What Ben Shapiro Gets Right

“Shapiro’s book is a well-written and, at times, moving defense of Western Civilization.”

Ben Shapiro is most well-known for videos on YouTube, often with titles along the lines of “Ben Shapiro DESTROYS [X, Y, or Z].” While I disagree with Shapiro on different policy areas, the undoubted entertainment value of these videos can obscure someone who has a greater depth to his thinking than this suggests and leads to easy caricatures and straw-men that don’t help anyone. Shapiro’s new book is his love-letter to Western civilization and what makes it great. This is juxtaposed to what he views as the threats to this civilization. Overall, I find myself in broad agreement with his thesis: that our civilization is a good (not perfect) thing and we should wish it to continue. There are, however, some notable differences, which stem from our different positions on the Right. While these matter, they do not detract from the fact that we both have a gratitude for what has been handed down to us, and we both have a wish for this to be handed down to those who come after.

As Shapiro argues, we have never enjoyed such a time to be alive. If there were ever a time to spend on this earth, one would wish it to be ours. On nearly every measure of utilitarian life satisfaction, we are better off than ever before. Yet, there is also a sense that there is something deeply wrong…

Shapiro’s thesis revolves around two questions: “Why are things so good?” and “Why are we blowing it?” These two questions are the driving force behind an urgent call to rediscover what it is that made our civilization great, and what we risk losing if we don’t recover. As Shapiro argues, we have never enjoyed such a time to be alive. If there were ever a time to spend on this earth, one would wish it to be ours. On nearly every measure of utilitarian life satisfaction, we are better off than ever before. Yet, there is also a sense that there is something deeply wrong, a sense that there is a hole in our hearts that cannot be filled or satisfied by the latest temporal analgesic for the spiritual void opened within us. The French philosopher Chantal Delsol writes of this sense of absence and directionless loss in her haunting book Icarus Fallen, recounting how we’ve dreamed the dreams of religion, philosophy, utopian ideology and been sent crashing back to earth following the cataclysm of the 20th century, burnt like Icarus. Except we are still alive, so what now?

Shapiro believes that in order to answer this question that arguably underlies his thesis, we need to go back in time and recover the balance between the two pillars of faith and reason that drove the West to become the civilization it can be again, a civilization with the unique ability in Shapiro’s view to “generate the moral purpose that provides the foundation for happiness.” This comprises individual moral purpose, individual capacity to pursue that moral purpose, communal moral purpose, and communal capacity to pursue that purpose. The proper balance between Athens and Jerusalem enables the proper balance in these four elements that allows maximum moral and material flourishing.

In this, we can see the influence of Leo Strauss’s thought on the inevitable tension between reason and faith, Athens and Jerusalem. These two pillars are being eroded by the attacks of various manifestations of modernist ideology, whether from the far-left or far-right. Although they might have their roots in the 19th century, they reached their most violent denouement in the first half of the 20th century. We are now facing a world of increasing material comfort but one increasingly barren of meaning. As Shapiro argues, we now think we can dispense with faith entirely and rely purely on reason to carry us along as individuals and society. The problem is the religious impulse doesn’t die. We can see this today with the increasing investment in politics as a new procedural religion and identity politics as a new personal religion—or what Shapiro refers to as the new paganism.