In the closing acknowledgments of his new book, Lions and Scavengers: The True Story of America, Ben Shapiro declares, “Some books are suffused with a cold objectivity. Others are written at white heat. This book was written passionately, because we live in shockingly turbulent times, and because the truth has never been more urgently necessary.”
He is stating, in other words, that his book is a polemic. Some polemics are tendentious, slapdash, indifferently sourced rants. Others are essential—the rhetorical equivalents of a ship’s lookout sounding the alarm at the sudden appearance of an enormous iceberg. Shapiro’s book fits into the latter category, although the peril that faces our civilization is not an iceberg but a swarm of pirates.
Does this sound a bit melodramatic? So be it. The pirates, or “Scavengers,” in Shapiro’s terminology, are those individuals and institutions in Western cultures, increasingly ascendant, who valorize terrorism and political violence, worship at the altar of Marx, favor the takers rather than the makers, and believe that wealth and success are, by definition, evidence of evil-doing.
As many have noted, the dominant notion in modern intellectual discourse, incubated in our universities and cultural institutions, is that the powerful are automatically evil and the powerless are inherently good. It’s an incredibly simple, and simplistic, notion, despite all the post hoc intellectual appurtenances attached to it by radical thinkers ranging from Edward Said and Frantz Fanon to modern-day leftist fashionistas such as Noam Chomsky and Judith Butler.
The effectiveness and pervasiveness of this worldview is illustrated every day in our news media, where the sins of the powerful are quite rightly excoriated while the sins of the supposedly powerless are either excused away or, more often, utterly ignored.
The very simplicity of the message “Western civilization bad” is the reason for its success and uncritical acceptance on our college campuses and, increasingly, among Western leaders. It’s a message that appeals to primal human emotions such as envy and guilt (though wealthy radicals believe they can easily expiate their guilt by declaring a “land acknowledgment” and bellowing “Free Palestine!”) and takes advantage of these leaders’ wish to be, or at least to appear, decent, fair-minded, and “empathetic.”
Shapiro, editor emeritus of The Daily Wire and host of the podcast The Ben Shapiro Show, has set out to flip the script on the radicals. Too often, defenders of capitalism and Western freedoms have gotten bogged down in patient explanations and defenses (not that these aren’t necessary) rather than creating a simple and comprehensible framework for understanding why postcolonial Western civilization, despite its manifest shortcomings, is superior to its alternatives. This is doubly true for the defenders of Israel, who find themselves constantly engaged in running skirmishes and dead-end debates with naive or bad-faith actors about non-existent “apartheid” and “settler colonialism” instead of engaging in a full-throated and confident defense of the only free democracy in the region.
Shapiro’s effervescent intelligence, adherence to traditional values, and his boyish, earnest, debate team persona combine to make him seem both deeply sincere and utterly uncool. The latter, I suspect, is something Shapiro doesn’t care about, and that is decidedly to his credit. He is a moderate thinker who writes with immoderate passion.
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Lions and Scavengers is divided into eight chapters, each one devoted to a specific aspect of the ongoing war between the “Lions,” who create and protect, and seek answers instead of excuses, and the “Scavengers,” who “leech off the true productivity of the Lions” and “would rather everyone be equal in misery than that everyone be unequal in prosperity.”
The Scavengers, Shapiro writes, “are creatures of envy. They are creatures of ressentiment. They are creatures of destruction.” In a chapter set in England—Ground Zero of Western civilization’s gradual devolution—Shapiro writes, “We see them. We see the rivers of humanity, their fists raised, their flags of third-world countries and terror groups held aloft, the hatred in their eyes, climbing our monuments and defacing them, ripping down our flags and replacing them with their own. We hear them chant for our eradication, their screaming voices raised in ecstatic frenzy, the stamping of their feet as they march in unison against us. We feel their venom, their senseless and ceaseless animosity, their blame, their shame, their rage. They are all around us.”
The Lions, however, are persons of faith, family, and hard work, the builders of the very structures that the Scavengers are simultaneously parasitizing, vandalizing, and pulling down. That destruction is accelerating, and the Lions are losing faith in their mission under a constant assault of criticism, mockery, and social media subversion. Most of all, they are being weakened by the manner in which the left uses the lions’ own moral scruples and rules of law against them.
The moral jujitsu of the left is exemplified by the current outrage about supposed Israeli war crimes. “The Scavenger has one tool, and one tool only: the decency of his enemy,” writes Shapiro. He goes on:
Relying on the Lions to abide by a more humane war code, the Scavengers exploit that same code: If the Lion worries about killing too many civilians, the Scavenger cloaks himself as a civilian while engaging in military activity; if the Lion is concerned about collateral damage, the Scavenger seeks to maximize civilian casualties so as to magnify that concern; if the Lion seeks to pacify the local population via positive incentives, the Scavenger seeks to maximize the suffering of that local population to magnify threat. The Lion is forced to play defense rather than to attack, bound by his adherence to a code the Scavenger denies but insists that the Lion apply, no matter the circumstances.
Though Shapiro’s message is deliberately simple, this is not a simplistic book. While Shapiro’s own words are impassioned, his arguments are buttressed by copious quotations from a virtual Hall of Fame of conservative thinkers such as Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, and G.K. Chesterton, among many others. It is also exhaustively footnoted.
A true moderate, Shapiro doesn’t hesitate to slam the repellent conspiracists of the right such as Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones. In a chapter on sexual mores, Shapiro notes that “a reactionary ‘manosphere’ Conspiracy Theory has emerged on the Right to match the transgressive Lechery of the Left … [that is] trollish dumbassery.” Regarding the MAGA movement and Trumpism, Shapiro proceeds with some degree of caution, if not delicacy. He defends Trump’s record on foreign policy, but, for the most part, the current administration is avoided. The book is more civilizational than it is political, after all.
I must admit to a personal admiration for Shapiro and this book, for three interlocking reasons. First, I am a refugee from Russia, which, in both its Soviet and post-Soviet incarnations, is the ultimate scavenger society. Second, I am able to witness the creeping acceptance of scavenger parasitism in my daily life in the leftist bastion of Oakland, California. Within 15 minutes of first arriving at my apartment here, my car windows were smashed, and every item of any value was stolen. The police, needless to say, barely mustered the energy to shrug.
The third reason is the most important. As a student of ancient history at Berkeley, I have learned that great civilizations can be destroyed by a single, simple idea that is seductive, satisfying, and disastrously in error. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” ended up enslaving half of the world. Yet this unworkable notion is, to this day, being revived by the likes of Zohran Mamdani and his army of TikTok acolytes.
That Marxist cliché, as well as one or two other pernicious nostrums such as “be nice to your enemies, and they will be nice back” and “the poor and the powerless are entitled to be violent,” is really all that’s driving the radical mobs marching through the metropolises of the West. Everything else is either cosplay, a lie, or an excuse.
This is not to say that the radical left does not have a great many cogent critiques of capitalist societies. Beginning with Marx onward, the intellectuals of the left have provided incisive and well-merited criticism of certain Western values and practices. It’s just that they rarely offer workable alternatives. (What economic system actually works better than capitalism? What would a “free” Palestine actually look like?) There is, indeed, little concern on the left about effective alternatives. The predominant message is “We’ll tear everything down first and worry about what replaces it later.”
So Ben Shapiro need make no apology for opposing simple errors in simple terms. We need many more Ben Shapiro’s to speak out with moral clarity. Right now, Shapiro and a few others are our modern-day Cassandras. It’s a role that has been thrust upon them by the silence or moral equivocations of academics, pundits, and politicians.
Aldous Huxley once said, “The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.” Lions and Scavengers is sometimes highly emotional, exceedingly plain-spoken, and determinedly old-fashioned—even “obvious.” And it is just what our critically endangered civilization needs.
Photo: Karl Ammann/Getty Images
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