Jak zachránit západní civilizaci – Shapiro Ben (2020)

In his book How to Save Western Civilization, Ben Shapiro aims from the perspective of today's crisis of the West to the roots of European culture, which the current prevailing materialistic and hedonistic culture has forgotten. He explains that without the heritage of Athens and Jerusalem, not only freedom and order, the cohesion of democratic society, but also today's unprecedented prosperity is at risk. He dramatically describes 3,000 years of European history that united seemingly incompatible elements: the Jewish-Christian existential faith with Greek philosophy. In the symbiosis of this faith and reason, the most successful civilization grew, which gave the world science and technology, dramatic art, and the concept of personal freedom, human dignity, and civil rights. The author defends the Greek natural law telos, which derives from the ultimate purpose of human nature that a person should cultivate virtues to fulfill the meaning of their life, that is, towards wisdom and nobility. Without a higher meaning of life, the West will collapse into chaos of irrational conflicts, as we see today, where substantive discussion is replaced by passions, subjectivity, ethnic or minority identity, and so on. Paradoxically, even reason itself depends on faith – faith in a rational, knowable, and objective world, in which it recognizes the Creator.