hello and welcome back to this special episode of the Ben Shapiro show today's show features a portion of my last book club where I went through the screw tape Letters by C. S Lewis fantastic investigation of the nature of evil and good human Frailty and the power of God listen now as we Chronicle a handful of different ways that T. S Lewis predicted the vices and predations of our modern culture there are a bunch of large-scale arguments that that Lewis makes in screw tape letters the first one is that Satan's best weapon is the quote-unquote real world and this is right I mean if you talk to people who are secular they'll always say that the spiritual world the spiritual World God is unreal the real world is the material world and then when you ask them about what's important to them they'll talk about their feelings which of course are inherently unreal in the same way the spiritual world is unreal and this is a point that Lewis makes is that the definition of real is capacious and changing on a regular basis from secularists so Lewis believes that man's draw to the Divine can be rooted in reason and that reason actually guides you towards something Beyond yourself it guards you it guides you toward the Transcendent that's an idea that I obviously agree with I believe that the notion of Free Will free choice in the universe guides you toward the idea of there must be something Beyond us that if there's a logic to the universe that guides you to the question of who is the chief logician who made the rules for example Lewis makes the same point and then he says that the job of the secular materialist is to get you to focus on the thing it's to get you to focus on the thing in itself that's sort of the language of Bertrand Russell famous atheist and so Lewis says this even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favor this is a screw Terry as screw tape you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the Fatal habit of attending to Universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences your business is to fix his attention on the stream teach him to call it real life don't let him ask what he means by real right so just keep them focused on the immediate I'm focused on the now there's nothing that's done that's more than the internet age where our attention spans have been reduced to the next 15 seconds sitting and ruminating on life leads you to a higher ideas if you can prevent people from doing that sort of stuff you end up with a very materialistic Society so what exactly does reality mean well according to screwtape people ought to be taught that in all experiences which can make them happier or better only the physical facts are real while the spiritual elements are subjective and in all experiences which can discourage or corrupt them the spiritual elements are the main reality and to ignore them is to be an Escapist right so the idea is that when you're thinking about death that the only thing that is real is the death right you're not supposed to look to the the you're not supposed to look to the spiritual element of death or if you look at something that makes you very happy you're not supposed to look to the spiritual element of what makes you very happy just focus in on the pure materialism of the thing and the goal is to enmesh Mankind in the world and this is something that Catholic theologians talk about a lot the idea that the spiritual world if you can enmesh it in reality too much then you can bring people away from the reality of something higher this means for example that you have to get people to stop thinking about death it says screw tape says how disastrous for us is the continual remembrance of death with which war enforces one of our best weapons contented worldliness is rendered useless in Wartime not even a human can believe that he is going to live forever the material world then is the chief Ally of screw tape because people desire not to think of God God is a distraction God has obligations God has duties scrutase has human beings hate every idea that suggests him just as men in financial embarrassment hate the very sight of a past book past book meaning like a checkbook so the idea is that that if you're not thinking about Duty and then you're forced to think about Duty you don't like it very much the other thing that screwtape tries to get you to focus in on is the future at all times if you can focus in on the future at all times then people will be very neglectful of the president so says screw tape it's far better to make them live in the future the future is of all things the thing at least like eternity it is the most completely temporal part of time for the past is frozen it no longer flows the present is all lit up with eternal Rays hence the encouragement we have given to all those schemes of thought like Creative Evolution scientific humanism or communism which fix men's affections on the future on the very core of temporality hence nearly all vices are rooted in the future it's the idea is if you're thinking about the future then you're not thinking about the spiritual consequences of the things you do in the here and now you're thinking about the material consequences of the things that you do in the here and now and that allows you to do bad things in the name of a quote unquote better future screwtape says the best thing you can do is convince people that their utopian thoughts are the things that are mandated by God so on the one hand you try to get people sunk in reality and this drives them away from God on the other hand screwtape advises wormwood that people should be led to examine their own emotions constantly like if you can be narcissistically checking yourself all the time you're going to end up without God so if you feel wildly enthusiastic about becoming religious then wormwood ought to encourage people to wait for the anti-climax right because you get enthusiastic about I think I'm less enthusiastic about the thing and then you pounds quote work hard then on the disappointment or anti-climax which is certainly coming to the patient during his first few weeks as a Churchman in every Department of life it marks the transition from dreaming aspiration to laborious doing the enemy takes this risk because he has a curious fantasy of making all these disgusting little human Vermin into what he calls his free lovers and servants Sons is the word he uses so in other words very often in life we engage at the beginning of a task with great enthusiasm and then the enthusiasm wears away this happens all the time with a variety of tasks and once that happens that is when you encourage people to look into being morose look into being depressed to reject the spiritual aspect of their duty to stop trying to take joy in the in the spiritual aspect of what they're doing and instead focus in on the fact that it's just sheer drudgery so for example when it comes to prayer human beings should be encouraged to seek a feeling of inspiration specifically because it's very hard to find I mean I pray three times a day I've talked about this before finding a feeling of inspiration while you're praying can be really really difficult and so if you're constantly searching your feelings I'm not inspired enough I'm not inspired eventually like I'm never getting inspired you stop doing it and that's the goal whereas the reality is that when you're praying you should stop searching inside your own feelings all the time you should focus on the doing of the prayer and then when eventually you stumble onto the feeling it's an incredible thing but at least you won't stop doing the thing when you when you lose the feeling so you focus in on the feeling when the feeling goes short you stop doing the duty if you focus in on the duty then eventually you come to feeling is the case that Lewis is actually making we'll get some more on this in just one second first it's no secret that the holiday season is the best time to buy a car dealers are motivated to hit end of month and end of your sales quotas and with used car prices coming down we can expect to see even more amazing deals this year but before you set foot into a dealership you have to check out karzing cars is 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S Lewis calls grayness right if you're passionate about things then very often you can find spirituality but if you're great about things it's very hard to find spirituality he says the Christians describe the enemy as one without whom nothing is strong and nothing is very strong strong enough to steal away a man's best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the Mind Over it knows not what and knows not why in the gratification of curiosity so feeble that man is only half aware of them it does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to Edge the man away from the light and out into the nothing I mean is this a great description of the internet age or is this a great description of the internet age you spend all day on social media consuming your time with absolute stupidities you don't feel anything good about it it just feels like and then when you go outside in the sun you still feel unenthusiastic the the goal of modern society is almost solely apparently to do the work of wormwood here the the point that Lewis makes is that you you're you're able to to get at people through ART through popular culture he says we've engineered a great increase in the license which society allows to the representation of the apparent nude in art and its exhibition on the stage of the bathing Beach it's all fake of course the figures in the popular art are falsely drawn the real women in bathing suits or tights are actually pinched in and propped up to make them appear firmer and more slender and more boyish than nature allows a full-grown woman to be yet at the same time the modern world is taught to believe that it is being frank and healthy and getting back to Nature as a result we are more and more directing the desires of men to something which does not exist making the role of the eye and sexuality more and more important and at the same time making its demands more and more impossible what follows you can easily forecast that is the greatest description of internet porn that has ever been written and C. S Lewis is writing this in 1942. right that you're setting up increasing expectations for what women are supposed to look like what sex is supposed to be what it's supposed to look like and then people are engaging in it less and less you're making demands nearly impossible and yet you are satisfying those demands with the virtual and that again C.
S Lewis a man ahead of his time because here's the thing sin is always the same this is the thing that people always say about the Bible and it's so stupid they'll say oh the Bible it's archaic the Bible's talking about things that things have changed you know it has never changed human nature CS Lewis could have written this 4 000 years ago would not have mattered human nature does not change human nature is the same as it was thousands of years ago the only thing that has changed is that we believe that we have been able to overcome human nature which of course is extraordinary arrogance and silliness it turns out that all of the systems that we built to hem in human nature all the systems that we built in order to channel human nature to its best available Pursuits we've exploded all of those in the in the belief that we have created a new human already now there are a lot of ideologies that say that you can create a new human Marxism size you can create a new human change the economic conditions change the man secular humanism says the same thing that if you just get rid of God then magically a new human being will flourish religion says no human beings are exactly the same as they were when Adam ate the apple with Eve in the garden we're exactly the same and nothing has changed the only thing that has changed is that we've built institutions and systems in order to channel us toward our better selves and when you blow up all those institutions what you end up with is something very very bad which is precisely what has happened screwtape also talks about how Human Relationships can undermine Faith as well because human beings have a really tough time living with each other and so most sin is not between man and God most sin is between man and man when he talks about the relations in marriage for example Lewis is right on the money he says in civilized life domestic hatred it usually expresses Itself by saying things which would appear quite harmless on paper the words are not offensive but in such a voice or it's such a moment that they're not far short of a blow in the face your patient must demand that all his own utterances are to be taken at face value and judged simply on the actual words while at the same time judging all his mother's utterances with the fullest and most oversensitive interpretation of the tone in the context and the suspected intention this is true in virtually all human relationships right you you say something and you you say it in kind of a nasty way and then when somebody gets offended you're like hey what did I say what did I do I did did I say no I just lit and I'll read back the words that I said it's like well no the tone mattered an awful lot right there by the way this is one of the reasons why just a piece of Shapiro advice here try to have as many conversations via voice as you can and not via text text is open to misinterpretation voice really really is not but we do have a double standard we insist that everybody interpret Us in the best light and then we interpret everybody else in the worst possible light and then his descriptions of men and women are also extraordinarily accurate this is one of my favorite sections of the book he says a woman means by unselfishness chiefly taking trouble for others a man means not giving trouble to others as a result a woman who is quite far gone in the enemy's service will make a nuisance of herself on a larger scale than any man except those whom our father has dominated completely and conversely a man will live long in the enemy's Camp before he undertakes as much spontaneous work to please others as a quite ordinary woman may do every day in other words women tend to be very helpful and if Satan can get a hold of them then intrusive and invasive and men tend to be very blase which means that they allow people their space but also if Satan get a hold of them then they are completely disconnected from other human beings and selfish a sensible human once said quote if people knew how much ill feeling unselfishness occasions it would not be so often recommended from the pulpit and again she's the sort of woman who lives for others you can always tell the others by their hunted expression screwtape also talks to Wormwood about the the misinterpretation of the word love how love has come to mean sexual desire and how we have moved away from Marriage as a duty-based relationship to the volunteerization of marriage screw tape says quote in humans the enemy has gratuitously Associated affection between the parties with sexual desire he has also made The Offspring dependent on the parents and given the parents an Impulse to support it thus producing the family which is like the organism only worse for the members are more distinct yet also United in a more conscious and responsible way the whole thing in fact turns out to be simply one more device for dragging in love the truth is that wherever a Man Lies with a woman there whether they like it or not a transcendental relation is set up between them which must be eternally enjoyed or eternally endured from the true statement that this transcendental relation was intended to produce and if obediently entered into too often will produce affection in the family humans can be made to infer the false belief that the blend of affection fear and desire which they call being in love is the only thing that makes marriage either happy or holy so in other words family is a relation that is created by nature but if we can reduce it if the devil can reduce that down to the subjective feeling of love then the minute that you lose the love you lose the duty so obviously this is what's happened with regard to marriage it's with regard this is how the slogan love is love has ended up being a definition of marriage and it has no boundaries right Love Is Love could include bigamy Love Is Love could include polygamy Love Is Love can include two brothers getting married right the love is love has no definition because obviously love is not in fact love love in the traditional sense meant Duty love in the traditional sense meant familial relations between man woman and children if you redefine love is that subjective feeling within you then love is love I suppose is true the problem is that is a complete redefinition it is a robbing marriage of its identity and then wearing it around as a skin suit the screw tape also points out that one easy way to hell is to get people to disregard the individual human beings in front of them in the name of mankind writ large this obviously is the project of the left which is willing to completely run over its neighbors in order to pursue a better world for everybody else screwtape says the great thing is to direct the malice of his immediate neighbors whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference to people he doesn't know the malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imagine is something I say about people you know I always say that I'm sort of um a a uh a not people person but that's actually not particularly true my thoughts about Mankind at large are not particularly generous I don't think that human beings are Saints I don't think that human beings are devils I think that we are somewhere in between when it comes to interpersonal like day on day relations I get along with I love individual human beings individual human beings are great it's the species that's a problem and when you start to think that the human species is filled with joy and wonder but the individuals who live next door to you are the worst people in the entire world you can do some pretty terrible things to your neighbors one of Screw tapes other tools one of the tools that he likes to use as well is the human incapacity to understand the Divine so God obviously has to limit his power in our lives in terms of being right in our face all the time in order for us to have free will this means a sort of unbridgeable gap between the human beings and the Divine and so we have a picture in our head of what God is and that picture is not real and then when God doesn't manifest in the way that we think the picture ought to manifest we get angry at God or we say that he doesn't exist we think he's an old man in the sky he's a gumball machine and you pray to him and he gives you what you want that's not how God works so one of the big questions that you are you're supposed to not ask is really the nature of God because you're not really able to comprehend God there are certain things you can comprehend about God you know the idea that God is generous in creating Humanity the idea that God has bound himself to a particular logic of the world and these are things that Aquinas talks about or maimonides um but but the idea that you can know God at the most intimate level obviously the Bible itself says that this is not the case right Moses in the book of Exodus specifically asked God whether he can see his glory and God says if you can't see my glory and live because you can see my back the idea being you can identify What I Am by by sort of my actions in the world but you can't actually see my face you're not capable of understanding who God totally is attempts to delve too deeply in what God is ends up in what screwtape calls materialist magic quote if we can produce our perfect work the materialist magician the man not using but veritably worshiping what he vaguely calls forces while denying the existence of spirits then the end of the world will be in sight so the materialist magician in this world is the person who believes in larger forces like physics or global warming or Evolution or disease as controlling our Fates while denying that God has any say in the matter whatsoever and it's sort of the the notion that that the environment is taking revenge on us the world is taking revenge on us it's sort of an animistic philosophy that separates us off from God screw tape also says that the notion of complete human autonomy apart from God is ridiculous screw table has much of the modern resistance to Chastity comes from Men's belief that they own their bodies those vast and perilous Estates pulsating with the energy that made the world in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of another again this is a pretty good point we tend to think of our bodies as our own uh did you ask to be born were you asked about when you wish to die do you have permission does your body take your permission every time you get sick or when you get cancer the notion of complete bodily autonomy that may be true from other human beings it is not true in terms of Godly Duty I hope you enjoyed this preview of my book club if you want to hear the full episode on the screwtape letters by C. S Lewis or my thoughts on other Classics including 1984 Huck Finn Moby Dick and many more go to dailywireplus.
