Book Review: The Right Side of History

The following is a guest post by contributor Ross McIntyre. We support the sharing of ideas relevant to humanism here on our blog, but the views expressed in any guest post do not necessarily reflect the views of Humanists of Linn County.

The Right Side of History by Ben Shapiro

Broadside Books 2019

288 pages

ISBN: 978-0-06-2857910-3

The premise of this book is that Western Civilization is great because of its combined heritages of Judeo-Christian and Greek thought – and that Americans are on the cusp of throwing it all away if trends continue. The author takes much space to establish this debt toward “Jerusalem and Athens,” and briefly mentions ways in which that very goodness is being discarded – implying that too much deviation from the “Jerusalem-Athens” tradition is dangerous.

Through the book, Shapiro shows a broad knowledge of history, thinkers, and trends. He uses examples carefully to show contrasts between good developments and evil experiments and credits the “Divine purpose” given to humans and the “Reason” we employ to establish a land of freedom, abolish slavery, defeat Nazis and Communists, and bring material prosperity to millions, if not billions, of people.

The logic used to establish many politically and culturally conservative positions is openly displayed and explored. The fear of losing such great benefits captures the reader’s attention and wins agreement with many following propositions.

The great weakness here is the absence of clear definitions. For example, what the “Judeo-Christian ethic” is is not defined, only described as having roots in the Ten Commandments. An undefined Judeo-Christianity does not contrast well with things like genocide, mass murder, terrorism, slavery, because all of those things are endorsed in the Judeo-Christian tradition. King Saul was not thorough enough with genocide, Jehovah killed people for complaining or gave them to their enemies, and slavery is taken for granted without question on moral (or economic) grounds.

Another concept that is ill-defined is “Western Civilization” – that group of cultures identified with American success. How much taint is enough to disqualify a system as “Western?” How “pure” does a group have to be?

With these concepts undefined, the reader is left with the “Reason” of the ancient Greeks as the remaining basis for any greatness seen around them. It is very unconvincing to explore that premise, and Shapiro does not do so – selecting instead many decontextualized facts, quotes, and events and omitting many others.

The most catching thing about this book is that Shapiro ends with a sort of call for unity. “Working together” under his terms, of course – and this after he has leveled several insults to individuals in the proceeding pages. Perhaps the concept of “unity” is another of the concepts that is – undefined?

By the end of the book, I am forced to conclude that there are no good definitions for the concepts that undergird the premise. It is imaginative to conceive of a “Judeo-Christian” heritage to which one can assign such success, but reality seems quite the opposite: America became great, little by little, as she shed more and more parts of the Judeo-Christian traditions. Throwing off monarchy, ending slavery, granting equal rights to ethnicities and women, standing against rule by terror and mass killing – all of these and more are contrary to biblical traditions.

Taking bankrupt concepts of “heritage” and the dubious lineage of reasoning as the basis – for a status that is great from one perspective, yet deeply flawed from another – is the only logic some positions claim. Of course, the fear of “loss of greatness” if we wander from the Judeo-Christian heritage can be safely ignored.