Over the weekend, The New York Post ran an excerpt from Daily Wire Editor-In-Chief Ben Shapiro’s new book to be released on Tuesday: “The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great.” The book, Shapiro’s eighth non-fiction book, argues that Western civilization is in the midst of a crisis of purpose and ideas, and that civilizations that rejected their debt to Jerusalem and Athens have collapsed into dust.
The excerpt, which comes from the beginning of the book, reads:
For nearly all of human history, life has been nasty, brutish and short. In 1900, some 10 percent of all infants died before reaching their first birthday in the United States; in other countries, the number was far higher. Approximately one in every 100 mothers could expect to die in childbirth.
Yet we now live in an era in which mothers can expect to survive pregnancy and childbirth (the mortality rate among pregnant women has dropped 99 percent). Babies can be expected to survive infancy and then live another eight decades; we live in an era in which the vast majority of the American population lives in climate-controlled spaces with plenty of food, a car and at least one television. We can speak with each other across thousands of miles instantaneously, find and collate information with the touch of a few keys, send money seamlessly whirring around the globe and buy products manufactured in dozens of different places for cents on the dollar without leaving our homes.
We can expect that a baby born in the United States will never be enslaved, murdered or tortured; an adult in the United States can go about his or her daily business with the expectation that she will not be arrested for espousing an unpopular viewpoint or worshipping the wrong god or no god at all. There are no restrictions barring particular races or genders from particular jobs, no governmental rules designed to privilege one particular biological or religious in-group at the expense of any other out-group. We can live with whom we choose, have as many or as few children as we want and open any business we see fit. We can expect to die richer than we were born.
We don’t live in a perfect world, but we do live in the best world that has ever existed.
So, the first mystery is this: What changed?
And why are we throwing it away?
We are killing ourselves at the highest rates in decades. Rates of depression have skyrocketed. Drug overdoses are now responsible for more deaths than car crashes. We’re spending more money on luxuries and enjoying everything less. Conspiracies have replaced reason, and subjective perceptions have replaced objective observation. Facts have been buried to make way for feelings; a society of essential oils and self-esteem has replaced a society of logic.
We’re more divided than at any time in the recent past. In July 2017, Pew Research found that 68 percent of Democrats said it was “stressful and frustrating” to talk to political opponents; 52 percent of Republicans agreed.
Gallup polls show that our average trust in 14 key institutions is just 32 percent. As for our democracy, fewer and fewer people like it. An October 2016 poll showed that 40 percent of Americans said they had “lost faith in American democracy,” with another 6 percent stating that they never had faith to begin with. And 80 percent of Americans said America was more divided today than ever — ever.
Just a reminder: We’ve had a full-scale civil war in this country, as well as Jim Crow and the domestic terrorism of the 1960s.
We fight harder and more viciously over smaller and smaller matters — the more frivolous the topic, the harsher the battles.
What in the world happened?