jerusalem, those creators of the Constitution and the Magna Carta, those thinkers behind the scientific method and deductive reasoning—what if they had all pulled a fast one? What if, as it turned out, man was born free but was everywhere in chains because of these systems of thought themselves? What if objective truth was a trap? What if reason was a trap? What if the system of rights promoted by the Enlightenment was actually a cleverly disguised method for enshrining the power of the few at the expense of the many?
What if the system itself could be torn down?
And if the system could be torn down, how could it be torn down?
The answer, as it turns out, was simple enough: by rejection of all prevailing societal norms in favor of precisely the tribal paganism and animalistic passion that had preceded those norms. Only by going back to the beginning could humanity be built aga
in from scratch. Everything had to be torn down in order to be built back up again.
BAITING THE BABBITTS
This was a bigger problem in the United States than it was in Europe. Europe had been devastated by war; Europe had discarded religion long ago. But in the United States, the post–World War II situation looked bright. Unlike in Europe, religious practice remained incredibly strong. As of 1950, about three-quarters of Americans were members of a church, synagogue, or mosque; in 1954, almost half of all Americans said they had attended church, synagogue, or mosque in the last seven days. Over nine in ten Americans identified as Christian.2
This didn’t mean that America was full of dead-eyed androids praising Jesus and stumping for segregation and sexism. Jim Crow remained in full, evil force in the South; sexism remained a serious obstacle to women. But the 1950s and early 1960s saw the rise of a burgeoning black middle class—as Thomas Sowell points out, “from 1954 to 1964 . . . the number of blacks in professional, technical, and similar high-level positions more than doubled. In other kinds of occupations, the advance of blacks was even greater during the 1940s—when there was little or no civil rights policy—than during the 1950s when the civil rights revolution was in its heyday.”3 And the number of women in the workplace had been rising steadily for decades: in 1950, one in three women were in the workforce,4 as compared to just 19 percent of working-age women fifty years earlier.5 Across the board, American living standards changed radically for the better as the United States took global leadership.
Furthermore, America was hardly a cultural desert. The attempt to paint the American dream as an American nightmare had common currency on the American Left; Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt (1922) painted a businessman as an unfulfilled dreamer, coining the term Babbitt as an insult for everyday Americans. But in the aftermath of World War II, the American dream was still very much alive. And that dream was never merely a white picket fence, a dog, and two kids out in suburbia. It was a dream of cultural enrichment and common purpose. As Fred Siegel reports, between 1940 and 1955, local symphony orchestras increased 250 percent; in 1955, thirty-five million people paid to attend symphonies as opposed to fifteen million paying to attend baseball games. Even early television became part of the cultural education of the public: NBC presented a three-hour production of Laurence Olivier’s Richard III; as of 1951, there were twenty-five thousand members of the Great Books discussion groups, with “50,000 Americans a year . . . buying collections of the writings of Plato, Aristotle, the Founding Fathers, and Hegel” at serious cost to themselves.6
But the American Left could not accept that a capitalistic America could produce a more cultured America—and a more tolerant America. Thus, the argument went, the growing wealth and culture of the American middle class was merely a ruse: deep down in their hearts, Americans were empty pretenders, Stepford wives and Babbitt husbands. They were shallow materialists who shunted human suffering to the back of the bus in favor of their vainglorious pursuit of wealth at all costs. They were repressives who hid pornography beneath the bed and petty jealousy in their hearts.
On the other hand, changing the system could bring about a new humanity: a humanity renewed in individual and communal purpose, and in individual and communal capacity. Human beings had been fooled into believing that they had purpose and capacity under the Judeo-Christian-supported Enlightenment system. But they could be disabused of that notion. They could be changed for better—if only the system itself could be reduced to rubble.
This argument had deep roots on the Marxist Left. Italian socialist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) had supposed in 1916 that the failure of World War I to usher in global Marxist revolution was a result of culture—that too many people had grown up under the repressive orthodoxy of capitalism. “Man is above all else mind, consciousness—that is, he is a product of history, not of nature. There is no other way of explaining why socialism has not come into existence already,” he wrote.7
Gramsci died in an Italian prison under the regime of Mussolini, but his philosophy was picked up by the members of the so-called Frankfurt School, a group of German scholars expelled from Germany amidst the rise of the Nazi Party. Their leader, Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), preached the gospel of social change—and suggested that systems had to be deconstructed in order to make way for that social change. He explained that what he termed critical theory was “suspicious of the very categories of better, useful, appropriate, productive, and valuable, as those are understood in the present order.”8 The present order had to change, Horkheimer said, because “the wretchedness of our own time is connected with the structure of society.”9 And the way to change it was to tear it down. It is no coincidence that various forms of university study dedicated to various alleged victim groups—black studies, Jewish studies, LGBT studies—all find a home under the “critical studies” rubric.
Horkheimer and other members of the Frankfurt School were forced to leave Germany with the rise of the Nazis, but they made their way to the United States with the help of Edward R. Murrow, among others. Leading lights like Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) posited that American culture was replete with antirevolutionary materialism; Erich Fromm (1900–1980) suggested that the roots of totalitarianism could be found in the materialism he saw in the United States. Fromm stated that fascism would rise in the United States thanks to its devotion to capitalism. Individuals had been alienated from society by its consumerism, made into widgets. Indeed, we are not free—we only think we are, thanks to the lies of the Enlightenment and Western civilization. “We are proud that we are not subject to any external authority,” Fromm writes, “that we are free to express our thoughts and feelings, and we take it for granted that this freedom almost automatically guarantees our individuality. The right to express our thoughts, however, means something only if we are able to have thoughts of our own.” The powerlessness of Western man could only find solace in “compulsive conforming in the process of which the isolated individual becomes an automaton,” or in “the authoritarian character.” Without Marxism remolding, men became either Nazis or the trite little consumers of modern America—who, in turn, would become proto-fascists.10
This was a dire and deliberate misreading of the nature of American individualism, which rested on Judeo-Christian values and Greek reason. Fromm wasn’t wrong that the replacement of individual and communal purpose with base materialism is a problem—but his diagnosis, the destruction of the American value system rather than its restoration, was dramatically off. Nazism didn’t arise from consumerism. It arose from communal purpose overriding individual purpose, and individual capacity abandoned in favor of worship of the communal capacity of the state. Nazism, in other words, lay a lot closer to Marxism than capitalism did.
But Fromm and thinkers like him suggested that the solution to the supposedly inevitable slide from dull consumerist conformity to horrible fascism lay in complete rebellion. Only acts of rebellion could destroy the system within. Rebellion in sex; rebellion in art; rebellion in work; rebellion everywhere.
The leading advocate of that rebellion was Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979). Marcuse, one of the progenitors of the so-called New Left, preached that the prevailing order had to be torn out root and branch. In 1955, coincident with the rise of Kinsey’s thought, Marcuse penned Eros and Civilization, in which he argued that repressive sexuality had damaged mankind, and that only freeing man of his Victorian mentality regarding sex could build a better world. Like Kinsey, Marcuse rejected Freud; instead, he posited a world of liberated eros, and called for “the concept of a non-repressive civilization, based on a fundamentally different experience of being, a fundamentally different relation between man and nature, and fundamentally different existential relations.”11 Capitalism had structured adults so that they fell into patterns of labor specialization—and that same logic held true for sex, where certain body parts were for certain things. But no more! Now, “the body in its entirety would become an object of cathexis, a thing to be
enjoyed—an instrument of pleasure.”12 Everything would become happy and wonderful as human beings finally gloried in their total self-realization: “No longer employed as instruments for retaining men in alienated performances, the barriers against absolute gratification would become elements of human freedom. . . . This sensuous rationality contains its own moral laws.”13
Unbridle Dionysian paganism, and the world would become free. No wonder Marcuse’s popular slogan ran “Make love, not war.” Students in Paris during the 1968 revolt carried banners reading MARX, MAO, AND MARCUSE.
But Marcuse’s pagan revelry didn’t stop with revolutionary sex. The capstone to his theory came in the form of censorship—what he called, in Orwellian fashion, “repressive tolerance.” Marcuse suggested that certain forms of speech had to be barred so that they could not emerge victorious, toppling critical theory itself. According to Marcuse, “the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed.” Freedom, Marcuse said, was “serving the cause of oppression”; oppression, therefore, could serve the cause of freedom. Speech could be labeled violence—Marcuse called to “reexamine the issue of violence and the traditional distinction between violent and non-violent action”—and violence speech. In essence, “Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left . . . it would extend to the stage of action as well as of discussion and propaganda, of deed as well as of word.” The marketplace of ideas had to die, since it was “organized and delimited by those who determine the national and the individual interest.” Minority groups had to be given special privileges to shut down opposition: “liberation of the Damned of the Earth presupposes suppression not only of their old but also of their new masters.”14 The roots of sexual liberation, victim politics, and political correctness had been laid.