Conversation of Our Generation

This is a great book that will help you understand the Supreme Court, how they make decisions, and how those decisions affect you. It's a great look into the major cases that have shaped America, and most especially, American jurisprudence.

In light of my recent episode defending American values, I thought it would be good to talk more about one of the arenas where these values are put to the test, and at times, come to fruition. This is a great book to help you understand what was going through the minds of the Justices as they made their decisions. And, when the Supreme Court is making some insane decisions now, it's a great reminder that these are fallible people and can be overturned.

Is America irredeemable? Is it an intrinsically evil place, built on evil principles? Or, is it a place worth defending?

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The charges being brought against America all too often are numerous. Charges of racism, imperialism, misogyny, greed, and more are thrown around casually, often with complete disregard for the implications. If America is so irredeemable, how can these critics take part in any way.

Are there fair criticisms? Sure. Were there grievous atrocities and injustices committed. Yes. But, that is not an excuse to be complicit in the erasure of history in favor of this Marxist hypothesis.

Why then is it worth defending? The ideals are the answer. A Constitution is not simply a written document. We have a written one to preserve the real constitution and offer the nation's citizens a means of redress against the government.

However, the constitution in its original sense was the institutions, traditions, culture, politics, and common values that made up the society. It is developed over time, and after 300 years of subsisting as colonies, our founders realized we had broken from the English motherland.

As for these charges, do we find evidence to back them up in the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, and other documents?

No, and that's why they don't stick. Not only is there not evidence of these charges, but there's actually evidence that we led the way in getting rid of many of these things. And that is why America is worth defending.

In Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway tells the story of an elderly fisherman in Cuba who's struggling to make ends meet. He's poor, and desperately so. He has a young man who helps him, and he mentors him some.

The story is a lot about grit, determination, and striving to regain the vibrancy of youth. I won't give away the story, but it is a great embodiment of the Stoic ideal as this old man battles with nature out at sea.

If you know someone who likes adventure stories, this is a fantastic book for them. I will admit that it has points that it gets a bit slow, but it is normally short and gets back to the action quickly.

A few weeks back, I had the chance to sit down and talk to the guys at the Vital Masculinity Project. The conversation covered a range of topics, and was a lot of fun. They put it up on their site, and I thought while I was on vacation this would be a great episode to share with you.

I enjoy the back and forth that's possible with smart people interested in the truth. And, I hope you enjoy it as well. If so, let me know so that I can try to make more things like this happen. I've been speaking with a couple other people about finding a way to collaborate, so maybe this could be a more regular occurrence.

The Vital Masculinity Project has posted a couple of guest blogs as well to the Conversation of Our Generation, so if you like this interview, check those out as well as their other content too.

About The Vital Masculinity Project

In case you haven't heard me talk about Jordan Peterson, you should know I'm a huge fan. I think he's one of, if not the, greatest intellectual alive. So, reading this book was a huge joy for me. That said, even if you're not a huge fan or have never heard of him, 12 Rules for Life is an amazing read.

This book is an amazing guide to becoming a better person. It is a mixture of Psychology, Religion, Ethics, Philosophy, and Literature that shows you how all of truth is related to other types. And, each of these is a tool for us to use by participating in the truth by speaking it and defending it.

In this book, Peterson walks through 12 rules that sometimes seem apparent, and sometimes not, in order to give the reader a way of living a productive, fruitful, meaningful life. I like it because he makes his claims without religion, and thus has to be contended with without writing him off has a "religious nutjob."

While I don't like that classification, and find it to be lazy thinking, it is something that can't be applied to Peterson for sure. He approaches the religious ideas from a secular, pragmatic point of view, and often backs them up with great evidence.

Having read the Communist Manifesto and most of Das Kapital, it is apparent where Marx goes wrong right off the bat. All of his thought is littered with bad logic, but most of all, it is built on the improper understanding of what it means to be human. Today, we'll look at where he goes wrong in his thinking and what this bad logic leads to.

Marx's premise is off to begin with. He begins from a materialist assumption. He praises science while denying many of the major tenets that allow for the modern scientific process. In his denial of the immaterial part of the human being, he denies the possibility of beauty, truth, and love - each of which is a product of a mind that emanates from a person with a soul.

He then goes on to poorly apply this premise with other German philosophers' work to create a new way of studying history that is built on the assumption that all of history is on a track toward "progress." Thus, we ought to understand all of history as a journey toward some end constantly progressing towards progress (though this is never really clarified). Because that is the course of history, it is our duty to comply with or propel progress, just as we wouldn't try to fight the effects of gravity as it pulls a piano from the 5th story toward our head as we walk below. This allows for the conclusion that complies with this theory to be accepted, no matter how faulty the logic that precedes it.

A few major flaws in the economic theory:

Thomas Sowell is one of the clearest thinkers and communicators, and has a deep knowledge on a range of topics. Controversial Essays is perfect proof of this as Sowell offers practical thoughts and solutions to a range of political, sociological, economic, and personal problems.

This book is an easy read. Each of the essays is only a couple pages, so you can do it in bursts. It's a great book to have on the table to pick up here and there and flip through a couple essays. I found it really helpful to read a couple then reflect on them and gather my thoughts so I can distill it. He writes simply, yet profoundly, and there are layers to it that you can unravel the more you contemplate. Also, it's a great way to get lots of facts and figures quickly and easily that are well sourced and cited if that's something you need.

This isn't the first of his books that I've reviewed. It is however, the first one I read of his that I read. I was heavily influenced in how I think and approach issues by Sowell after reading this, and I think it would make a huge difference to anyone else looking for new ways to think.

Our world has turned its back on truth, and instead looks to the comforting story. Truth is not as important as avoiding cognitive dissonance. The idea is "if you upset me, it's not because something's wrong with me, but with what you said. I'm offended, and therefore you're wrong."

But this isn't sane at all, and today we're going to look at where the narrative is winning over truth in our culture, and how to push back individually as well as culturally.

Before we can discuss solutions, we have to demonstrate the problem. So here are some examples of the narrative usurping the truth:

But, where does this come from? It is the left's stranglehold as the "purveyors of truth" in our education system, news media, and entertainment industry. Each of these is a cultural center, and one that every American interacts with to some extent, often spending much of our time with these pillars of society.

We are forced to interact with the leftist narrative, one that has been modified from Marxist ideology to disrupt and invade every aspect of our lives. Because we in America were so resistant to the Socialist case - largely due to the success of a free market economy - the Marxists attacked our culture, education, and entertainment in order to push their false narrative.

Our politics are breaking down, and has been for a while. I think that if we want to talk to each other, we’ll need to start speaking the same political language. To do that effectively, we must learn from the same canon.

This is a foundational text when it comes to political understanding. Aristotle is so exact in his terms, it makes it easy to follow his thought and see how he ties his ideas together to create a political philosophy. Many of the terms he lays out are still used today, but are often marred in their meaning to push an ideology.

Aristotle writes free from any ideology, and as a man in his time. So, some of the ideas may not be what we would find right today, but in his time and place,  it was likely seen as enlightened compared to many of the legal systems that preceded the Greeks.

This and Plato's Republic, are the foundation of our Western political philosophy, and to go without reading them is to neglect your duty to understand where this society comes from.

We have effectively separated the subject from the object in our culture. We no longer see other people as people, but as "bodies." This is evident from quotes I've heard and read from Ta-Nehisi Coates referring to black bodies rather than black people. Not only have our philosophy and politics divided the object and subject of the human person, but so has our art.

In our art, architecture, music, and literature, we have divorced the object and subject. This is most evident in the title of this episode: pornography. We watch sexual acts of people who treat each other as objects as we treat them as objects in order to satisfy our pleasures. We do this in our music and literature as we play to the base appetites instead of challenging the appetites and urging change toward the divine.

Pornography- printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity, intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings.

This is what we're going to look into today because I'm tired of seeing it, and would like to bring this to the forefront.

I tweeted this over the weekend, and had one emphatic, correct response.

Places where we've divorced object and subject effectively in our culture:

In order to push back, we must reunite the subject and object of the human person, recognizing each other as a body-soul composite. We are temporal beings, immortal souls that give life to our impermanent bodies, but souls that will be reunited with a permanent body at the end.

If we take that approach to each other (whether or not you're fully sold on the idea) it will revive our culture and give it a substance. We will soar to new heights, and hopefully, more will come to understand this as true.