Ben Shapiro's The Right Side of History: easy read, informative, wrong

I find it annoying when Christians proudly equate their faith with something concrete or definable. Aren't they familiar with their saviour, a man who believed life is infinitely more than what can be seen, smelt or touched? A man who resorted to parables and chastised his disciples for needing a sign, because he knew that faith has no rational grounds. It's an emotional, not cognitive, experience. Seeking to prove what is important, or to have it objectified as dogma, just confirms you haven't a clue.

Ben Shapiro, though an observant Jew, is similarly afflicted.

His favourite Tweet: "Facts don't care about your feelings."

The Right Side of History, the tenth book by the 35-year-old American, is an easy read. Rifling through its chronological stages, Shapiro surveys Western civilisation with two questions in mind: what underpins its incredible achievements and why, after so much toil and suffering, are we now so keen to blow it? The West is "riddled with internal contradictions, communities bereft of values, and individuals bereft of meaning". Something has been lost. And absent a consensus on what that is and how it might be recovered, we're left to "fight harder and more viciously over smaller and smaller matters".

Shapiro is informative in an impatient, I-know-something-you-don't kind of way. His defence of Judeo-Christian values (Jerusalem) and classical Greek thought (Athens) is fortified by apt religious, philosophical and political references, with a dash of popular culture to indicate he isn't a conservative bore. Unfortunately, Faust and God's claim that "man still must err, while he doth strive" doesn't figure in his musings.

The Jewish God, so the story goes, inserted himself into history to bestow upon us the dignity of purpose. Listen up: only the Creator can know why the universe exists. But to help out, here's some general tips on what I'm after. Though be sure not to forget the grand plan is, as I told Job, beyond human conception and logic. In the end, because man is not God, he is obliged to make a leap of faith.

Fair enough, though Shapiro, as with most religious types, doesn't sufficiently explore the ruse with revelation.

Getting the whole of humanity on the same page at the same time, committed to a metaphysical source of meaning and value that transcends everyday reality, is a fraught process. God opting to profane his eternal and indivisible self in order to take corporeal form or violate the laws of nature can certainly be inspirational and thought-provoking. Yet proof of the unprovable and talk of the ineffable also, perversely, tend to encourage materialism and hubris over spirituality. A situation made worse by the need for a distinct group to promote a new post-pagan standard.

The road to eschatological oneness begins with preferential treatment and exclusivity.

Hence the chosen people and the Torah. And the importance, as Shapiro notes, of man having to wrestle with God and the related belief that "the messiah would be a political figure, not primarily a spiritual one".

Jesus brought things to a head, rendering access to God both universal and particular. Our subjective inner world, what we feel, became the locus of salvation, by way of divine grace. Faith no longer had to do with the law, knowledge, tribal identity or even good works. Shapiro quotes the early Christian theologian Tertullian approvingly:

What has Jerusalem to do with Athens, the Church with the Academy, the Christian with the heretic? … After Jesus we have no need of speculation, after the Gospel no need of research.

Alas, practicalities concerning the individual versus the collective remained.

Jesus's all-or-nothingness had the potential to undermine reason, temporal authority and organised progress. Man is too weak and vain to assume personal responsibility for aligning his heart and soul with the sublime will of whatever it is that lies behind and beyond physical reality. Politics and material conditions matter. Best, then, to treat the mystery of the cross, not as the end of history, but the start. Armed with an updated materialistic morality founded upon a miraculous confirmation of God's interminable love, Christianity, the one true religion, would now drive the entire globe toward finality.

As Shapiro correctly points out, the response to Catholic imperialism had two strains: one retained Athens and Jerusalem, most evident in America, the other rejected both, as per the Reign of Terror.

The ideological confusion, however, was merely additional cover for the ongoing Judeo-Christian project aimed at relieving us of the burden of genuine faith. Cherry-picking at will, the Enlightenment initiated a final, blasphemous push to get to the bottom of things, on the basis a theory of everything would, as Stephen Hawking once wrote, be "the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we would truly know the mind of God".

No matter God had been killed off, leaving man alienated from something greater, without a higher moral purpose to wrestle with. No matter modernity retained Greek telos, the search for a final cause, while proclaiming its new religion of science to be value-free and directionless. No matter the comfort and convenience of material success was never going to serve as a satisfying substitute for spiritual meaning.

"The tension between Jerusalem and Athens is real," contends Shapiro. "But removing the tension by abandoning either Jerusalem or Athens collapses the bridge built between the two."

But the bridge is – and always was – a self-deception.

As Paul, Tertullian, Luther, Kierkegaard and others make clear, the choice is either unconditional faith or not. Detach from the external, intelligible world and embrace one's fate, and all that that entails, or don't. There's no middle ground.

Ironically, those who Shapiro condemns for severing our culture from its historic roots and then trying to tear down the foundations, have an emotional sense of this very truth.

The continued intellectual striving is pointless. Time to let go, as Jesus did.

Rather than wanting to blow it, radical feminism and other "irrational" movements are therefore actually agitating for a liberating end-of-history moment, the one Western man has been talking up and practicing – albeit half-heartedly – for more than three millennia.

Ben Shapiro is so clever he's dumb.

Yes, there is a hunger for spiritual leadership with the courage to acknowledge that something has been lost, an underlying harmony that truly binds us. But this something is a feeling not a fact. It's metaphysical and more true than anything rational.

Moreover, it can only be restored if and when we regard our glorious worldly and intellectual achievements, both religious and secular, as effectively meaningless.