The Right Side of History

by Ben Shapiro

  Voltaire’s morality tends toward the fully libertarian, then—freedom from control, liberty in behavior. But such a system, absent the virtue of a citizenry, quickly collapses. Voltaire knew that, which is why he wished that those of lesser rational capacity worship an omnipotent, omniscient God—God was necessary for others, but not for Voltaire. Unfortunately, he would be proven right in his estimation of human nature in short order. By removing the supposed shackles of virtue, Voltaire also removed the constraints preventing chaos and tyranny. When Voltaire’s version of freedom was mixed with the passion of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), the result was the guillotine.

  Juxtaposed to the vainglorious, acidic Voltaire, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) appears a secular saint. Kant never left Königsberg, Prussia; he was certainly no hedonist. But like Voltaire and Locke, Kant was a devotee of reason above all, even if he explored its limits to the utmost. In his essay, “What Is Enlightenment?,” Kant spelled out the central philosophy of the era: “Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) ‘Have the courage to use your own understanding,’ is therefore the motto of the Enlightenment.”16

  And what of morality? Kant thought that the search for virtue could be found not through reason applied to the universe, but through investigation of the moral instinct. We all have an instinct for morality, Kant believed. Reason was limited, as human perception was limited; Kant remained skeptical of the human capacity to know the world. By looking at our moral instinct, Kant believed we could derive a universal morality:

  Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.17

  Kant sought to locate the new meaning and purpose in a priori knowledge—things we can know without experiment or experience. Kant believed that certain truths were not dependent on the human experience—2+2 would always equal four, whether or not human beings experienced it. Kant thus embarked on an almost Platonic quest for knowledge beyond the material—but where Plato looked to the realm of Forms, Kant looked instead to the human heart. The human heart, he said, had embedded within it a moral logic. And that moral logic relied on categorical imperatives: absolute truths. Those categorical imperatives included injunctions never to use other human beings as means, but rather to treat them as ends. Actions are good in and of themselves, not because they have good effects. And acting in pursuit of the good makes us free. The measure of religion itself is its adherence to this moral law of the heart.18 In short, “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”19

  To our secular minds, this is beautiful stuff—and the closest thing philosophy has ever crafted to a serious sense of meaning and purpose. But Kant’s idealism could not sustain itself—his philosophy of morality soon fell apart. Kant’s categorical imperative—the idea that every law must be generalizable—provides a nice guidepost for human activity, and one that seems to mirror the Golden Rule. But Kant’s categorical imperative does not answer more complex moral calculations. Is it really correct that we do a wrong whenever we lie, even to hide a Jew when the Nazi is at the door, for example, as Kant seems to suggest?

  Furthermore, Kant’s categorical imperative isn’t objectively mandatory. Why not simply assume that everyone else should abide by Kant’s rule, and break all the rules yourself? And even if you don’t wish your own self-serving priorities to rule, there are other moralities just as logical as Kant’s. Indeed, Kant’s categorical imperative was but one system for organizing human morality along the lines of a priori reason. Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) similarly sought to construct a moral system by using reason—and his system, unlike Kant’s, wasn’t based on universal moral principles but on utility. Bentham believed that human action should be constructed to “promote or oppose” happiness, which could be measured in terms of pleasure and pain. Bentham believed, along the lines of Hobbes, that no rights preexisted the state, and called natural rights “nonsense upon stilts.”20

  Voltaire, Kant, Bentham—all assumed that reason could construct morality from scratch. But their moralities did not coincide. Practically speaking, their morality lifted elements, even if unconsciously, from the Judeo-Christian tradition and Greek telos they suggested they had exploded.

  All of this left an unanswered question: If reason could not construct objective systems of morality, what could? What if faith in reason was misplaced—and something darker actually motivated human beings?

  THE DEATH OF CAPACITY

  The death of Judeo-Christian values and Greek telos didn’t mean the liberation of reason from superstition. For some key philosophers, it meant the destruction of reason itself. That may seem counterintuitive—after all, philosophers had tossed out the Bible and Aristotle in the name of reason. But the Enlightenment did not merely involve utilizing reason to question Judeo-Christian values and telos. It involved turning reason in on itself, examining the human mind. It meant obliterating mankind as the jewel of the cosmos, bringing him low, returning him to the animals rather than allowing him to aspire to join the divine. By throwing God out of the kingdom of man, the Enlightenment also reduced man to a creature of flesh and blood, with no transcendent reason to guide the way.

  Machiavelli and Bacon had both recognized the power of passion—but they had also upheld the rule of reason above passion. Machiavelli believed that passion could be manipulated to useful effect by reason-driven leaders, and that passion could be used to check passion; Bacon believed that reason could be successfully applied to the universe to unlock its secrets for the betterment of mankind. Neither Machiavelli nor Bacon significantly undermined the belief in the free will of humans. Machiavelli’s devotion to virtù sprang from his desire to oppose fortuna—the vagaries of fortune, which could thwart even the best-laid plans. Machiavelli sought to overcome fortune with will, with the concerted use of means to achieve goals.

  Not so with Hobbes.

  Hobbes, who was deeply devoted to tearing down Greek teleology, attacked not only the idea that the universe had discoverable purpose, but that human beings were capable of exercising reason more broadly. “The Passions of men,” Hobbes writes, “are commonly more potent than their Reason.” Reason cannot bring happiness, nor can it be used as the goal of a philosophical life. There is no happiness. There is only striving and security and passion. Reason cannot save us from the war of all against all; only the Leviathan, the power of the state, can.21

  Hobbes’s skepticism of reason was mirrored by Descartes, who suggested that human beings were driven by passion rather than reason.22 But Spinoza made the most radical break with the past when he discarded the notion of free will altogether. He likened human beings to stones cast through space, but believing that they move themselves: “Such a stone, being conscious merely of its own endeavor and not at all indifferent, would believe itself to be completely free, and would think that it continued in motion solely because of its own wish. That is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined.”23 Through reason, human beings are capable of better understanding their plight, and this grants them some limited measure of freedom—but their freedom of action is heavily circumscribed.

  It was left to Hume, once again, to completely circumscribe reason. “Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions,” Hume famously wrote, taking to its logical extreme the thought of his predecessors. “[Reason] cannot be the source of moral good or evil, which are found to have that influence.”24

  Hume’s contemporary and friend Jean-Jacques Rousseau accepted Hume’s essential argument about human nature—but then elevated the passions in a way Hume never did. No, said Rousseau, passions were good. Man was perfectible. And morality was based on empathy. In the beginning, Rousseau argued, man lived in harmony with nature, comfortable and “indo
lent,” until he formed societal bonds. Those societal bonds were formed in an attempt to perfect human nature—to develop human nature itself. Human beings gathered together and lived as communities in “the happiest and most stable of epochs” before greed came to the fore, pushing men to create surplus rather than surviving at subsistence levels. Property was the death of the natural man. “The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society,” Rousseau wrote. But now that society had been created, human beings could only find happiness through an administration of the “general will”—as Mary Ann Glendon writes, “an agreement by which everyone would give himself and all his goods to the community, forming a state whose legislation would be produced by the will of each person thinking in terms of all.” And that state would be led by a transformative leader dedicated to “changing human nature.”25

  This move away from reason and toward passion—the rejection of Judeo-Christian values and Greek teleology—may have been popular among philosophers, but it remained a rather fringy perspective. All that changed, however, with the rise of Darwinism. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) provided the first scientific grounding to the notion of a world without God, and a world beyond the mind of man.

  With Darwin’s evolutionary biology, a unifying field theory of life could suddenly be proposed: accident. God did not create man in His image; man was merely the next step in a chain of evolution propelled forward by natural selection. There was no telos to the universe—there was merely nature, and man was part of it. Man was an animal. God was unnecessary. Reason itself disappeared into higher brain function designed for better environmental adaption. Objective truth itself became an article of faith, since the human mind was designed not for its discovery, but for finding the nuts and berries necessary to ward off death and pain. Morality, too, was an outgrowth of simple convention and adaptive innovation: animals could engage in rudimentary “moral” behavior, without any semblance of human reason.

  Darwinism was seen by the intelligentsia of the time as a final permission to break with the ways of the ancients. Finally, at long last, the superstitions of religion could be put aside; finally, at long last, the legacy of the ancient Greeks could be escaped. Mankind, in joining the animals, had finally liberated himself from the chains of the divine. In fact, the excitement of Darwinism can still be felt today in the literature of atheists like Daniel Dennett, who writes, “Darwin’s idea is a universal solvent, capable of cutting right to the heart of everything in sight. The question is: what does it leave behind?” Dennett claims that “we are left with stronger, sounder versions of our most important ideas.”26

  But were we?

  As the scientific world celebrated its newfound elevation over Judeo-Christian values and Greek telos, two figures emerged to warn the West of what was to come. One was a Russian novelist; the other, a German philosopher.

  THE WARNING

  Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) worried deeply about mankind unbound from moral obligation. He saw in the rise of an atheistic world the face of the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), the famed French sadist, rapist, and pedophile who embraced passion, discounted human responsibility, and saw in his own pleasure the highest good. De Sade infamously dismissed God and added, “We rail against the passions, but never think that it is from their flame that philosophy lights its torch.”27 Dostoyevsky saw the Sade-ian perspective as the logical endpoint of a system without God, theorizing that without immortality, all constraints on human behavior would disappear. He foresaw that materialist man was far more of a threat than religious man—that human beings who think themselves mere agglomerations of matter, without the responsibility of choice, will throw decency aside. He saw that man would find in his search for purpose something far darker than the Judeo-Christian tradition and Greek teleology that built the modern world.

  Dostoyevsky feared the materialism that had come to dominate European thought. In the famous “Grand Inquisitor” chapter of The Brothers Karamazov, in which Ivan Karamazov tells his tale of a Spanish inquisitor grilling Jesus, Dostoyevsky suggested that the day had come when human beings would give up on meaning in favor of worldly goods: “Dost Thou know that the ages will pass, and humanity will proclaim by the lips of their sages that there is no crime, and therefore no sin; there is only hunger?” Dostoyevsky suggested the cure for hunger would be the dictator—the man who satiates hunger will be worshipped as a deity. Human beings, Dostoyevsky suspected, were too frightened to use God-given freedom of will to seek God Himself; instead, they would retreat into infantilism, happy to follow leaders who will relieve them of their need for bread and provide them the comfort of conformity, promising them that their sins mean nothing: “We shall show them that they are weak, that they are only pitiful children, but that childlike happiness is the sweetest of all.”28

  The dark side of the Enlightenment was no secret to Dostoyevsky, who saw the rumblings of a coming cataclysm looming through the mists of the future. He knew that reason alone, unmoored from God, could not hold back the tide; in fact, reason itself would provide the impetus for evil, he argued.

  In Notes from the Underground, Dostoyevsky decried the scientific optimism of the materialists, scoffing at their suggestion that human weakness would be eradicated by “common sense and science . . . completely re-educat[ing] human nature.” He laughed at the notion that men could be told that they lack the ability to choose, but could simply be guided toward morality by the application of scientific rules. No, Dostoyevsky stated, man would rebel against such logic. Human beings were not made for it: “What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice.”29

  Human beings are creatures who seek more than that which reason and science purport to give them—and they are more than the self-interested animals reason and science seek to make them. The search for meaning, untrammeled by Judeo-Christian values and Greek telos, freed from moral responsibility by scientific determinism, would burst forth in a conflagration that will set the whole world on fire, Dostoyevsky predicted. The result would be blood and suffering, a maelstrom of horror, followed by an epoch of emptiness. God’s death, Dostoyevsky thought, was man’s death as well.

  THE TRIUMPH OF THE WILL

  The death of God, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) saw, left no room for purpose through reason. Like Hume, Nietzsche believed that morality through reason alone was a lie, a cover for instinct wearing the costume of reason: “Your decision, ‘this is right,’ has a previous history in your impulses, your likes and dislikes.”30 Nietzsche, in other words, had consolidated the lessons of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and ripped the mask of nicety from the face of the Enlightenment.

  Reason and passion are both aspects of something deeper, something primordial, Nietzsche stated: the will to power. Nietzsche suggested that we stop brooding over the “moral worth of our actions.” Instead, he said, let us “seek to become what we are,—the new, the unique, the incomparable, making laws for ourselves and creating ourselves!”31 Nietzsche knew that the only answer to scientific materialism was radical subjectivity, and with it would come the death of morals. He celebrated that fact, and reveled in the power of the will.

  What, exactly, is the will to power? It is the will to self-perfection. In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche poeticizes:

  Before God!—Now however this God hath died!—Ye higher men, this God was your greatest danger. . . . Now only travaileth the mountain of the human future. God hath died: now do we desire—the Superman to live. The most careful ask to-day: “How is man to be maintained?” Zarathustra however asketh, as the first and only one: “How is man to be surpassed?” The Superman, I have at heart; that is the first and only thing to me—and not man: not the neighbor, not the poorest, not the sorriest, not the best . . .32

/>   Nietzsche advocated the destruction of Judeo-Christian values. He properly understood that all other systems of morality, from utilitarianism to Kantian categorical imperatives, are based at root on the moral discoveries of the Judeo-Christian tradition—and he said that man can only be freed by destroying that moral vestigial structure. That structure, he believed, had held man back; it was “slave-morality,” which sacrificed strength for weakness, which celebrated poverty and powerlessness.

  What was required is a new morality. Man could create his own morality, but only on the basis of strength and will. That morality will no longer be based on human happiness—it would not be based on how to “maintain himself best, longest, most pleasantly.” These were petty virtues, Nietzsche claimed. Instead, Nietzsche valued honesty and struggle, strength and courage. He valued man unbound.

  What Nietzsche observed, and what he lauded, had been under way for generations. Philosophy spent two centuries killing Judeo-Christian values and Greek teleology—or at least discarding them in favor of brave new utopias filled with perfectible human beings, or crystal palaces ruled by men of reason, or worlds of determinism filled with avoidance of pain and maximization of pleasure.

  Either man would rule supreme, or he would destroy all in his path. Which would it be? The world would soon find out the answer to that question.

  Chapter 7

  The Remaking of the World

  Why can’t we all just be reasonable?

  This is the characteristic call of our age. Forget values; forget judgment. Let’s just be reasonable with one another. Tolerance can supplant Judeo-Christian ideas. We all know what’s right, deep down. If we follow our star, civilization won’t just survive—it will thrive and flourish.