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Jan. 18, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
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REPORT FROM DAVOS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep750
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Coming up, I'll discuss a very important case.
Just went before the Supreme Court on the extreme overreach of the agencies of the federal government.
Author and scholar Larry Taunton joins me.
He's in Davos.
He's at the World Economic Forum.
He's going to give us a first-hand report on the goings-on there.
And I'll begin my discussion of Eros in C.S. Lewis' classic work, The Four Loves.
Hey, if you're watching on Rumble, 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.
Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard a back and forth, heard arguments in an extremely important case.
That involves the power of federal agencies to make rules, to not make rules but administer them and regulate them and adjudicate them that control various aspects of our lives, of the corporate sector, of the economy.
So the case, although it focuses somewhat narrowly on the issue of fisheries and the marine fisheries agency of the government, but the implications stretch to federal regulations in environmental areas, federal regulations over guns, the ATF, the FBI, think of the
kind of plethora of agencies of the federal government, and all of them make detailed rules.
And yet when you look at the congressional statutes that have authorized these agencies, you can very well ask yourself, where did Congress give you the power to do this?
And the federal agencies typically reply, well, Congress gave us sort of a general power to, quote, look after the environment, or gave us a general power to manage fisheries, or gave us a general power to administer law enforcement, and And then we took it upon ourselves to have all kinds of technical experts and administrative judges.
And then even if people question our decisions, what do we do?
We refer to an administrative judge inside of the fisheries department or inside of the ATF. So these people can't even really go to court.
Because when they go to court, the judge will say, well, it's not our job to second-guess these federal agencies.
This federal regulation, although you can dispute it, is a reasonable interpretation of the broad congressional statute, and so we the courts are going to stay out of it.
Now... The reason that the courts take this stance, which is, you may call it a deference to the power of the administrative agencies, is because of a decision going all the way back to 1984 called the Chevron Decision.
The decision was Chevron versus Natural Resources, Defense Council, and the meaning of that decision was that The federal agencies were successfully able to argue to the court that courts should not attempt to adjudicate their rules.
Federal agency makes a rule.
Let's say, for example, that if your land adjoins a wetland, Then the EPA has the right to seize your land or fine you or conduct all kinds of operations on your land whether or not you agree to it.
And it's because even though your land is not a wetland, it, quote, adjoins a wetland.
Alright, so that would be an example of a rule.
And then a guy gets, let's say, fined for some EPA rules on his property, and his property is near a wetland but doesn't actually touch the wetland.
So the guy sues, and he goes, hey...
Adjoins doesn't mean that...
Adjoins means that my land is actually on the wetland or it is so connected to the wetland that the government can't regulate the wetland without regulating what's happening on my property.
But my property happens to be half a mile away.
And yet, in their view, it does adjoin the wetland because the same kind of birds fly over both properties.
And in the past, citing Chevron, the court would rule, well, I guess we can all disagree over the meaning of the term adjoins.
And we think that the EPA's interpretation is reasonable because exactly wildlife and so on exist on both properties.
The one is not sort of separated from the other in terms of an ecosystem.
So, we're going to let the EPA decide whatever it wants.
This is really the issue that went before the Supreme Court.
And what happened with these fisheries guys is that there is a rule that says that the government can require EPA administrators, researchers to go along on these fisheries expeditions to study these fish patterns and to study oceanic currents and so on.
And the fisheries guys weren't even objecting to that.
So the government decided that the fisheries groups would have to pay for it.
And so not only do they have to sort of take along these researchers and these government guys with them, but they've got to pay, I forget the number, it's something like $700 a day to cover the government expense of these guys.
So it's just essentially a sort of a tax that is being stuck on to the fisheries guys.
And it's all based upon a rule that interprets a broad statute to mean essentially the fisheries guys can decide whatever they want.
They can impose any kinds of rules.
And as somebody said...
A comment in the process of this litigation, they said, well, we the little guy have no power against these agencies.
Why? Because they make whatever rules they want, and when it goes before a court, they just cite Chevron.
Ah, so this is why the Chevron precedent was right up before the court.
And I heard Judge Ketanji Jackson making what was probably the best point for the government, for the Biden administration, for the left.
The left, let's remember, is the party of government.
They want government to have more power.
And she's like, well, listen, these federal agencies rely on expertise.
If you're dealing, for example, with the airline administration, the FAA... They need to know.
They know a lot about planes.
They know a lot about what goes wrong.
If they make a rule that involves some bolt or some type of screw or something that affects the landing gear, do you want someone going to court and some judge who went to law school but knows nothing about airplanes saying, well, that's a bad rule.
I'm going to strike that rule down.
No. We should defer to the expertise of these agencies because they know what they are doing.
And it'll be chaos if you let courts...
And remember, there are many courts. One court can go here, another court can go over there.
So this was Judge Ketanji Jackson's point.
But it was countered.
By Gorsuch and by other conservatives on the court who said, in effect, first of all, this whole idea that these agency rules are based upon expertise, no.
Many times these rules are punitive, they're ideological.
Like, for example, what expertise does it take to tell a fishery guy, you've got to pay $700 a day?
What kind of administrative genius is involved there?
No, they're just trying to screw the fisheries guys.
They're just trying to take advantage of them, make them pay because they have the power to do it.
In a sense, this is like arbitrary power because it's who gave you, you're not the legislative branch who gave you this kind of authority?
Who allowed you to reach into somebody else's pocket and take money out of it?
So this is the point that we're not dealing here with airline safety.
We're not dealing here with any kind of expertise.
We're dealing with arbitrary impositions of power often at the expense of the little guy.
Second, while it seems that a federal agency making a rule, the rule would be stable, you wouldn't have multiple courts taking different positions left and right on it.
It turns out that no.
These agencies change their mind all the time.
First of all, they always change their mind when there's a new administration.
And so the rule is interpreted one way, and then in comes a Democratic administration.
They decide, no, we want to interpret the rule much more expansively.
Look at the way, for example, immigration policy is interpreted under Trump versus interpreted under Biden.
So this is not a case where the rules involving border apprehensions and so on are somehow very stable.
On the contrary, the Biden administration turned the Trump rules on their head and essentially...
We made a creative interpretation of immigration law that basically says if somebody wants asylum, that means that they can stay in the United States for a year, two years, maybe five years.
Maybe we'll never find them, but we let them go pending their court date for which they may or may not show up.
Where's the great technical expertise that led to this decision?
There is none. It's just an ideological decision.
And so the point being, Gorsuch's point, that no, it is the job of the court to make sure.
This is part of the checks and balances of government.
We have a legislative branch.
They make rules. Now, they're allowed to delegate to these federal agencies certain administrative enforcements.
But the administrative agencies are not themselves directly accountable to anyone.
And so they take a broad rule, they run off with it, and the court goes, if somebody sues, it is very much the job of the court to look and see, wait a minute, is there an underlying legal justification for what you're doing?
Or... Are you just taking a broad sanction and making up the rules as you go along to the disadvantage of citizens and industries that get badly hurt by what you do?
And then they can't even go to court because you say, hey, you can appeal, but you know what?
We have an administrative judge inside the ATF. Well, we have an administrative judge inside the EPA. I mean, think of it.
These are EPA officials playing that role.
They're obviously going to be hugely biased in favor of the agency.
And this is the way these federal agencies have had it.
They've had a sweetheart deal for 40 years.
I think the good news is not a done deal because it seemed like Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett did have some fears of what might happen if courts in a sense are second guessing these agencies all the time.
But I think it's fair to say that by At least 5 to 4, if not by 6 to 3, we're going to see the Chevron decision.
At least this is my sense, listening to the tenor of the arguments.
The decision won't come until June, but I think it's going to be a good decision.
And the Chevron precedent, a very bad precedent that has expanded the, you can say, unchecked exercise of the power of these federal administrative agencies, it looks like the Chevron precedent is going to go down.
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Guys, you've probably been hearing about the World Economic Forum that's been going on in Davos. I believe it ends today.
And our friend Larry Taunton is there, or was there.
Larry Taunton is an author, he's a columnist, he's a cultural commentator.
His work has been covered by the BBC, the New York Times, he's written books.
Many years ago, Larry sponsored a debate that I was involved in with Christopher Hitchens over the issue of God.
You can follow Larry on X at Larry Taunton, T-A-U-N-T-O-N. Larry, thanks for joining me once again.
You are now in London, but you were just in Davos at the World Economic Forum.
Let me start by asking you, what was your purpose in heading to Davos?
Did you want to sort of check things out on the scene?
What was your reason for being there?
Yeah, great question, Dinesh.
I was there this morning And, you know, listen, 70% of the WEF is online, you know, so you don't need a guy like me there to tell you what John Carey said or Javier Malay or, you know, some of the various, more than 60 heads of state, you know, who are there.
So the major plenary sessions are mostly online, but it's that other 30% that I think is very interesting, and it's the 2,800 attendees.
And I really think that's the important part.
And so in a sense, Dinesh, I'm a little bit of a mole there because they just assume I'm a weffer.
They just assume I'm like them.
And the result of that is that they talk very openly of the agenda.
I mean, listen, you were just speaking of debating Christopher Hitchens.
And as you know, I debated him as well.
And part of the purpose that both of us had In that, it wasn't just the public part, it was the private part of getting to know him.
And I kind of wanted to get into the mindset of these people.
Who are they? And how do they think about these issues?
Let's talk about who speaks at these events and who attends them.
So many years ago, this is about 20 years ago, this is when I was at the American Enterprise Institute.
So actually, the very late 1990s, And a woman with a briefcase marched into my office and said, you know, I'm an official with the World Economic Forum, and we want to invite you to come to our next meeting.
And at the time, I just barely heard of it, but they wanted to have at that time a debate about, is Western civilization a good idea?
And so they had teamed me up with the former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, and then there was a leftist academic named Benjamin Barber, and also the black Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka.
So we had this debate, two against two.
I went to Davos.
I was actually in the agenda of the program.
I was able to go to a couple of these really pretty remarkable private luncheons.
My lunch, believe it or not, was with Arafat.
It was a window into this world of Davos, so to speak.
Then there was a big audience of about...
300 people at our debate, and sitting in the first row was the Queen of Sweden, and then there were all these sort of luminary types.
But I never figured out, like, who gets invited?
How do you get to come to this?
Do you buy a ticket like you do to Wimbledon?
Do you know? Who are these 2,800 people that you described to attend these events?
How do they get there? You know, Dinesh, was Arafat wearing a little name tag that said, Hi, I'm Yasser?
I mean, because he did in The Naked Gun.
I'm just curious, I mean, because you were there.
Listen, to go to the World Economic Forum, you have to be, that is to say their annual meeting, We're good to go.
That can be into six figures.
I mean, it's very, very expensive to be a part of it.
So it's not just the billionaires who fly in on their private jets, but even the attendees have to be some people of some material means to attend that, or at least be backed by a company or something that has those material means.
I didn't pay any of that.
I just go and I just boldly walk into these meetings as though I own the place.
And it's interesting to dash because almost no one ever challenges you when you do that.
So I'm able to sit in on a number of these meetings.
As for who gets invited, you can apply, but there's no guarantee that you'll be allowed to attend.
I mean, I remember, again, thinking back to that, you know, you referred to the Arafat lunch.
They had given me a menu, a sort of a choice.
Would you like to go to the lunch with Michael Dell?
Would you like to go to the lunch with, like, Bill Gates?
And I thought to myself, well, chances are I can meet Michael Dell in some tech conference in the United States or Bill Gates, but where the heck am I going to meet Arafat?
Like, where will I be able to hear this guy sounding off, you know?
And this, of course, let's remember, was before 9-11.
Arafat was, in fact, the global face of terrorism in those days, and yet he had been given a certain type of respectability because, you know, he represents the Palestinians.
He's the one negotiating with Menachem Begin.
And later given a Nobel Peace Prize.
Exactly. So, now, let's talk about the psychology underlying the WEF, the World Economic Forum, because it looks like there is a shared ethos.
In other words, the Hitchens-Dinesh debate is not likely to occur because their debate is within certain accepted parameters.
So, is there a kind of underlying...
The ideology of the World Economic Forum.
People sometimes use the phrase globalism.
Is that who these people are?
Yeah, another great question, Dinesh.
That really is the part that fascinates me.
Again, so much of what is being said in the sessions, you can watch that online or you can see that it's being covered often dishonestly in major media, but nonetheless being covered to some extent.
I think it's interesting that you're referring to the God debates, the ones that we did with Dawkins and with Hitchens and Shermer and Daniel Dennett and all that kind of stuff, because that stuff was going on in a big way about a decade ago.
Now, it's as though these people...
Are implementing that ideology, meaning the public debate on God has moved on a notch to where they just kind of assume there isn't one.
And so the result is that it's as if these are people who look at, say, Orwell or Huxley and see it as a how-to manual.
There aren't really any debates over religion, and they don't really debate anything.
The thing that I thought was quite fascinating in engaging the WEFers, and you're generally talking about, I'm just talking about the attendees, not necessarily, although I did have an interesting conversation with Theresa May, former Prime Minister of the UK. But it reminds me, Dinesh, of the kind of conversations that we might have today on a university campus or on a high school where their feelings trump your truth.
And where the shared ethos is shared to such an extent that when a guy like me is in their midst and begins to push back just a little bit, there's a collective sense of we don't actually even know how to answer his questions or even how to respond to them.
So I thought it was very interesting that the president of the European Commission said their primary mission for the next two years is Is dealing with misinformation and disinformation.
And then they went on to talk about how X, Twitter, is such a toxic place.
It was obvious to me just being there.
That it's almost like my conversations with them kind of recreated for them their feelings about Twitter because I was a toxic presence.
Why? Because I didn't share that ethos.
You see, so they don't really even know how to engage you on the question, and they don't want to.
They don't want to have debates.
They don't want to have discussions.
They don't want to have disagreement. There can be no dissent.
So the shared ideology is utterly secular in nature.
It's utterly godless, and it's fundamentally anti-human.
Let's come right back, and I'm going to ask you, Larry, about whatever happened to the concept of relativism, because for decades we kept hearing that truth is relative, and yet somehow now you have people solemnly declaring, this is misinformation, whereas I thought it was the case that ideas and truth were relative to the person who was perceiving them.
I'm going to ask you that when we come back.
Okay, sounds like a great question.
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you can follow him on x at Larry Taunton. He's an author, he's a columnist, he's a cultural commentator, and he has just arrived in London. In fact, I think Larry, I'm catching you in your hotel room. We just got there from Switzerland where you were at the World Economic Forum. And the question I was asking you at the end was of the last segment was simply this, that the left has sort of been emphasizing the notion that truth is relative, that you cannot assert absolute truths.
And yet suddenly that relativism of the past several decades appears to be chucked out the window and the left is now asserting that this is true, basically what we say is true, what they say is true, and any rival view is either misinformation or disinformation.
Yeah, exactly, Dinesh.
I think they still are in the business of relativizing truth, all truth except those that are important to them.
So the result is that they've recreated, in a sense, the Roman pantheon.
You know, you can believe what you want to believe.
Hey, we'll put your gods in our God Hall of Fame.
Yeah, you can worship that too.
They want to relativize everything, but...
Everyone must worship the state.
That is to say, the super state that they would create, the globalist vision which they have cast for themselves.
And so it was in Roman times, of course, as you well know, relativize all truths, but everyone must acknowledge the absolute truth of the state.
And see, they see themselves as the arbiters of truth.
I mean, for the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, To say that they're addressing misinformation and disinformation, which in and of itself is Orwellian doublespeak, it also implies that they're the arbiters of truth.
I mean, we're the ones who will decide what is truth.
They're not about the protection of free speech.
They see free speech as toxic, but they want to protect their own free speech.
I mean, when I was there a couple of decades ago, I didn't see it in these sort of dark terms.
I basically thought, look, this is a kind of a luxurious get-together of elites from all over the world to bloviate at each other, exchange ideas, have some entertaining repartee back and forth.
So it's all put on a show.
And of course, it's a very profitable show for Klaus Schwab, the guy who runs it all.
But now what I detect out of it in listening to people is something that's much more creepy, sort of a Guardians of the Universe mentality.
Like somehow this...
And I'm going to call it fascist because it's a sort of a collaboration between government instrumentalities and titans of industry.
So that's the classic fascist collaboration.
It's sort of like we, the people who run the world, have gotten here to decide how we can do a better job of running it together.
Am I wrong in detecting this kind of idea that these people think of themselves as...
Living life for the rest of us?
Yeah, well, you may recall the remarks of John Kerry last year where he said that they had a, he said an almost, he didn't go so far as to say God, he said an extraterrestrial mission.
We've been appointed by extraterrestrials to fulfill this kind of divine mission of ours.
I mean, there is that kind of creepiness, but no, something you said right there is absolutely right.
The World Economic Forum, for the most part, the presentations, most of the people are listening to us would not find them objectionable.
I mean, for instance, you know, I crash a meeting with the former Prime Minister of Britain and the former Prime Minister...
Portugal, you know, the CEO of Hewlett Packard talking about how they want to end human trafficking.
I mean, we're all in favor of that, right?
There might be another presentation on agriculture and another one here on, you know, coping with stress in the business place and that sort of thing.
But the way I think of it is kind of like that final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, you know, you chose poorly, you know, where there's the real grail and then it's surrounded by all these fake grails that can kill you.
Except here it's in the inverse.
They hide their real anti-human agenda, the deadly bit.
With all of this other stuff that sounds really, really good, I mean, for the most part, the WEF feels like the kind of conference your employer might have required you to go to that felt kind of meaningless and full of platitudes but didn't really offend you.
That's the way most of the WEF is.
But at its core, it's fundamentally anti-human.
And let me add this.
Some people read too much into the fact that they might invite somebody like Javier Malay or a Georgia Maloney or a Trump or an Elon Musk.
They're happy to do that because they're clever enough in their marketing.
They want to give the impression that they are listening to dissenting voices.
So they'll give a stage to someone like that.
But they absolutely are not listening to those dissenting voices.
And you're also 100% correct that they are fascists.
They're not Marxists. They're fascists.
I mean, I think the interesting thing about it is they are very statist on the one hand.
But on the other hand, they talk incessantly about innovation, about new discoveries, about the future being so different and so much better than the past.
And yet they...
At the same time, downplay the invigorated private sector that produces those innovations.
In other words, they seem to think that these innovations come through some kind of stage management by the state.
But, of course, the state doesn't invent anything.
It doesn't make any innovations.
What is an innovation that has been made in the area of, let's say, energy exploration by the Department of Energy?
Nil. Nil. And that's a generic point I'm making.
So how do you think that they see the compatibility between the statism on the one hand and this sort of vigorous entrepreneurial innovation that they celebrate on the other?
You know, I don't know, because I think they see the state chiefly as an instrument of popular coercion.
I don't know that they're too worried about it as an instrument of innovation.
I don't think they really care in that regard.
What they do care about, and what really kind of gives them these...
Almost religious responses to things, cult-like responses, is they get all excited about digital IDs and mass surveillance and being able to vaccinate the entire world and reducing the global population and that kind of stuff.
And they see the state as the chief means of doing it.
And therefore, the old You know, the old definition that I was given years ago as an undergraduate was that the fascism is strict regimentation of the economy for war.
But in this case, it's for war against domestic populations.
So that's what ESG is.
And they get all excited about those kinds of things because they see the state and industry as weapons to be used against people like us.
I mean, they seem to get almost unnaturally excited about what was being called disease X. It's almost like now, you know, in a different context, at a medical conference, if somebody said, you know, we handled this pandemic very poorly, let's plan to do better next time, let's have a discussion about a hypothetical pandemic with a 20% fatality rate.
I don't have an objection to that in principle, but I have an objection to these guys because it looks to me like they're salivating over the next pandemic.
They're looking for it as a pretext of even greater governmental control.
It's almost like they said, you know...
These rebels got out from under us with the last one and a lot of people did not take the vaccine.
They didn't listen to our authority.
How can we do better in keeping the peasants in line next time around?
Wasn't that the underlying thrust?
Yeah, it is. And another thing that I found very striking about the WEF is even in presentations that had nothing to do with vaccinations, vaccinations would come up, but always in a positive way.
There was never any discussion or hint that anyone had ever questioned or pushed back on vaccines.
That I thought was interesting.
I mean, you're having a public discussion about vaccinations, and you think somewhere in the presentation there would be something about the fact that there's some strong scientific evidence to suggest that they really weren't all that successful.
It might have even caused an awful lot of harm.
That never comes up.
So the unity that you spoke of in terms of their ethos is such that even on a topic like that where you're waiting for them to at least acknowledge dissent, they don't do it.
Well, Larry, I appreciate your being there and checking in with us to give us a report.
I mean, these are people, you're tempted to dismiss them and laugh at them, but they do represent a very powerful enclave of people from all over the world.
When they say that they have a lot of decision-making power, they actually do.
And they're working together in concert at this conference.
We've been talking to Larry Taunton.
You can follow him on X, at Larry Taunton.
Larry, thanks for joining me.
Hey, it's been great to be with you, Dinesh.
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I've been discussing C.S. Lewis' classic work, The Four Loves, and we've covered two of them.
First one is Affection, or Storgi.
The second one is Philia, or Friendship.
And today we launch into the third one which is Eros.
Now I don't know if you've seen pictures of CS Lewis but the ones I've seen generally from his Oxford and Cambridge days now you've got this guy and he's a rumpled fellow with an overcoat and kind of a tweed jacket he's got a scarf and he's typically sporting a pipe and right away you go this guy gonna tell me about Eros.
Is this the guy I'm going to be listening to on this subject?
And so it comes with some surprise that Lewis actually knows what he's talking about and is able to apply the same sort of gentle but critical lens to this type of love that he does to the others.
Once again, he is going to give us what he does characteristically well, which is close observation and Very good comparisons and contrasts.
What he's trying to get at is, what is the peculiar nature of Eros?
I mean, not something we think about, because we use so many terms, love, desire, passion, lust, kind of somewhat interchangeably.
The only difference in general and common usage is that one sort of has a somewhat lust as a bad odor.
But what about desire?
Is that bad? What about passion?
Is that bad or good? What about love itself?
What does it refer to?
So there's a lot of kind of foggy ambiguity surrounding all this.
And Lewis's point is that it makes it difficult for us to do any kind of, not just moral evaluation, but even aesthetic evaluation.
Here. This is how he begins.
By eros, I mean, of course, the state which we call being in love.
Right there, Lewis is tapping into something I think pretty interesting.
He doesn't seem all that conscious of it, but...
There's a difference between kind of love and being in love.
So what is this weird phrase, being in love?
Because it doesn't apply to other things.
If you look at the other types of love, you wouldn't say, well, I'm in affection.
You're like, no, I kind of like the guy.
I have an affection for him.
Or, I'm his friend.
You wouldn't say, I am in friendship.
So, why do we say, I am in love?
It appears to be some kind of a unique state, peculiar to this type of love.
Lewis knows this, and that's why he's starting there.
And he says, I'm going to talk about this state, this state of being in love.
And he says, we have to realize right away that this state is not the same as sexual desire or human sexuality.
In other words, being in love is something different.
It may encompass sexuality or sexual desire, but it's not identical with it.
Now, why is that? He says because a lot of people think, for example, that being in love and romantic desire are necessarily united the one with the other.
And of course this is true. If you ask someone, would you marry someone with whom you are not in love?
They'll go, no, I won't do that.
And so they seem to think, most people seem to think in this culture, that romantic love, the feeling of being in love, And let's say, getting married, having children, all of this is like the same thing.
And Lewis goes, that's really not true.
And it's not true historically, it's not true in other cultures, it's not even true in Western culture, and hasn't been true for thousands of years.
Here's Lewis, he goes, The times and places in which marriage depends on Eros are in a small minority.
Most of our ancestors were married off in early youth to partners chosen by their parents on grounds that had nothing to do with Eros.
They went on to act with no other fuel, so to speak, than plain animal desire.
Then, unexpectedly, Lewis goes, and they did right.
Honest Christian husbands and wives obeying their fathers and mothers, discharging to one another their so-called marriage debt, bringing up families with the fear of the Lord.
So this is where Lewis's sort of historical knowledge comes in and is very useful.
Because it's kind of a natural corrective to contemporary assumptions that are based very often on unthought premises.
We've got to be like this.
It must have been like this forever.
People always thought like this.
No, they didn't always think like this.
And because they didn't always think like this, we have to ask, what is it about kind of our way of being that makes us think this way?
Now, Lewis goes right on to say that there is nothing about eros that inherently makes it a kind of superior selector for marriage.
And he goes on to say, listen, we have seen the kind of uncontrolled power of eros in our society.
He's talking really about the middle of the 20th century, but we could say even more today, how kind of eros unchecked, eros untamed, goes in like...
Crazy directions.
Lewis refers to adultery, breaking a wife's heart, deceiving a husband, betraying a friend, polluting hospitality, deserting your children.
So... Lewis is right into the thick of it already, just in like page two.
You can see right now that he's going to be discussing romance, but he's not going to give, you could call it, the romantic view of romance.
By the romantic view here, I mean the view of the romantic movement, that eros was some kind of a sacrament, that romantic desire has like such an elevated feeling, it's so powerful, so noble, so good, that sort of nothing can come in its way.
You remember when I talked many weeks ago about Dante's Inferno in Canto 5, we have Paolo and Francesca.
And Francesca, in explaining love to Dante, and Dante is a very captive audience, he goes, love that absolves no one from loving.
I can't control it.
It's not even me.
It's like love took a hold of me.
I'm a captive to love.
So Francesca's point is you can't really blame me.
And if you look at Francesca's tone, it's very interesting and in fact different from some of the other sinners.
It's very defiant.
It isn't even something like, well, I fell, I made a mistake, I shouldn't have listened, none of that.
It's more like, who are you to question love itself?
Love is so ennobling, so powerful, such a lofty human impulse that surrendering to it pretty much under any circumstances must be the right and good and true thing to do.
This was exactly the perspective of the romantic movement.
And Lewis is going to go along with this way of feeling up to a point.
So Lewis is not one of those guys who is going to step back and start attacking romantic love or questioning eros and saying, always be suspicious of it.
He doesn't take in that sense the sort of puritanical view, at least the view that we identify with the puritanical view, which is essentially highly skeptical of love itself, of eros itself.
Lewis agrees. Eros is in fact powerful.
It is in fact good.
And he even thinks that in certain ways it is God-like.
But God-like is not the same thing as being divine.
God-like means that there's a certain, at least outward, resemblance to the divine.
He goes, this is really why human beings are so tempted to surrender wholly to it.
But Lewis is going to show why that is not a good idea.
That we should appreciate the real power of eros, and yet recognize that eros doesn't really control itself.
It needs to be controlled.
Now, it doesn't need to be controlled by, like, law or discipline, or it doesn't need to be controlled necessarily by suppression.
It needs to be controlled, Lewis will argue, and this, I think, is the beauty of this chapter, needs to be controlled by the other types of love.
In other words, the way to fix eros, if you will, is not to give into it entirely, to recognize that it's a good thing, it has its place, it's a very important part of human happiness, while not being human happiness itself, and it needs to incorporate all the other three types of love to reach its own fulfillment.
Lewis is going to argue, and I'll pick this up, In subsequent days, I'm going to devote three or four days, I think, to this topic of eros, maybe two days, I don't know.
Lewis is going to argue that eros ultimately always promises what it can't deliver.
And this is really a key point.
I mean, think about some guy you meet or some woman, married like five times, every single time, this time it's the right one, I really found it this time.
So, Lewis is saying, that is in fact the right way to talk, because there is something about eros that demands permanence, demands the eternal, if you will.
But then look, what's the consequence?
How many people actually carry it through till death do us part?
Not that many people.
So many relationships dissolve and break up.
And what happened to the Eros?
And how come it couldn't deliver on its promises?
This is Lewis's point. Eros inherently promises these things and then very frequently fails to produce them.
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