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April 12, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
48:35
RIGHT TURN Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep309
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I'm really interested in the subject of conversion, religious conversion, but also political conversion.
So what makes people who are diehard Democrats, who are on the left, suddenly see the light and begin to move over into the conservative camp?
I'll talk about that. I'm really chuckling over leftist paranoia that Elon Musk will do to Twitter, what the digital moguls on places like Twitter have been doing to conservatives.
It's our turn now. Debbie joins me.
We're going to talk about a forthcoming trip to Israel, and you're invited.
And I'll discuss Dante's treatment of free will in the purgatorial terrace of wrath.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
What causes the process of political conversions?
Some people call it red-pilling, but it's the idea that you have been a lifelong leftist and Democrat, and then you begin to see the light.
Well, there's a remarkable article about this written by a guy named Leo Leibovitz.
It's called The Turn. It appears in Tablet magazine.
You can look it up. I recommend the The full article.
But he begins by talking about how, when he was a young guy, he says, you know, he believed the truth and justice kind of point you to the left.
He says, if you're a caring human being, you want to help the less fortunate.
You know you can't help them all the way, but you'd like to help them at least some of the way.
And he goes, how else do you do that if you're not on the left, if you're not some kind of a Democrat?
And he goes, besides, even if the Democrats are doing some things that are wrong or that fall short, he goes, on the other side of These horrible conservatives, and they just don't care.
And so this guy, Leo Leibovitz, was sort of raised and marinated in this kind of doctrine.
He says, we felt we were on the right side of history.
We always felt that the future belongs to us.
And he goes, this pathway took me to a lot of success.
He goes, I was a young socialist.
I went to Columbia University.
And he says, not only did I have this kind of intellectual sense that I was the sophisticated one, the intelligent one, But I got all kinds of social benefits.
He's like, I was invited to all kinds of dinner parties on the Upper West Side.
He said, you know, I would meet all kinds of prominent figures on the left.
Salman Rushdie, Susan Sontag.
So, this sense of belonging, it's a social benefit of belonging to a left which dominates our culture, right?
And then he says, however, that for a lot of people, it happens to him, he undergoes what he calls the turn.
And he says the turn doesn't happen overnight.
He goes, it starts with a kind of twitch and then a doubt.
And then he says, quote, an annoying sense of panic.
And then he says, suddenly you feel like you're politically homeless because you begin to question things that you previously took for granted.
And the moment you start questioning them out loud, your own friends begin to attack you and desert you and ignore you.
So you begin to feel like a political pariah.
Why? Because you realize that the left, your own team, is actually very intolerant.
And that intolerance doesn't become obvious at the beginning.
So the turn is produced, he says, by a sense of contradiction.
He goes, you're for free speech.
And you suddenly realize that many people on the left don't like free speech.
He goes, you raise the question that, wait a minute, are these lockdowns and school closures good for people who are the most marginalized in our society?
Aren't they hurt the most?
And then people give you these dirty looks.
And so right away, you begin to question, wait a minute, do they care about these people as much as they claim to?
And then you raise the question, wait a minute, if you're trying to help people who are trying to get a start in life, does it really help to go to Hispanic stores and black stores and in the name of Antifa or social justice, burn them down, pull the inhabitants out of cars and start threatening them and trashing them?
He goes again, when you raise these questions...
You begin to get attacked.
And he says it's the attack generally gives you a very strange feeling which you normally don't have as an adult because you almost have to go back to when you were in junior high school and some bully was like threatening you on the playground and you felt that sense of awkwardness and humiliation and fear.
And he says, Even though you're given all these labels, people will say things like, oh, you know, you're a racist and you're anti-science and you're this and you're that.
He goes, but you know what?
He goes, if you can summon up the courage to break with the left, to reject even the social benefits that come with belonging on the left...
And you begin to push away from the left.
He goes, I'm not quoting him.
He says, this story will have a happy ending.
He goes, the freedom that you feel on the other side is so real, it's physical.
And he has a beautiful analogy.
He goes, it's like emerging from a long stretch underwater and taking that first deep breath in the cool afternoon air.
So, in other words, it's liberating.
And he goes, listen, don't be held back.
Don't say things like, well, you know what?
The left was the party of...
There were leftists who went and fought for civil rights in 1962.
Oh, well, you know, the FDR guys was the party of unions in the 1930s.
He goes... Who cares what the left did 70 years ago or 40 years ago?
We are living with the left today, and these people are a danger.
They are a menace. And so he says, listen, they're going to call you all kinds of names, but who cares?
You're a fascist.
You're a conspiracy theorist.
You're anti-science.
Blah, blah, blah. He goes, the real word to describe you, he says, is you're free.
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Elon Musk was recently on Joe Rogan's podcast and apparently he basically lit up and he lit up both literally and symbolically and then Elon says, quote, Twitter's next board meeting is going to be lit.
I think what he's saying is that this is not just a guy who wants to buy Twitter shares.
He doesn't just want to become the largest Twitter shareholder.
He's becoming more of an activist.
And I think this couldn't come.
This is coming when we really need it.
And Musk has, after first buying the shares, now joined the Twitter board, which means he's going to be showing up at board meetings and he's going to be in a position of authority because, after all, this is a guy who...
Who has the ability to buy a lot more shares and basically sees, you can say, virtually full control of this company.
And the big shots at Twitter know it.
So Parag Agarwal, the kind of Indian CEO of Twitter, he's like, I welcome Elon Musk to the board.
And Jack Dorsey, I welcome Elon Musk to the board.
So these guys are sounding the right noises and they have to because they really don't have any choice.
I mean, Elon Musk could buy these two guys and put them out on the street.
With pocket money, as far as Elon Musk is concerned.
Now, apparently, Elon Musk's presence on the board is sending shockwaves through Twitter.
And conservatives have actually been aggravating this angst on the part of the left by saying, bring back Trump!
Bring back Trump! Lauren Boebert tweets in all caps, bring back Trump!
Now, the Twitter staff immediately goes rushing to the New York Times and rushing to Reuters to say, oh, you know, at Twitter, board members don't make policy.
You know, policy is made at the administrative level.
So these fools think that somehow, just because the manual says the policy is made by the staff, that board members don't have any impact.
Well, welcome to the real world.
Guys, board members control organizations, and the way they do it is by hiring and firing people, and so if the guys in charge aren't carrying out policy, you know what?
Remove them. Bring other people in their place.
Now, a few guys on Twitter have already quit, and I think this is actually fantastic news.
These are obviously intellectual pugs who are afraid of free speech.
They're afraid of things like Elon Musk's statement where he goes, why should Twitter be, quote, the de facto arbiter of free speech?
In fact, One of the things Elon Musk did is about a week before he made this big purchase of a 9.1% stake in Twitter, he polled his 80 million Twitter followers and he goes, hey, listen, tell me whether Twitter lives up to the principle of free speech.
The majority voted no.
And by the way, it should be said that Twitter is the best of all the social media platforms in terms of free speech.
Facebook is an absolute joke.
Facebook is essentially a, you may say, a meta voice of tyranny.
YouTube is exactly the same.
So these are the thugs of the free speech world.
And Twitter is not quite a full-scale thug.
It's kind of a half-thug.
But it's better than the other two, although it's still pretty bad.
And I mentioned, I think yesterday or the day before, how Twitter bans the Babylon Bee for making a joke.
And in fact, Musk had called up the Babylon Bee guys.
He goes, is it really? Is it that bad that for a satirical site they ban you for making jokes?
What is satirical sites supposed to do?
And so I think Musk realizes there's a deep problem here.
In a way, Musk has a great opportunity on Twitter that he doesn't have or wouldn't have on Facebook.
Why? Because Facebook is structured in such a way.
There are kind of two classes of shares.
You can invest in Facebook, sure.
But even if you buy a whole bunch of shares, it doesn't give you any control because there are two classes of shares.
And the majority of the, you can call it the ruling class shares, are owned by Zuckerberg.
So Zuckerberg maintains control of Facebook no matter what financial stake other people buy in it.
Twitter's not like that. There's only one class of shares.
And so basically, he who provides the gold, this is the golden rule, he who provides the gold makes the rules.
And I think Elon Musk figured that out, and he figured that he could have the kind of leverage and have the kind of influence at Twitter that he couldn't have at Facebook.
Now, interestingly, Twitter people have been going to the media, as I said, all off the record.
They're saying things like, we're very worried, because after all, we've been working really hard to have Twitter be a constructive forum.
This is all code.
Constructive forum means throwing our opponents off the platform.
Oh yeah, we've been neutral arbiters of free speech.
No, they haven't been neutral in the slightest.
When is the last time they fact-checked things happening on the left?
When's the last time they threw prominent leftists one after the other off the platform?
That's never happened.
Think of all the people who perpetrated the Russia collusion hoax.
One hoax on top of the other.
None of them held accountable. All the people who trumpeted the Jussie Smollett hoax.
Why are those people? Or which one?
More addicted. Or, right, think of all the dictators, the Iranian mullahs, the Vladimir Putin.
All these guys thrive on Twitter.
And they don't just call for insurrections.
They actually do insurrections.
They launch massive violence against their own...
Twitter doesn't care. Twitter cheers them on, gives them a massive platform.
So the hypocrisy is unspeakable here.
And fortunately, Elon Musk is on it.
I think he recognizes that he's in a position to do something about this.
And delightfully, we'll see what he actually does do.
but delightfully I think he's taking the first steps to actually do it.
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Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, has a great idea that he is now carrying out.
What's the idea?
The idea is really simple.
The Biden administration is taking in all these illegals across the border and then dumping them in all kinds of places around Texas.
And Abbott's point is, we don't really want them, but you evidently want them because you're letting them in.
So you can have them.
And essentially what Texas is doing is it's now chartered 900 buses to take these illegals to dump them in Washington, D.C. You have them.
So we got to follow this because this is genius.
I mean, this is actually the kind of stuff Republicans need to do.
I'm going to quote Abbott.
He goes, we're sending them to the U.S. Capitol, where the Biden administration will be able to more immediately address the needs of the people that they are allowing to come across our border.
Abbott says he got the idea because some of the smaller towns in Texas were getting really angry at these illegals being stashed in their communities.
And they realized there were some leftist politicians in San Antonio who were saying, Oh, we've got to welcome the illegals and so on.
And so these small towns were like, you know what?
We'll send them to San Antonio.
And so this movement begins in Texas to take the illegals and basically dispatch them to the places in Texas where there seem to be leftist politicians cheering them on.
But Abbott goes, wait a minute, why are we rearranging them in Texas?
Let's send them off to D.C. Quote, What better place for them to go than to the steps of the Capitol?
They get to see the wonderful Capitol but they also get to be closer to the people who are making these policies that are allowing people to come to the border illegally.
Interestingly, Abbott is not permitted to take illegals against their will and do this.
Because apparently, if you do that, then you're opening up the issue of, well, are you actually kidnapping them?
And so the state of Texas doesn't want to be involved with any of that.
But the idea is quite simple.
You go to these illegals and you go, hey, would you like to go to Washington, D.C.? And a lot of them go, yes, yes, I would.
Yes, si, senor. So, okay, fine.
Here's a bus. Get on it. So these illegals have been previously the Biden guys were like, hey, get on a bus.
Hey, get on a plane. And so now the Texans are like, hey, get on a bus.
Get on a plane. And off you go to Washington, D.C. Now, here's something interesting.
This is, by the way, Texas Division of Emergency Management Chief.
It's Nim Kidd. He's like, the state has got a pool of 900 buses.
And he goes, we are ready to go.
Now, interestingly...
Interestingly, the moment that Texas began to put these illegals on the buses, guess what?
Suddenly, they noticed that the Biden administration is no longer dumping illegals in Texas.
In fact, I'm now quoting Seth Christensen.
This is a guy... Who makes this observation.
He says, he goes, So what does this tell you?
Well, what this tells you is that the moment that these guys have to deal with the illegals themselves, the Biden people, they're like, okay, no, no, no, no, no.
This is not working out the way we envisioned.
Our idea was to take these illegals and put them in swing states.
Where over time they would become loyal Democrats and help swing those states into our camp.
But once you send them to Washington, D.C., it's a whole different issue.
We now have to deal with them.
We have to feed them. I mean, think about it.
The Biden people don't care about any of these people.
They're political pawns.
They're tools of their agenda.
And what Greg Abbott has done is essentially call their bluff.
He says, you want them? You can have them.
And the Biden people suddenly go, well, you know what?
We'll send them elsewhere. And so when Republicans take initiative and strike back and think of creative ways to push back on what the left is doing, you realize that the left is not so tough.
Their aggression relies on our lassitude and our timidity and our acquiescence.
And if we don't give them that timidity, we don't give them that acquiescence, we discover that they're not so tough after all.
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This past weekend, Debbie and I drove to College Station, the site of Texas A&M University, for something that was very auspicious, namely a ring ceremony.
A ring ceremony. My baby, Juliana, your stepdaughter, got her ring, her Texas A&M ring.
And me not being an Aggie, I graduated from...
The now Texas State University, but when I graduated, it was Southwest Texas State University.
But anyway, The only thing that I got when I got my ring was the box that it came in.
There was no fanfare to get my ring or anything like that.
It's like, go get your glass ring.
Exactly. I got my glass ring.
There we go. Put it on. That was it.
But this is a whole big deal.
But I thought, because it was a ceremony, that there was going to be this, like, you know, she was going to walk on stage or something like that.
Oh, no, no. It's simply you go to your table where it's alphabetized and they have your ring and you go tell them your name and they give you your ring and that's pretty much it.
Yeah, but when you post it on social media, all the Aggies weigh in and they've got all their sayings and they've got all their phrases.
Anyway, it was fun. It was fun, yeah.
Let's talk about another trip coming up.
This one is coming up the end of November.
Well, the very end of November and the early part of December.
So Debbie and I are going to Israel and we're going with a kind of a tour group, which you're welcome to be a part of it.
It's actually super exciting.
Talk a little bit about, honey, talk a little bit about where we're going.
Right. So before I do that, I have been thinking about this tour, this trip for a very long, probably since we started the podcast.
Why? Because we have to do the podcast from there.
And guess who has to figure out a way to do that?
Honey, don't go into all your duties as a producer.
But we've always wanted to go to Israel, and neither of us have been.
That's the interesting thing. Your mom went.
Right. My mom went in 2014, and she loved it.
It was a trip of a lifetime for her.
She's now 86 years old, and she's really glad that she was able to do that.
I think she was 79 when she went.
So she was very happy to have done that.
And as you know, I was a worship leader for many years.
And one of the most amazing experiences that I have every Good Friday is singing about, you know, Jesus' sacrifice on the cross and everything.
And so I always visualized going to Via Dolorosa.
Well, look over here on the schedule.
There it is. And I see Via Dolorosa is on the schedule.
Well, the schedule is...
You leave on November 30th.
That's how you join the tour.
And it goes all the way through December 9th.
But, I mean, look at this. It's like the Mount of Beatitudes, the boat ride on the Sea of Galilee, Caesarea, the Western Wall.
Jerusalem and the Old City, the Jewish Quarter, the Christian Quarter, the Mount of Olives, the Dead Sea Region, Tour of Bethlehem.
This is, I mean, quite apart from the historical significance, the political significance, there's obviously the theological significance.
I think it has a...
This could have a real fortifying effect on our understanding, our spiritual wisdom, and our faith.
So they gave us the table of contents.
And I mean, literally, it's from Tel Aviv to Tiberias.
Is that how you say that? I mean, it's incredible.
around the Sea of Galilee, the Northern Boundary Region, Tiberias to Jerusalem.
I mean, going to Jerusalem.
That's amazing.
So Sebastian Gorka and I are the two kind of, I won't say tour leaders.
We're not really tour leaders.
No, you're the speakers.
There'll be tour guides on board.
We're speakers.
So we'll be talking about current events as well as current events in their context.
Yeah.
So it's super exciting and there's room if you wanna go.
This is like a wonderful trip to plan.
It's kind of a way to get away from and get out of the whole, you know, closed-in COVID environment and do it.
And important is, you know, they had a COVID requirement that you had to have all your vaccines and everything, but they have lifted those.
I know. As far as we know, it's all good to go.
The part of your joke was you didn't think Gorka was Maxine.
You're like, I don't know if he can go.
They might throw him out.
But no, he can go.
Right. And so anybody that wants to go can go.
How do they go? Let's talk about this.
Right. So to sign up or to look at the schedule, go to StandWithIsraelTour.com.
And we're going to play a little trailer.
At the end of this segment so that you can get a little glimpse of what it's going to look like.
But if you go to StandWithIsraelTour.com, you will be able to get a lot more detail than what we're giving you here.
And it'll just be really fun.
I don't really know what the limit is, but there's plenty of room still on it.
Well, this is the time to plan because obviously you need a little bit of a runway to get your tickets and so on.
But... You know, I've been all over the world, but I have not been to Israel.
And this has been sort of one.
And it's kind of fun that we're going to be doing it together.
And it'll be fun to do it with you.
So if you're interested, sign up.
Standwithisraeltour.com. That's where you go to...
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you I talked in the last segment about what Governor Abbott in Texas is doing to highlight what Republicans can achieve when they push back on the left.
Now I want to illustrate kind of the same point by switching to Florida and the conflict between Disney as a company and the Republican legislators who control the state of Florida.
So let's follow this story Really, just as a news story to see how it developed.
It all started with Florida passing a bill, a legislation that limits the exposure of very young children to indoctrination on the issue of sexuality.
And the new Florida law, which was signed by Governor DeSantis, basically says that you can't Teach kids who are very young about sexual matters at all.
That is something that is left for their parents.
And the Disney company originally said nothing about this, but after a while, apparently internally, they got a lot of woke pressure.
You've got to come out against this.
And the left sort of named this the Don't Say Gay Bill.
Now, for the Florida legislators, there's nothing in the law about gay at all.
It's essentially... We don't want young children before they are even in any mature sense sexually aware to be indoctrinated.
So it's an anti-indoctrination law.
And by the way, it doesn't prevent kids from talking about these subjects.
It just prevents the school officially or the administrators and teachers from indoctrinating them.
One of the Florida legislators says students can talk about whatever they want to bring up.
But sometimes the right answer is you really ought to talk to your parents about that.
So that's the point. The law is leaving the moral authority of the discussion of sexuality with very young children in the hands of parents.
Disney, interestingly, is a company that has been very cozy with the communist Chinese.
They make all kinds of accommodations for that.
They're a company that runs cruise lines to other countries that, by the way, criminalize homosexuality.
Disney seems to have no problem with that.
But domestically, they got this woke pressure.
And so the Disney CEO... Basically, comes out aggressively.
This guy's a guy named Bob Chapek.
And he says he condemns the Florida law.
And he essentially says that Disney is going to be officially opposed to it.
And Disney is going to be bringing political pressure to bear against the law.
And this annoyed the Republican legislators who passed the law.
Because Disney, by the way, gets all kinds of benefits in the state of Florida.
Let's talk about that.
About half a century ago, the Florida legislature passed something called the Reedy Creek Improvement Act.
And this was an act that basically gave Disney an incredible amount of autonomy in In Florida.
Essentially, it treated Disney like its own city.
Although Disney is in Orange County, Florida, Orange County, in a sense, permitted Disney not only to have a company and have corporate facilities, that's of course completely normal, But to do things like oversee land use, provide public services like fire protection, emergency medical services, water services, electricity, sanitation.
In other words, Disney, in a sense, is the mayor and the public authority that runs its own town.
Now, where does Disney get that kind of authority?
Well, they basically get it from the state of Florida.
And what the state of Florida gives, the state of Florida can take back.
And so, Republican legislators in Florida have been meeting, they've actually had two meetings, basically saying, listen, Look, Disney has every right to decide that they're officially opposed to what the state of Florida is doing and to the laws of the state of Florida, democratically passed laws according to the Constitution of Florida, and so the state of Florida doesn't have to give Disney the benefits that it has given Disney in the past.
And this is huge because this is again a case where the Republican legislature is not just lying down and going, listen, you can walk all over us.
We wouldn't dream of walking all over you.
No. This is a case where Disney is being taught a lesson and a very important and valuable lesson it is.
So Disney can make a choice.
To some degree, they made a choice.
They decided to go with the woke movement.
And let's think about this. Disney is, by and large, think about it.
This is a company that once had a very wholesome image that parents felt safe with Disney because of who the Disney characters were.
But these Disney characters themselves are kind of under transformation.
This has now become a thoroughly woke company.
I recommend having nothing to do with Disney.
And I recommend that the state of Florida, in a sense, use its power, use its authority to To teach Disney a lesson that they won't soon forget.
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We are continuing our ascent up the Purgatorial Mountain with Dante the Pilgrim.
Yesterday I talked about Provenzan Silvani and we went through the Terraces of Pride and then the Terrace of Envy.
And now we come to the Terrace of Wrath.
And notice that in the Purgatorio, it's kind of the opposite of the Inferno.
In the Inferno, as you go down, the sins become more serious.
In Purgatorio, it's the opposite.
You begin with the more serious sins, pride.
Envy, wrath.
And then as you move up the mountain, in a sense, the sins are lighter.
Sloth, gluttony, and incontinence or lust.
But here we are in the Terrace of Wrath.
And we suddenly realize we're at Canto 16.
We are dead in the middle, not just of the Purgatorio.
Let's remember that there are 34 cantos in the Inferno, 33 in Purgatorio and 33 in Paradiso.
So we're in the middle of the Purgatory and we're in the middle of the entire poem.
And for Dante, this is not insignificant.
Dante's poem is constructed with the most elaborate architecture and cleverness.
And Dante, as we know, just from where we are in the poem, is going to be discussing some things or thing that is extremely important and critical to understanding not just the poem as a whole, but the architecture of life and the afterlife as a whole.
And no surprise, Dante, in the Terrace of Wrath, introduces three monumental themes.
And I'm going to mention them now, and then I'm going to kind of go through them one by one in sequence over the next few days.
So the first theme is the theme of free will.
This is the critical issue of whether or not our actions are determined by our own choices or are they determined by external forces over which we have no control.
I'm going to focus really on that one today.
The second issue is what is the true meaning of love?
This may seem like an easy one.
It turns out it's not.
Dante gives a definition of love that at first glance will seem utterly surprising to us.
What? This is not what we think of at all.
This is not what people talk about when they talk about being in love or when they talk about love.
And yet Dante's definition, you'll see, comes closer to what love is than a lot of contemporary rhetoric on the subject.
And the third topic, very interesting because it's coming in this most intellectual section of the Divine Comedy.
Dante here is moving, in a sense, into philosophical territory, and we have to pay careful attention to what he says.
But nevertheless, the third topic is about the limits of the intellect.
So here's Dante, and he's going to be making all these intellectual distinctions, but he's going to conclude this discussion by talking about what the intellect cannot know.
So valuable though the intellect is...
And essential though it is, even for the moral life, the intellect is not sufficient.
It is not by itself fully reliable because there are questions and answers that lie beyond its reach.
Now, Canto 16.
Let's follow the Canto and we'll get a very good sense of the issues that Dante is talking about.
And the first one we're going to come across is the issue of free will.
So here is Dante.
And he hears the wrathful.
And these are the wrathful, of course, undergoing purgation.
And they're all singing together in perfect concord.
They're singing the Agnes Day.
And let's think about why wrathful people would need to sing in concord.
Because wrath is, in a sense, being...
Taking to yourself a certain emotion.
I'm angry about this.
So when you are in conformity, when you are singing in tune, when you're with other people, that introduces a sense of cooperation, of meekness, of temperance, of participation, and that is the very opposite of rats.
So you can see how Dante chooses very carefully What the souls are doing, what they're doing is rehabilitating themselves from this kind of wrathful, you may say, predisposition.
Dante himself calls it loosening the knot of wrath.
And then, as Dante is passing through, he sees a shade, he sees a soul in the Terrace of Wrath, and this is a guy named Marco Lombardo.
And Dante addresses him in a very beautiful way.
Dante says, Wow, what a succinct description of the purgatorial process.
You who cleanse your soul to give it back.
In other words, you are readying your soul for heaven.
You are purifying yourself so that you are, in a sense, ready and worthy to present yourself before God.
And this guy replies, I was a Lombard.
Marco was my name.
So he's Marco of Lombardo.
And historians have tried to figure out, who is this guy?
We've never really heard of him.
And it turns out that they don't know, we don't know a whole lot about this Marco Lombardo character.
He was not a prominent figure of And it's not clear whether Dante has, in a sense, invented this character.
So what Marco Lombardo, very important, by the way, figure in the Purgatorio, but he's not important for who he was historically.
He's just important for what he's going to say.
and he's important for the subject matter that is being discussed. So Dante, as it turns out, poses a question to him. And this is Dante for the first time getting a very philosophical and genuinely wanting to know the answer. And it's a question, as you will see, of almost eternal significance. The world indeed, as you have just declared, this is Dante, is destitute of every virtue
known, swarming with evils ever breeding more.
What is the cause of this?
Please make it clear that I may teach the truth to other men.
Some see it in the stars, some on the earth.
Here's Dante. And Dante is saying, in effect, listen, why is the world so messed up?
And he goes, some people think it's due to the stars, and other people put the cause on Earth.
Now, let's be very clear here.
What Dante is saying is that on the one hand, there are people who think that bad actions are caused by innate predispositions.
And by the way, in Dante's time, most people thought that these innate predispositions came from the stars.
So, for example, if someone was predisposed to anger or predisposed to jealousy, that's because their disposition was dictated by an outside force.
Now, interestingly today, more people believe that we have innate genetic dispositions, but the point is the same.
Dante is basically saying, is it the case that our bad behavior is due to something we can't control?
Now, in Dante's own time, most people were much stronger believers in astrology than we are today.
Most people in Dante's time did think that your predisposition was dictated by the stars.
Today, there are more people who would say it's dictated by your innate kind of inner self.
But either way, it makes no difference because the issue Dante is deciding is, do you choose to act in an evil way?
Or are you disposed to act in an evil way because of something that you can't control?
So here's Dante asking this guy, Marco Lombardo, where in Canto 16 of the Purgatoria, right in the middle of the poem, is evil the result of free will?
Or is evil the result of some kind of innate disposition given either from within us or given from the stars?
Here's Marco Lombardo replying, first of all, a deep sigh as if he's a little exasperated.
And then Marco says, you men on Earth attribute everything to the sphere's influence alone, as if with some predestined plan they move all things.
So think of how familiar this is.
Right away, Marco's saying, listen, you're acting as if human beings do bad things because of something outside their control.
And remember, that's not Dante's position.
Dante simply says, there are people who think this.
Here's Marco continuing.
If this were true, then our free will would be annihilated.
It would not be just to render bliss for good or pain for evil.
So think of what Marco is saying.
Marco is spelling out the implications, which is that if you don't have control over your own actions, you can't be blamed for them.
And then your good deeds are no credit to you.
So the whole Dantean scheme of the Divine Comedy, the whole idea of just retribution, the whole idea that some people belong in hell, others in purgatory, others in paradise, all depends upon some notion of cosmic justice.
And what happens to that notion of cosmic justice if there is no free will?
Marco Lombardo continues.
So Marco is saying here that, yeah, people do have dispositions.
Yeah, there could be some of your behaviors that are prodded, you might say, by dispositions either interior or coming from the outside.
But either way, you have the light.
Your moral life, in other words, is something that you have control over.
And continuing.
And your free will, which though it may grow faint in its first struggles with the heavens, can still surmount all obstacles if nurtured well.
Now, this is a very interesting twist by Dante, because Dante is not saying that, hey, listen, people are free to act in whatever way they want.
They have complete control over their feelings and their thoughts and their actions.
No, Dante is saying, in effect, that your free will, in order to be free, has to be nurtured well.
In other words, free will here is not something that is a given.
It is something you have to work for.
It is an accomplishment.
Why? Because part of the way that you strengthen your capacity to be free is by gaining a certain kind of rational and moral control over your own dispositions.
If your dispositions, your proclivities, are running you, Then you have less control.
But if you are in the charioteer's seat and you are driving your dispositions, you're being prodded this way, but you decide to go that way, then your free will is in control.
So Dante is talking here about the fact that we need to nourish and build our own freedom so that we are, in a sense, governing ourselves.
And so, if the world today has gone astray, the cause lies in yourselves and only there.
Boom. That's Marco Lombardo, a resounding affirmation of the idea of free will.
After this happens, this very important discussion of free will, it might seem that Marco Lombardo would conclude his discussion or continue kind of the same path, but he takes a very surprising turn.
He goes on to talk about the fact that children and infants are by and large innocent.
They're by and large in that sense uncontaminated by evil, uncontaminated by sin, or at least sin that they have chosen in a mature way for themselves.
But then Marco Lombardo begins to talk about the importance of teachers.
And he's not just talking about your instructors, the people who teach you in school.
He's talking about law, law as a teacher.
Now, this is an old idea that goes back to Plato.
Plato writes a book called The Laws.
And the idea here is that the laws are not merely a form of prohibition.
They are a form of instruction.
And Dante is right on board with this.
And here's Dante. He says, men therefore need the restraint of laws.
This is Dante talking. And he says, true, the laws there are, but who enforces them?
No one. So this is Dante making a point he's made before.
We have Roman laws, he says, but they're not being enforced.
And why are they not being enforced?
Bad leaders.
Bad leaders in politics and bad leaders in the church.
Here's Dante now zooming into the church.
And so the flock that see their shepherds greed for the same worldly goods that they have craved are quite content to feed on what he feeds.
So what's Dante saying here?
He's basically saying that bad leaders produce bad followers.
He's saying, and this is a principle very good to apply to our own society, we sometimes talk about rotten elites, we talk about the fact that our leadership is corrupted, and Dante is basically saying, you know what happens over time when you have corrupted leaders?
You're gonna get a corrupted population.
Why? Because let's follow what Dante's saying.
He's saying that when the shepherd is greedy, The followers look, and they might see the shepherd robbing on a big scale.
And so these guys go, well, you know what?
We'll rob on a small scale.
So we will do what the leaders are doing.
Dante here, by the way, is evoking something that can also be pulled right out of the Old Testament, which is There's a very poignant section in which Jeremiah is talking about the fact that he sees all this corruption in the city.
And he says, oh, I gotta fix this.
I gotta go meet the leaders.
I gotta tell them about it.
In a sense, Jeremiah wants to alert the leaders to the depravity of the followers.
And then when he encounters the leaders, Jeremiah realizes, wait a minute.
The leaders are as corrupt, if not more corrupt, than the followers.
In other words, the followers aren't breaking with the leaders.
They're actually doing exactly what the leaders are doing themselves.
And so Jeremiah realizes that the problem is with the leaders, not with the followers.
And that's Dante as well here.
This is a point that resounds throughout the comedy, because if you go back to the Inferno, you'll notice that Not only is the issue of free will present in a very powerful way, all those sinners have chosen their own destiny, and yet all those sinners are trying to pretend like someone else made them do it.
Francesca Love made me do it.
Pierre de la Venier, the Emperor and Envy made other people do it to me.
And so this sort of constant effort to blame your actions and your sins on other forces.
But the other point to make, and I'll pick this up next time, is Dante's point that a lot of the big, big sinners in Inferno are leaders.
They're in a position of leadership.
They've abused that position.
And that's why they deserve these kind of deep positions in hell, because the destruction that they have wrought is not just destruction upon themselves.
It is. But it's also destruction that has affected a lot of other innocent people.
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