By Ben Shapiro
Tuesday, March 19, 2019
Last week a white supremacist murdered 50 innocent
Muslims in a brutal terror attack he livestreamed to Facebook. This emissary of
evil then released a manifesto outlining his philosophy — and his goals. He
wanted, he said, to tear apart civilization through racial and political
conflict. His goal: to defend “the West.”
But what did he mean by “the West”? He meant racial
supremacy of whites. He explicitly derided “the myth of the individual” and the
“sovereignty of private property.” He spat at democracy. He scoffed at
capitalism and tore into conservatism, which had surrendered to these concepts.
Unfortunately, the terrorist’s view of “the West” isn’t
limited to white supremacists. It’s echoed by intersectional critics of the
West, who suggest that Western civilization truly is founded in racial hegemony
rather than eternal concepts of truth. In this view, Western civilization is
inherently racist, sexist, and bigoted — rooted in hierarchies of power, to be
torn down through tribal division. The West, they say, doesn’t exist: It’s a
mythos of white power, imbibed by white supremacists.
But that’s not right, obviously. Western civilization
does exist, and it is responsible for the vast majority of human gains in
history. Thanks to the West, billions of human beings no longer suffer in
abject poverty; thanks to the West, democracy is seen as both the moral and the
practical default position for aspiring governments; thanks to the West,
individualism has been able to gain ground against the natural tribalism
endemic to human beings. The history of the West isn’t a history of unalloyed
greatness: It is replete with suffering and tyranny and slavery and misery. But
all of those evils are present in every civilization historically. The question
is why the West changed the world.
The West changed the world because the West isn’t based in tribal notions of race
but on creedal notions — the same notions rejected by the Christchurch
terrorist. As I discuss in my new book, The
Right Side of History, the West is important only because the philosophy of
the West — the ever-shifting balance between Greek reason and Judeo-Christian
values — provides the foundation for those gains. We haven’t always lived up to
the highest principles of either Judeo-Christian morality or Greek reason — but
by acknowledging the importance of both, and building a civilization on the
tension between the two, the world has been bettered.
The West was built on Jerusalem and Athens — revelation
and reason. Thanks to the Judeo-Christian tradition, the West accepted certain
foundational principles: that the universe is a logical place, established by a
reasoning God; that human beings have moral duty not out of pragmatism but out
of principle; that human beings have the capacity and obligation to better
their world; that every human being is created in the image of God.
Thanks to Greek tradition, the West accepted other
foundation principles: the belief that our purpose lies in our use of reason
and that the universe could be discovered and understood by the human mind.
The West broadened the application of Judeo-Christian
principles more and more widely over time by applying Greek reason, resulting
in the birth of science, human rights, free speech, and free markets. Whenever
the West abandoned Judeo-Christian values, the West fell into secular tyranny;
whenever the West abandoned Greek reason, the West fell into theocratic
tyranny. The balance between reason and revelation gave us meaning and purpose
— and with that meaning and purpose came prosperity.
The West is worth defending from those who would define
it down to racial solidarity. If we don’t, tribalism will reign supreme once
more, bringing the bloody ruin it has always brought, grinding the principles
we all hold dear into the dust.
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