Coming up, I'll discuss an important article by Chris Ruffo on our new civil rights agenda going forward.
I'll make the case for why the Harvard Corporation should call it quits, because its own conduct needs to be a case study for mismanagement at the Harvard Business School.
And Josie Klayback joins me.
She's the host of Spaces with Josie.
We're going to talk about the prosecution of Daniel Penny and the problem for today's Good Samaritan.
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.
We are at a very pivotal moment in this country, well in many ways. It's pivotal in terms of an election that will decide the future, or maybe some would say non-future, of the country.
We are at a pivotal stage in terms of our economy.
Because the level of debt, now, what, $30 plus trillion, is raising the question of whether or not we can, in a meaningful sense, call ourselves a rich country anymore.
Think of it, a guy who has a lot of assets but owes a giant amount of money...
That is going to threaten the security of those assets or wipe them out or severely diminish them.
He doesn't really call himself rich.
Yeah, I have $10 million, but I owe my debtors $9.8 million.
Well, okay, then you don't really have $10 million, do you?
Regardless of what's in your bank account or in your possession, you're paying massive interest on all the stuff that you borrowed and the debt is increasing and it's catching up with you.
So we're facing critical forks in the road on many fronts.
One of them, and this is the one I want to focus on today, is civil rights.
I mentioned some days ago on the podcast that there was a debate going on over Martin Luther King, and part of it was kicked off by Charlie Couric saying in effect, well, Martin Luther King was this kind of suspect character, and then some of the black conservatives come along and say, well, why are you bashing Martin Luther King?
Because, yeah, we're not saying that Martin Luther King was perfect.
He, of course, had some sexual peccadillos.
He was plagiarized in his youth, but nevertheless, aren't we trying to align ourselves with King's colorblind philosophy, his colorblind doctrine?
And this back and forth, which went on for a couple of days, seems to make it appear like the fight is over King.
It's over Martin Luther King, the man.
But actually, the fight is not over that.
It's over civil rights.
It's over the civil rights movement.
And specifically, it's over the colorblind vision and it's over the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Now... The Civil Rights Act of 1964 has been around, well, for now, more than half a century.
It has shaped our civil rights law.
It has, in the view of many people, caused our civil rights law to go in a very radical direction.
In some ways, it was the early incarnation, if you will, of a lot of things that we see today, proportional representation, affirmative action, DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Now, there are some people who say that the civil rights laws enabled those things, and there are others who say that the civil rights laws were flipped on their head for those things to come about.
So to take the second point of view, the civil rights laws...
We're there. And the civil rights laws say pretty plainly that you can't discriminate on the basis of race.
And so the question then becomes, well, how is it that in our society, discrimination on the basis of race is extremely common?
And it's extremely common not because there are white supremacists and racists doing it in ordinary life.
It is actually being done by our institutions.
It's being done by our universities, by our corporations, by our government, and they're doing it in a kind of naked and rampant way.
So how is this possible?
How can this even be happening?
Well, the answer is, the government says we're doing it to fight past discrimination, to rectify the discrimination that has created certain institutional arrangements in our society.
We are trying to sort of undo those arrangements.
We're trying to overturn the legacy of white supremacy.
So we're doing it in a kind of corrective way.
Or remedial way.
Now, this has caused some conservatives to take the view, we need to go back to the original civil rights vision.
We need to stop with this using discrimination to fight discrimination.
The Chief Justice, John Roberts, put it pretty well where he basically said that if you want to stop discriminating on the basis of race...
Stop discriminating on the basis of race.
And that is one view of the matter.
The other view, and this is the view to which I take Charlie Kirk and others to be pushing toward, is, you know what?
Maybe the civil rights laws were themselves a mistake.
Maybe the civil rights laws themselves need to be overturned because, after all, what is the parent of of the wayward child that we see running about.
So if you see a monster in front of you, let's call it DEI, who birthed that monster?
Well, whatever you think, the simple fact of it is what birthed the monster is what came before the monster, what enabled it, what gave it its moral capital, and that was in fact the civil rights movement and the civil rights laws that were The sort of legal extension of the civil rights movement.
And so here comes Chris Ruffo, who has an interesting article in City Journal where he kind of calls a truce.
And he says, in effect, look, let's not go after the civil rights laws.
Let's not go after the civil rights movement, not because the civil rights movement is perfect, but Not because the Civil Rights Law of 1964 is perfect.
The Civil Rights Law of 1964 has, in fact, a serious flaw built into it.
And what is that? It is that it goes beyond outlawing state-sponsored discrimination.
Think of it. If you just outlawed state-sponsored discrimination, then the government couldn't engage in any kind of affirmative action, and you couldn't engage in any kind of segregation.
Why? Because those are all actions by the government.
But the civil rights laws went much further than that.
They also outlawed private discrimination.
And this justified a massive intrusion of the agencies of government.
And there are huge bureaucracies behind all this.
Not just a kind of official civil rights bureaucracy in the government, but civil rights bureaucracies in other departments.
The Department of Education has a major civil rights bureaucracy.
The Department of Transportation, the Department of Defense, and so on.
So civil rights, these bureaucracies now pervade the government.
And so this should not have been done.
It would have been better if the Civil Rights Act did not do this.
But Rufo takes the view, and I pragmatically agree with it.
In other words, I agree with it not in principle, but pragmatically, that it's not going to be very likely that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 can be repealed.
So what Rufo says is Congress needs to pass legislation that modifies it and limits the ways in which the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has given rise to these giant enforcement bureaucracies.
These enforcement bureaucracies aren't We're good to go.
Vivek Ramaswamy in his campaign would talk about repealing Lyndon Johnson's executive order.
This is a famous, I would call it infamous, executive order that goes back to 1965.
It's Executive Order 11246, and it uses this idea of affirmative action, which is taking affirmative steps, i.e., wink-wink, racial preferences, in order to correct the effects of past discrimination.
The amazing thing is that a president, and think about it, we've had all these Republican presidents.
Reagan, he didn't do it.
George H.W. Bush or W., they didn't do it.
Even Trump. No one has repealed Lyndon Johnson's executive order.
I think what Trump should do, and maybe Vivek can help convince him to do it, repeal this executive order.
And the other key thing that Rufo stresses that I think is important is we need to take the case...
Of proportional representation to the Supreme Court.
Now, what does this mean?
What it means is that today, in deciding if a company is guilty of discrimination, what the Supreme Court, what not the Supreme Court, but what the enforcement agencies of DEI, of the civil rights bureaucracy, do is they say, hey, blacks are 10% of the population or of the surrounding population.
Why are they only 6% at your company?
Well, the correct answer is, we're a computer company, we hire people based on merit, and if blacks turn out to be 6%, or 8%, or 4%, or 2%, who cares?
That's the correct answer.
But the presumption here is that if blacks are 10% in the surrounding population, they ought to be 10% at this given company as well.
Otherwise, the company is presumptively guilty of discrimination.
Now, this is, on the face of it, nonsense.
It is, in fact, nonsense in so many different ways.
Why? Because if you look at any feature of life, racial groups do not fan out into the population in their, quote, correct percentages.
Let's just say Asian Americans are 9%, roughly, in the United States.
How many Asian Americans in the NBA are Probably less than 1%, maybe close to 0%.
So is that because the NBA has been discriminating?
No, the NBA is picking people based on merit and that's how it happens to be.
The same might be true if you're looking at, for example, cardiac surgeons.
Or if you're looking at airline pilots.
Or if you're looking at firefighters.
The point is there are all kinds of reasons.
Even when immigrant groups come to this country, they don't fan out into every profession in a kind of algebraic way.
They kind of go where other Indians are.
So Indian guys come to America, they go, what are Indians doing around here?
Well, some of them run these motels.
Okay, I'll go work for a motel.
So all the Indians or a bunch of them end up in motel management.
Why? Well, there's no systematic pattern.
Indians are overrepresented in that field or overrepresented in medicine.
And then they're underrepresented, say, in farming.
Why? Again, not because farmers are discriminating against Indians.
Indians just don't happen to go there for reasons of culture or interest or whatever.
They tend to go elsewhere. So there is a case that was decided by the Supreme Court all the way back I believe this was in the 19—well, it was in the latter part of the 20th century, that's for sure.
It's called Griggs v.
Duke Power. That's the name of the case.
That's the case that consolidated proportional representation as the presumed correct fit— For racial groups and their presence in particular companies and universities and so on, well, the whole thing rests on a fallacy.
And so Rufo says, and I think this is quite right, that we need to take Griggs to the Supreme Court.
We need to overturn Griggs, the Griggs case, so that if you want to prove discrimination, you can't merely say that your racial group is underrepresented or overrepresented.
Who cares? You have to show that there were intentional acts of discrimination that were launched against particular individuals and those individuals in that case have the right to sue for a remedy.
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I'm continuing my discussion of the broad topic of civil rights and DEI, but I want to zoom in here to a quite amusing article in Fortune magazine, of all places. And the article is about Harvard, and it's about the Claudine Gay scandal, but it's not about Claudine Gay.
It's about the Harvard Corporation.
It's about the ruling body of Harvard University, headed by, as it turns out, this woman named Penny Pritzker, who's an heir of the Hyatt fortune.
The article is written by a management professor at Yale named Jeffrey Sonnenfeld.
And his premise is really quite amusing.
It is that the Harvard Corporation itself needs to be a case study of corporate failure to be studied at the Harvard Business School.
Now, the reason I find this amusing is because the Harvard Business School has been famous for really a generation or more for adopting a unique approach to studying business.
And their approach is we don't study sort of the theory of business.
We don't read Adam Smith and try to understand the nature of capitalism or study financial complex mathematical models of financial speculation or how markets work.
No, ours is the case study approach.
And in the case study approach, you look at situations.
And that is, for example, how is it that the U.S. auto industry, which dominated the market, for example, in the 1950s and 60s, lost so much ground in the 70s and 80s to the Japanese and the Germans?
That's a case study.
Let's look at Ford Motor Corporation, or even let's look at a particular decision that was made by the CEO of Ford, let's just say, in the year 1971.
And so, in this situation, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld says, we have a case study for the Harvard Business School, and the case study is Harvard itself.
It's the management of Harvard Corporation of the Claudine Gay scandal.
And he says this was a massive failure on the part of the Harvard Corporation on five separate fronts.
So let's look at the front. And he goes, for years, if not for decades, Harvard students at the business school need to be studying their own university as a kind of model in incompetence or a case study in incompetence.
What was the incompetence?
Well, the first thing is, he says...
That there was a failed sort of diligence.
And the diligence here involves not the firing of Claudine Gay, but her hiring.
He goes, they didn't really run a proper search.
He goes, there are highly competent people all over the world.
They jumped over all that.
They didn't really care about either important academic credentials or administrative experience.
He goes, why? Why?
Because they wanted the first black woman as president of Harvard.
So right away, they put aside merit.
And so this was a failure of due diligence.
And he goes, there were lots of people at Harvard, not just the fault of the Harvard Corporation, there were people at Harvard lobbying for this.
Let's get a first black woman.
Let's get a first black woman. Alright, here's the first black woman.
Failure of due diligence.
Number two, he says a lack of responsiveness, by which he means that there were many people, alumni, students, even some faculty, who said that anti-Semitism had become a big problem at Harvard, Jewish students were being harassed, they didn't even feel safe in their dorms or on campus, and the administration basically goes away.
So, the lack of paying attention to your own community.
We're not talking about paying attention to what's being said on X or what's being said in social media.
Failure to pay attention to your own community.
Number three... Premature denials of misconduct allegations.
So what Sonnenfeld is getting at here is you have a case of plagiarism.
Instead of saying, we'll look into it, we're setting up a committee, we'll carefully examine it, they go, no, not true.
And not only do they say not true, they hire a law firm to threaten the New York Post in particular for wanting to publish a story about this.
So the immediate response is defensiveness, we're not guilty, innocent...
Innocence is proclaimed even without investigation.
And then what happens, says Sonnenfeld, you got the second case, the third case, and the third case is worse than the first two, and the fifth case is worse than the first three.
And so you have a kind of escalating situation where you've ended up with 50 cases of plagiarism, and now you realize, oh wait, we've been...
We've been suspending and removing Harvard students from the university for doing this.
How can we let the president do it?
What we've been saying is demonstrably false about Claudine Gay is demonstrably true.
And now you have a situation.
And then four, a failure to address the erosion of Harvard's brand.
In other words, the Harvard Corporation was concerned about...
It's DEI credentials.
They were concerned about what do we say if we fire a black woman?
They're not concerned with what is happening to the credibility of Harvard.
You've got the premier educational institution in the United States.
You are the conservers, the defenders of this brand.
You're charged with protecting this brand and you are showing complete indifference to it.
And so the reputational damage is enormous.
And finally, unexplained violations of collegial, shared governance, and presumptions of racial bias.
And what they're getting at here is simply that That Harvard, because it was so worried about being seen as racist, for even investigating Claudine Gay, didn't really investigate her.
They set up a sham.
Well, we had a committee of three.
Who are those three people? We're not telling you.
They looked at the situation.
They found that she didn't really plagiarize.
How so? Where's their report?
Let's see what their findings were and what cases they looked at.
Well, we're not showing any of that to you.
So, Sonnenfeld, this is such an obvious failure of transparency.
You're in the public limelight.
Plagiarism is the most serious academic offense.
And if you act in this way, you're really showing an indifference to To plagiarism itself.
It shows that you're more worried about being called names.
Oh, Harvard doesn't want to be called racist.
And so for that, we destroy our academic reputation.
So for all these reasons, says Jeff Sonnenfeld, the Harvard board itself is at fault.
Now, he doesn't call for the Harvard corporation to resign.
I think they should. These people are lousy managers of Harvard's reputation.
Now, there's some people who say, so what?
Let Harvard go down the tubes.
I actually don't want Harvard to go down the tubes, as I don't want any of these IVs to go down the tubes by themselves.
I would rather rescue them, although I agree that if they continue in this poisonous fashion, then they do deserve to sink to the bottom of the ocean.
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Guys, I'd like to welcome to the podcast a new guest.
I actually kind of know her as the Red-Headed Libertarian because that's her handle on X on Twitter.
Well, it's actually T-R-H-L, the Red-Headed Libertarian.
Libertarian Official.
That's her handle on X. She is Josie Glabach, and she's host of Twitter Spaces with Josie.
She's also a correspondent with TimCast, and we're going to be talking about the Daniel Penny case.
Josie, welcome. Thanks for joining me.
It was really fun.
I joined you on one of your X Spaces to talk about the themes around police state, so thanks for doing that.
Let's talk a little bit about this Daniel Penny business.
First of all, is the underlying issue that we're going to be discussing the question of the kind of Good Samaritan?
Because it seems to me this is not fundamentally a case about self-defense, is it?
No. So, Daniel Penny, he was charged with second-degree manslaughter for neutralizing a violent man on a subway.
But there's a lot of inconsistencies between what happened with Daniel Penny and what happened with another man, Jordan Williams, who had exactly the same thing happen to him, where there was a violent man on a subway and ended up stabbing him.
So Daniel Penny, he had a $200,000 bond or bail, and the other one had no bond or bail.
And Daniel Penny didn't have his charges dropped, and this man did have his charges dropped.
Their difference is their race.
Daniel Penny's white, Jordan Neely's black.
So it makes you wonder if this is racially motivated or if this is equity restorative justice, I believe is the term that they like to call it.
And it comes down to, okay, are they trying to...
We know that they're releasing a lot of black and brown men from prison and not charging them at all and just keeping them on the streets, where at the same time, you see kind of more of a push for the white people to go to prison, even the ones like Daniel Penney who did nothing wrong.
Yeah. I wonder if it's a Like a way to push through a false narrative that they've already kind of prepped themselves and just affirm it for themselves and say,
look at all this white-on-black crime is what it feels like is happening.
It's demoralization, really.
Yeah. Wow. Let's go into the Daniel Penny case in a little bit of detail so we can follow what actually happened.
Here's Daniel Penny. He's on the subway.
And apparently this guy who might have been mentally ill but was certainly out of control.
Describe what was actually happening.
What was that guy doing that caused Daniel Penny and a couple of others?
But why did Daniel Penny put him into a chokehold?
He was making threats.
He was violently making threats.
People were scared. They were screaming, there's video of it.
And you see people are clearly afraid of this man.
You see this man yelling erratically.
You see Daniel Penny subdue him and get him on the ground and subdue him.
And Daniel Penny, I believe, is military.
Am I wrong about that? I think that's right.
Yeah, he's... Sorry.
No, go ahead. Okay.
Well, he seemed to follow the protocol.
So he got the man into the headlock.
He neutralized him.
And then he released him. He put him on his side.
He followed the steps of his training.
And in a way that the man should have been safe if he wasn't mentally ill, maybe on drugs.
We don't know. I don't know those instances.
Any civilized and just society would celebrate this man.
As Jordan Williams, which I mentioned earlier, he's a hero too.
Exactly. So what's going on here?
Why aren't we celebrating this man?
Why is he being arraigned?
Why is he charged with these insane charges that he murdered, that he has manslaughter?
He was saving these people from God only knows what.
We don't know what this guy was about to do.
I mean, I think the point here, Josie, is as I understand it from the circumstances, it's pretty clear that, number one, Daniel Penny wasn't trying to kill this guy, right?
He was trying to restrain him.
Yes. Did not hit or strike anybody.
He had created a volatile atmosphere of threats.
In fact, apparently it said something like, I don't mind if I get killed.
I don't mind if I get life in prison.
He was raving and ranting in a way that would make an ordinary person terrified.
Apparently there were people who got out of the subway and so on.
So, and number three, you are allowed, aren't you?
In other words, it's not just the case that you can use force if some guy comes and is threatening you.
If some guy is threatening another guy, let's say in a restaurant or on a subway, you are allowed to intervene and use force to subdue them.
So, in all these respects, Daniel Penny was...
Doing the right thing, right?
He was doing what a law-abiding citizen would be expected to do.
And what you're saying is the fact that they're taking this to trial, and recently a judge goes, I'm not dismissing the case, I'm going to let it go to trial.
I assume the judge is a bit of a coward here, and the judge doesn't want to take the heat for letting this guy go, so the judge goes, you know what, I'm gonna kind of punt it to the jury.
If somebody's gonna let him go, we'll let the jury decide that, so I'm not blamed for sort of white supremacy.
You think that's what was going on?
That's what it feels like.
And, you know, we're watching the breakdown of our country and we're seeing it on a state to state level, not just on a federal level, but on a state to state level.
We're seeing this demoralization, this destabilization, this chaos, and then the normalization of all of it.
And I mean, I was thinking about it and I'm a constitutional historian.
And if you look at the grievances in the Declaration of Independence, New York City is worse off than we were in colonial America when it came to King George.
I mean, there's a two-tiered...
They were itemized in there, all 27 of them.
Two-tiered justice system, government self-interest, government waging war against the people, government enabling...
Enemies to hurt the people.
Then there was the refusal to write laws for the betterment of people.
And then there was this coercion of your rights if you want it to be represented.
And these were all listed in 1776.
And we're seeing them all happen on a state level in captured states like New York City and Massachusetts and California.
And I think that this is just such a huge issue that we're seeing Like, a bigger issue than we can even imagine that we're seeing right now when it comes to how bad things were then to how bad things are now.
Like, this is the kind of stuff our founders revolted over.
I mean, Josie, I would argue that in some ways, even the red states are in no way immune from this.
In fact, Debbie and I were just talking on the podcast a few days ago.
We were talking about Texas.
Now, Texas is a red state.
And the fact of the matter is Texas is now trying to do something about the border.
But guess what? The federal government is interposing itself and saying, no, if you build fences, we will take them down.
So, in a sense, if you think about it, you know, what is the purpose at the most fundamental level for why we have a government at all?
Isn't it to protect us from foreign and domestic thugs?
I mean, isn't it to protect our basic safety because all our other rights depend on that?
So that if you have the borders, one kind of problem, criminality is another kind of problem, but the two intersect, right?
Because they intersect at the point of rampant law breaking that is being tolerated by the authorities.
And in the case of New York, I take it that this is happening at a double level because the state government is doing it and the federal government is going along with it.
So the citizen is at the mercy.
I think this is what you're saying and I'm saying it a different way, is that our fundamental rights are being jeopardized and it's almost like the government is taunting us and saying, what are you going to do about it?
Yes, exactly. What's interesting about Texas is that the limit in the Constitution to the federal government's authority over the border is limited to the naturalization process.
So that would go to say that unless there's invasion, if there's an invasion, if they declare an invasion, then...
The federal government steps in, too.
So that would go to say that everything else, the borders of these border states, are the responsibility of the states.
So that Texas has full authority to control its border because there's nothing in the Constitution that prevents them from doing that or that the government has any power to take it from them or do it for them.
So this is an interesting test.
Ken Paxton's brilliant.
And this is an interesting test that he's doing on them because he does have the power.
He does have the authority. I mean, that's interesting.
What you're saying is that, because I know that the Biden administration is going to say that the job of controlling the outer perimeter of the United States is 100% the prerogative of the federal government.
And what you're saying is...
That is true, but only to a very limited degree.
The government can decide who gets to be or not be a US citizen.
It controls that administrative process.
But no, it doesn't mean that Texas cannot secure its own border.
That's very interesting. Let's come back to Daniel Penney.
So on the one hand, you got Daniel Penney.
And he is being charged.
They're sort of throwing the book at him.
On the other hand, you mentioned at the beginning of this conversation, you have this other guy, the black guy, and he was in a situation somewhat resembling that of Daniel Penny.
He exercised his right.
As a citizen. And so, they're not going after him.
And that tells you that it's not that the government is...
It's not open season on all citizens.
It's open season kind of on whites.
Now, I mean, think of how ridiculous this is, right?
I mean, whites aren't white people, 70% of the population, even now, even this increasingly diverse America.
So, is it the case, do you think, Josie, that they have browbeaten white people in America, To become defensive about their whiteness, to basically almost accept that their whiteness is a curse or liability.
This is the whole premise of like white studies and abolishing whiteness.
So it's a DEI precept extended to law enforcement.
Yes. Whiteness is the original sin.
It's the new original sin.
Now, what's interesting about whiteness and what's interesting about communism is that they have the same parameters for what needs to be done about them.
So whiteness, if you were to look up whiteness, what it means from the CRT people, it is whiteness is your history, your family, your religion.
It's truth and It's borders, right?
And you got to overthrow all of that.
You got to overthrow all of this whiteness, right?
Communism, in order to have your perfect communist utopia, you have to overthrow what?
Family, your history, your borders, your religion, your truth.
And so they took the outline from Karl Lark's.
and they put it on CRT and it's the same process and same things only instead of this is all bourgeoisie or whatever they call it in Marxism, now it's whiteness.
So they've demonized the same traits of people, of their enemy essentially.
I mean I've been doing on my podcast, I completed it a couple weeks ago, you know a survey of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago and he talks about in the Stalinist trials, They would ask people, you know, what is your class?
In other words, describe your profession, and that will tell us what class you belong to.
It has nothing to do with whether, you know...
Whether you broke the law, it has nothing to do with whether or not you did not turn over your grain to the collectivized farm.
Your membership in the class is your crime.
And I think this clearly applies to Daniel Penney, right?
He's a white guy. His sin is kind of whiteness because it's pretty obvious that if Daniel Penney were not white and did exactly what he had done, let's just say he was a black guy, he did the same thing, it was a black homeless guy, it would have been no big deal, they would probably not be charging him, they'd let him go. So Daniel Penney is facing trial that they won't say it this way, but his charge is being a white guy.
Yes. It's not even just being a white guy.
It's being a masculine white guy.
It's coming at all the different traits of whiteness, all the different traits of masculinity and what keeps our society whole and running.
And it's tacking those things saying it's not only bad to be white, it's bad to be masculine and white.
It's bad to defend people.
And what's that going to make people do?
That's going to make people not want to defend people.
That's going to create more chaos in our society because...
There's going to be more harm happening to people because nobody wants to step up.
It's a very dangerous precedent what they're doing and what they're setting for sure.
And it's pretty obvious that they don't care about that.
In other words, they've probably thought of that, right?
It doesn't take a genius to see that if you start criminalizing people for being a good Samaritan you're just going to have fewer good Samaritans on the subway and that's pretty obvious.
Josie, this has been a very good conversation.
I really appreciate you joining me, guys.
We're talking to Josie Klayback.
She can be followed on X at TRHLOfficial, the red-headed libertarian official.
She's also on TimCast.
Josie, thanks very much for joining me.
Thank you so much for having me, Dinesh.
I haven't covered C.S. Lewis in a couple of days.
Just a lot going on.
And so I took a bit of a break on the C.S. Lewis commentaries.
But I'm picking it up now.
And we are in the third of the four loves.
This is the love that is called Eros.
And I want to emphasize that Eros is not simply sexual attraction or sexual desire.
It is the particular...
Desire for a particular person.
It is wanting that person that constitutes the eros.
Now, the sexual desire is part of that, but one can have sexual desire in a generic sense.
Oh, I'm feeling really horny.
Well, that's not eros.
At least it's not yet eros.
Eros is when... Those feelings and others descend on an individual, actually a member of the other, the opposite sex.
The question of whether you can have eras in one's own sex, I will leave to the side, and it's something that C.S. Lewis leaves to the side.
Now, Lewis makes the point that although Eros is very intense, it is very serious, it takes the whole project with a kind of grandeur, nevertheless, people who are wise or people who are living in Eros, people who recognize The place of Eros in life take Eros less seriously.
Certainly the world takes it less seriously because the world, on the one hand, grants that there's a certain kind of latitude that you give to Eros.
It deserves a certain kind of respect in itself.
You go to a movie, for example, and a guy falls in love.
It's never dismissed as, oh, that's ridiculous.
Why did he choose that person?
You give a lot of latitude that, okay, well, he's in love.
And even though you and I are a little puzzled, that doesn't seem like somebody well-suited, we don't really see the chemistry, nevertheless, it's sort of like, alright, well, that's his choice.
That's somewhere that he wants to go.
So the world gives Eras a lot of latitude.
At the same time, says Lewis, there's a lot of sarcasm, there are a lot of puncturing jokes.
Eros relies upon a general recognition.
The reason someone can make jokes on the subject is they can count on the audience to be in agreement.
The audience is already there, and so there's a natural sense of laughter when silly things about Eros are brought up.
And Lewis says it has to be like this because anybody who understands the nature of eras recognizes that you've got something, you've got two things that are conjoined that sort of, it's an odd couple.
So what's the odd couple? I don't mean the odd couple is the boy and the girl.
The odd couple here is the soul and the body.
And so Eros on one level is soaring, it's transcendent, it's spiritual in somewhat of the same sense that friendship is spiritual.
It is voluntary, unlike Storgi, which is, you know, you and your neighbor, you happen to be next door, or you have siblings, you just happen to be born into the same family.
In Eros as in friendship, this is something that you undertake it, you make a choice.
And so it's spiritual in all these ways, and yet, It, of course, involves bodily sensation, bodily excitement, bodily feeling.
And C.S. Lewis goes, whenever the body is involved, well, all kinds of other factors come into play that are really not in our control.
And so, for example, one of the kind of, you know, standard jokes in Eros is that, you know, in the middle of it, one of the two, like, let out a major fart, right?
What does that mean? By the way, this is my example.
Debbie looks up like, is this something raised by C.S. Lewis?
It doesn't really seem in character.
No, it is not in character, but it may be in character for me to raise it.
Why? Not because I like talking about these topics per se.
Although Debbie's like, well, Dinesh, I don't know.
I don't know. But what it is, is it illustrates the point.
And the point is that right in the middle of this really serious thing that you're doing, your body lets out on you.
Right. So here's Lewis.
This is Lewis talking in an abstract way of what I'm trying to make more concrete.
Lewis says that, like any other appetite, it reveals its connections with such mundane factors as weather, health, diet, circulation, and digestion.
So, what is Lewis saying?
Just what I just said!
Except Lewis is saying it in a more roundabout way.
Part of what's going on is, you know, 50 years ago, you could address these matters with a certain degree of tact and insinuation, and people would immediately know what you're talking about.
I take it for granted that people don't always know what Lewis is talking about digestion.
What does that have to do with the weather?
What? So, I think it's important, and this is why I try to make these things explicit.
So, here's Lewis.
Lovers, unless their love is very short-lived, again and again feel an element not only of comedy, not only of play, but even of buffoonery.
Why buffoonery?
Because the body is like a really clumsy instrument for this kind of spiritual connection that one is seeking to develop with the beloved.
Again, eros is about developing not only a connection, but kind of a permanent connection.
And therefore, says Lewis, you can only really make it work if you recognize that you're doing it with, you can say, faulty equipment or clumsy equipment.
And he says mature people kind of recognize this.
Now Lewis goes into something that is a little bit unexpected, and he doesn't give a real reason for going into it, but it connects to his issue of play, and I think his point is actually quite profound.
And that is, he says that in Eros, you often have a man, and even a woman, sometimes participating in what is clearly a kind of massive...
Control and domination type of ritual.
And so the man goes, in effect, begins to think of himself like, I'm a conqueror.
And the woman kind of feels like, I'm being conquered.
And in fact, this is part of, by the way, what the feminist critics say about heterosexual sex.
They go, oh, it's an exercise in male domination.
And what Lewis is doing here is not denying that.
He actually agrees.
He agrees that it's that.
And he asks, what's really going on here?
And his answer is what's going on here is an important kind of role-playing.
But the emphasis here is not on the word role, sex roles, traditional roles, but it is on the word playing.
And what C.S. Lewis is getting at is that no, the man is not in fact the conqueror of the woman.
The woman is not in fact the subject of the man.
This is a theater scene.
That is put on within the permission, if you will, of ERAS and with the consent of both the parties involved.
In fact, if it was not that, says Lewis, it would be horrible.
Why? Here's Lewis. A woman who accepted as literally her own this extreme self-surrender would be an idolatrous offering to a man what belongs only to God.
In other words, no, a woman can't give herself over that way in a permanent sense because she should only be in that kind of full surrender to her creator.
And the same with the man.
The man who's given that kind of power in a permanent sense, again, that kind of power belongs only to the ruler of all rulers, which is again God himself, and it would be extreme arrogance for a man to think that he owned another person.
In this kind of way.
I mean, this is the sense in which if a man took those kind of ideas literally, he would in fact be a lord lording it over a serf, or he would be a slave master lording it over a slave.
And those are not in fact the arrangements that are typical of Eros, not at all.
So Lewis goes, that's not really what's going on at all.
He says, in fact, in real life, there isn't this kind of subjugation.
He goes, in real life, in fact, he kind of says somewhat wryly, wryly here, W-R-Y-L-Y, he says that it's quite possible, he says that the wife dominates the husband in ordinary life.
In other words, when you think about the major decisions of life, like...
Where should we go on vacation? What movie should we see?
What should we have for dinner? How should we raise our children?
Very often it's the wife who's calling the shots and not the husband at all.
And then Lewis goes into a fairly traditional account of the fact that the husband, quote, rules the wife, only in the sense that Christ, quote, rules the church. Well, how does Christ rule the church?
Well, Christ rules the church by...
So, Christ rules the church sacrificially.
And in this sense, says Lewis, if husbands are willing to do this, take on that Christ-like role, what wife is going to object?
And, therefore, says Lewis, and I think this is one of the beautiful lines of this book, he goes, The sternest feminist need not grudge my sex the crown, for the crown, he says, is a crown of thorns.
So, in other words, the traditional Christian recommendation is, Is that the husband play the Christ-like role and be the bridegroom of the church in that sense?
And this is not something that even the most vociferous feminist needs to have any objection to.
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