This is the Babylon Bee Interview Show. In this episode of The Babylon Bee Podcast, Kyle and Ethan talk to professor of political science Justin Dyer, author of C. S. Lewis on Politics and the Natural Law and director of the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy. Topics range from C.S. Lewis' view on natural law, being a classical liberal, and how C.S. Lewis wanted all kids off his lawn. Be sure to check out The Babylon Bee YouTube Channel for more podcasts, podcast shorts, animation, and more. To watch or listen to the full podcast, become a subscriber at https://babylonbee.com/plans Topics Discussed How Dyer became interested in CS Lewis Would CS Lewis vote for Trump How Lewis pulls theology, philosophy, and politics all into his writing What is natural law? C.S. Lewis influences C.S. Lewis being a classical liberal Social Dilemma Abolition of man and the modern times Left and right attacking natural law in Lewis' time C.S. Lewis would be a libretraian Lewis wanted to be treated like a dinosaur Abolition of man waterfall C.S. Lewis criticism of english language textbooks Objective standards to beauty and art Oxytocin for humor Subscriber portion Lewis answering every letter written to him Lewis hated his modern technology Lewis didn't like change Lewis wouldn't be a fan of twitter CS Lewis and Sexuality Cs Lewis view on marriage made Tolkien uncomfortable How one writer believes Lewis is going to Hell Lewis' view of tradition 10 Questions Great embarrassing story
I just have to say that I object strenuously to your use of the word hilarious.
Hard-hitting questions.
What do you think about feminism?
Do you like it?
Taking you to the cutting edge of truth.
Yeah, well, Last Jedi is one of the worst movies ever made, and it was very clear that Ryan Johnson doesn't like Star Wars.
Kyle pulls no punches.
I want to ask how you're able to sleep at night.
Ethan brings bone-shattering common sense from the top rope.
If I may, how double dare you?
This is the Babylon B interview show.
Hello, everyone.
Welcome to the Babylon Bee Interview Show.
I'm Kyle.
I am still Ethan.
Still.
Yep.
Yeah.
People want me to change that, but I'm sticking with it.
And this is going to be the podcast with the most people who are experts on the Inklings whose last name rhymes with Dreyer.
Hmm.
This is our.
World record broken.
Yeah.
Get us right.
Because he's been on other podcasts.
Well, but Diana Glyer would have had to been on the same podcast.
Oh, yeah, Glier and Dreyer.
That was your joke.
Totally missed it.
You got it?
This is going well.
We need to do a show with both of them together.
Glier and Dreyer.
Yes.
And then get a friar in here.
Friar?
Do they still exist?
Friars?
I think so.
Do we have to have friars?
I think we could round up a friar somewhere.
Round up a friar.
But friars still exist, right?
I think so.
Yeah.
I don't know where to find a friar.
We could just Google that.
If there's any friars listening, comment in the comments.
I'm pretty sure friars exist.
I don't think they just stopped existing.
Well, there's a lot of things that did, but that's not what this episode's about.
We're sitting here with Justin Dyer.
Yeah.
Justin Dyer is C.S. Lewis.
Well, he wrote a book.
He's not C.S. Lewis.
He wrote a book on C.S. Lewis.
He wrote a book on C.S. Lewis.
Called C.S. Lewis on Politics and the Natural Law.
So, where do we begin?
You came here from Missouri.
Came from Missouri.
Woke up yesterday morning in Missouri or Missouri.
It was 26 degrees outside.
Came here.
I feel like I'm leaving.
Yeah, came out to sunny California.
It's 76.
Beautiful.
Enjoying our time out here.
It's funny, we're all cold right now.
Are you?
Actually, it's kind of a warm day.
The wind, any bit of wind, I'll send you like, yeah, the wind kills it.
I'm from the Northwest, so I should be fine, but I'm getting soft.
Yeah.
Yeah, we got a convertible just so we could drive around with the top-down.
Really?
Wow.
It was, yeah, it was a little sweaty yesterday.
How are you enjoying the convertible experience?
It's been great.
Really?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It always sounds better than I think it might maybe is.
Yeah, it gets old.
You don't want to do the highway driving with the top down too much.
Yeah, and that's all highway driving in LA.
But if you're going to have, we're going to have two days out in California bumming around.
You might as well.
You might as well go for the convertible to do it.
Yeah.
So C.S. Lewis.
So your book, can you give me like kind of just an overview of what your book is about?
Let's start there.
Yeah, sure.
So a little bit of background in C.S. Lewis and how I got interested in Lewis.
I was, like a lot of kids probably, drawn to Lewis first and introduced first to the Chronicles of Narnia.
And I had, as a grade school kid, been introduced to the Chronicles of Narnia from a teacher and so knew Lewis just from that and that was it.
And then at one point I was a public school kid and I had a very modest assignment in a high school English class and the teacher said to go to the library, pick out a book and read it.
And that was all we had to do.
It could be any book.
And I was looking at the shelf and I found Mere Christianity and just recognized Lewis from the Narnia series and all that.
And so I read that book and the first chapter in it, you remember, is about the law of human nature.
And so that was my introduction to natural law theory, this idea that there's a moral law that we don't make up, that we can understand by reason, that we can expect other people to know it.
And it made a lot of sense to me at the time, and it started an interest in natural law theory that I connected to politics when I was an undergrad.
I went to Oklahoma and I was there and took a class called Foundations of American Politics and saw all of these references to the law of nature and to natural law and the American founding documents and John Locke and all of that.
And so I immediately had that connection in my mind and got drawn into studying American politics and American political thought.
And then later, as I read more and more Lewis and read about Lewis, I saw that everybody who has written about him, his biographers, all said that he was apolitical, that he didn't care about politics, had nothing interesting to say about politics, that he was somebody who just took no interest at all in politics.
And I was interested in that because reading Lewis was what really got me interested in politics in the first place.
And I connected with a guy named Micah Watson who had a very similar experience, and he's a professor at Calvin College now, and he studies American politics, but did a master's thesis on C.S. Lewis and politics.
So we started talking about it and just thinking whether there's a book here, and nobody had written the book yet about C.S. Lewis and politics and political thought.
So we took the challenge of trying to establish first that Lewis actually did care about politics.
He thought about it, he wrote about it, and he had something insightful to say.
And I think a lot of his writings were just about finding the permanent things in what's political at the moment in trying to identify the foundations of a just political order.
And so it flew under the radar screen a little bit where people just, they think about politics as legislation or bargaining or just what you would see on blogs and on television shows and whatever.
And Lewis didn't have a lot of interest in that.
But he's got deeply political themes that go throughout his writings.
So that was really the burden of the book was trying to show that Lewis was an insightful and interesting political thinker who shaped, I think, how a lot of us approach political questions.
So he would have voted for Trump?
Is that what the book's about?
The book is a 2016 book.
And yeah, it didn't anticipate the transition.
You wish that you had.
You should do the updated 2020 version and really work that out.
Yeah.
It's an interesting question.
What would Lewis have thought about a Donald Trump type of a figure?
And in 2016, I wrote an op-ed piece where I tried to draw political lessons from the things that Lewis wrote.
And I could see a case for Lewis being a kind of apolitical in that sense.
Faced with a vote that he didn't like either option, he would have grumbled about it and probably wouldn't have made known his preference to anybody.
And actually, Lewis was so concerned, this is one of the reasons why people think that he's apolitical.
He was so concerned about his Christian witness and his vocation being identified with politics and therefore people seeing all of his religious writings as political propaganda that he didn't want anybody to think he cared about politics.
And so he kind of went out of his way to have this apolitical persona.
And there was one moment where Winston Churchill had offered to make him an honorary commander of the British Empire.
And he admired Churchill greatly.
He thought Churchill was a great leader.
I think he supported him and his election as prime minister.
But he turned down the offer.
And when he wrote the letter back to the prime minister's office, he said, there are knaves who think and fools who believe that all of my religious writings are anti-leftist propaganda.
And my appearance on your list would, of course, strengthen their hand.
And so he declined the honor and he didn't want to be associated with politics.
But yet, I think he thought a lot about it.
And he described himself in different places as an old Western man, somebody who I think was very committed to the broader tradition of Anglo-liberty that you find in writers like John Locke and others, and then stretching back to Richard Hooker and the ancients.
And so he would have been a very traditional sort, and I think he would have found a lot to gripe about in our current political moment.
Smart question, alert.
Here comes.
Oh, now I'm set up.
There's a lot of expectations.
I would have pulled Dan in for that.
I reserve the right to swap this for a Dan question.
From what I'm understanding, is the issue partly that we have narrowed the definition of politics to be teams.
Yeah, or just what the specific issue is in this four-year period or legislative policies or whatever when politics probably has a broader application.
I mean, everything is politics in some sense.
You know, G.K. Chesterton quote: G.K. Chesterton.
I only discuss politics and, of course, I discuss politics and religion.
There's nothing else to discuss.
Yeah, there's something about that.
Say something smart.
Yeah, there's something about that.
So, Lewis, Lewis thought about politics in a broader sense.
And I think we often, when we talk about politics, what we mean by politics is something like partisan politics, the partisan maneuvering that people go through, and then policy disputes.
What kind of public policy questions should we have?
But behind all that are other questions that we just take for granted, the idea that there's such a thing as a public sphere and that's different from the private sphere, and that religion is different from government or religion is different from the state, and that there are certain decisions that should be left private and certain decisions that should be public.
All of those things involve political analysis, thinking about these things in a political way.
And in the broadest sense, I think politics is really about how we live together as a community.
And if we have to ask questions about how we live together as a community, how do we set this whole thing up?
What kinds of political institutions do we want?
What things truly are private and what things should be public?
What things are your business and what things are not your business?
And we ask all of those kinds of questions, it's going to depend on some vision of human nature.
It's going to depend on some vision of what are we?
Who are we?
What kinds of creatures are we?
What's our purpose?
And once we start giving answers to those questions, I think it takes you, in a sense, way beyond politics.
It takes you into questions of philosophy, questions of religion.
But all of those answers that you can give to those questions are going to have political implications.
And so this is a book about Lewis and Lewis's political thought.
But it begins, the first couple chapters are about Lewis's vision of creation, fall, and redemption, and how that influenced his anthropology and how he thinks about human beings and what we are.
And then his vision of reason and reason's place in the modern world and whether we can defend reason.
And then the abolition of man book that he wrote, which is really about education.
And so it's really pulling in all of this.
It's pulling in theology, it's pulling in philosophy, it's pulling in educational theory, and then trying to put that into a vision of political life, of how we live together.
So I think it's all related at the end of the day.
So it's hard to separate those spheres out.
Can you for the dumb people, not me, but like other dumb people.
There's some dumb people that listen to the podcast.
Yeah, and we try to serve them too.
Because some of them have money.
We intentionally try to represent their line of thinking.
So you talk about natural law.
I think the person who hasn't steeped themselves in this stuff much thinks, oh, like evolution.
So like when you say natural law, can you like lay that out for the dumb people what that means?
Yeah, two parts of that.
And it's the one part is natural and the other part is law.
And the idea is that there's a moral standard.
The math gif right there.
There it is.
There's a moral standard that is independent of human creation, that we don't create moral rules.
We know them.
We have access to them.
We can know them.
But we didn't create them.
They're not just a product of our will as a society or individually.
And natural law, the natural part says that it's part of human nature, that those moral rules are part of human nature, and that the highest part of human nature is your reason, and that they're knowable, that you can access that through reason, and that they're binding on you.
They're morally obligatory, and that's the law part of natural law.
And within that, there are a lot of different theories about how this is.
You know, what would have to be true about the universe that we live in for there to be a natural law?
And there are a lot of different ways that you can go about that.
There are some people who are Darwinian, coming back to evolution, who think that you could have a kind of Darwinian natural law that probably is going to look very different from a theist who says, no, there's a natural law and there's a natural law giver.
And there's a God who's the author of the natural law.
And that's always been the Christian tradition.
But the Christian tradition came after the Greeks and the Romans who talked about natural law a lot and just took it for granted that there was a law of nature, we have moral knowledge, we've violated the law of nature, and so we know that we have sinned.
That's the Christian way of talking about that.
And the natural law then precedes the gospel.
That's Lewis's view, that the good news only makes sense if you know that you've sinned, but if you don't believe in natural law, you don't think you've sinned.
And so when Lewis talked about natural law, it was in the context, at least in mere Christianity where I was first introduced to it.
It was in the context of World War II.
And so the example he gives in that book, which I think is intuitive and kind of drew me in, was that there's no sense in saying that the Nazis were wrong and we were right.
We there collectively being the allies or the British people he's talking to.
No sense in saying the Nazis are wrong unless there's a standard of right and wrong that's independent of what the Nazis think and what we think and what anybody else thinks.
And if we're going to deny that, then there's no sense in complaining about the atrocities that the Nazis committed.
Maybe we have to fight.
Maybe it's a struggle of wills, but there's no sense in saying in any meaningful way that what they did was wrong.
And I think that's the challenge.
That's the challenge of natural law, and that's a challenge of how to think about it and understand it and what relevance it would have for our day-to-day lives.
So it's like the consequence of saying like, well, each culture finds their own right and wrong.
Then you go to the Nazis and you go, well.
Yeah, exactly.
If every culture comes up with their own right and wrong, are we really willing to live by that?
Are we really willing to say that there aren't things that are truly wrong?
And World War II just brings that back, I think, where you have, you know, after the war, you have the Nuremberg trials where you put Nazis on trial.
And the question was, what are you putting them on trial for?
Yeah, according to whose law.
According to whose law.
And it wasn't, everything they did, they were meticulously legal in German law.
And so they were doing everything according to their own law.
And if their objection was, well, it wasn't against our law, what's the response?
And I guess there are two responses.
You can say, well, it's just victor's justice.
We won the war and we'll do what we want and might makes right.
Or you can say, no, there is something like a law of nature that you have violated that we expect you to have known even when you said you didn't know it.
We don't believe that you were truly morally ignorant.
We think that you were willfully evil and you're morally responsible for that.
That was our answer.
That was how we conducted the Nuremberg trials.
We charged them for crimes against humanity.
And after that, you get the UN Declaration of Human Rights, and you get this proliferation of thinking about human rights as something that is not just an artificial construct.
And so you get a kind of resurgence of natural law thinking, I think, after World War II.
And Lewis was one of the people on the vanguard of that, really, I think, pushing that forward in his writings.
And it's one of the keys that helps me at least understand everything else Lewis did.
It's a theme throughout all of his writings, even his fiction stuff.
Hmm.
Yeah.
So, I mean, this is like John Locke liberalism.
This comes from the Enlightenment, or this is an idea that this natural law thing that goes back further than that?
It's a tradition that goes back further than that.
You have.
Was Lewis influenced from Enlightenment guys like Locke?
I think he was.
That's probably one of the, for the kind of people who have ears to hear, who are on the inside, the nuances of the argument, probably one of the more controversial parts of the book was linking Lewis with some of the modern theorists like John Locke.
And it depends on how we understand him.
So you had people burning the book.
Yeah, there was a mob out of the book.
There's a mob at book burning.
I hope so.
That would be great for marketing.
That would be great for marketing if somebody could start a book burning.
Lewis was, he read the ancients, he read the Greeks, he read the Romans.
They all talked about these kinds of ideas.
And the Romans were really the first ones to talk about the natural law, but the Greeks emphasized nature as a standard.
And the early Christians did too.
And so you find Paul, for example, in the Bible talking about the law written on the heart and appealing to the idea of a natural law.
And then a lot of Christian writers had done that.
Lewis was influenced, I think, most by Aristotle, and then later came to reading Thomas Aquinas and then Richard Hooker.
And Richard Hooker is this 16th century Anglican blues singer, yes.
Anglican priest and theologian.
And Lewis described Hooker as offering the most beautiful expression of the natural law.
And so I think he found in Hooker something there.
And then John Locke appeals to Hooker when he writes.
So John Locke, who's this English political theorist who's one of the moderns, is writing about natural law theory, visions, we all live in a state of nature.
What would that be like?
He says, well, if we all lived in a state of nature, no government exists, there would still be a natural law.
He defines the natural law as reason.
He says God features prominently in Locke's theory.
And I think Lewis took Locke seriously on that.
A lot of scholars don't.
If you talked to some American political theorists, they would probably say Locke wasn't really serious about the stuff he said about God.
His natural law is really kind of a muted natural law.
It's not what you get from the ancients.
But I think Lewis actually read Locke differently.
He read Locke as a serious Christian who took the idea of God seriously and the idea of natural law seriously.
And Locke's theory underscores what we just would call classical liberalism, this idea that you'd have limited government, that you would protect individual rights.
And Lewis was a partisan of that kind of government.
I think he wanted to see that flourish in England.
And he was always pushing back against what he thought was the threat to liberty from the growing state.
He has a whole essay on socialism after the war, and he's warning about the dangers of concentration of government power.
And a lot of that was related to his Christian view of human nature and a kind of negative view of human nature.
That you can't trust people to concentrate power in their hands because of the kinds of things that we all are, that nobody should be entrusted with that much power.
As somebody who knows a lot about John Locke, what was your reaction to the depiction of him in Lost?
You know, The first time I referenced Lost in class, I was teaching about John Locke, and I had this big American government section.
And I used Lost to talk about social contract theory, because that's all it is.
You know, if you think about being in a state of nature, they go down on the airplane, they're on a deserted island, no government exists, and then they have to figure out how do we create a government.
And it actually brings up all the questions of social contract theory.
Who gets to rule?
And why do they get to rule?
And if one person just stands up and starts barking orders and commands at everybody else, they could say, well, why do I have to listen to you?
What gives you authority and all that?
And then the big character is John Locke.
But when I asked him first, I said, you know, how many of you know who John Locke is?
A few people raised their hands and they all thought it was the guy from Lost.
They had never heard of John Locke.
And then actually, that was long enough ago now if I asked him about, I don't think they even know about the Lost List.
Yeah, how old it is now.
Yeah, Lost is a while ago.
Yeah.
I did have a more serious question.
It's in my head somewhere.
Oh, yeah.
So like when the Greek people and stuff were thinking about natural law, were they thinking God made this law?
Were they just thinking, oh, it's somewhere in nature and it just exists?
Like how did the idea that it was a law written by God morph or was that always the thought or how is that?
It was Zeus.
Zeus as long as the lightning bolts out.
That's the natural law.
I think if you read people like Plato and Aristotle and the way that they talked about nature, God does feature into their theories, but often God would be an impersonal first mover, maybe even a kind of pantheistic God where God and nature are the same.
And so there is a way in which they think about God, but it's certainly different than the Christian conception of God.
So God is not the creator of nature necessarily, probably doesn't exist independent or outside of nature.
And the universe probably is eternal in the way that they thought about it.
And so nature becomes kind of nature with a capital N becomes the normative standard for how you would live.
And nature helps us uncover how we flourish as human beings.
So there's a lot there, I think, to take away.
If somebody reads, a lot of Christians have read Aristotle and Plato and found a lot of truth in them, but thinking that they, you know, they know better now and their ideas have been updated as they had access to more.
But for somebody like Aristotle, you read his way that he talks about moral virtues and a life well lived and what human flourishing consists in.
A lot of it seems to ring pretty true even still as he's just reflecting, as Lewis would have said, by the natural light or reflecting with his own reason about how we can live well as human beings.
But Christianity adds to that.
It adds, I think, a deeper and richer conception of human nature.
When we talk to smart people, we need to bring like a pipe.
Yeah.
Or something.
Because then if you don't have anything to say, you can be like, hmm.
Just think on that.
It makes you look academics.
If you're sitting in an academic talk, especially I've been in Oxford a few times and the Oxford professors seem to all do this.
Whenever somebody makes a good point, they just go, hmm.
Yeah, there's a lot of that going on.
So you can always just follow along in the conversation with some.
Matt does that.
And Matt's not here, but he does that in our podcast when we say something that he likes.
He goes, and you can hear it in the background.
Just affirming.
Affirming.
Well done.
Really good donut hole.
I just ate.
That kind of thing.
Yeah.
Well, do we want to tag Dan in for a smart question?
Does Dan have a smart question?
Dan, ask a smart question.
Oh, he's ready.
Oh, he's going to – I think he can even swap the camera.
I got to figure this out.
He's a multitasker.
Let's see if I can do this.
Smart enough to ask good questions about C.S. Lewis.
I might have to ask you to ask questions.
Not enough questions on the computer.
I might have a question for you guys.
Oh, well.
How about I'll let Dan Dan jump in if he's got one?
Well, you take your time, Dan.
Ask us a question.
Yeah.
So thinking about Lewis, have you all seen The Social Dilemma on Netflix yet?
No.
I have not.
I watched part of the interview with the guy.
I'm holy, so I canceled Netflix.
That was one of the lessons from the movie.
You have to cancel Netflix right after you watch it.
Good.
I might be ready on my question.
Oh, well, hang on.
All right, so we're on a track.
Here's the social dilemma.
And I was thinking about Lewis a lot when I was watching this movie.
So Lewis, his natural law theory comes to play, I think, in a concrete way in this book called The Abolition of Man.
And The Abolition of Man is his reflections on education.
It was originally given because he gave a series of lectures and he was asked to give them, and he decided to give them on what he just calls the green book, and it's this educational theory book.
But the whole book is about how if we lose nature as a standard, then we're just left, we get rid of reason, we're just left with will.
And there is no scrutinizing will.
It's just you feel how you feel, you want what you want, there's no getting behind that.
And then it's just everything's just about power.
And then he leaves with this line that that's always been the goal of tyranny was to exercise power over other people.
But he was worried that we would get to a place where it could actually be done because you would have the perfect applied social psychology or perfect applied psychology and the technology to do it.
So he thought, you know, we would figure out how to manipulate people.
We'd have the technology to manipulate people.
And as I was watching The Social Dilemma, I just thought, we might be there.
We might have arrived.
We did it.
He kind of saw it all coming.
So anyways, get somebody's Netflix password and get on.
Because that movie asks the question kind of like, what do we do?
The dilemma is social networking obviously has an impact, and what are these people that control it?
What morality do they answer to in this?
So the people who program the tech platforms can manipulate you in all sorts of ways, and they do.
And that's why the platforms are designed the way that they do, or the way that they are.
And a lot of them studied psychology at Stanford, and they're thinking about actual psychological manipulation.
These are the same techniques as gambling casinos or things to try to get you this reward.
And the question is, what are they being motivated by?
I know, maybe this is okay in a sense because they're actually not trying to manipulate you in any other way other than try to make money, which is give you what you want, which is leading to this hyper-partisanship and polarization because everybody goes into their own little silos and then they get fed news that they like and that keeps them online and they can monetize that.
But it did lead to that question, well, what motivates them?
So if you have people who can turn up the ads in one country of the world, or they can try to get one outcome if they want to, or they can turn down the ads, or they can block certain things, or they can amplify certain ideas, and they can see real-world consequences by doing that.
That's a lot of power.
What motivates them?
And I think Lewis's worry was you're always going to have people in power.
You're always going to have people who are influential.
But are they tied to or underneath any other kind of standard outside of just whatever they happen to want?
And so I just kept thinking about Lewis's argument when I watched that movie because it seems like we've gone down that road a little bit.
I have another question about that, but I want to let Dan have his question, so I got to remember my question.
Dan.
Can you write it down?
I don't know.
All right.
So I think you guys were talking about natural law and how that's under attack and how Lewis kind of defended that view of natural law.
It seemed like it was under attack in his day from both the left and the right.
I think part of your book, you talked about, is it Karl Barth?
It seems like there are certain camps of Christianity that would even reject natural law.
So I'm wondering if you can speak about that and if that applies today as well.
Yeah, so for Lewis's, in his time, he thought that the key to standing up to Nazism, that the thing that would save civilization would be a return to the idea of an objective morality rooted in nature and return to this idea of natural law.
But at the same time, there had already been a lot of Protestants who were moving away from the idea of natural law, and particularly Calvinists.
And this was represented by Carl Bart in particular, who's this reformed theologian who, on the same day that Lewis was giving his BBC broadcast talks in Mere Christianity, had written what was titled A Letter to Christian Britain, British Christians.
And his claim was that we should stand against Nazism by appealing only to the revealed word of God in the Bible and not by appealing to nature.
Because once you start appealing to nature, then you end up with Munich and you end up with Nazism and you get outside of this biblical framework.
And so he was a kind of stout old Calvinist who thought that man's reason was fallen.
Real quick, if you say Calvin on our show, it's important if you have the Calvin mugging you holding this say available in the Babylon Beast store, John Calvin mug.
In the Babylon Beast store.
And on the back, everyone is on the naughty list, which helps explain Karl Barth.
So if everybody's on the naughty list, and Lewis would have agreed with that, of course, we're all on the naughty list.
But for Bart, your fall, part of the idea of the fall is not just that you sin, but that your reason is unreliable.
That the things you think you know by just reflecting on the world or on human nature, that's not reliable.
The only reliable thing for how we should live and how we think about morality is revealed in scripture to us.
And so that emphasis on scripture and the discounting of reason is something that Lewis just disagreed with to the point where it's kind of awkward to read it, especially if somebody, I was influenced and raised in a Calvinist tradition and go to Presbyterian church.
And so you read the way that, and we all love C.S. Lewis, and then you read the way that Lewis talks about Calvin, and it's kind of unsettling.
But Lewis, both Calvin and Bart, he compared the view of the fall to devil worship.
And here's why.
So to unpack that, why would he say that?
He said that, look, if you really don't have access to these truths by reason, then you can't actually evaluate the goodness of the revelation or the goodness of God on any independent ground other than he's powerful.
And if you only, if his claim to your obedience is only his own physical strength and power over you, then there's nothing that separates that claim from devil worship, which is the worship of power for its own sake.
So that was his kind of theoretical claim there.
But in Christianity, it was a really divisive question.
And the Catholic Church had adopted Aquinas and adopted Thomism and so had adopted natural law theory.
And a lot of the Calvinist theologians in Bart was one of those then identified natural law with Catholicism and they identified it as a kind of Catholic doctrine and wanted something different for Protestants.
And I think after Bart's writings and his influence, you really didn't see much from Protestant theologians on natural law for a long time.
And there's been a resurgence probably starting in the last 20, 30 years where Reformed theologians in particular have revisited the idea of natural law and rediscovered natural law and some of the early Reformed theology.
And so it's come back a little bit in terms of Protestant theology.
But it was a controversial thing, and you have people denying it on both sides, not just secular people, but people denying it for religious reasons as well.
Dan said Calvin, a lot of times you didn't hold the mug up.
Yeah, every time you said Calvinist, every time.
And you got to wink at the camera.
At least.
And I know you said big tech CEOs or whatever, but if you ever say Mark Zuckerberg, you have to add, may he live forever.
Yeah.
You have to feed the algorithm.
Like the Tisrock.
Dan, your rebuttal.
That rebuttal for that, Dan?
No, I don't have a rebuttal.
I think I do have more questions, but maybe I'll.
Go, no, go, hear you.
Oh, figure out from the camera around again.
I'm like four and a halfish point Calvinist.
He's like probably seven-point Calvinist.
And we're going to get the Calvinist art up on the wall behind it.
We have the Hobby Lobby Calvinist art that we're going to talk about.
Yeah, you contribute nothing to your salvation except the sin that made it necessary.
That'll be up there.
So I guess my other question is kind of more about liberalism in general.
Kind of, I guess, is natural law connected to liberalism or because I've been reading more philosophers like Patrick Dineen.
And he wrote a book called Why Liberalism Failed.
And it kind of like deconstructed things that I thought I knew.
So I'm wondering what you think about that and how that connects to this discussion with Lewis.
Let me go to the bathroom.
When you say liberalism, are you talking about classic liberalism or like armpit hair girls?
No, no, no, no.
Different liberalism.
Liberalism, that word comes from the idea of freedom.
And so the classical liberalism is this idea of individual rights and freedom.
I think when smart people say liberalism, they always mean classical liberalism.
That's what they always mean.
And when people with MAGA hats and shotguns say liberalism, they don't mean that liberalism.
I know they're going armpit hair.
It makes talking about politics confusing when you say we're all liberals.
It doesn't really make a ton of sense.
Well, it's liberals versus libs.
Or that Americans are different liberalism.
Not libs.
That America is part of this liberal tradition.
And so in this weird way, conservatives in America are liberals.
They're conserving a liberal order.
And conservative is a term that is always relative to some other thing.
So if you're a conservative, you know, if you watch Downton Abbey and you think of those people as being conservatives, well, they're not really conservative in the American sense because hopefully we're not pro-aristocracy and wanting to keep an upstairs and a downstairs and the monarchy and all that, right?
So it depends on what you're conserving.
And what we're trying to conserve often in America is this liberal tradition where you believe in limited government, individual rights, separation of public and private, separation of church and state, all of that.
And it's this kind of package deal.
Patrick Dineen, who is a friend, and you should have him on the podcast sometime.
He would be great.
He has a thesis and it's kind of succinctly summarized in this line, which is really a well-thought-out line, you know, great for summarizing his argument that liberalism succeeded because, or it failed because it succeeded.
And it's this idea that the foundations of liberal thought go too far in separating individuals out from each other.
They don't emphasize duties.
They emphasize rights.
And once you have just this emphasis on individuals and what individuals want and their own wills and their own rights and no emphasis at all on community and duties and all of that, then it just, that logic will cannibalize itself and it leads us to our present moment.
So Deneen sees, I think, a kind of straight line from John Locke to the founders to the libs, you know, to the present moment.
And I think if I agree with Deneen on everything except for his actual analysis of the founding.
So.
So if he was right about the founding and if he was right about the kind of liabilities of founding thought, then I think the rest of the argument follow.
But my own take on it is it's more complicated than that, that I don't think that the founding era political thought actually is as individualistic as he thinks it is, that they didn't talk about duties or that they thought that human will was the ultimate thing.
I think there was a lot more emphasis on reason in this classical tradition.
But really what he would like and what a lot of people are talking about now in that school, Denine, and then you see Rod Dreyer and other people like that who are talking about what's the alternative?
What's the solution?
If we're going to kind of break with the founding and break with liberalism, what do we have?
Are we going to go back to monarchy?
Do you want an aristocracy?
Do you want a kind of church hierarchy running things?
And I think the answer is no.
It's just, no, we just want more deliberative communities.
We want to be able to live together.
We want to be able to run our own schools and have our churches be free and decide about the kind of way of life we want to live and have more emphasis on duties and obligations and less on individual rights all of the time because this rights-oriented and focused thing just makes everybody thinking about themselves all the time.
And that's not the way that you build a community.
But it's usually, it's not really clear exactly where you go from there, but it stands as a powerful analysis and critique of the founding and of our whole tradition.
And I think it had a lot of people just scratching their heads and thinking about, like Dan said, you know, it kind of upends all of the things that you had always thought about the founders and about our tradition.
Good job.
He said duties three times.
You didn't.
I know.
I could tell.
Were you smirking over there?
Just twitching.
It's too cheap of me.
I just know him.
It's too low-hanging.
I just know him.
Even for me, it's such low-hanging fruit that I have to bend over to get it, and I'm too lazy to bend over.
I went for him.
Oh, yeah, you did.
I remember my question.
Oh, it is a little bit off the trail of what we're talking about.
It's not really related to Lewis, but you were talking about the social dilemma and all that stuff and the psychologists shaping.
But, you know, there's the other element that's shaping it, and it is really the free market element of social media and the internet, which we dabble in a lot.
I mean, that's our life.
There is an inherent drive for people to be shocking and to make things clickbaity to outrage.
And because clicks get people to open your article and see the ads, which gets them money.
And so there's a whole free market aspect to the division and the outrage and things that it may not even be.
It could be that psychologists are trying to fix it.
It's the free market side.
I'm playing devil's advocate here.
So I guess my question is, I don't even have a question.
What do you think?
I don't know what the solution is.
I think you're right about that.
So the incentive structure is just built into it.
Yeah, the incentive structure is terrible.
It's just built into it.
And if the way that you monetize is by getting clicks and the way that you get people to click is by having sensational headlines, then what do you do about that?
And if the algorithm is just feeding you what you wanted in the first place, it doesn't seem actually to be that nefarious in the sense that you begin with, we want people to read this, and so we're going to push it to them.
Although maybe that does happen, I don't know.
But it seems more that what the algorithm's trying to figure out is, what do you want to read?
You want this?
We'll give you that.
You like that?
You want more of that?
Does that keep you online?
Does that keep you clicking ads?
And then we'll give you more of that.
And so that just is the incentive structure.
I don't know what the legal solution is.
I have friends that work in this area in the law, and they disagree about whether some kind of antitrust case could be made and whether there's some kind of legal solution.
I don't know enough about it to have an opinion about that.
I certainly don't like the idea of government control of communications.
And so, if the alternative to having a kind of free market with a bad incentive structure is to have the government put their stamp of approval on everything before it goes out, I wouldn't want that to be the case.
But it might be that we just kind of wake up to it, that we realize that this is often not good for us.
And we were just at a coffee shop before coming over here, and there was an ad for a new book that was coming out that was all about how screens are connected to loneliness.
That the more time you spend in front of a screen, the lonelier you end up being, and that there's this epidemic of loneliness.
And what's the antidote to that?
I think it's probably true friendship, right?
So, if social media, ironically, you have all these friends online, but you don't actually spend time with them and you don't have any meaningful, real connection with them.
The solution is probably not to regulate the social media, but it's to get people reconnected together with real friendships and real community.
And that's a bigger project.
And I don't know an easy solution to that.
That seems to like an individual person-by-person, family-by-family kind of a project.
Yeah, it seems to tie into what you're saying about the flip side of liberalism, classically, is duty, morality, what is your sense of right and wrong.
And you need that to decide not to post the clickbait article or to click on it or to that you have to have some foundation.
I think truth is a big one.
The very idea that there is such a thing as truth, that something could be true.
And part of that gets into the question: what kind of world would we have to live in for there to be such a thing as truth?
And if there is no such thing as truth, if you've got your truth, you've got your truth, we all have our own truth, we're just living our own truth.
If we all have our own perspective or own narrative, but if there's nothing else but that, then, well, that's just an extension of your will of what you want.
And so, if you're writing an article, we just make the most extreme claim you can that's going to get the most likes, the most looks, the most clicks, or whatever it would be.
But you're not really concerned for trying to say things that are true, right?
And I don't know, maybe truth might not do that well in the free market.
I'm not sure.
And if your goal is to activism on either side of the line, you're trying to get people on a team, then truth is secondary, right?
Yeah, right, right.
And that's one of the big, I think, the big worries that Lewis had, and that you can see in our culture today is this abandonment of the idea of truth.
And so, in a lot of the theories that are going around that are influential in our culture, there probably are some things in it that would be true.
That, you know, take one example, you have this whole growth of critical theory.
And if you've followed all this, it's the idea that the world is just set up as power structures, and you can analyze these power structures and you can try to take them down and dismantle them and all that.
There's probably a lot of truth there, but if you build that on a foundation of denying that there's any truth at all, then what else is there?
After you dismantle the power structure, then what?
Somebody's going to wield the power.
Maybe it's the people who dismantled it.
Do they have, is there anything else there but power?
Is it just about that?
And if it's just about that, and if enough people internalize that, then every relationship's adversarial, everything's zero-sum, everything's a fight, everything's about power, and it just doesn't yield itself to living together in community, caring about each other, having obligations.
I won't say duties.
Duties.
That was him.
I preempted your claim that I knew he wanted to.
No, I don't do duties.
That's below me.
They sure are.
You're making C.S. Lewis sound like a crazy libertarian.
So would he have had like the don't tread on me shirt?
Would he have done DMT?
I think he...
Done DMT, voted for Ron Paul.
I think he was something like a crazy libertarian.
Yeah, he was a get off my lawn kind of old man in a way.
He's got this essay called Delinquents in the Snow.
I don't know if you remember that one where he talks about these kids who came and vandalized his home and he's just an old man complaining about kids these days and how the social contracts broken down and all this.
So there is an element of that to Lewis.
He writes a whole essay about that.
That's a good thing.
He was appointed as a chair at Cambridge University and he gives this inaugural address and he's looking at the students.
It's kind of the end of his career.
And he tells the students to treat him like a dinosaur and that he was a kind of dying breed, that there wouldn't be many more people like him.
That he was somebody, partly he was thinking about his own academic work.
He said he could read the ancients as a native.
Like he actually understood them as though he were part of their culture.
And people couldn't do that anymore.
And so he said, just, you know, before you put me out to pasture, just study me and take away what you can from people like me because you won't get many more.
I'm going to say that before I die.
Study my body of work.
And there was a little bit of that to Lewis.
I think he greatly valued private things, the private sphere.
He always emphasized the most meaningful things about life were his friendships, those kinds of deep, meaningful friendships.
He often talked about the purpose of the state was to allow private moments of happiness.
And so, you know, there are a few different points in his work where he talks about why does the state exist?
Why does the economy exist?
Why is all this stuff there?
And he says, well, it's there because it enables a husband and wife to sit together and talk by a fire and enables two friends to have a beer and throw darts at a pub.
And it enables those moments of private happiness.
That's what it all exists for.
To the extent that it doesn't enable that or allow for that, then it's all just meaningless vanity and a vexation of spirit.
He says something along those lines.
And so his emphasis was always on not achieving national greatness, not having some kind of vista of what we want to do as a people, certainly not a kind of race pride or anything like that.
It was just having a basically competent government that can enable people to live their own individual lives and to pursue what's meaningful in their lives, to protect religious liberty and to protect true education.
And those are the things that were important to him.
And I think in our terms, that would make him something like a crazy libertarian.
So no mask in the profile picture for C.S. Lewis.
It's kind of hard, actually, to see Lewis.
I don't know what he would have done about this.
No.
He pronounced the bio.
He has a cavalier attitude toward death.
And it's always interesting to me reading Lewis and the way that he approaches this.
And some of this might have come from his time in World War I.
He has a horrible experience in World War I.
He loses friends.
He's on the trenches.
He's injured in the war.
And he says at a time that he just resolved that they could have his body for the time that they conscripted him or that he was going to war, but they couldn't have his mind and he would live differently from that.
And then from the rest of his life, he always had this kind of attitude about death.
There was this famous essay that was going around right at the beginning of the pandemic where he writes on living in an atomic age.
Yeah.
And everybody was like, someone had to apologize for posting that.
I think TGC posted it, and then later on they put a disclaimer, like, but still social distance and warning.
It's not that.
I thought that was a powerful essay, and I understood the connection.
But then I also understood that, yeah, okay, but it's not exactly the same as Adam Baum.
But he has this line where What do we do?
Adam bombs aren't contagious, though.
Yeah, that's true.
But he says, look, how should we live in an atomic age?
We know that at any moment we could die.
And we know that the whole community could be incinerated.
And then his answer is, well, we just live like we have always lived.
We've always lived under threat of death.
We never, tomorrow's not promised to anybody.
We know we might die tomorrow.
And so if the Adam Bomb finds us, let us find us doing meaningful, humane things like, you know, all the things that we talked about.
And then, yeah, that went around.
I was like, well, maybe that doesn't apply exactly to when the virus finds us, let it find us playing darts in a pub or something.
But it did seem like a healthy attitude that he had, which is we will all die.
That's a reality.
That it's much more meaningful for us to live well than to live long.
And we're not in control of that anyway.
And there is this line.
He has this essay on King Lear, the Shakespeare play, which I disclaim or haven't actually read.
But Lewis is talking about.
Well, I'm talking about it.
So if I make mistakes, I don't actually know what I'm talking about here.
But I remember this line from Lewis.
There's a scene where there's an injustice that's happening.
Somebody comes off stage who doesn't even have a name, the character.
He tries to defend this person against the injustice that's happening.
It's the blinding of this old man.
And he's immediately killed.
And Lewis then comments: if the play were real life and not a play, that's the role that would have been best for you to have acted.
This idea that somebody sees a wrong, decides to stand up for it because he just wants to do the right thing, and then he loses his life immediately, that that would be the best role to play in the film or in the play.
And that always seemed kind of a profound way to just, you control what you can control.
You try to live well, you do the right thing, and you leave the rest up to God.
And that was how Lewis lived, I think.
I was curious to talk about, so I was reading some of the essays from Abolition of Man.
I believe it's an it starts off, correct me if I'm wrong, there's this thing about the waterfall.
And the education people, this is the dumb way of explaining this.
The education smart people that wrote this textbook that he's criticizing were saying that the idea of beauty in the waterfall is not a real thing.
It's a thing that is perceived by the viewer of the waterfall.
And he's criticizing that, saying that beauty must be a real thing.
And so why does he go to, instead of going to morality, right and wrong, natural law, why does he go to beauty?
Which feels so subjective.
But at the same time, it is powerful because there are things that seem objectively beautiful.
Right, right.
Yeah, I think it's all connected for Lewis.
It's not just about morality.
This idea of objective standards would apply to music.
It would apply to art.
And it has consequences for all.
It applies to architecture.
It would have consequences for all of those things if we reject the idea of any standards.
And then his example there is: you look at a waterfall, you say that it's sublime or that it's beautiful.
What does that mean?
And the authors of this textbook that he's criticizing are telling the students that if you're really thinking clearly, what you're actually saying is that it makes me feel a certain way.
I'm not actually saying anything about the waterfall.
It's not about the object, it's about the subject.
It's all subjective.
But if we think that, if everything's just subjective, then there's just no difference.
And the interesting thing about The Abolition of Man for me is that Lewis reads that in this educational textbook for really high school students in England.
And he devotes three of his lectures for these endowed lectures at the University of Durham to trying to take down this textbook.
But he's a kind of a mundane statement they make in the textbook, which they probably take for granted.
Right, they're probably not thinking too much of it.
And he's a gentleman enough that he doesn't want to name the authors.
So he gives them pseudonyms in the book, and he just calls it the green book.
It doesn't even say what book he's criticizing because he's trying to not ruin their careers and all that.
When I was doing research for this book, I put in an interlibrary loan request for this book that he called the green book.
It's actually called The Control of Language.
You're going to get canceled to the authorship.
I know.
So it came in and it's green.
It was like the dust jacket had been taken off a long time ago.
It was just a green book that came in, which is what he calls it.
And interesting side note, it was the foreword for the book was written by Rupert Murdoch's great uncle.
I don't know if that means anything, but these guys.
I made annoyance to see a little bit of a burden.
So he's Walter Murdoch, who was Rupert Murdoch's great uncle is a professor of English from Australia or whatever.
Interesting.
Writes the foreword.
And then so Lewis has this book.
He's criticizing the way they teach students to think about the English language.
And then he connects that to politics at the end.
You know, this is where all these things end up connecting.
So he's talking about what do you say when you say a waterfall is beautiful?
What do you mean by that?
And then at the end of the day, it's also going to be, what do you mean when you say something's just or unjust?
Are you just saying, I don't like that?
That makes me feel bad.
Are you just describing your own feelings?
I don't like the Holocaust.
Yes, right.
I find it disagreeable.
Hitler gives me cold pricklies.
Right.
And if that's what we're saying, where does that leave us?
And I think that's what Lewis foresaw.
He said, you know, for a while there, we might live in a culture that had been conditioned and was living on the fumes of Christianity.
So you have, we kind of have these vaguely Christian ideas that we should protect the weak and we should care for the poor and we shouldn't just glorify violence and we shouldn't just think that the strong should rule.
But is that just because those things kind of make us feel good?
Or is it because there's something objectively true about them?
And if there's nothing true, what happens when we feel a different way?
Or what happens generations from now when we have different ideas about these things?
So that was always his worry.
And I think that's a concern that we see today and could still think about.
So Lewis would say that there's art that's objectively beautiful.
Yeah.
So like classical music versus rap core.
Yeah.
Like he would say that classical music, well, maybe, is beautiful.
You'd like a teaching at the hear rap core music.
I assume he would.
I don't know.
What year did he die?
He died in 63, the same day as he was.
He probably wouldn't have hit rap core.
Yeah, he got overshadowed pretty big.
And Huxley died that day, too.
So yeah, Aldous Huxley and JFK and Lewis all died on the same day.
Illuminati.
It was Murdoch.
Yeah.
Walter.
One of the Murdochs.
Yes.
So he would have thought that.
I don't know what he thought about rap music or what he would have thought about rap.
I kind of have some idea.
He probably wouldn't have loved it.
But he did think there would be objective standards.
So it's not like all music is subjective.
It's just whatever you like.
That there would be something built into the structure of reality about melody and about notes and about how things come together.
That would mean that even if you had some, even if you found pleasure in and you liked listening to pots and pans bang together, that that was somehow pleasing to you, it would tell you that there's something wrong with you.
People who like lint biscuit.
Yeah.
Something wrong with that.
Corrupted.
That it wouldn't, it's not all subjective.
It doesn't mean that you have rightly ordered desires or that you appreciate.
So you could not appreciate beauty or you could not appreciate good music or whatever it is, but there would be actual standards to judge those things, that it's not all subjective.
And I think this kind of philosophy of subjectivism starts creeping into every discipline.
And Lewis kind of, he saw that.
He was in the academic world.
But if it starts creeping into standards of art, then you get abstract art.
I always think it's fascinating if you go to an art museum and below the placard who tells you the artist in the year and whatever, a lot of times it will tell you the philosophy that influenced the art.
And you see certain kinds of philosophy.
And in this postmodern there is no truth kind of philosophy, the art makes no sense.
I mean, there's not proportionality and there's not certain angles and it's just kind of, you know, it all becomes abstract.
And then it's hard to say what's art and what's not art and all that.
This picture of all these grizzly bears launching on rockets.
You know, there are probably different objective standards for how to evaluate satire.
Satire has its own eternal standards to judge a good satire.
Actually, there's probably some truth to that.
So if Lewis was thinking about comedy and whether there are objective standards for what makes something funny, is there any such thing as objectively funny?
Where what is comedy?
Is comedy a kind of teasing on the truth where you're actually uncovering and unpacking things that are true, but doing it in this kind of way that looks at it from a different angle and does it in a way that sparks humor.
And are there certain things that we would say, like, that's just not funny.
You don't joke about that, that that's objectively not a funny joke.
And there might be something there.
I was listening to this comedian on Netflix the other day.
He was telling atheist jokes.
And at the end of the joke, it was always about, should you be grateful to God if you get a good prognosis?
And the whole joke was, no, you should be thinking you're a doctor and God had nothing to do with it.
And I remember thinking, well, it didn't seem objectively funny to me.
But then the funny part that he had and made me appreciate American culture was he's a Scottish comedian and he's performing in Ohio.
And he says, after he tells this atheist joke, that a guy in the front row lifts up his shirt and shows him his gun.
And he looks at him and he's kind of worried about it.
And then another guy stands up and he says, you're in America.
You've got a First Amendment right to speak your mind.
I don't appreciate your joke, but if that guy shoots you, I'll shoot him.
Patrick is the measure of what's objectively funny.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's the last one.
If he laughs, then you hit it right.
Eternally funny.
Yeah.
Do you run the articles by Patrick first?
Yeah, we just present them to him.
He sits on his throne.
And if he laughs, it's good.
If not, he shakes around like a muffin.
Roll around the floor.
So what about the very science-y argument that we can find our morality because of oxytocin?
It bubbles up and then when we're doing right, and then it bubbles down when we're doing wrong or something like that.
I don't know.
I heard a speech about that.
It's just chemicals, man.
It's just the chemicals.
It's all chemicals.
I don't know how you could follow that logic because what happens when you get that dopamine hit from doing things that are, well, I guess maybe that's just how you know.
But you really like, I mean, some people find masochists or whoever, they find great pleasure in inflicting pain or being cruel.
Yeah, the moment you find somebody who gets that little rush of dopamine from a bad thing.
That can't be.
Yeah, right.
Torturing puppies and enjoying it can't be the objective measure of whether that's right or wrong.
And I don't think anybody, any serious person would say that.
Yeah, I think there are some serious people.
Maybe they say that.
Maybe they say that.
They need something besides God totally stupid.
Yeah, so that's an interesting question.
One, is there an objective standard?
Two, how do you find out what it is?
And could you substitute for this idea of reason something else?
The challenge with the natural law tradition has always been that people disagree about justice.
And so it's at once the challenge, but it's also the motivating factor.
So the very fact that we disagree about justice is precisely the reason why we have this quest for justice and why we want to understand what the true standard is and why we want to engage in this analysis.
But the fact that everybody disagrees about it is also what makes us skeptical that there is any such true standard.
Everybody disagrees.
But mere disagreement can't be the thing that means there is no justice.
Because if I register my disagreement with your disagreement, that doesn't just negate the whole thing.
There has to be an answer.
But it does become hard.
And for Lewis, this was the role of education.
He thought that not only do individuals have access to knowledge of the natural law, but they also have to be taught in the same way that there's a true answer in math.
There's an objective mathematics, but it doesn't mean everybody knows how to do math.
You still have to be taught math.
And so there was a tradition of moral education and moral formation that had to take place.
And he talks about that in the abolition of man as men transmitting manhood to men, as he says.
And he's using that inclusive of women, of course, as well.
But it's humanity transmitting humanity and doing it through this kind of moral education.
But it was that moral education always presumed that there was some standard that we were trying to shape students to truly be courageous because courageous is a real virtue or that courage is a real virtue, that it's not just all arbitrary, that cruelty is not equal to charity or something like that.
When he talked about men without chests, was that a transphobic comment?
I don't know.
Because men can have chests.
I think Lewis probably wouldn't have even that.
That would have been a hard moment for him to even contemplate.
He died in the 60s, and that would have been a strange thing.
But seriously, what does he mean by mental health?
What does he mean by chest?
So he's thinking about the ancient conception of a human being and of human nature was you had reason on the one hand, and then you had something that was associated with your head.
And then you had just your base appetites, your animal instincts, and that was associated with your gut or even lower than your gut.
Like what?
Knees.
These knees.
Stuff became the knees and the between there.
And so those were the two elements of a human being, that the human being was partly animal.
You had those animal appetites and instincts, and then partly rational.
And then there was this thing in the middle that was kind of hard to name exactly what it was.
The Greeks talked about it sometimes as a kind of thumos, which is a hard word to even translate, or some element of our passions or our emotions that had to be rightly ordered and rightly shaped in order to allow our reason to rule our appetites.
And so what he thought was once we get rid of the middle part, men without chests, then there's nothing left to prevent appetite from dominating our reason.
So then our reason just becomes instrumental.
It's the way that we get the thing that we want, but it doesn't tell us what we should want.
There is no answer to what we should want.
And so, you know, you reason, you scheme, you use your mind to try to just achieve the things that you already wanted.
But what do you want?
Well, it's just whatever you happen to desire, and that's just from your animal instincts.
And so that was what he was always worried about.
That's the men without chests.
And that's the abolition of man.
It's the abolition of what makes human beings different from the animals.
We just end up just like the beasts, he thinks, under that philosophy.
Want to go hang out in the subscriber lounge?
Yeah, we need to get over there.
Juicy stuff.
I found a list of a guy who said he has shocking truth proving C.S. Lewis was a heretic and is burning in hell right now.
Uh-oh.
All right.
So if you want to find out what that is, you've got to subscribe to the map.
We're going to talk about that and do the 10 questions and anything else.
All right.
Salacious and Jason Dyer's C.S. Lewis on politics and the natural law.
All right.
Thanks.
He wrote all the good chapters, Michael J. Watson.
Yeah.
Not so much.
Yeah, the chapters he loved were Michael's.
Coming up next for Babylon B subscribers.
He did have on the more racy side for Lewis, he before he became a Christian.
There are really kind of two things here.
And there's some speculation among his biographers about whether or not he had a sexual relationship with her, with Mrs. Moore.
Boy, do you want to read the shocking truths proving Seuss Lewis was a heretic in his burning in hell?
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