The collapse of our social fabric, the collapse of communities, is a much graver crisis. While there’s a truth in the claim that some people are being left behind, I don’t think that’s solvable merely through economic means. By any historical standard, we live in the best available age. I really don’t care if Bill Gates is making the lion’s share of wealth if other people are also increasing their wealth. There are at least some questions about how these things get measured.īut in any case, I believe that economic inequality doesn’t matter nearly as much as poverty. I think some of the metrics that have been used, for example, to measure the growth in income inequality are not accurate. And frankly, some of those stats you cite I just don’t agree with. The reason I say that is because we’ve obviously had much worse economic conditions in America with much less political polarization. I don’t think it’s the main part of the story. Wages have been stagnant for 40 years, Americans are working longer hours for less pay, the vast majority of wealth being produced is going to ever smaller numbers of people, more people are facing economic precarity due to rapid technological change - you don’t see that as part of the story here? Ben Shapiro What’s astonishing to me is that in noting all of this, you dismiss material conditions as a relevant causal factor. And the reason for this, you write, is that we’re abandoning our “Judeo-Christian heritage” and that “facts have been buried to make way for feelings a society of essential oils and self-esteem has replaced a society of logic.” You open the book with a parade of statistics showing how bad things are - record drug overdoses, declining marriage rates, increased rates of depression, high levels of distrust, etc. We were never going to agree, but the differences are, I think, revealing.Ī lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows. I read the book closely and reached out in good faith to Ben to debate it. He does caution readers at the beginning that he’ll be “giving great philosophers shorter shrift than they deserve, and simplifying issues for the sake of brevity,” but what he leaves them with is a nuance-free narrative that dismisses counterarguments and distorts 3,500 years of history. You can’t make any sense of Western civilization without some knowledge of Judaism, Christianity, and Greek philosophy.īut the intellectual history Shapiro offers is incomplete, and obscures some important facts.

I’m sympathetic to Shapiro’s most obvious claim, which is that we shouldn’t cut ourselves off from our religious and philosophical history. But in the past few decades or so, we’ve gradually abandoned our “Judeo-Christian” roots, and that’s making us feel less fulfilled and less happy. The thesis goes something like this: Western civilization in general, and America in particular, is great because we’ve managed to balance religion and reason in a way that drives material progress and satisfies our deep need for purpose at the same time. Instead, it’s a lamentation of the decline of religious values in American life.

Unlike his previous books, this one does not take on an explicitly partisan tone.

His book, The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great, is an attempt to rebrand himself as a high-minded intellectual, a kind of cross between Jordan Peterson and George Will.

The New York Times called him a “provocative gladiator” and “the voice of the conservative millennial movement.” Now 35, he rose to fame as a 17-year-old wunderkind columnist and has been a central part of conservative discourse for the past decade and a half. He’s made a name for himself as a lib-owning, fast-talking logician, the sort of pundit who thrives in the age of Twitter. Ben Shapiro is arguably the most popular conservative commentator in the country.

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