History progresses, and man has a responsibility to pursue God through all times and circumstances Human beings are judged by moral, and not utilitarian standards (i.e., even if some things don’t benefit you on earth, they might after you die) God is unified, and there is a master plan behind everything Judaism did this through four faith-based claims which Shapiro says were “utterly different from the pagan religions before”: In other words, before Moses discovered God, humans were a plaything of the gods and of nature afterward, suddenly, humans were granted both individual and communal purpose. “The revelation at Sinai, in approximately 1313 BCE according to traditional Biblical belief, changed the world by infusing it with meaning for those who knew the story,” writes Ben Shapiro. He was soon lost… We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.” Chapter 2: From the Mountaintop “Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. Solomon agrees: “There is nothing better for a person than to rejoice in his work because that is his lot.” (Ecclesiastes 3:22)Īnd-as we’ve noted many times-so does Viktor Frankl, who wrote in Man’s Search of Meaning:
According to Aristotle, the same holds true for men, as well. Think of it this way: a watch is good if it shows the right time to the second if it doesn’t, then it’s broken. For him, a happy person was a person who has fulfilled its moral purpose, i.e., a good person. Well, Aristotle didn’t confuse happiness with pleasure. For us, happiness is basically akin to pleasure: golf, fishing, playing with your children, sex-these are all things that make you happy.īut, for many people, so do drinking, drugs, infidelity-to name just a few of the least amoral activities.
Namely, just like the word “silly”-which originally meant happy-the word “happiness” itself has lost the meaning it had for Aristotle and the Ancient Civilizations. There’s a problem with that sentence, however! In other words, even when people want honor, money, health, friendship, or romantic love-they want it so that they can be happy.Īnd, in a way, nobody has ever disagreed: according to most philosophers, happiness is the ultimate objective of every human being. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle noted that happiness is the only thing that humans desire for their own sake. And this book argues that we’re tossing away what’s best about our civilization because we’ve forgotten that those foundations even exist.” Chapter 1: The Pursuit of Happiness “This book argues that Western civilization, including our modern notions of values and reason and science, was built on deep foundations. “I believe these two questions are intimately related,” he writes. Shapiro believes that neither of these theories explains away enough because all of them are offered independent of the first question: how did our world come to be. There are four main theories: heightened economic divides, reopening of racial wounds, technologically created filter bubbles and tunnel visions, and/or, for whatever reason, human nature has kicked back in. There have never been more depressed people in history, we are killing ourselves at the highest rates ever, facts have made way for feelings, everybody is lonely, nobody trusts anybody, and democracy has become unfashionable-to name just a few of the banes of our present-day world.
The other part-the more political one, perhaps-is concerned with the question: “Why are we throwing it away?” Most of Ben Shapiro’s book attempts to understand how did this all happen. In short, “we don’t live in a perfect world, but we do live in the best world that has ever existed” ( although, millions and millions of Africans and Asians would beg to differ). Regarding the first question, you already know the main facts: fewer people are dying, most babies can survive and live up to 80, fewer people than ever are hungry and uneducated. “This book is about two mysteries,” says Ben Shapiro in the “Introduction” to The Right Side of History, and straight off the bat, lists them: “The first mystery: Why are things so good? The second mystery: Why are we blowing it?”
#BEN SHAPIRO TWITTER RIGHT SIDE OF HISTORY PDF#
“The Right Side of History PDF Summary” Introduction He became a nationally syndicated columnist as a teenager-the youngest in the history of the United States.Įditor-in-chief for The Daily News and editor-at-large of Breitbart News (2012-2016), Shapiro is also known as the host of The Ben Shapiro Show. Ben Shapiro is an American lawyer, author, and conservative political commentator.
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