May 10, 2021 - Dennis Prager Show
06:41
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Your book is an ode to what I have lamented the death of all of my public life, and that is wisdom. | |
| The book is that important because it is about wisdom, it's very engaging, and it is exactly as he just described, about a given thinker on any given subject. | |
| There is no wisdom in our educational system. | |
| The secular world, and I'm only saying this for you to react to, No, it's a brilliant characterization. | |
| Knowledge, or let's say fact, is the one lone star of modernity as such, of liberal modernity as such. | |
| And what's lost in our obsession with facts, not that facts aren't important, but facts are narrow. | |
| And facts are just collections of things that we observe about the world, either with our senses and with our scientific instruments, and are able to express them, generally speaking, in mathematical formulae. | |
| Now, those are very important. | |
| But at some point in the West, now we can debate where the deformation or the wrong path was taken, but at some point we came to equate all of truth... | |
| We're all of wisdom with these kinds of facts, which is the result of it in a practical way, is how our educational systems deformed young minds, where they just learn these kind of disconnected little trivia. | |
| You know, how much magnesium does Uzbekistan produce, which is maybe an important thing or maybe not be, but it's not. | |
| It's not wisdom, as in, how do you live a good life? | |
| What's the source of a happy life? | |
| That question has true or false answers, too, and the answers to it don't take necessarily scientific form, and the reduction of all truths to these kinds of factoids has really impoverished us. | |
| Now, unfortunately, as you'll agree maybe, we've even gotten rid of the factoids and replaced them with just pure kind of race, gender, sex ideology, which is like kind of a second layer of degradation. | |
| That's right. | |
| They say follow the science, but they don't even follow the science. | |
| As I ended my last hour, I said people who say follow the science also tell us that men menstruate. | |
| Right? | |
| Yes, yes. | |
| I mean, even kind of scientific empiricism gives way to... | |
| Just kind of pure ideology. | |
| And we see so many men menstruate and so many other phenomena of this kind. | |
| And I argue that that's because science itself cannot give answers to the fundamental questions of life. | |
| That's right. | |
| Go on, please. | |
| No, no. | |
| Science is a very kind of legitimate thing in its own domain. | |
| So, absolutely. | |
| Well, if we follow science, then we should follow survival of the fittest. | |
| We shouldn't have hospitals for the truly sick. | |
| We should just let them die. | |
| That's what science recommends. | |
| Precisely. | |
| So there are questions that we constantly face in life, little more of the dilemmas in our individual lives and as a society. | |
| Whose answers don't take scientific form. | |
| Now, all sorts, thank God, we do take care of the seriously ill, and we don't, you know, just throw away children with profound disabilities, although some ideologues would even do that. | |
| But the reason we don't do that is we still recognize there are certain questions about ultimate meaning whose answers can only be found in things like the Bible, in the Western tradition, in the great books. | |
| In great novels and poetry. | |
| And all of those things cannot be kind of cast aside without our society paying the price as it is now, with this kind of scientific managerial governance, which is also extremely ideological. | |
| That's exactly right. | |
| You wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal this weekend, a very long piece on behalf of the Sabbath. | |
| I'm sure you wouldn't know this, but I have been pushing. | |
| Sabbath observance all 35 years of my broadcast career. | |
| I regularly tell people it is the source of my sanity, that I leave the world one day a week, that I am with friends or family every single week, including the lockdown. | |
| I've been with about 16 people every Friday night for Shabbat dinner from the beginning of the lockdown, maskless and enjoying life, singing and talking. | |
| And I've had this as a result of having a Sabbath. | |
| And the loss of it is profound. | |
| You will find this of interest in light of your being Catholic and writing this piece. | |
| I have asked priests and ministers, that is, Catholics and Protestants, all of my life, well, not nearly all of my life, I've asked them, as a Christian, are you bound? | |
| To keep the Sabbath? | |
| Are you commanded to? | |
| And the answers have been literally 50-50. | |
| I have no way of predicting what they would say. | |
| They would say, well, it's the only one of the Ten Commandments that really doesn't apply any longer. | |
| It was specifically to the Jews, and it's not a universal commandment. | |
| What do you say to that? | |
| So, speaking as a Catholic, and again, not being a... | |
| Theologian or an ordained priest. | |
| I will say that if I look at my Catechism of the Catholic Church and my little Roman Missal where I carry when I go to church, Mass with me, the commandment to keep the Sabbath and go to church that day and try to avoid serval labor is still there. | |
| And so, therefore, when I go to confession... | |
| One of the questions I have to ask myself is, have I broken the commandment to keep the Sabbath and avoided servile labor unless absolutely necessary? | |
| That's the theory, but in practice, you're right, though. | |
| My serious Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jewish friends, their Sabbath, let's put it this way, is a lot more of a Sabbath than compared to mine. |
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