Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 372

 

Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great," by Ben Shapiro.

Every week, I drop everything for twenty-five hours. As an Orthodox Jew, I celebrate the Sabbath, which means that my phone and television are off-limits. No work. No computer. No news. No politics. A full day, plus an hour, to spend with my wife and children and parents, with my community. The outside world disappears. It’s the high point of my life. There is no greater happiness than sitting with my wife, watching the kids play with (and occasionally fight with) each other, a book open on my lap. 

I’m not alone. Sabbath is the high point of many Jews’ weeks. There’s an old saying in the Jewish community: the Jews didn’t keep the Sabbath, the Sabbath kept the Jews. It certainly kept us sane. 

Now, I cover politics for a living. And I’m happy doing it—it’s purposeful and important, and working to understand and convey ideas can be thrilling. But politics isn’t the root of happiness for me. Politics is about working to build the framework for the pursuit of happiness, not the achievement of it; politics helps us establish the preconditions necessary for happiness, but can’t provide happiness in and of itself. 

The Founding Fathers knew that. That’s why Thomas Jefferson didn’t write that the government was granted power to grant you happiness: it was there to protect your pursuit of happiness. The government existed to protect your rights, to prevent those rights from being infringed upon. The government was there to stop someone from stealing your horse, from butchering you in your sleep, from letting his cow graze on your land. At no point did Jefferson suggest that government could achieve happiness. None of the Founders thought it could.

The secularist myth holds that religion held back science for millennia. The reverse is true. Without Judeo-Christian foundations, science simply would not exist as it does in the West.