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This is Undaunted Life, a man's podcast.
0:43
I'm your host Kyle Thompson.
0:44
Let's get into it.
0:45
All right, guys, today we are going to be doing a review of the already best-selling book,
0:50
The Right-Sided History from Ben Shapiro.
0:52
So this is the first book that Ben Shapiro has released since he's kind of become Ben Shapiro.
0:57
Right, I mean, he's this guy that has just absolutely exploded on the political and social
1:01
scene in the last several years.
1:03
He's written a lot of books before, but this is the first book that he has released since
1:07
he's been a very, very popular TV show host, or excuse me, not TV show host, but podcast
1:12
host, online radio show host, he now has a national radio show.
1:17
And so the cool thing about this is Ben Shapiro and his team at The Daily Wire actually
1:22
sent us an advance copy of this book.
1:25
The book just came out Tuesday.
1:26
So if you're listening to this on time, it came out on Tuesday.
1:29
So it is in every story that you could possibly imagine right now and online.
1:33
But we were just tickled to death that he sent us an advance copy because he wanted us to
1:37
be able to share this with the audience, with the audience of this podcast.
1:40
He wanted me to be able to go through some of these things with you all.
1:43
And so today, this episode won't be an exhaustive review of the book.
1:48
I mean, in order to do that, I'd literally have to walk you through the entire narrative,
1:53
which would take steam out of you actually reading it, right?
1:56
Because I want you guys to actually read it.
1:58
But my goal for you guys for a day is to make this book sound appealing enough for you to
2:02
go out and read this and really read it as soon as possible.
2:05
And so I'm going to be going through chapter by chapter looking at some of the macro elements
2:09
that we're going to see throughout these different chapters.
2:11
And then hopefully by the end, you've got enough of a taste for it that you want to
2:14
keep going.
2:15
And I figured a good place to start would be to do the description.
2:18
So if you go to Amazon or Goodreads or Barnes and Noble, this is a description of the books.
2:22
I think it basically gives you a good primer for what you're going to expect.
2:25
So here we go.
2:26
In 2016, Ben Shapiro spoke at UC Berkeley.
2:30
Hundreds of police officers were required from 10 UC campuses across the state to protect
2:34
his speech, which was ironically about the necessity for free speech and rational debate.
2:40
He came to argue that Western civilization is in the midst of a crisis of purpose and
2:44
ideas.
2:45
The freedoms are built upon the twin notions that every human being is made in God's image
2:48
and that human beings were created with reasonable reason capable of exploring God's world.
2:55
We can thank these values for the birth of science, the dream of progress, human rights,
2:59
prosperity, peace, and artistic beauty.
3:01
Jerusalem and Athens built America, ended slavery, defeated the Nazis, and the communists, lived
3:06
in billions from poverty and gave billions spiritual purpose.
3:10
Jerusalem and Athens were the foundations of the Magna Carta and the Treaty of Westphalia.
3:14
They were the foundations of the Declaration of Independence, Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation
3:18
Proclamation, and Martin Luther King Jr's letter from Birmingham jail.
3:22
Civilizations that rejected Jerusalem and Athens have collapsed into dust.
3:26
The USSR rejected Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law, substituting a new utopian
3:31
vision of "social justice" and they starved and slaughtered tens of millions of human beings.
3:37
The Nazis rejected Judeo-Christian values in Greek natural law and they shoved children
3:40
into gas chambers.
3:42
Venezuela rejected Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law, and citizens of their
3:46
oil rich nation have been reduced to eating dogs.
3:49
We are in the process of abandoning Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law, favoring instead
3:53
moral subjectivism and the rule of passion, and we are watching our civilization collapse
3:58
into age-old tribalism, individualistic hedonism, and moral subjectivism.
4:02
We believe we can reject Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law and satisfy ourselves
4:07
with intersectionality or scientific materialism or progressive politics or authoritarian governance
4:12
or nationalistic solidarity.
4:14
We can't.
4:15
The West is special, and in the right side of history Ben Shapiro bravely explains that
4:19
it's because too many of us have lost sight of the moral purpose that drives us each to
4:23
be better or the sacred duty to work together for the greater good or both.
4:27
A stark warning and a call to spiritual arms.
4:30
This book may be the first step in getting our civilization back on track.
4:34
So there you have it, that's kind of the basic overview and guys really overall, my initial
4:38
reaction to this book, which I actually just finished right before I started recording
4:42
this podcast, is it's a really heady book, but it is very easy to follow.
4:48
I mean, guys, this might be the densest 200 page book I've ever seen or certainly ever
4:53
read.
4:54
I mean, I remember whenever I got this in the mail, not only did I shriek like a little
4:57
girl because of how excited I was, but I just thought, oh man, I thought those book was
5:00
going to be quite a bit longer.
5:01
I thought it was going to be, you know, three, four hundred pages long and it's really just
5:04
barely above 200 pages and it didn't take me.
5:08
But you know, the first 10, 15 minutes of reading to realize, oh boy, if this was three
5:12
or four hundred pages, I don't know that if I could have got through it in a way that
5:15
was beneficial to where I can bring it to you guys in time.
5:18
And so the thing that's really cool about this book is most of the time whenever you're
5:22
reading a book, there are sections of the book that you really enjoy, but you're not
5:25
really captured by the beginning, right?
5:28
But this is perhaps the best intro to a book that I've ever seen.
5:32
I mean, and that's something weird for me to even think about because I mean, I just don't
5:36
even remember reading a book in the last several years where I was like, oh man, it had me
5:40
hooked by like the first couple of sentences, but this is the intro to the book.
5:44
This book is about two mysteries.
5:46
The first mystery, why are things so good?
5:49
The second mystery, why are we blowing it?
5:53
And I just thought like, wow, I mean, I've been listening to Ben Shapiro for a while.
5:56
I've been following the podcast, I've been following a lot of different things and he's
5:58
brought up these elements before, but I just thought it was incredibly interesting to see
6:03
him basically start out that way.
6:05
And I'm going to go ahead and read at different points during this podcast guys are consistently
6:09
through the podcast.
6:10
I'm going to be reading chunks of the book to you guys.
6:14
And so I'll do my best to read out loud and not screw up, but at the same time, I think
6:18
it's going to help give you a narrative without basically being exhaustive and how we're covering
6:22
it.
6:23
And in light of the basically first two mysteries that he talked about, I'm going to read this
6:26
quote from the introduction here.
6:29
We are killing ourselves at the highest rate in decades.
6:31
Rates of depression have skyrocketed.
6:33
Drug overdoses are now responsible for more deaths than car crashes.
6:37
Marriage rates have declined and as have childbearing rates.
6:40
We're spending more money on luxuries and enjoying everything less.
6:44
Conspiracies have replaced reason and subjective perceptions have replaced objective observation.
6:49
Most have been buried to make way for feelings, a society of essential oils and self esteem
6:54
has replaced a society of logic.
6:57
And so guys, there's, there's a lot of information in this book that's going to kind of come
7:00
down to some of the things that I even just mentioned right there.
7:02
But there's a couple of central tenets of this book that I want to make sure that I go through.
7:08
And again, we're going to go through kind of every chapter.
7:10
But again, I do want to make sure that we hit some of the big central tenets of this book.
7:15
And so the first central tenant of this book is that there are four elements that we need
7:19
in order to generate the moral purpose that provides the foundation for happiness, okay?
7:25
So a lot of you guys have read or seen things on happiness and things like that.
7:28
But you know, there's basically the very first chapter of this book after the introduction
7:32
is called the pursuit of happiness.
7:34
And we start digging into what exactly that means.
7:35
I'm going to be reading from page nine here.
7:38
We need in my estimate four elements, individual moral purpose, individual capacity to pursue
7:44
that purpose, communal moral purpose, and communal capacity to pursue that purpose.
7:50
These four elements are crucial.
7:52
The only foundation for a successful civilization lies in a careful balance of these four elements.
7:58
And even in addition to that, there was another section there late in the first chapter, where
8:02
he's basically talking about the ingredients of happiness.
8:05
So I'll be reading from from pages 17 and 18 and guys, this is from the actual physical
8:09
book.
8:10
I know I always talk about I do a lot of e-reading and things like that.
8:13
But for this one, obviously they sent me a physical copy.
8:15
So if you like hear pages, don't worry about it.
8:18
There's nobody in here with me.
8:19
I'm just going to be reading this to you.
8:20
So here we go page 17, talking about the pursuit of happiness.
8:23
That's from chapter one.
8:25
Happiness then comprises four elements, individual moral purpose, individual capacity, collective
8:29
moral purpose, and collective capacity.
8:31
If we lack one of these elements, the pursuit of happiness becomes impossible.
8:35
If that pursuit is foreclosed, society crumbles.
8:38
Our society was built on recognition of these four elements, the fusion of Athens and Jerusalem
8:42
tempered by the wit and wisdom of our founding fathers led to the creation of civilization
8:46
of unparalleled freedom, replete with virtuous men and women striving to better themselves
8:51
and the society around them.
8:53
But we are losing that civilization.
8:55
We are losing that civilization because we have spent generations undermining the two
8:58
deepest sources of our own happiness, the sources that lie behind individual moral purpose,
9:03
communal moral purpose, individual capacity, and communal capacity.
9:07
These two sources, divine meaning and reason.
9:09
There can be no individual or communal moral purpose without a foundation of divine meaning.
9:14
There can be no individual capacity or communal capacity without a constant abiding belief
9:18
in the nature of our reason.
9:20
The history of the West is built on the interplay between these two pillars, divine meaning
9:24
and reason.
9:25
We receive our notions of divine meaning from a three millennia old lineage stretching back
9:28
to the ancient Jews.
9:30
We receive our notions of reason from the 2500 year old lineage stretching back to the ancient
9:34
Greeks.
9:35
Rejecting those lineages and seeking to graft ourselves to rootless philosophical movements
9:40
of the moment, cutting ourselves off from our own roots.
9:43
We have damned ourselves to an existential wandering.
9:46
We must make our way back towards our roots.
9:48
Those roots took hold at Sinai.
9:50
And this is where we get into the second central tenant of this book.
9:53
And that is that Western society is the result of Jerusalem and Athens.
9:57
You hear him talk about Jerusalem and Athens throughout this entire podcast or sorry throughout
10:02
this entire book, but I'm going to go back to a quote from the introduction, which basically
10:05
sets up this idea.
10:06
So here we go.
10:08
We believe freedom is built upon the twin notions that God created every human in his
10:11
image and that human beings are capable of investigating and exploring God's world.
10:16
Those notions were born in Jerusalem and Athens respectively, those twin notions, those diamonds
10:20
of spiritual genius built our civilization and built us as individuals.
10:24
If you believe that life is more than materialistic pleasures and pain avoidance, you are a product
10:28
of Jerusalem and Athens.
10:29
If you believe that the government has no right to intrude upon the exercise of your individual
10:33
will and that you are bound by moral duty to pursue virtue, you are a product of Jerusalem
10:37
and Athens.
10:38
If you believe that human beings are capable of bettering our world through use of our reason
10:42
and are bound by higher purpose to do so, you are the product of Jerusalem and Athens.
10:47
Jerusalem and Athens built science, the twin ideals of Judeo-Christian values and Greek
10:51
natural law reasoning built human rights.
10:54
They built prosperity, peace and artistic beauty.
10:56
Jerusalem and Athens built America, ended slavery, defeated the Nazis and the Communists,
11:01
lifted billions from poverty and gave billions of spiritual purpose.
11:04
Jerusalem and Athens were the foundations of the Magna Carta and the Treaty of West Folia,
11:08
and they were the foundations of the Declaration of Independence, Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation
11:12
Proclamation and Martin Luther King's letter from Birmingham jail.
11:15
Civilizations that rejected Jerusalem and Athens and the tension between them have collapsed
11:19
into dust.
11:20
The USSR rejected Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law, substituting the values
11:24
of the collective and the new utopian vision of social justice.
11:28
And they starved and slaughtered tens of millions of human beings.
11:30
The Nazis rejected Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law and they shoved children
11:34
into gas chambers.
11:35
Venezuela rejected Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law and the citizens of their
11:38
oral rich nation have been reduced to eating dogs.
11:41
So again, you'll remember a lot of that because we read that in the introduction, but that
11:45
really does help set up this section, which is from chapter two.
11:49
So chapter one was basically just setting up the idea that we were going to be going into
11:53
in this book.
11:54
And that was after the introduction, but chapter two is called from the mountaintop.
11:57
And so this is where we start getting into Jerusalem and it basically gives the argument
12:01
for Jerusalem as an essential element that undergirds the West.
12:05
And so it really just starts in chapter two on page 20 on the importance of revelation
12:12
in terms of how we got to where we are right now.
12:14
So I'm going to read you a quote from page 20 and 21.
12:18
The revelation at Sinai is approximately 1313 BCE, according to traditional biblical
12:22
belief, changed the world by infusing it with meaning for those who knew the story.
12:27
In particular, Judaism, as later we'll see Christianity granted individual purpose and
12:31
communal purpose.
12:32
It did so through four faith based claims that were utterly different from the pagan
12:36
religions before it.
12:37
First, Judaism claimed that God was unified that a master plan stood behind everything.
12:43
Second, Judaism stated that human beings were held to particular behavioral standards for
12:47
moral, not utilitarian reasons.
12:50
We were ordered to be moral at the behest of a highest power, even if God's rule could
12:54
benefit us in this life.
12:56
Third, Judaism claimed that the history progressed that revelation was the beginning, but it
13:01
was not the end and that man had a responsibility to pursue God and bring about the redemption
13:05
of mankind and that God could use a particular example, a chosen people to act as a light
13:10
onto the nations.
13:12
Finally, Judaism claimed that God had endowed man with choice that men were responsible
13:16
for their choices and that our choices mattered.
13:19
And from that point in chapter two, we start to get towards the concept of oughtness, right?
13:23
We hear a lot of talk about, you know, different types of philosophies in terms of some that
13:28
require some sort of oughtness and others do not.
13:30
So we're going to start reading from page 27 here.
13:33
Why then does the Bible focus so much on seemingly pagan sacrifices?
13:37
Because biblical sacrifices are designed merely to appease a higher power.
13:40
They're designed to change us to teach us something.
13:43
Mamadides argues that sacrifices were originally designed to woo polytheists towards monotheism
13:48
by repurposing an ingrained cultural ritual and directing it away from sheer appeasement
13:53
and towards self-betterment.
13:54
According to mamadides, sacrifices are intended to remind us that we ought to pay for ourselves
13:59
and that only the mercy of God allows us to escape that accountability.
14:03
The Talmud openly acknowledges that we could use reason to learn certain character traits.
14:08
Judaism suggests that we can, in fact, determine certain moral injunctions.
14:11
Even ignoramuses, Judaism believes, can determine that there is a God and that murder is wrong,
14:16
for example.
14:17
But such learning is in complete Judaism holds.
14:20
Reason Kim teach us how not to be bad, how not to harm others, for example.
14:24
The seven know-hide laws that govern humanity before revelation are all designed to minimize
14:28
human cruelty.
14:29
Bands on murder, theft, idolatry, sexual immorality, animal cruelty, cursing God, and
14:34
the positive commandments to set up courts of law in order to punish crimes.
14:38
And those know-hide laws are incumbent on everyone, regardless of whether they even
14:42
know about the Bible, specifically because they're so perfectly obvious.
14:46
But Revelation teaches us how to be good.
14:49
It teaches us wish values we ought to hold dear, which characteristics we ought to cultivate.
14:54
Revelation is necessary to raise us beyond the realm of the mediocre.
14:58
And so that kind of gets us into the concept of oughtness.
15:01
And really as we kind of wrap up this second chapter from the mountaintop, we look at how
15:05
Revelation is only part of the equation.
15:08
So obviously there's a lot of different things that go into explaining the overall philosophy
15:13
of this book, but this is a very, very important one here as we're wrapping up our conversational
15:17
revelation.
15:18
And so here we go to the last few paragraphs of chapter two.
15:22
In short, the Bible presents a fulsome view of human happiness, but one that requires
15:26
further elucidation.
15:27
The Bible tells us what God expects of us and tells us that we have the duty to fulfill
15:31
those expectations.
15:32
It tells us that we are special and that we are loved by an infinitely good, caring,
15:36
and powerful being.
15:37
It tells us that we have the duty to reach out to him.
15:40
The Bible makes God accessible, it brings God down to earth, in doing so it offers man
15:44
the opportunity to raise himself, but the biblical tradition does not stress the ability
15:47
of people to reason a priori.
15:50
Revelation stands above reason and revelation alone is not enough.
15:54
The soul with which God endowed man seeks the divine through reason, the uniquely human
15:58
quality that lifts human beings above animals and places us at the foot of God's throne.
16:02
To seek a higher moral purpose, human beings would have to cultivate their reason.
16:06
For that, they turned to Athens and so that gets us into chapter three of this book and
16:11
that's when we're really going to get into Athens and chapter three is called From the
16:13
Dust.
16:14
And this really gives us the argument for Athens as an essential element, just like Jerusalem,
16:19
that kind of undergirds the West.
16:20
And so the first section I want to read here, starting on page 41, is the power of Western
16:24
civilization.
16:25
So back to the book.
16:27
This is a dramatic deliberate misreading of history of Western civilization.
16:31
The greatest force for good in world history.
16:33
The statement is not meant to ignore the myriad evils in which Western civilization has participated,
16:38
but Western civilization has freed more people than any other by a long shot.
16:41
It has reduced poverty, conquered disease, and minimized war.
16:45
Western civilization is responsible for the economic betterment of the global population
16:48
and for the rise in human rights and democracy and that civilization has deep roots.
16:53
Why should Americans bother to learn about ancient Greeks?
16:56
Because the classical roots of Western civilization and Athens still have much to teach us.
17:00
Athens teaches us that we are capable of doing as human beings.
17:04
Athens teaches us we have the ability to use our reason to reach beyond ourselves.
17:08
Athens teaches us not only how liberty can flourish, but why it should.
17:12
I've argued that without Jerusalem, there could be no West.
17:15
Without Athens, Athens, the same holds true.
17:18
Religious faith is empowering because it tells human beings that they are loved and
17:21
that they have the capacity to choose between good and evil.
17:24
But religious faith also requires us to acknowledge the inherent limits on human capacity.
17:28
It requires us to say that there are things we will never understand, that we are earthly
17:32
creatures bounded by dust.
17:34
But if the Project of Sinai was about elevating man above the animals by associating him with
17:38
a godly mission and granting him a godly soul, the Project of Athens was about the elevating
17:44
the man using man's own faculties.
17:46
Religion doesn't discount the capacity of mankind, of course, but that capacity is always
17:50
secondary to God's will.
17:52
Athens elevates man's capacity and makes it primary.
17:56
And so that really gives us the overall power that gives us that argument for the power
18:00
of Western civilization.
18:02
But we have to look at what is the foundations of Greek principles, because basically what
18:07
Ben Shapiro is going to be talking about here is that there are three foundations for Greek
18:11
principles that kind of undergird what we're talking about here with Athens.
18:14
So back to the book on the same page, page 42, utilizing human reason to escape the cave
18:18
and bringing knowledge of the light.
18:20
That was the task of ancient Athens, a task uniting Plato for 28 to 348 BCE in Aristotle
18:26
384 to 322 BCE.
18:29
The ancient Greeks gave us three foundational principles.
18:32
First, that we could discover our purpose in life from looking at the nature of the world.
18:37
Second, that in order to learn about the nature of the world, we had to study the world around
18:41
us by utilizing our reason.
18:42
And finally, that reason could help us construct the best collective systems for cultivating
18:47
that reason.
18:48
In short, the Greeks gave us natural law, science, the basis of secularly constructed
18:52
government.
18:53
Jerusalem brought the heavens down to earth.
18:55
Athens' elevation of reason would launch mankind towards the stars, okay?
19:00
And so that gets us a little bit deeper into why Athens is so important, but then there's
19:04
also the importance of telos, okay?
19:06
And so that may be a new word for a lot of you guys, but basically that's a Greek word
19:09
for ultimate objective or aim.
19:11
And so a lot of guys don't really understand where this this comes from or how this really
19:16
works in.
19:17
But Ben Shapiro does a fantastic job of basically bringing Greek telos into a lot of the different
19:21
sections of this book, but this first part here in chapter two, or it's a quote from
19:25
chapter three from the dust that gives us an idea of where that comes from and why it's
19:30
important.
19:31
So I'm going to go to page 45 here of chapter three, whereas modern systems and morality
19:35
focus far more on whether given actions are good or evil.
19:38
Ancient ethical systems worried less about the rules for action and more about making
19:42
men and women virtuous people.
19:44
People capable of fulfilling their telos as human beings and utilizing reason and character
19:49
to carry out complex moral equations.
19:52
Okay, so again, there's a lot to unpack here and it's just not really my job to go in here
19:57
and unpack all of this because there's just so much content, even as I'm, as I'm, you
20:01
know, flipping through right now, there's just an unbelievable amount of content, but
20:05
we're going to move on from chapter three and we're going to go to chapter four where
20:07
it starts to kind of meld together Jerusalem and Athens, like how did these things come
20:12
together?
20:13
And as you might expect, there's a big influence here from Christianity.
20:17
And so I'm going to do one quote from this section here, but it basically gives us an
20:20
idea of how Christianity really brought Jerusalem and Athens together.
20:24
And this is from page 57.
20:25
So here we go.
20:26
The birth of Christianity represented the first serious attempt to merge Jewish thought
20:30
with Greek thought.
20:31
The Christian admixture was far more Jewish than Greek in its vision of God and of man's
20:35
question the world, but it was also far more Greek than Jewish in its universality.
20:40
Okay.
20:41
And so really the rest of this chapter really digs even farther into that entire concept
20:45
right there.
20:46
For me to even give it lip service right now would be really inappropriate.
20:51
But chapter four is an incredible melding of these two ideas.
20:55
And so again, that's, that's the reason why you got to buy the book so that you can experience
20:58
that for yourself.
20:59
So now we're going to get into chapter five and that's called endowed by their creators.
21:02
And so this is where we're starting to see the first huge revelations of certain elements
21:08
that are additionally foundational.
21:10
And so I'm going to go ahead and do a quote from page 74 of chapter five endowed by their
21:14
creators.
21:15
By the end of the 13th century, Western civilization was completely dominated by Catholicism.
21:19
That dominion stretched across Europe, giving new freedom to thinkers like Aquinas.
21:23
But it also masked serious religious tensions among various orders, as well as even deeper
21:27
tensions with secular rulers who felt threatened by the irrigation of power to the church.
21:32
Furthermore, the reign of Catholicism mass serious conflicts within the church itself.
21:36
All these conflicts frequently broke out into open conflict.
21:40
In 1303, for example, Pope Boniface the eighth found himself arrested by forces in the pay
21:44
of Francis King Philip the fourth, which resulted in the temporary exile of the papacy from
21:50
Rome itself.
21:51
From this era of challenges, two strong new ideas emerged.
21:54
First, human beings are capable of exploring the world and bettering their material condition
21:58
in it.
21:59
Second, each human being is free and endowed with natural rights.
22:03
Skepticism of centralized political power grew from centuries of political and religious
22:07
conflict.
22:08
Optimism in the power of the science grew in new discoveries made in light of the liberated
22:12
individual mind.
22:13
The Renaissance and the Enlightenment completed the foundations of the West that built our
22:17
world.
22:18
And this really goes right into the power of science.
22:22
And so you might be wondering how the science really work into all this, but there's really
22:26
huge sections of this book that are dedicated to science and how it's important for us
22:30
to understand where that comes from.
22:31
So I'm going to go ahead and continue reading here on page 74 in chapter five.
22:36
The explosion of science in the West is perhaps the West's best known, most celebrated legacy.
22:40
The story of technological development has never changed.
22:44
Human beings want to live more comfortably in the world, but the story of science changed
22:47
radically beginning with Thomas Aquinas and Franciscan friar William of Occam and their
22:52
successors.
22:53
Human beings sought the cosmos through science and used that newfound knowledge to develop
22:57
technologies that would later be thought to obviate the need for God himself.
23:02
The secularist Miss holds that religion held back science for millennia.
23:06
The reverse is true without Judeo Christian foundations, science simply would not exist
23:11
as it does in the West.
23:12
We're going to skip to a section here on page 76.
23:15
Galileo was no exception.
23:16
He was a representative of the rule religious men saw a duty to examine the universe and
23:21
to do so with the best possible methodology.
23:25
This philosophy permeated the wisdom of the enlightenment's greatest scientist Johannes
23:29
Kepler 19 or 1571 through 1630, the discoverer, the laws of planetary motion explained the
23:36
chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order
23:40
and harmony which has been imposed on it by God in which he revealed to us in the language
23:44
of mathematics.
23:46
Kepler routinely described his own physics as part and parcel of Aristotelian metaphysics
23:50
and explained that the laws of nature are within the grasp of the human mind.
23:54
God wanted us to recognize them by creating us after his own image that we could share
23:58
in his thoughts.
23:59
Kepler's philosophy was also that of Isaac Newton 1642-1726.
24:05
According to God is atheism in profession and idolatry in practice, atheism is so senseless
24:09
and odious to mankind that it never had many professors.
24:14
And so obviously when you get into that section, you're looking more at how important science
24:17
has been to the overall idea and the major macro ideas that we're seeing within our society.
24:24
But that really sends us into another section that is going to give us a better idea of
24:29
where science is having its biggest impact here.
24:32
So we're going to go back to the book page 78.
24:34
Unlike modern social scientists, however, Bacon took his cue, they're talking about Francis
24:38
Bacon here, took his cue for governance and ethics from the Judeo-Christian tradition.
24:42
While Bacon upheld the importance of the scientific method and a belief in a pure value of innovation
24:46
to better the material lives of human beings, Bacon was no atheist.
24:50
He derided the notion of a godless universe in harsh terms, suggesting that, while a little
24:54
philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, depth in philosophy bringeth men's mind about
25:00
to religion.
25:01
Bacon wrote this prayer in Novum, Argonum.
25:04
Let none be alarmed at the objection of the arts and sciences become depraved to malevolent
25:08
or luxurious purposes and the like, and for the same can be said of every worldly good.
25:13
Talent, courage, strength, beauty, riches, light itself, and the rest.
25:17
Only let mankind regain their rights over nature, assigned to them by the gift of God
25:20
and obtain that power whose exercise will be governed by right reason and true religion.
25:25
This last statement is the attempt to read ancient thought and Christianity back into
25:28
science over his own objections.
25:31
Bacon's confidence and man's mind to better the world, in accordance of course with the
25:34
right reason and true religion, saw further development from René Descartes, 1596-1650,
25:40
who also discarded speculations on behalf of useful knowledge.
25:44
He saw meaning not in theology, but in science, full knowledge of which would surely carry
25:49
mankind forward toward the perfect moral science.
25:52
As with Bacon, the good of man lay not in the search for God or the pursuit of a virtuous
25:56
telos, but in the quest for a better material state of man, morality would surely follow
26:01
in the wake of man's technological progress and increase scientific knowledge.
26:05
Such knowledge Descartes believed could not be pursued without radical skepticism of received
26:10
wisdom.
26:11
I ought to reject as absolutely false all opinions in regard to which I could suppose
26:15
the least ground for doubt.
26:17
In order to ascertain whether after that there remained ought in my belief that was wholly
26:22
indubitable.
26:24
This led Descartes to doubt all of the senses except his knowledge of his own thinking.
26:28
Thus Descartes stated, "Cogito Ergum Sum, I think, therefore I am."
26:32
From this basis he reintroduced a good God who would not create senses that lie to us.
26:37
Both Bacon and Descartes, while discarding the teleology of the agents, maintained faith
26:42
in the Bible and in God.
26:44
But they also laid the groundwork for the rise of deism, and in time for the fall of
26:47
religion itself.
26:48
By cutting final causes from science, by separating God from the natural world, the modern scientific
26:53
project would eventually remove religion and purpose from the domain of reason.
26:57
A project that both Bacon and Descartes would have abhorred.
27:00
And then this is where we start getting into some really, really important territory, which
27:04
is where we get the concept of the individual.
27:07
So this is kind of the emergence of that concept.
27:09
So back to the book.
27:11
Hobbes, however, had opened a door that he could not close again.
27:15
If human beings had individual rights, did those rights end merely with survival?
27:19
Or in a state of nature did human beings enjoy inalienable rights beyond merely breathing
27:23
and eating and not being murdered?
27:25
The philosopher who asked a question was John Locke, 1632-1704.
27:31
Following in Hobbes' footsteps, Locke believed that sovereignty resided in the individual.
27:35
Locke, a deeply religious Christian, believed in both natural law discoverable by reason
27:39
and a Hobbesian natural right inherent in human existence.
27:43
Natural law, like the ancient supposed, could be discovered in nature, a law dictating through
27:47
right reason, both correct behavior and the purpose for life.
27:51
Locke based his beliefs in human reason, sovereignty, inequality not merely in the ancient philosophy,
27:55
but in the book of Genesis, and God's suggestion that man is made in his image.
27:59
Natural rights, according to Locke, were those rights at spraying from exercise of natural
28:03
law.
28:04
A right to property, since we had a corresponding duty not to steal, a right to life, since we
28:08
had a duty not to kill, a right to liberty, since we had a duty not to oppress, those
28:13
rights carried them with them duties as well.
28:15
The right to property carried with it, the duty to cultivate that property, for example,
28:19
since God had granted the earth to all people in common, and that our self ownership to
28:23
the exclusion of others allowed us to mix our labor with land, and thereby transforming
28:27
it.
28:28
And so this is where we first start getting into the concept of the individual, but then
28:31
how that individual is basically applied to America gets into some very, very important
28:36
territory, because we start getting really into the minutia of how the concept of the
28:42
individual affected us as Americans.
28:44
So here we go back to the book, most important for American history, Locke openly recognized
28:48
a right to rebel against the government that violated the rights of its citizens.
28:53
Any government doing so would allow citizens to revert to a state of nature in which the
28:57
citizens could set up a new government, whenever the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy
29:01
the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put
29:05
themselves into the state of war with the people who are there upon absolve from any
29:09
farther obedience and are left to the common refuge, which God hath provided for all men
29:14
against force and violence.
29:16
Power devolves to the people who have the right to resume their original liberty.
29:20
Locke's philosophy would not merely influence the founding fathers of the United States,
29:23
as we will see, it would shape the foundations of free market enterprise.
29:27
The vision of Adam Smith, 1723 to 1790 of natural liberty also precisely mirrors Locke's vision
29:33
of natural right.
29:35
The obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord.
29:39
Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of injustice, is left perfectly free
29:43
to pursue his own interests his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into
29:47
competition with those of any other man or order of men.
29:51
Smith posited that the government had but three fundamental duties, preservation of life,
29:56
preservation of liberty through administration of justice, and funding for public goods.
30:00
His viewpoint would be deeply influential in the formation of the greatest economy in
30:04
the history of mankind.
30:06
And this really goes right into a foundational discussion of the American triumph in this
30:12
area.
30:13
So we'll just keep on reading here.
30:14
This long philosophical journey would come to fruition in the first country in the history
30:17
to be crafted based on philosophy, the United States of America.
30:21
The founding fathers were devotees of Cicero and Locke of the Bible and Aristotle.
30:25
They'd done their reading and they base their new national philosophy on the lessons garnered
30:29
from that reading.
30:30
Natural law rooted in the reason and enshrined by religion, individual natural rights, balanced
30:35
by corresponding duties, a limited government of checks and balances designed to protect
30:39
those rights in accordance with natural law, and the inculcation of virtue to be pursued
30:44
by individuals and communities, again in accordance with the dictates of natural law.
30:48
The founders weren't heedless narcissists, unconcerned with the dangers of radical individualism.
30:53
They feared a society of religionless individuals, nor were they tyrannical collectivists.
30:58
They feared mob rule and the heavy hand of government cramming subjective definitions
31:02
of virtue down the throats of individuals.
31:05
So as you can imagine, you start hearing a lot about the individual, but you don't really
31:08
have effective individualism if you don't have virtue.
31:11
So back to the book here.
31:14
Rights and duties according to the founders were simply two sides of the same coin.
31:17
While some critics of the founders have claimed that they ignored duties on behalf of rights,
31:21
thereby setting the course for societal disintegration, that's a misreading of the founding philosophy.
31:26
As George Washington stated in his first inaugural address, quote, "The foundation of our national
31:31
policy will be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private morality.
31:35
There exists in the economy and course of nature an indissoluble union between virtue
31:39
and happiness."
31:40
And here we have the culmination of these ideas here.
31:43
The founding ideology was the basis for the greatest experiment in human progress in liberty
31:48
ever devised by the mind of man.
31:50
But then again, it was an idea developed through Judeo-Christian principles and Greek rationality,
31:54
molded and shaped over time by circumstance, purified in the flame of conflict.
31:58
It was the best that men have done and the best that men will do in setting philosophic
32:03
framework for human happiness, skipping along here, bottom of page 91.
32:07
The founding philosophy also glorified the power of individual capacity.
32:10
The founders were fully cognizant that human beings have the capacity for evil as well
32:14
as good, for passion as well as reason, and they had immense faith in the power of reason
32:18
to impel human beings towards proper thinking.
32:21
Jefferson stated in the Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom in Virginia in 1779, quote,
32:26
"The opinions and belief of men depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily
32:30
the evidence proposed to their minds that Almighty God hath created the mind free and
32:35
manifested his supreme will that free it shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible
32:40
of restraint," unquote.
32:41
John Adams identified liberty itself with the power of reason, quote, "It implies thought
32:45
and choice and power and it can elect between objects indifferent in the point of morality
32:50
neither morality, neither morally good nor morally evil," unquote.
32:54
The only thing, according to Adams, that would turn reason toward good was a societal inculcation
33:00
of good and a general pursuit of knowledge itself, quote, "My humble opinion is that
33:04
knowledge upon the whole promotes virtue and happiness," unquote.
33:08
And so there's obviously some huge ideas that come from here, but at the same time whenever
33:12
you have the culmination of these ideas, obviously we've seen there's been a little bit of an
33:16
erosion of these philosophies, right, because those were the philosophies of the Founding
33:21
Fathers, but here we are several hundred years later and we're trying to figure out
33:24
where we got into where we are at this moment.
33:26
And so let's talk about where it began to erode and this is at the end of chapter five
33:30
called in doubt by their creators.
33:32
The philosophy of the founders made material in the creation of the United States and in
33:35
the continuing quest to fulfill their ideals has been the greatest blessing for mankind
33:40
in human history.
33:41
The United States has freed billions of people.
33:43
It has enriched billions of people and has opened minds and hearts.
33:47
But that founding philosophy, the crown jewel of the West has not prevailed.
33:50
It has instead been gradually decaying.
33:53
With that decay, the foundations for human happiness have been eroding.
33:56
We in our day may be watching the collapse, them collapse completely.
34:00
How could such a collapse occur, gradually, slowly, and then all at once.
34:06
So this gets us into chapter six, which is called killing purpose and killing capacity.
34:10
So this will follow up on that idea. So I'm going to read a fairly lengthy section here
34:13
that's going to kind of give you the basis of the idea and it's just the beginning of
34:17
the chapter here.
34:19
Seemingly every year in the United States, a great debate breaks out regarding the separation
34:23
of church and state. The headlines change, but the underlying conflict is not. It may
34:27
be a court case about removing the Ten Commandments monument from a public space or about prayer
34:31
in the public schools or about forcing a religious baker to create a custom cake for a same
34:36
sex wedding.
34:37
The root conflict is always the same.
34:39
Has America built on secular grounds or religious grounds or both? More important, will America
34:44
be made better by curbing religion in the name of secularism or vice versa? Now I have argued
34:49
that the founding philosophy was based on both secular reason and religious morality that
34:52
modernity was built on these twin poles cultivated and perfected through the fires of religious
34:56
warfare and secular argument. We built a civilization that was practical and purposeful, religious
35:02
and rational, virtuous and ambitious. Individual capacity and communal capacity has been brought
35:07
into harmony. Citizens had committed to Judeo-Christian values and individual rights, working to bolster
35:12
one another. Individual purpose and communal purpose have been aligned. Individuals were
35:17
set free to cultivate virtue and communities were built to set the framework for that pursuit
35:23
of happiness, but advocates for the so-called enlightenment offer a different theory. They
35:28
suggest that the philosophy of modern West, the philosophy of individual rights, particularly
35:32
spring from rejection of religion and embrace of reason. The proponents of self-proclaimed
35:37
age of reason flatter themselves and that we live today in accordance with the thought
35:41
of great enlightenment thinkers. Bold new minds who spring forth from the ground wholly formed
35:46
ready to do battle with and triumph over the ancients. In fact, the very term enlightenment
35:50
suggests a pre-enlightenment era in which religion inhibited human development rather
35:55
than fostering it. And by extension suggests that belief in Judeo-Christian values and
35:59
God himself was the best at best and obstruction to modern Western civilization. Furthermore,
36:04
the most ardent believers in the enlightenment derided the Greek search for telos as misguided,
36:08
resting as it does on the assumption of the reality lying between material reality. They
36:13
believe that enlightenment thought could only progress by jettisoning teleology itself
36:17
in substituting materialism. They argue that the enlightenment only became the enlightenment
36:21
by killing God and discarding the idea of an objectively discoverable purpose. The enlightenment
36:27
they say shed the vestigial organs of religion and Greek teleology and took civilization
36:32
to new uncharted heights. Unfortunately, these claims are manifestly false.
36:37
As we've seen, history is necessary. If it weren't, enlightenment could have sprung
36:41
up anywhere at any time. Perhaps it should have arisen earlier in societies without the
36:45
barriers of Greek telos and Judeo-Christian religion. It didn't. It didn't because of
36:50
philosophy of individual rights, springing from the biblical beliefs and individual human
36:54
beings are created in God's image and that individual virtue matters were key to the
36:59
enlightenment. So was the search for knowledge. A search rooted in belief that God had a master
37:03
plan for the universe that human beings were blessed with the free will and the reason to
37:06
investigate that plan and that we had a moral duty to seek God and to better our own situations
37:11
materially and spiritually through that search. A devotion to progress is in history began
37:17
with Judeo-Christian religion as well. Most important, Judeo-Christian thought and Greek
37:21
thought both held in common the belief in purpose, but advocates of the revisionist
37:25
enlightenment history say what if the Judeo-Christian belief system and the Greek devotion to reason
37:30
were necessary to build Western civilization, but later prevented Western civilization
37:34
from fully realizing its potential. What if the ideas of Judeo-Christianity and Greece
37:40
weren't foundational? What if they were more like a scaffolding to be removed from the
37:44
structure as West thought solidified? What if we could pick and choose our favorite ideas
37:48
from the Enlightenment canon and junk all the rest? As we've seen, and as we'll see,
37:53
we've tried it. It failed. In reality, just as with every other philosophical development
37:57
history, the Enlightenment had its upside, the glories of American founding, philosophy
38:02
and Western classical liberalism, both of which were direct outgrowth of Athens and Jerusalem
38:07
and it had its downside. What was the downside? That downside began with the purposeful destruction
38:11
of the Judeo-Christian values and Greek teleology. It turns out that those thinkers had maintained
38:16
the wisdom those twin foundations built the power and glory of the modern West. Those
38:21
who sought to chip away from those foundations would eventually emerge victorious and the
38:24
victory would plant seeds for the existential crisis of meaning from which the West suffers
38:29
more deeply every day. And even their supposed devotion to reason itself would be consumed
38:33
by their reflexive instinct to tear down the old no matter how objectively good it was.
38:38
So this chapter really ends with some big warnings, right? So there's two people that
38:43
are talked about here. He's talking about Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, and he's basically
38:47
talking about these two people that are basically pointing towards where the philosophies that
38:51
we've discussed, like where those things will go. And so this is a quick, quick little paragraph
38:56
from the end of chapter six. This is on page 119, if you're following along. What Nietzsche
39:00
observed and what he lauded had been underway for generations, philosophy spent two centuries
39:05
killing Judeo-Christian values and Greek teleology, or at least discarding them in favor of brave
39:09
new utopias filled with perfectible human beings, or crystal palaces ruled by men of
39:14
reason, or worlds of determinism filled with avoidance of pain and maximization of pleasure.
39:20
So obviously we know what's happened after this. And this leads us, when you're starting
39:26
to get into the 19th and 20th century, this leads us into chapter seven, which is called
39:29
the remaking of the world. Now this is perhaps the most dense chapter in the book. I don't
39:35
think it's the longest chapter, but the ideals that are that are revealed here are incredibly
39:39
dense. But interestingly enough, I feel like the introduction, the introductory several
39:44
paragraphs and the, you know, conclusion of this chapter really kind of tie a good bow
39:49
on this. And so we're going to be skipping a huge section of chapter seven, but I'm going
39:53
to go ahead and read the first part of chapter seven, the last part here. So let's go ahead
39:57
and go into the intro. And this is from the chapter called the remaking of the world.
40:01
Why can't we all be reasonable? This is the characteristic call of our age, forget values,
40:06
forget judgment, let's just be reasonable with one another. Tolerance can supplant Judeo-Christian
40:11
ideas. We all know what's right deep down. If we follow our star civilization won't just
40:15
survive, it will thrive and flourish. This idea is a vestige of the Enlightenment mentality,
40:21
but it ignores the dark side of the Enlightenment hope. It ignores the history of the 19th and
40:25
20th centuries. It ignores the fact that the Enlightenment had two strains, one based on
40:29
Athens and Jerusalem and the other bereft of them. History performed a comparative study
40:34
in which form of Enlightenment worked best. And the results were clear and convincing.
40:38
The Enlightenment straddled two sides of a thin line. On the one side was the American
40:42
Enlightenment based on the consummation of the long history of thoughts stretching back
40:45
to Athens and Jerusalem down through Great Britain and the Glorious Revolution to the
40:50
New World. And the other was the European Enlightenment, which rejected Athens and Jerusalem
40:55
in order to build new worlds beyond discoverable purpose and divine revelation. The juxtaposition
40:59
between the American Revolution and the French Revolution demonstrates the contrast between
41:03
the strains of Enlightenment thinking. The American Revolution based on Lockean principles regarding
41:08
the God-given rights of individuals, the value of social virtue, and a state system created
41:12
to preserve inalienable individual rights broke sharply with the French Revolution based on
41:17
Rousseau's General Will, Voltaire's generalized scorn for traditional virtue, and an optimistic
41:22
sense of the perfect ability of mankind through the application of virtue-free reason.
41:27
And as promised, we'll skip to the end of this chapter and go into the last few paragraphs
41:30
because it kind of sums up what we're going to be talking about. And it's called a world
41:33
in ash. This is what this last session is. In World War II, all three of these prominent
41:38
collectivists worldviews came into direct conflict and somewhere between 50 and 80 million
41:42
people died. Romantic nationalism engulfed Nazi Germany, along with the worship of centralized
41:48
bureaucracy and scientific governance. And 6 million Jews were mowed down by German bullets
41:53
or gas and death camps. The Soviet Union saw its own population as fodder for the preservation
41:58
of the state, sending its citizens to die on the front lines of Stalingrad with no guns
42:02
in their hands but guns at their backs. The United States interned 117,000 Japanese. By
42:07
the end of the war, the great hope of the telos-free Godless Enlightenment had faded from view,
42:12
or more precisely, it had been buried under the mountains of corpses from World Wars 1
42:17
and 2. The West was suddenly in crisis. Despite massive technological improvements, and in
42:22
part because of such improvements, the human race had nearly wiped itself off the planet.
42:27
Science had not solved the search for purpose. In fact, with the discovery of atomic weaponry,
42:32
it seemed that the West had come to the brink of its own annihilation. The great dream of
42:36
redefining human beings, discovering transcendent values without reference to God or universal
42:41
purpose, seemed to have died. While some still held out hope in the West for the eventual
42:46
triumph of the Soviet experiment, with the revelation of Stalin's crimes, that hope
42:50
too faded. What would replace that hope now? So those ideals kind of lead us to chapter
42:55
A, which is called "After the Fire," which is very similar to chapter 7, in that it's
42:58
a very dense chapter. A lot of things to go through, but I feel like the intro and the
43:02
outro of this chapter give us a good idea of kind of what we're going to get into. So
43:06
let me go ahead and read the intro here. The world survived World War II, of course. Not
43:10
only did the West survive, it got freer, richer, more prosperous than ever. Human wealth expanded
43:15
exponentially. Lifespans increased. But there remained a hole in the center of the Western
43:19
civilization, a meaning shaped hole. That hole has grown larger and larger in the decades
43:25
since, a cancer eating away at our heart. We tried to fill it with the will to action.
43:30
We tried to fill it with science. We tried to fill it with world changing political activism.
43:34
None of it provided us the meaning we seek. By the end of World War II, European optimism
43:39
was dead and buried beneath six feet of human ash. The philosophies of the Europeans, enlightenment
43:44
ideals above the value of human beings and the need to move beyond God or Greek teleology
43:49
had ended in tragedy. Hitler claimed ideological forebears in Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche. Stalin
43:54
took his cues from arcs and eugenicists took their ideas from Darwin and concept. The post-lock
43:59
enlightenment projected that project had been a tower of Babel with a common goal of supplanting
44:04
reason for religion rather than seeking the congruence of the two. As the tower began
44:08
to challenge God, its builders went to war with one another, speaking languages all their
44:12
own. And then the tower fell and the land was left barren. Europe had buried millions
44:16
of its sons and daughters. The West had placed its bet on mankind and reaped the whirlwind.
44:22
So the rest of this chapter is kind of spent with some of this neo-enlightenment thinking
44:26
and kind of what that had led to and also kind of what a lot of these neo-enlightenment
44:31
types of individuals have tried to claim. So he kind of calls them out and this is the
44:35
outro for this chapter after the fire. Carving off the roots of the Western tree while hoping
44:40
to maintain the integrity of the trunk amidst high winds is an exercise in wishful thinking.
44:45
In December, 2017, I discussed this in issue precisely with Sam Harris, who was arguing
44:50
that the Bible was a rotten text field with awful lessons. I told him the moral system
44:55
by which you suggest that the portion of the Bible should be removed is built on the moral
44:59
system of the Bible developed over 2000 years. When Harris protested that his most considered
45:04
view of ethics came from a broader framework of studies, I answered, I'm not talking about
45:08
your browsing and world literature. I'm talking about the fundamental moral precepts that you
45:12
took to be moral from the time you were a child, arise from the Western civilization predicated
45:16
on Judeo-Christian notions of good and bad. Enlightenment ideals didn't arise in a vacuum,
45:21
entreating them as though they can survive and thrive without the water and oxygen that
45:25
nourished them for thousands of years, revelation and reason, telos and purpose, free will and
45:29
responsibility, isn't likely to sustain those ideals beyond those who read the neo-enlightenment
45:34
philosophers and scientists. The neo-enlightenment isn't teachable. Attempt to transplant it
45:38
to the soil of other cultures and it withers. Don't get me wrong. I think that Harris and
45:43
Pinker and Schurmer are doing and reviving enlightenment ideals is spectacular. I agree
45:47
with a lot of the enlightenment ideals, particularly regarding individual liberty and natural rights,
45:51
as we've discussed. But the new scientific Athenians will have to come and will have to
45:56
make common cause with the devotees of Jerusalem, rather than making war on them. The same holds
46:01
true and reverse. Four, as it turns out, there are larger philosophical threats to Western
46:05
civilization that require our attention. And this gets us into the last chapter before
46:10
the outro, which is called the return to paganism. And so the sections that I really wanted
46:14
to go through here, we're talking about the rise of kind of the self esteem movement and
46:18
the rise of intersectionality, which obviously, if you've been following Ben Shapiro for
46:23
any length of time, intersectionality is something that he's talked about a lot and something
46:27
that he has really fought against. So I'm going to read a section here that kind of gets
46:30
into a little bit of that self esteem movement and intersectionality. This pathetic illogic
46:35
has even extended into the realm of scientific staffing. The National Science Foundation
46:39
of federal funding agency for science says that it wants to pursue a quote, diverse stem
46:43
workforce on quote, not the best scientists of all races, but a specifically diverse group.
46:48
To that end, the NSF spent millions of funding projects on implicit bias research, one of
46:53
the least verified most hyped attempts to ferret out secret racism ever attempted, as well
46:58
as $500,000 on studying intersectionality. Science departments around the country are
47:02
securing not those with the highest scores or the best credentials, but those with special
47:06
contributions to diversity. As Heather McDonald points out, the American Astronomical Society
47:11
has now asked PhD programs to stop using the graduate record exam, the GRE, in physics
47:16
for applicants, since too few women were doing well. The same is happening in medicine, where
47:21
schools have been encouraged to stop using the medical college admission test, the MCAT
47:25
for ethnic minorities. The impact from 2013 to 2016, medical schools nationally admitted
47:31
57% of black applicants with a low MCAT of 24 to 26, but only 8% of whites and 6% of
47:38
Asians with those same low scores, according to Claremont McKenna, Professor Frederick Lynch.
47:43
How it helps patients to have less qualified, but more ethnically diverse heart surgeons
47:47
remains unexplained. We've seen this sort of anti-scientific, blather skype rear its
47:52
ugly head over and over. Former Treasury Secretary Lauren Summers lost his job as president of
47:56
Harvard University when professors voted to oust him. Summers had the temerity to cite
48:01
studies suggesting that there are more men who follow in both the higher and lower ends
48:05
of the spectrum of test score distribution, thereby creating a disparity in the distribution
48:09
of men and women in particular science and mathematics jobs. Jordan Peterson, Professor
48:13
at the University of Toronto, received a letter from his administration warning him that his
48:17
refusal to use transgender pronouns was contrary to the rights of those persons to equal treatment
48:21
without discrimination based on their gender identity and gender expression. The letter
48:26
suggested that Peterson's insistence on using correct pronouns in accordance with biology
48:30
had been "emotionally disturbing and painful" for some students. Lindsey Shepard, a graduate
48:35
student at Wilfred Lorry in Canada, was disciplined after showing a video of Peterson discussing
48:39
the use of made-up pronouns in order to placate transgender people. Aboysie State Professor
48:44
Scott Yinner was called on the carpet for the great sin of writing a piece suggesting
48:48
that radical feminism's insistence that gender was a societal construct had paved
48:51
the way for the transgender rights movement. Students walked out on Evergreen State College
48:55
Professor Heather Heying as she pointed out that men are taller than women. Heying's husband,
49:00
Professor Brett Weinstein, losses job at Evergreen when he refused to leave campus after black
49:05
students demanded that white teachers not teach on a particular day. Students called
49:09
him a racist and led a takeover of campus buildings. College speakers ranging from Charles Murray
49:14
to Heather McDonald to Christina Hoff Summers have been run off campus usually following
49:18
violent protests for the sin of citing statistics. Better false statistics and bad social
49:23
shines than to violate someone's sense of self-esteem. This anti-scientific anti-reason
49:28
nonsense is a return to the random chaos of the pagan. A belief in subjectivity above
49:32
objectivity. A belief in lack of control over your own fate. A belief that reason itself
49:37
is merely a reflection of power dynamics. The same scientific method relies on reason and
49:42
belief in individual worth that led to the greatest surge of wealth in human history
49:46
are now under assault, all on behalf of the quest for self-realization and self-worth.
49:51
All of this deeply damaging to precisely the people who are supposed to be freed by it.
49:56
Intersexual thinking promotes a victim mentality entirely at odds with the pursuit of fulfillment
50:00
and success. If you were told repeatedly that your self-esteem is threatened by the system
50:04
and the structure, and that even statistics and science must not offend you, if you are
50:08
taught that your bliss matters more than objective truth, you become weak and fragile, unable
50:13
to cope in the real world. Social psychologist Jonathan Heit of New York University points
50:18
out that the most effective type of therapy for distorted thinking is cognitive behavioral
50:22
therapy, therapy in which people are taught to break chains of thought by using reason
50:26
and evaluation, precisely the opposite of what our modern universities have been doing.
50:30
The recent collegiate trend of uncovering allegedly racist, sexist, classist, or otherwise discriminatory
50:35
microaggressions doesn't incidentally teach students to focus on small or accidental
50:40
slides he writes. Its purpose is to get students to focus on them and then relabel the people
50:45
who have made such remarks as aggressors. This heit concludes make society more sensorious
50:51
and makes students more psychologically unstable. The new protectiveness may be teaching students
50:56
to think pathologically. Even worse, people who perceive themselves as victims are more
51:01
likely to become aggressors, as social psychologist Roy Baumeister explains, "Many violent people
51:07
believe that their actions were justified by the offensive acts of the person who became
51:10
their victim, which is precisely what we've seen from campus rioters in social media malcontents
51:15
and the movement to use government force to shut down that particular types of disprove
51:19
speech. But we are told at least this new awareness of our intersectional problems will
51:24
bring with it a more aware world, and thus perhaps a better one.
51:27
Not so. Focusing on right-able wrongs is worthwhile. Blaming all disparities on discrimination
51:33
leads to more political polarization and individual failure. Studies show that perceived discrimination
51:38
is heavily connected with lower grades, less academic motivation, and less persistence
51:42
when encountering an academic challenge. That's certainly the case for fighting discrimination.
51:47
It's also the case for not exaggerating its extent, or silencing conversations in order
51:51
to pander to sensitivities." So I know that sounded like a lot of information there and
51:56
from all these different sections, but I believe me there's like 100 times more information
52:00
than I didn't even go through. But here we've gone to the conclusion and I just want to read
52:04
the first section of the conclusion and the conclusion is taught how to build. So here
52:08
we go. America is struggling right now in a lot of ways, but its largest struggle is
52:12
a struggle for our national soul. We are so angry at each other right now. That anger
52:16
is palpable. Where did it come from? It came from the destruction of a common vision.
52:21
We used to believe in the founding vision supported by a framework of personal virtue
52:25
culled from Judeo-Christian morality. We used to see each other as brothers and sisters,
52:29
not the 1% versus the 99% or the privilege versus the victims. We weren't enemies. We
52:34
were a community forged in fire and tethered together by a set of values stretching back
52:38
to the Garden of Eden, a community of individuals working to understand the value of each other
52:42
as images of God, a community of individuals who believed in our own capacity to change
52:46
ourselves and the world around us. We can regain that. We must regain that. Our individual
52:52
and communal happiness depends on us regaining the values we're losing all too quickly. To
52:57
do so will require boldness. To do so will require sacrifice. And so this gets into the
53:02
section here where he's going to start giving us a little bit of information on that. So
53:06
here we go back to the book page 213. The easiest way to evade responsibility is to
53:10
avoid teaching our children our values. If we merrily let them choose their value systems
53:15
for themselves, we reason, then we put them in no danger. If we act as neutral arbiters
53:20
bubbling them off from the possibility of harm through vague shibles about tolerance,
53:25
although we're never quite specific about just what we're willing to tolerate, we can
53:29
leave our chosenness behind. In the fiddler on the roof today, it complains, I know, I
53:34
know, we are your chosen people, but once in a while, can't you choose someone else?
53:39
The answer is obvious. We can opt out. We all we have to do is stop teaching our children.
53:44
If we wish for our civilization to survive, however, we must be willing to teach our children.
53:49
The only way to protect their children is to make warriors of our own children. We must
53:52
make our children messengers for the truth that matter. That comes with risk. And that
53:57
is a risk we must be willing to take. As Ronald Reagan put it, freedom is never more
54:01
than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream.
54:07
It must be fought for protected and handed on to them for to do the same. And one day
54:11
we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what
54:15
it was like in the United States where men were free. My father is fond of saying that
54:19
in life, there aren't six directions, East, West, North, South, up and down. There are
54:24
just two forward and backward. Are we moving towards something or away from it? Are we
54:30
teaching our children to march forward, the banner of the civilization in hand, or back
54:33
slowly away from it, watching the shining city on a hill receding into the distance?
54:38
So what do we teach our children? When I look at my four year old daughter, my two year
54:41
old son, what do I want them to know? What must they know to become defenders of the
54:45
only civilization worth fighting for? My wife and I will start by teaching our children
54:49
for simple lessons. And I'm not going to tell you those lessons suckers, you're gonna have
54:55
to go buy the book and get it. Guys, that's the, that's the very end of the book there
54:59
where he kind of gets into his lessons that he would teach his children. It is absolutely
55:02
fantastic. But again, I'm doing this on purpose. The entire book, like I said, it's 200 pages
55:08
of super heady, dense content that gets down into these very, very practical suggestions
55:13
for how we should even talk to our children. Because most people look at the greater society
55:17
and we're like, man, I just don't know if we can change things. I don't know if there's
55:20
a politician out there that can basically get us back to where we were. And I would agree
55:24
with that. But overall, there, there's this gigantic lack of us even focusing on the
55:29
people that we have the biggest amount of impact on. And that's our families, right?
55:33
That's our spouses and our children. And so even though that's just kind of a basic cursory
55:37
overview of the entire book, there are three reasons that every modern Christian man should
55:43
read the right side of history. Okay. The first reason is that most of us don't even have
55:47
a cursory understanding of how we got our Western values. Okay. So this book takes us
55:52
through that narrative, right? Because there's a lot of philosophy in this book, but it's
55:56
not super deep philosophy. A lot of things that are discussed are discussed kind of
56:01
in a, you know, in a summary type of stance and not in a way that's, you know, basically
56:06
exhaustive of a particular ideology. And I think that's a good thing. I mean, you can
56:10
get into some of the content here. And then if there's a particular philosophy or area
56:14
of study, there, there's a billion different splinters that can come off the information
56:19
that Ben Shapiro talks about in this book. So again, the first reason why every modern
56:22
Christian man should read this is most of us don't even have a cursory understanding
56:25
of how we got our Western values. Okay. The second is many men avoid reading things on
56:30
subjects that are beyond them. Okay. And so I'll just be honest with you guys. Again,
56:35
I'm not the greatest reader. Yeah, I read about 25 or 30 books a year. And some of you
56:38
guys are like, that's insane. But then again, I know guys are to read over 100 books a year.
56:42
In a lot of the books they read are probably more difficult to get through than the ones
56:44
that I read. But in general, I tried to, if I'm going to be reading a challenging book,
56:49
I try to make sure it's, you know, five to 10% beyond me, right? And the thing about
56:55
the five to 10% beyond philosophy is it's not something like if you've never even taken
57:00
a biology class, or, you know, chemistry class or something like that, if you all of a sudden
57:05
go to a book about thermodynamics and, you know, rocket propulsion and all the nuclear
57:10
this or nuclear that that's probably not going to work out for you. Because that's probably
57:12
like 100% beyond where you're at. But this book, I got to be honest, this was about 10%
57:18
beyond me. Again, it was a short book, but it took me a while to get through it just
57:21
because I really, really had to dig in. And again, most of us don't even go at something
57:26
like that. And so I would encourage you, because there's a lot of guys are like, Oh, I love
57:29
Ben Shapiro. But man, I don't know if I want to read his book. I think I'd rather listen
57:31
to his podcast. I would say absolutely give this one a go. So again, three reasons every
57:35
modern Christian man should read the right side of history. The first, most of us don't
57:38
even have a cursory understanding of how we got our Western values. The second is many
57:42
men avoid reading things on subjects that are beyond them. And number three, if we don't
57:47
read books like this, we won't be able to teach others about the lessons inside the books
57:52
like this. Like we will not be able to, um, if we don't understand a concept, how are we
57:57
going to teach it to our children? If we don't understand the concept, how are we going to
58:01
inform people in our Sunday school, people on our teams, people at work, about certain
58:05
things? Are we going to just constantly be looking around at other individuals, trying
58:09
to get them to maybe save us or, you know what, we don't really need to talk about that. It's
58:13
not specific enough. It's just not something that's that important. So that would be something
58:17
that I would say for all of you guys is this is a very important book. I mean, he's going
58:21
to sell a billion of these books. I mean, it's already the number one nonfiction book
58:25
on Amazon. It's going to, you know, probably forced its way onto the New York Times best
58:28
seller list. Um, it's going to be a very important book. It's kind of like what, um, Jordan Peterson's
58:34
book from last year was, um, and the 12 rules for life basically sold and sold and sold and
58:41
it led to a lot of different things. I feel like this is going to be the same thing for
58:43
Ben Shapiro. And so I'm happy that I've, I've got to get to see a little bit of this. And
58:48
again, we're, we're just ecstatic and tickled to death. Um, that the daily wire and Ben Shapiro,
58:52
uh, thought enough of us to send us a advanced copy. And so we're glad we were able to bring
58:56
a little bit that to you guys here. So before we get out of here, we're going to do a quick
59:00
resilience boost. As you know, by now we are a men's ministry and our mission is cultivating
59:04
manly resilience. And specifically guys, we do that by providing content like this podcast
59:08
that helps forge spiritual, mental and physical toughness. And so when the mental resilience
59:12
side of things today, I've got an Amazon link to the book, the right side of history, but
59:15
I also have a YouTube link to an interview that Ben Shapiro did with a guy from a skeptic.
59:20
It's a skeptic channel. So obviously it's a, it's a channel, uh, that are ran by atheists
59:23
and agnostics, agnostics. And, um, they disagreed quite a bit on some of the things in this book,
59:28
but I thought it was a very cordial discussion. So I think that's worth your time there.
59:31
All right, guys. Thanks so much for listening to this podcast. If you would, please subscribe
59:34
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getting bigger and all those different things. And it's only because you're leaving the reviews
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and leaving a couple sentences. So we really appreciate it. I'm currently booking speaking
59:49
engagements for the rest of 2019. So if you guys want me to come speak to your amends
59:53
event on your podcast, to your team, to your whatever, hit me up info@undaunted.light. That's
59:58
the email info@undaunted.life. The website is www.undaunted.life and you can follow us
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plans. And we want to thank the band August Burns read for allowing us to use their music
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library for our content. The intro outro track on this podcast is our song King of Sorrow,
1:00:19
which is off their latest record entitled Phantom Anthem. The links to all of this are
1:00:22
in the description. I'm your host Kyle Thompson. Remember, keep cultivating manly resilience,
1:00:29
keep forging spiritual, mental and physical toughness. Keep seeking the lion of Judah.
1:00:52
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