Ben Shapiro’s The Right Side of History is an attempt to create a conservative usable past. In his telling of the story, the greatness of the West comes from two traditions: the Judeo-Christian religion and Greek philosophy.
At first, these two traditions develop separately, but they merge when Christianity becomes the official religion of the Roman Empire. This Greco-Judeo-Christian culture reaches its peak in the Enlightenment, but not the bad Enlightenment which leads to the French Revolution, but the good Enlightenment that leads to the Constitution of the United States. In Shapiro’s estimation, “The founding ideology was the basis for the greatest experiment in human progress and liberty ever devised by the mind of man. But then again, it was an idea developed through Judeo-Christian principles and Greek rationality, molded and shaped over time by circumstance, purified in the flame of conflict” (90-91)
In the remainder of the book, Shapiro recounts the numerous threats this Western Civ tradition now faces. Among those ideologies seeking to overthrow the West are Utilitarianism, Marxism, Progressivism, Nationalism, Existentialism and Bureaucracy. Shapiro gives us the charge that it is necessary to keep the roots of the West alive and work against those who would weaken them.
There are, of course, difficulties with any attempt to present a philosophy of history covering several thousand years in 200 pages. There is a need to summarize and simplify, to leave out nuance and exceptions. Shapiro has also chosen to write almost exclusively about philosophers, apparently on the assumption that ideas drive history. I will leave these methodological concerns aside for the rest of my remarks.
For Shapiro the greatest loss is a sense of meaning which he attributes to a loss in belief in the revelation of the Bible and the loss of belief in telos. If one wants to argue for a virtue ethics, then the concept of telos is very important. We judge something good or bad based on whether or not it fulfills its function. Serving a purpose gives something a “meaning” or “significance.” So, Shapiro argues, by eliminating teleology from nature, human beings have lost their sense of meaning. It is therefore incumbent upon us to keep alive the tradition built on Greek philosophy and the Judeo-Christian tradition.
While virtue ethics is one of the central themes of his narrative, it is curious that Shapiro doesn’t do more to recognize that virtue ethics, while not the dominant school within academic philosophy, is still a serious ethical position. Elizabeth Anscombe, Stanley Hauerwas and Alasdair MacIntyre are just a few names associated with this movement.
One of the important limitations of Shaprio’s narrative is that he does little to understand those who he sees as the enemies of Western Civilization. In particular, it is curious that Shapiro doesn’t address the central event in the repudiation of Aristotelianism. Aristotle’s physics is based on the Earth being stationary. The element “earth” has a natural motion to move down. One could say that it is the telos of earth to get to the center of the Earth. Likewise, the natural motion of the element “fire” is to move up. One could say that it is the natural motion of fire to reach the heavens. But once you understand that the Earth is in motion, describing the motion of “earth” as “down” doesn’t adequately account for that motion. Once Newton provided a new explanation for motion, then Aristotle’s physics and astronomy were no longer viable. It is not that “Philosophy spent two centuries killing Judeo-Christian values and Greek teleology” (119), but rather that the Aristotelian account of the cosmos had been proven to be inadequate; alternatives needed to be found.
To create his “usable past,” Shapiro frequently treats those with whom he disagrees unfairly. For example, he is very critical of Hume’s argument that one cannot derive an ought from an is. Just because something is the case, doesn’t mean it ought to be the case. If Hume is correct, then the facts of nature do not allow us to make any moral conclusions. But the ability to argue from an is to an ought is an element of what Shapiro sees as “[t]he final step away from Judeo-Christian ethical monotheism and Greek teleology” (104). While he makes it clear he believes that Hume’s argument is not only wrong, but pernicious, he does not try to refute it.
Also, to create his usable past, he frequently fails to recognize fellow travelers. For example, John Dewey’s theory of education is based on the belief that the function of education “is to set free and develop the capacities of human individuals. . .” (142) Shapiro finds this objectionable. Somehow, and I have no idea how Shapiro draws this conclusion, Dewey advocates that “the state ought to reeducate children toward the type of growth the intelligent bureaucrats have endorsed; children are, in effect, the property of the state” (142-143). What makes this especially strange is that translated Dewey’s educational ideal into Greek, he would be talking about eudaimonia, the happiness which Aristotle is the telos of moral action.
But the biggest problem with his attempt at creating a usable past is his treatment of the American Revolution and the US Constitution. He wants to place the Constitution in the context of the Judeo-Christian and Greek Philosophy. He wants to claim that the Constitution is the culmination of these traditions. But how the Constitution is related to these traditions is unclear.
In particular, Shapiro places the US Constitution and the political philosophy of the founding fathers in the natural law tradition. But the connections he makes between the natural law tradition and Aristotleian philosophy and Judeo-Christian religion is tenuous at best. He cites the work of Hugo Grotius, one of the first modern natural law theorists. While Grotius’s thought goes through several iterations, one cannot argue that his understanding of natural law is derived from the idea of a telos or, in his later thought, from God’s commands.
Nor does Shapiro make his case with a figure closer to the Founding Fathers. He claims that Locke derives his understanding of natural law from the biblical claim that man is made in God’s image. But if you check the reference Shapiro cites, it is clear that, while Locke does indeed quote that verse, he is making an argument about the distribution of property in the state of nature. Moveover, this reference is taken from the First Treatise on Government, in which he debates the theologian Richard Hooker. The Second Treatise on Government does refer to this passage.
Shapiro is right that both the Judeo-Christian tradition and the Greek philosophical traditions have inspired some of the great works of the human imagination. But if he is looking for a usable past for conservatives, he is going to have to work harder to find a usable patrimony for the US Constitution and modern conservative thought.