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Jan. 11, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
47:43
IS THE PRIMARY OVER? Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep745
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Coming up, I'll talk about Hunter Biden showing up before the GOP House.
I'll talk about the issue of DEI, diversity, equity and inclusion, and airline safety, and other issues of the day.
Alan Mashburn, he's a candidate for Lieutenant Governor of North Carolina.
He's going to join me to talk about whether the GOP presidential primary is...
Actually over before it even began.
And I'll begin my discussion of philia, the second type of love, outlined in C.S. Lewis' classic work, The Four Loves.
Hey, if you're watching on Rumble or listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy.
In a time of confusion, division, and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
I want to talk today about some items in the news.
And I'm going to focus on this issue of airline safety, which has sprung to the forefront with the incident.
I mean, what an incident involving the Alaska Airlines.
Then some subsequent research by United Airlines.
There were some loose bolts on a number of the United planes.
Boeing has come under increasing scrutiny.
So I'm going to get to all that.
But a couple of comments on other matters.
Hunter Biden shows up defiantly before the House and storms out when Marjorie Taylor Greene starts to speak.
And all of this is a theater that is engineered by the Democrats and the media.
They want it to be about sort of a circus.
Hunter Biden shows up, Republicans pounce, Hunter Biden exits, as opposed to a scrutiny of what is going on with Hunter Biden.
What is the information that is being suppressed?
Why won't he appear before the committee in the normal process, do his deposition, then appear in a public hearing?
Ultimately, this is really all about the corruption of Joe Biden.
And the Democratic strategy here is to procrastinate, delay, Pretend there's nothing going on.
So the Democrats are always forcing the hand of Republicans.
Do you guys know how to pull this off?
Do you know how to do the kind of staged trials that we Democrats are so good at?
Look at the way the January 6th committee staged its public performances.
Well, do Republicans know how to get their information out?
And the answer is, well, it's an open question.
Now, I do think that James Comer has done a pretty good job, the oversight committee, not only in their press conferences, but also in social media.
They have become very adept, not only at putting out information, but putting it out in a very digestible way.
And a lot of times that's half the battle.
It's how you present information.
I think also, for example, about the way that information was presented with Claudine Gay.
Not just, hey listen, here's an article attached that shows that she was a plagiarist.
No. It's like, let's cut the things that she said, let's find the sources that she plagiarized, let's put the two side by side, and let's run a long thread on X. In which we show 5, 10, 15, maybe 50 examples of plagiarism, and one on top of the other, the effect of it becomes overwhelming.
I also have a sense, watching these Trump cases, and we're on the verge of completing the New York campaign, What is his name?
Engeron? I call him Judge Moron, but anyway, Engeron.
That trial is about to conclude.
A verdict may be, well, a verdict in a sense has already been delivered.
He's already decided against Trump.
Remember, honey, it's the optics.
That's what they're going for.
But Debbie says, yeah, they don't really care what Trump did.
For the left, it's about they want to see the guilty headline.
In fact, they've probably written that headline already, and Judge Ngaran seems very willing to deliver it for them, kind of the way that Judge Tanya Chutkin in the January 6th case is another partisan hack, and you can expect nothing out of her except rulings that are favorable to Jack Smith and to the people trying to get Trump.
Now, let's turn to this issue of airline safety.
I mean, it's an issue that affects all of us.
Debbie and I, I mean, I'm on an airplane a lot.
And being on an airplane relies so much on a willingness to trust, you might say, your rational beliefs over common sense.
Because you've got an object that's flying in the sky, it's hanging in the air.
An old object. There's a certain part of us that's like, we can't even believe it.
We can't even believe that we're up, what, 35,000 feet in the air.
We can't believe we're traveling in below zero temperatures.
And you can imagine the terror that those passengers felt when the window blows off.
And suddenly it's like, what?
Apparently people were in so much shock they didn't even really know how to react.
Yeah. Now, what is behind all this kind of stuff?
Well, there are some theories about it.
One of them, of course, a very old one is airplanes are old.
Airplanes sort of over time develop problems.
But look, there's a very tried and true formula over 100 years for how to deal with those problems.
Airplanes are constantly upgraded.
Airplanes are eventually replaced.
So I don't think that is the problem.
A second potential problem is the Gen Z problem.
And Debbie chuckles with recognition.
I think many people will.
They can't even make a latte.
Debbie goes, they can't even make a latte.
They're supposed to fly the planes or manage the whole airline system.
You know, I saw an interesting article recently about problems in the air traffic control system.
And it has to do with the, let's call it the Gen Z mentality.
Which is that, oh yeah, of course I showed up late.
Well, I had a doctor's appointment.
Or, you know, the kind of lackadaisical attitude that is epitomized in the, you know, I was watching a comedy and the guy was talking about this Gen Z guy who goes, you know, his parents go, hey, Johnny, put your plate in the sink.
And he goes, I'm not even going that way.
He's He's not already headed to the sink, so this is going to cause him some problems.
It's going to take an undue amount of effort.
So look, it could be that that's a little bit of what we're dealing with, that you have a pampered generation.
Well, more pampered than our generation, that's for sure.
And we have to also admit, pampered to some degree by us.
Oops. But...
That may be part of the problem.
But here's a third part of the problem, and I think probably the main one.
DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Now, why do I say that?
Well, I mean, no one has traced a direct straight line from DEI initiatives to the window being blown out of Boeing.
But what people are doing, and this is a perfectly legitimate thing to do, They're going back and they're looking at Boeing.
They're looking at Boeing's policies, what has changed, what is different.
And the answer is, all these airlines are in a really big way into diversity.
Now, you might think that maybe they want diversity among the stewards and among the airline.
What is it? Yeah.
Yeah, it's the ticket agents or the...
Not the stewardesses.
Yeah, the people on the plane serve you.
What do we call them these days?
A flight attendant? Flight attendants.
A flight attendant?
Okay, that's fine. That's like having diversity at Starbucks because think of it.
What could go wrong? Oh, my latte isn't properly prepared.
Usually that's the case. And that often is the case whether or not the staff is diverse because...
But nevertheless, the point being this, that with an airline, airlines are ultimately about getting you there safely.
And that is not just the job of the pilots, by the way.
We think it's the pilots. Well, yeah, it's a pilot and a co-pilot.
And I read a very disturbing report that said that what these airlines do, they know there's a problem, and they are hiring incompetent pilots.
So what they do is they pair an incompetent pilot, or at least a pilot hired under more minimal standards.
With a competent pilot in the hope that the competent pilot will compensate for the errors of the incompetent pilot.
But this is an unstable arrangement to put in mind.
If this is going on, we are in a serious problem.
I want to emphasize one key point.
In the past, we have talked about, and Debbie and I have actually watched shows which focus on airline calamities, airline accidents.
But what is an accident?
I mean, an accident is an unforeseen calamity.
An airline goes through the normal procedures, but guess what?
Some ball bearing or some screw unknown to them has gotten loose or is not in the right place.
So they do what they're supposed to do, and then something unfortunate happens.
That's an accident. An accident, by definition, is unforeseen, it's unpredictable, it's unplanned.
But think of it.
If you have an air crash that's due to DEI, that is traceable to the policies of DEI, that's how we got this.
And that can be done.
How would you make the connection?
Well, it's like saying if you trace an airline crash that is due to Islamic radicalism.
How do you make the connection? Well, the guy was shouting Allahu Akbar as he plunged the plane into the ocean.
That's how I make the connection.
So there are ways to make connections.
If you can show that a crash is due to DEI, guess what?
It's not an accident.
Why? Because it was completely foreseeable.
You knew... Airline X, when you put these policies into place, that you were playing with the safety of your own passengers.
You knew that you were taking these risks.
You obviously deemed the risk to be acceptable.
And so my point is that there should be much harsher, not only civil, but criminal penalties for airlines.
And if these crashes occur, we know...
We know what the effect of putting aside safety, putting aside merit, looking at diversity.
I want to make sure... And airlines, by the way, are very blatant about this.
We're going to make sure that 50% of our pilots are going to be women or persons of color.
Well, I mean, that's a quota.
I thought quotas were illegal.
But nevertheless, to assert with this kind of confidence that regardless of who applies, you're going to make sure that 50% of your pilots are, quote, diverse.
Well, in that case, I say that the fury of not only the victims and their families, but of the whole country should be on you if these policies go wrong.
As I predict, they can and will.
Indeed, they must go wrong.
The reason that they must go wrong is that it is a complicated business to maintain airline safety at the very high degree of safety we have now, where it's Safer to take a plane than to even drive on the highway.
That's a very high degree of safety and that takes a high degree of competence.
And when airlines stop valuing competence, well, the consequences are not gonna be good.
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Guys, I'd like to welcome to the podcast a new guest.
His name is Alan Mashburn.
He's a leading candidate in the race for Lieutenant Governor of North Carolina.
He's had a long background in Christian ministry over three decades.
He appears regularly on American Family Radio.
He's appeared on Jenna Ellis' show, Eric Metaxas, The David Webb Show.
He also writes articles, and we've seen his work in American Greatness and Blaze Media.
You can follow him on X, Mashburn4, the number 4, NC, North Carolina, and his website, AllenALLEN, Mashburn4, the number 4, NC.com.
We're going to talk about the presidential race, about the primaries.
And Alan, welcome to the podcast.
Thank you very much for joining me.
Let's start by...
Talking for a moment about the Democratic side, and then we'll focus on the Republican side, but are you surprised that, number one, Joe Biden appears to have no, at least significant opposition, and the DNC is engineering it so there's not really even a Democratic primary?
Are you a little perplexed that they've decided to sort of stick it with Joe Biden?
Or... Why do you think they're doing that?
I'm perplexed by the whole side of the Democratic Party.
No, I'm not shocked at all.
You know, this is the party that has engineered not only this term of Biden, but this is a party that's engineered an election interference consistently.
And, you know, I'm one of those people who believe that Americans cannot be this dumb and naive to have elected this man.
So they have orchestrated a lot of things in the last four years, as you have documented.
So, I'm not shocked at all.
We have primaries on our side.
These folks, they just simply engineer who they want to put in.
And, you know, the speculation has always been that Michelle Obama is going to come forward or somebody like that.
But nothing that they do shocks me at all.
Nothing. I mean, I think what I find really strange is not that they have been engineering things, because you're right, they engineered Biden's candidacy in 2020, right?
He was not leading in the primaries.
They moved him to the front.
They pushed Bernie out.
So that was an engineered operation, but it was an engineered operation...
I guess with a certain type of logic behind it, which was, Bernie's too radical, Biden has this aw shucks, somewhat centrist image, so that was the reason for wanting to make him the prop man, but the guy is so obviously...
Dysfunctional, not in charge of events, not really running the country, that you would think that the smarter people on the Democratic side would be like, listen, one term is more than enough for this guy, and why not try to bring our strongest candidate forward?
So, I think that's really what I find odd, is that they seem to think...
That the virtues of Biden, so to speak, of 2020 will still be there in 2024, when all of us have had a chance to sort of check Biden out and see that this guy is a disaster.
Well, I think they really needed a puppet.
And Biden is that puppet.
He's a good front man for somebody else pulling the strings.
Now, whoever that may be, we all have assumptions.
But let's face it.
Biden was an inept senator.
He's been in government longer than I have actually been alive.
And he's never come up with anything good.
He's got videos that if he had an R behind his name, it would totally obliterate his political aspiration.
But I think they needed a puppet, and they found one.
And very, I mean, he has to be led around, sadly, because of the state that he is in.
But besides that, who knows what they're getting him to sign?
I mean, who knows what they're getting him to do?
Or perhaps we don't want to know.
Let's turn to the Republican side.
Where do you think we are in this process?
I mean, there appears to be what we see now is that Trump is kind of doing his own thing.
He'll do a town hall, he'll do an interview with Tucker, and then the rest of them...
Or some of the rest of them are typically kind of engaging with each other.
Christie, of course, just dropped out.
Let's start with Christie.
I mean, what I find amusing about the whole thing is not even the peculiar phenomenon of Christie thinking that he could win the nomination.
That alone appears to me delusional.
But a lot of people who are megalomaniacs have delusions.
What really baffles me about Christie is his donors.
I mean, there's obviously some body of donors who thought that this individual might have a chance at getting the nomination.
I mean, I don't even know who these people are.
How clueless do you have to be to think that?
I almost want to meet some of these donors for reasons of anthropological interest to find out, like, do such people even exist?
What do you make of the peculiar, crispy, now burned out candidacy?
Well, I think every candidate has their faction of people that just stick with their candidate.
But then you also have a big faction of people that are anybody but Trump.
And they just want to give to anybody that will be against Trump.
And I think that's probably what we have seen in the Chris Christie race.
We knew it wasn't going anywhere.
He knew it wasn't going anywhere.
He was delusional if he didn't think that.
But I'm glad he's now out of the race.
I'm glad he's now off the camera.
Maybe he can go do something that's worth his time.
Do you think that Trump has this nomination locked up?
Yes, I do. I think President Trump is the strongest candidate.
I think he's got the proven track record.
I think the Democrats are dead set on him not being the nominee, certainly not being in the White House again, obviously by what they're doing.
No man has ever had the following that he has.
No man has been able to, certainly no former president, has ever been able to fill a stadium, continuously have rallies.
He has just monumental support.
I cannot see anybody else getting this nomination.
And I think that we'll see that proven so.
I mean, I've seen some comment by some of the DeSantis advocates, because, I mean, quite clearly, the left is terrified of Trump, right?
Their actions show it.
They're going after him every which way.
Presumably, if DeSantis were the nominee, they would attack him.
But the venom with which they attack Trump is in a class or category by itself.
But there is a certain theory among the DeSantis people that says, in effect...
The left is pulling a fast one on the Republicans.
They're outsmarting Republicans.
They want Trump to be the nominee because they think that they can easily beat him.
And so they are sort of forcing the Republicans into a position where they rally around Trump.
But it's really a democratic scheme to elevate Trump, not to destroy Trump.
Yeah, that sounds nice.
You know, in the mind of the left, Trump was never supposed to be president at all.
So they've had that in their crawl ever since.
While that sounds good and they want people to buy it, the fact that they are so afraid of him.
I mean, he's a man that cannot be bought.
He's a multi-billionaire.
He has gold-plated Seatbelts on his plane.
This is a man that cannot be bought by the people in Washington.
And he was in Washington four years, and supposedly he's the biggest crime lord in the country.
That just doesn't add up.
They fear him.
I think they fear all of us.
They fear all of us who would vote for him, who have voted for him.
Because I think Trump is the representative man of all of us who want to remove them from power and take our country back.
We'll be right back with Alan Mashburn to talk more about the GOP primary.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H, Dinesh.
I'm back with Alan Mashburn.
He's the lieutenant gubernatorial candidate in North Carolina.
He's also a writer, American Greatness, The Blaze.
He's been on a bunch of shows, From Eric Metaxas to American Family Radio.
His website, Allen, A-L-L-E-N, Mashburn, M-A-S-H-B-U-R-N, the number four, N-C, dot com.
Allen, we're talking about GOP primary candidates.
We've talked for a moment about Trump.
I'd like your assessment of some of the other candidates, the other leading candidates, And let's start with Nikki Haley.
Nikki Haley appears to be at least the first choice of a segment of the big funders of the Republican Party because it looks like money that maybe even was at first...
moving toward Nikki Haley, they seem to think at least this is I'm assuming the kind of never Trump or anti-Trump faction in the Republican Party that Nikki Haley would be a better choice.
But I don't see a lot of support for Nikki Haley in the Republican base. Is this a case do you think where the funding community and the base are just disconnected from each other?
Well, I think so. We've seen that somewhat here in our own state where the donor base has been very disconnected with what I call the grassroots community of the party.
Um, Nikki Haley is, in my view, a centrist and she has not been very clear on a lot of her questions.
She attributes her getting into politics to Hillary Clinton, which Is a hard no for me.
I'm sorry. And it's just not Nikki Haley.
She's not going to be the nominee as much as people would want her to be, some people.
But she's not going to be the person who we need to lead the party.
We are in turbulent times.
We're in unprecedented waters.
And Nikki Haley just does not have what it takes.
I mean, I think this is a key point you just made, Alan, because in normal times, I would say that Nikki Haley would probably not be a very surprising choice, because think about it.
Bob Dole, 1996.
Think about John McCain.
Think about Romney.
So there are candidates that are very close to Nikki Haley in many respects that were perfectly acceptable to the broad mainstream of the Republican Party in earlier times. But I think what you're saying is we are not living in such times.
Let's turn to DeSantis because with DeSantis I've got to confess I have a lot of mixed feelings about DeSantis because I like DeSantis.
I think he has unquestionably done not just a good but an outstanding job in Florida.
He is a sort of natural heir apparent or at least one of the top people in line for the future of the Republican Party.
What do you think has gone seemingly wrong for Ron DeSantis?
Did he just make a catastrophic blunder, would you say, in choosing to run this year?
I think probably so.
The biggest blunder I think he's made is he's focused too much on attacking Trump.
That alienates supporters and it also gives Trump more leverage because when an opponent, and we do not do that in our race at all, when an opponent attacks another opponent, that opponent is elevated and his profile is raised and Trump is a master at the media.
And he uses every bit of it to his advantage.
And that's something that DeSantis has walked into, and he will not be able to recover.
I mean, it's interesting you say that Trump is a master of the media because, of course, Trump is so relentlessly attacked by the media.
And maybe one of the things they fear about Trump is he does have a sort of a jujitsu ability with these guys, the ability to turn things to his advantage.
And he certainly turned the indictments, I think, to his advantage because they are directly correlated with his rise in the polls.
In fact, Trump himself knows this.
He jokes, you know, like, one more indictment and I'm like, across the finish line.
Yeah. Talk about the very interesting, and I would say almost out of nowhere phenomenon of Vivek Ramaswamy.
Here's this fellow, I guess in his late 30s, and no political background, I guess to that degree resembles Trump, and is giving the other candidates kind of a run for their money and has a sort of...
A kind of glib articulate-ness about him that seems to have stunned the other candidates up on the stage.
Yeah, he's well-read.
He's articulate.
He knows how to present himself.
He comes across as being the smartest guy on the stage without thinking he's the smartest guy on the stage.
He has a lot of great qualities that the party needs to take note, and he attacks the left, but also points out where we, in our own party, have made mistakes.
Be it they are mistakes, we need to correct them and move on instead of ignoring them.
But he has done a tremendous job that I think he's got a tremendous future in American politics, be it in state government or in a cabinet position in an incoming administration.
I mean, I sometimes think to myself it would be really interesting if DeSantis had run, and run this year, but run sounding like Vivek.
In other words, if DeSantis had come to Trump's defense, basically said, listen, you know, I'm the guy who's going to pardon Trump.
I'm the guy who's gonna release these January 6th captives from prison.
I'm the guy who's gonna check into election integrity and make sure that it's...
I wonder if DeSantis would be in a completely different place.
So I wonder if the miscalculation is there, not so much in the running, but in the way that DeSantis has chosen to run.
Yeah, and I think you should have been on his advisory council because that's exactly the same advice that I would have given him.
Be complimentary to Trump and you will gain support, but instead you've come out the gate and you've made Trump your target instead of the left or instead of the problems that we have in the country.
So by doing so, he's just turned a blind eye to the actual problems and people who have Been faithful in being donors to him have diverted some of that to Nikki Haley.
Many have gone to Trump.
So it's had an adverse effect.
I think he's made a fatal mistake in that area.
He may not realize it until he is actually sitting at home on the primary night.
One thing that bothers my wife, Debbie, and me is the fact that I think that the factionalism and the level of acerbic or acrimonious rhetoric on the right has reached a bit of a fever pitch.
And I say this because in past elections, I've seen competition among Republican candidates, but there's a fairly amicable, let's come together once one of the guys has made it to the nomination.
I'm a little worried that we won't see that this time, and that will be a disadvantage, won't it?
Because don't we need all the Republicans plus some independents to win the 2024 election?
We do. Unfortunately, I agree with you on what we're seeing.
We have a segment in our nation that they don't see a problem.
They see an election coming up and it's politics as usual.
While you see the Make America Great Again people, MAGA, which I identify with.
I want to make this country great again.
We see a problem, and if we don't change the course and stop the politics as usual, then we're going to have a detriment here in the nation, certainly for future generations.
I want to have all Republicans come together, but I think we all have to have a great awakening.
And to the point in seeing that where we are in the country, we have to make some changes here.
We can't be a uniparty, but we have to be a united party.
But I guess the question I'm getting at is, unite around what?
In other words, the establishment's view is that you've got all these MAGA crazies out there, and so their point is, yeah, come over and unite with us, because we're the people who really know what's going on.
And then from the perspective of the MAGA wing, it's the opposite.
It's that the GOP establishment is really out of it.
Rona McDaniel doesn't even know what's going on.
Mitch McConnell doesn't know what's going on.
I guess what I'm getting at is when you have two people who both say, yeah, unite around me, is there a way to find some reconciliation of those two camps?
I think we have to put the country first.
If we focus on American greatness and American exceptionalism, that's the only thing we can really unite around.
We've got to realize that everything you just said, from the top of the RNC and the disconnect between the RNC and state GOP parties, the grassroots, it exists.
And if there's anything we can unite around, it should be the greatness of America and the fact that we are still the greatest land in the world and we have to unite around that.
The only person that I see on the stage that has done what he said who cannot be owned is President Trump.
So if you care about this country, I think it's time to put our pettiness aside and focus on the man who has actually delivered and bring this nation back as a roaring lion in an economy, in the military strength, and respect across the world.
I think this is the only way to do it.
Alan, I also think we can unite around the horribleness of the Biden administration, right?
In other words, I think Republicans all agree that this guy isn't just the wrong man for the country.
He's been an unmitigated disaster on so many different fronts.
Alan, really great to have you.
Thanks for joining me. I really appreciate it.
You can follow him on X. Alan, really appreciate it.
Thank you for joining me. I now turn to the second type of love described by C.S. Lewis in his classic work, The Four Loves.
I thought I'd begin before I jump into it.
The love we're going to talk about is friendship or philea.
The question of why...
Lewis does this.
Why is Lewis talking about four types of love at all?
Why make these distinctions between different types of love?
Why not just say that there is love?
Love is what it is, and sometimes it's love of your brother or your neighbor, and sometimes it's love of your spouse, or it's the love between friends.
Why even have this system of classification, of breaking things down?
Why devote separate chapters to each type of love?
And the answer is this, that it's part of a broader question of why do we do this in terms of trying to understand the world.
Because the world comes to us in a kind of a mishmash, doesn't it?
It's a whole bunch of things.
You have clouds and you have rain and you have trees and you have...
And so what you do when you're trying to make sense of the world is you try to look at things that are similar or even the same.
Things like, well, listen, even though you have trees and even though you have parrots and you have human beings...
All of those living things are composed of the same DNA. So that is an insight that is, call it a unifying insight.
It brings all these seemingly disparate things together.
Not only are we talking about different forms of life, but we're talking about different forms of life made of the same stuff.
Pretty interesting. Now, we also do the opposite, which is to say that you take things that appear to be unitary, or appear to be one thing, and then you realize that, no, this one thing is actually made up of elements, elements that need to be combined sometimes, but nevertheless, the elements are separate.
So think, for example, about...
A molecule of water or a glass of water.
You can ask yourself, well, you know, if I pour out half the glass, I still have water.
Okay, let's say I pour out half that.
I still have water. Well, let's say I keep doing that.
I go smaller and smaller.
I finally come down to a molecule of water.
Can I break it up even further?
And the remarkable answer to that question, we now know scientifically, is yes, you can do that.
And if you do that, you're going to get hydrogen and oxygen in a certain proportion.
Two atoms of hydrogen, one atom of oxygen.
That makes up water. So you get a better understanding of what water is, what it's made up of, by separating out the two things that make up water.
And so when we're talking about love, we experience love in very different ways.
And what C.S. Lewis is doing is saying, yeah, there are a lot of similarities between these different types of love.
They all, after all, fall under the category of love.
And they all involve that feeling, that willingness to do something for someone else, that adjoining of souls or of human beings.
So love does do that.
It brings people together into a sort of special relationship.
And that's its common element.
But what is...
What makes different types of love separate one from the other?
And what Lewis is going to do is he's sort of distilling each of these loves into their pure form.
So when he talks about friendship, he's going to talk about like what is the distinguishing aspect of friendship that makes it separate from the other types of love. Lewis has admitted from the beginning, we saw this when we were talking about Storge, that different types of love kind of bleed the one into the other. So Storge, which is affection, bleeds into a marriage. So a marriage has erotic or romantic love, but it also has affectionate love built into it. So
with all that as a kind of background, let's dive into our discussion of philia or Now, Lewis begins by saying that when you're talking about affection, family relationships, or romantic love, he goes, the world is...
Always celebrating these types of love.
For example, the entire romantic movement of the 19th century was based upon celebrating erotic or romantic love, eros, but it also celebrated the domestic affections.
As I mentioned before, the romantic writers would often contrast the warm comfort of the domestic fireplace against the kind of cold callousness of the workplace.
So industry is mechanical, it's repetitive, it's soulless, but sitting around with your family and having a meal or celebrating a Thanksgiving holiday, that is sort of the true meaning of life.
And We still see some of that even today.
Republicans will talk about family values.
So, what Lewis is saying is that there are plenty of people celebrating family values.
There's plenty of people celebrating erotic love.
But guess what? Like, nobody celebrates friendship.
At least nobody makes a big deal of it.
Lewis says, I can't think of a single poem or like a novel that is based upon friendship.
Actually, I can.
I can think of...
I mean, here's Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities.
And if you think about it, the key theme of that novel is, in fact, friendship.
Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in Cervantes' novel.
So there are some exceptions, but I think, in general, Lewis is right, which is that friendship is the undervalued form of love.
And so when Lewis talks about Anthony and Cleopatra, Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet, he's right.
There's like an ocean of literature devoted to romantic love.
It's celebrated from the floor to the ceiling.
And yet, says Lewis, you know, ego's friendship, the love that we make the least big deal of, was to the ancients.
And by the ancients here, we're talking about the Greeks and the Romans.
The Greeks and the Romans are together taken to be what we call classical antiquity.
And in classical antiquity, says Lewis, friendship was considered the superior form of love above the others.
And so Lewis right away says, we have kind of a puzzle.
Here is a type of love celebrated by the ancients and sort of downplayed by the moderns.
And yet he says, even when moderns talk about it, and this may be why they don't play it, they talk about friendship in a way, says Lewis, that the ancients would have found unrecognizable.
When we talk about friendship, people say things like, well, you know, I need to make more friends.
And Lewis will go on to say in this chapter that that is not only a foolish thing to say, it doesn't make any sense.
Friendship isn't a matter of going out and finding a friend.
There's no way to do that.
As we'll see, friendship, at least in the ancient or traditional understanding of the term, involves something quite different than going out and making a friend or finding a friend.
Lewis says that Aristotle celebrated friendship as perhaps the highest of all the virtues.
Cicero wrote a book on it.
And so, when people talk about friendship today, like, oh, that guy's kind of lonely.
You know, he doesn't have a friend.
Even that suggests that friendship is a marginal part of life.
It's not the main course.
It may be the appetizer, it may even be part of the dessert, but it's not essential.
Who needs a friend?
And Lewis will go on to agree, friendship is not really a necessary virtue.
And yet the ancients considered it to be kind of a sublime virtue.
And the ancients definitely believed that a life without friendship is sort of missing in something very fundamental in what it takes to be not a human being, but a fully developed human being, a human being with ariti, which is the excellences or virtues that make human life flourish.
Lewis says that maybe one of the reasons that modern people don't celebrate friendship is that modern people don't have friends.
This is such a shocking statement that we have to pause in thinking about it.
What Lewis does not mean is that modern people don't have acquaintances, that modern people don't belong to associations and clubs.
But Lewis will go on to say that that is not really friendship.
That is the larger pool from which friendship grows.
But that is not friendship itself.
It's sort of like saying that, oh yes, I know a lot of women and therefore I've experienced romantic love.
No, not necessarily. Knowing a lot of women in a broad sense just means that you're acquainted with them.
Romantic love may grow out of that for a particular woman, but they're not the same thing.
And so when people talk today about having friends, in Lewis's definition, the sort of pure version of it, Lewis is going to argue that much of what we call friendship in the modern era is not friendship at all.
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