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

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.