- Welcome back everyone to the front line with Joe and Joe. Joe Bessilow and Joe Ressinull, you're exactly right, Joe. - We work for the man upstairs as you do. - You're setting me up quite well. You just gave me an alley youth. - The greatest revolutionary act to commit right now is to open your mouth and speak the truth. - Whether you're an academic or you're a regular guy, you have to be fearless. - And once more, dear brothers and sisters, let us go into the breach. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - Hello again, everyone and welcome back to the front line with Joe and Joe. Joe Bessilow, as always joined by Joe Ressinullo and once more, dear brothers and sisters, let us go into the breach on the Veritas Catholic Radio Network, 1350 on your AM dial, 103.9 on your FM dial, spreading the truth of the Catholic faith of the New York City metropolitan area. You know what I'm gonna ask you. Download the app, share it with your friends. You'll have access to all of our station's content. And please, wherever you see Joe and I, help us out a little bit on social media, particularly Twitter and Rumble, but we are also on YouTube and Facebook until they drop the hammer on us, which they will. But in the meantime, like, subscribe, share, share, share. These conversations that Joe and I are having, we are so blessed as two Catholic men with big mouths from New Jersey. That men like Dan LeRoy and many others who are writing on topics that we need to know about is Catholics. This isn't a joke, okay? We're in a spiritual battle, we're in a culture war, and we need to know, and I'm gonna bring this to Dan LeRoy, we need to know why we think what we think as Catholics. And that's the title of his book. So we're gonna get into it. We're gonna get into Catholic philosophy. You know what it is, Dan? And I'm gonna hand it over to Joe in a minute, right? And we'll get, we'll get rocket, because I'm getting tired of people that think that we as Catholics, that somehow we have, we believe in some sort of a superstition or our religion is magic because we believe Jesus is in the Eucharist, okay? No, no, arch philosophical tradition. Let's put it like this, the atheist don't hold the candle. Say, and I get tired of it. And that's why Joe and I are grateful that you're coming on the show. Real quick, Dan LeRoy, he's an author, journalist, teacher. He's been the director of writing and publishing, department at Lincoln Park, performing arts charter school in Midland PA since 2006. His writing about music, politics has appeared in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Newsweek, Village Voice, alternative press, Esquire and National Review Online. Brother Dan LeRoy, welcome back to the front line with Joe and Joe. - Gentlemen, once again, it is a great pleasure to be here with you today. - Absolutely, Dan. And like I said, I wasn't trying to be like, you know, blowing smoke, we need to equip ourselves in many ways, whether it be knowledge of current events, knowledge of history, knowledge of philosophy. And I'm glad that you're here to talk about it. Joe Restonel, I'm gonna rock it open to you. - We always begin with the prayer, Dan, the name of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit, Amen. Remember, almost gracious Virgin Mary. Never was it known that anyone who sought your help or sought your intercession was left unaided. Inspired by this confidence, we fly into you, a virgin, a virgin's our mother. To you, we come for you, we stand sinful and sorrowful. Mother, the word in car, night to spies, not a petition has been in your climate to hear an answer or say, "Man, the name of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit, Amen." - Well, the last time we had Dan on, Dan's been on our show before, he was with Robert Riley. And a lot of philosophical conversations were covered in that conversation. But this is a broad one. I'll be honest with you, Dan, when the Sophia Press folks sent it over, I was like, "We gotta talk about it." Because it's a sweeping story of a Western thought, and you kind of covered from beginning to present. I think a good foundational, I guess, question and starting point here would be, just give us a brief timeline. What are we talking about from what to what? And then we'll kick right in. For our purposes, the story of Western thought, and I distinguished in a book Western versus Eastern. Eastern thought is interesting. There's certainly a lot to talk about there, but we're talking about our own Western tradition. For us, that begins around about the 6th century BC, with Thales of Miladus, who's thought of as the first Western philosopher. And as you say, it goes all the way up to the present day, the last philosopher covered in the book, Alistair McIntyre is still alive. He's in his 90s right now, a great Catholic philosopher. So we kind of go from the 6th century all the way up to our present moment. - Are we at a crisis moment? We're gonna get into that timeline a bit, maybe cover it all, Dan LeRoy. But are we at a crisis moment in terms of philosophy? I'm gonna put it like this to you. Now I'm gonna kick it over to you. I'm not a Nietzschean, but Nietzsche was a philosopher. I'm not a Hegelian in a strict sense, but Hegel was a philosopher. I don't find any of this stuff to be philosophy. I don't find Sam Harris to be a philosophical person. I really don't. I'm not picking on him, even though I do often. I don't find him. He calls himself a philosopher. I don't consider modern philosophy philosophy when they reject the whole idea of there even being a need for philosophy. If you listen to Richard Dawkins, he says we don't need philosophy anymore because we have science. Sam Harris who calls himself a philosopher agrees with that, get rights books, that he calls philosophical. Dan, you see where I'm going with this. What are your thoughts on that, brother? 'Cause I think philosophy right now in the Western world is dead. - Well, I think it is. Although I do wanna point out, yeah, we lost Richard Dawkins, we lost Sam Harris. However, Bill Nye, the science guy, I did have a change of heart. Bill Nye has actually come back around to the idea that philosophy has some value. So maybe there's still some hope. - There's hope, yeah. - But look, I think philosophy is dead. I think that is, in fact, I would say this, I think it's worse than dead. I think it is completely discredited. You can have something that's dead that people still respect and say, well, even though it's dead, we should still pay attention to it. Philosophy is worse off than that. It's dead and people, at least within their living memory, they can't think of any reason why it's something that we ought to pay attention to. But all of the problems that we've talked about on this show before and that I know you guys talk about it all the time, they start somewhere and a great number of them start in philosophy. People will try to pin this to some more modern events. They will say, well, it's the fault of the sexual revolution or it's the fault of the critical race theory. It's that these things have long and deep roots. And in a lot of cases, if we don't know the philosophy, it's that old saying, you're treating the symptoms, but you're not really treating the disease. And the disease goes back away. The good news for us is that before there was the disease, there were a lot of ideas that make a lot of sense. They're there to be reclaimed. So one of the reasons for writing this book other than that I thought that there needed to be a single volume Catholic based survey of Western philosophy is we need to reclaim Western philosophy. It might be a joke now for a lot of people, but it's not really a joke. In fact, it's a thing that's sitting out there right now, it's completely, again, it's dead, it's discarded, it's discredited, but it's maybe none of those things. If those of us who are Catholics take the time to go back and try to reclaim the parts of this that are worth reclaiming and they're a lot of, but we got to know what they are and why we stepped away from that stuff before we can do any such thing. - Joe, let me stay for one second. Joe, if you don't mind, Dan, let me ask you this. But doesn't what you just described, that requires bold action on our part. We say in the show all the time, Joe and I are here not to defend anything. We are attacking lies. We are attacking the lies of the atheists. We're attacking the lies of the moral relativists, okay? And yes, we are reclaiming what was ours to begin with that you stole, okay? You stole the scientific method from the Catholic church and then said we don't need God, but the only reason it came into existence is because of the belief in God. Our God, by the way, not a God, the God, okay? That led to that. Same with philosophy. They stole the philosophical tradition. See, Catholics embraced the philosophical tradition as you mentioned and we'll get into it of the Greeks, the logos, okay? - Yes. - Thomas Aquinas with Aristotle, a Guston with Plato. See, we embrace it. We don't reject it even though it was pagan, okay? 'Cause we see the rays of truth in it and we apply it to Catholic faith. We didn't steal anything. They steal from us. We need to reassert and be bold and say, you can't have it, we're taking it back. You start going on the defense of your thoughts, Dan. - Well, I think bold action is, as you say, it's required. The nice thing for us is that in the present day, one of the boldest things that anybody can do is also in a lot of ways, one of the easiest, you can read and we know about the decline kind of across the board in reading. Reading is, you know, it's just a thing that is not kind of like philosophy. It's not an important part of a lot of people's lives but there isn't any good way to figure out this stuff that we're trying to figure out and reclaim unless you're versed in it. And there are a lot of people who I think today will say, and it's not just younger people. Well, I'll need to read a book. Like I go online, I can find all of this stuff and there's plenty of resources. And yeah, that's true. But the whole reason for having a book is the book puts it in some kind of order for you so you don't have to do all of this stuff. Read the book first and then go seek out that other stuff as supplemental. But the idea that everyone's going to educate themselves a little bit here, a little bit there, look, it just doesn't work. So bold action, the first bold action is read and doesn't have to be my book. Of course, I'd love it if it were, but it can be any book there. The great thing about philosophy is that there are tons and tons of books and the even better thing is they're right out there for free rather than look it up on Wikipedia, read the book. The book is right out there for free in most cases as well. - Absolutely. Dan LaRoy is joining us here at the front line. Joe and Joe in the Veritas Catholic Radio Network. So his new book, Why We Think, What We Think? Please buy it from the publisher, Sophie Institute Press, support our Catholic publishers. Why don't you tell your local parish, the bookstore to order a few copies and keep it on the shelf because I'm sure good Catholics are going to want to look at that and pick it up. And as Dan Joe said, read it, Joe Ressinello. - You cover a number of thinkers in this book. One of them is Aquinas. And I'm going to throw something at you and Joe and I'm interested in both your thoughts on it. I think the rupture with regard to philosophy, centers on Aquinas for this reason. He focuses on the natural law and the natural law implies there is a God. I recently read one of Robert Royal's books and he was talking about the Russonian thought versus Socrates. Socrates comes before Christ but he still points to something in the natural law because it's written in man's hearts. Russo breaks from it and those who follow that philosophy reject God in many cases. But I think that's the crux of the rupture because he's too Catholic and you can't have that. So we have to reject that and look to something else which is clearly more relativism. Am I off there, Dan? - No, I don't think so and I would say anyone who's a fan of Russo that, well, I shouldn't say this. I would say if you're a fan of Russo, I'm going to probably challenge some of your fandom in the chapter about Russo in this book. Russo, he's a bad news guy. You know, the Burke called him speaking of Socrates. He called him the insane Socrates and in a lot of ways that's accurate. But to go to the rupture, I think one of the really, really tragic parts of this story is there are a lot of points along the way of this rupture. It doesn't happen cleanly. It's not a thing that where you can put a pin on a certain date and say, yep, after this, it was almost, it happens over the course of hundreds of years. But one of the really tragic things about it is that some of the rupture, you know, happens from within the Catholic church. You know, not long after Aquinas' death, you have some Catholic friars and I'm thinking in particular of William Mavachum who put it in a nutshell, they are saying, look, Aquinas is a little bit too science-based for us. He's a little bit too materialist for us. He embraces Aristotle and Aristotle's a guy. We don't know if we really want to be part of this tradition. In other words, Aquinas is saying that he knows too much about God and what he's thinking. And for that reason, we need to move away from this stuff. We need to make faith the centerpiece of our tradition. And, you know, Aquam didn't do it by himself. He had a lot of help. Aquam ends up excommunicated from the church because he takes issue with the Pope and, you know, Pope's then is now, they weren't too crazy about that. So, Aquam ends up being cast out. But, Aquam is the guy who paves the way for a lot of other thinkers who are not necessarily devout Catholics. They're not as tied to the tradition as Aquam and some of his other fellow friars were. So, if you want to put it this way, maybe Aquam isn't directly responsible for the rupture, although I make the case that he deserves a lot of the blame in the book. But he definitely, he leaves the door open. And what comes in through that open door are a lot of what we think of as, you know, the modern philosophers. This sounds weird to say modern because we're talking about guys who lived three, four, 500 years ago in some places. But these are the guys who will say, okay, if Aquinas is out of the way, then that means Aristotle's out of the way. And they had good reasons. A lot of these people who followed Ockham, they had good reasons to want to get Aquinas and Aristotle out of the way. And Joe goes back to your point about natural law. Aquinas and Aristotle before him said that there is a way that we can know creation. Aquinas baptizes Aristotle, but he takes most of the important stuff from Aristotle and aligns it with the Catholic tradition. And he says, look, if you look at the world around us, the world around us is real. We can see God's handiwork in the world. And because we can see this, there are limits to things. And probably the big sub theme of this book is limits. And the things that people will do to avoid having there be limits, you know, limits on their appetites, limits on their individuality. You know, the project of philosophy in the West for the last, let's just, let's say the last 500 years just to pick a number. The project has been to liberate the individual. And that is some believing Christians who were part of this project. That is some people who were not believing or orthodox Christians. That's some people who are non-believers. But wherever they fell on an aspect, their goal was to give the individual as much freedom as possible and to liberate the individual from all of these things, whether that be God, family, country, local groups, all the things that put constraints on these appetites. That has been the big philosophical project. In one sense, you could say, well, it's been very successful because we have managed to liberate man to a degree that we could have never imagined 500 years ago. On the other hand, it's why we started this with the question we started with. Why are we in the situation when we're in it because we have liberated man from any kind of restraint. And that has been the philosophical project. It's an old project. And we don't know where this starts. We're not gonna be able to fix it because this didn't start 50 years ago or a hundred years ago sped up since then. But the project has been to liberate the individual, that necessitated to go back to the question about Aquinas. We gotta get Aquinas out of the way. He came up with a system that makes more sense than any other system that has been developed. But the system says that there are limits. And so it's a non-starter for people who want to abolish limits. Anyway, long went through the answer. - Oh, no, we love it, Dan. Dan LaRoy is joining us here at the front line with Joe and Joe, we're discussing his new book, "Why We Think What We Think." It's available at Sophia Press. Dan, does it go, I mean, this is again, these same people hate scripture also. Okay, so does it go back to the garden? God gives us everything, brother. - Well. - He gives us, our freedom is vast. See, this is what the Rousseauians, the Nietzscheans, the all the so-called Enlightenment thinkers, there's God's freedom that he gives us is vast. I could do so many things, but they can't stand it as that one limit. - That one thing, exactly. - That's that one thing. All the fruit of the garden was great. Everything, but man has to pick at the one that God says no to, okay? Because, you know, I love you to talk about that because again, this is part of the way we think about things and the way we reason. This is not a new concept. It's all a rebellion against those restrictions. By the way, those restrictions, which obviously have led to eras of human flourishing, unknown in human history, either before or after, okay? 'Cause like you said, afterwards we have the mess what we have now, before what you had was pagan Rome, okay? Christendom is the one through these so-called restrictions that allows for human flourishing. Talk about that a little bit if you don't mind, brother. - I certainly will, and what I would say is, there's a quote in the book, and I wish I could quote it directly, but it speaks to this idea about, you know, the garden being the source of a lot of these problems because of limits. The quote, and I'll paraphrase it, is from a fairly recent history of philosophy. And it says something along the lines of, look, man realized that the one thing that he wanted to do was to create himself. He didn't wanna be created, he wanted to create himself. And if you wanted to sum up the, again, that whole philosophical project of the last 500 or so years, you could probably do it with just that line. Man wants to create himself. And the only way to create yourself is to abolish whatever limits are out there. And in abolishing those limits, you have to abolish these parts of the philosophical tradition in particular, the Catholic philosophical tradition, but also the parts of it that it took from Greece and Rome. We can't create ourselves if guys like Aquinas and Aristotle are hanging around looking over our shoulders in a manner speaking, reminding us that, no, I'll just, I'll drop in one thing 'cause I don't know if we'll get to it in any other place, but I think it's an important piece of this discussion. One of the big things about Aristotle that has been unpopular and certainly has been unpopular during this period with talking about his idea of the four causes, that everything has four causes. You have the material cause, what's it made of? The formal cause, what is the form that it takes? The efficient cause, how was it made? And then the one that everybody has hated the most the final cause, for what purpose was it made? Now, if you're talking about something like a pencil or this pair of glasses, that might not be very controversial 'cause we could answer those questions about these glasses. We know why these glasses were made, they have a purpose. If they don't have a purpose, there's no reason for them to be. But when you start applying those causes to people, that's when we get into a problem because then you're saying that people were created for some purpose. Well, that's anathema, if you are again, trying to liberate the individual, to create yourself. Nobody wants to hear that people might have some purpose 'cause if you have a purpose, that means you don't get to do whatever you wanna do. You have to do what your purpose is. So, Aristotle's four causes and that final cause are part of this thing that we're talking about that people have felt the need to abandon because it was really cramping their style. So, that's one of the many reasons why when we get to what we call this modern period, people look at Aristotle, they look at Aquinas, they look, these guys gotta go. I don't wanna hear that there's a final cause. My final cause in the words of the Justice Anthony Kennedy in the Planned Parenthood versus Casey decision, my final cause is whatever I say it is. To determine the mystery of life, I'm paraphrasing there, but that's one of the most famous quotes from a Supreme Court decision. And of course there, the freedom to figure out the mystery of life is to figure out when life ought to begin and when it ought to end. And of course, we're the only ones who can determine that nobody else gets any say in it. So, anyway, again, sorry, it's hard to do this and not end up with like the long winded answer. - No, it's good. - That's all right. - Yeah, it's all right. Hey, listen, it's time Joe and I shut up a little bit. We're a couple of big Mount Italians from New Jersey. Joe, where do you wanna go? We got a few minutes before the break. - Just a couple of things. You talked about recreating yourself, man, this idea. And you said that there's a root to this. Well, we're seeing that now play out with this gender deal. I mean, I take my kids on Saturday for hot dogs at this famous place. And the guys tell me that his kid at his school, there's kids that think they're cats. I mean, like how could any human being, like especially an educated one, think that that's real? You're recreating yourself. Well, there's a root to that. And Dan just broke that down. Dan also mentioned something about freedom. And this is where I like you to expand it on that idea. People say, oh, there's freedom. I have freedom. You have freedom, really? You're the biggest slave out there. Slave to a million different things, could be sex, could be money, could be power. You're not free. You're completely not free. Yet if we live within the confines of those limits, which you noted from Aquinas, we are free. We are never to be freer when we live within that bounds. And that's something that is ultimately rejected, but clearest day when it's seen. What are your thoughts on that? Because to be honest with you, you talk about real time. That's real time now. I think we've never been more enslaved as a culture and a society here in America. - I mean, there's a lot to say about that, but it's at the heart of it. It's this great paradox. How can it be? And the surveys will show you this over and over again. You could look up a dozen of them right now in the time that it takes to answer this question. Over and over again, the surveys show that people, younger people in particular, but all people generally have never felt unhappy or more insecure, more anxious about their place in this world, which has fulfilled in a lot of ways, like every material and scientific desire that people could have ever imagined when the enlightenment became a full fledged thing. We've gotten just about everything that we said that we wanted out of that, and yet people are more unhappy than ever. Why is that? The great paradox is that, as you say, Joe, rules equal freedom. Freedom from rules, all rules equals no kind of freedom. Yeah, one of the things that we have to call out on this, there are a lot of targets there. One of the things we have to call out is that in a lot of ways, since the enlightenment, this project has been the project of business, big business. It has been the project of people who have advocated for capitalism, again, without any sorts of limits on it. So we've got to call those people out too, because they were a big part of this philosophical project to free the individual. One of the things that it frees the individual to do, this project is to buy as much stuff as possible, whether you want or need it or not. One of the only times I agree with George Carlin is that we all got to just go out and we just got to buy some stuff, 'cause you just got to have more. He was, listen, he was anti-Catholic. We know that, but the dude was funny, and he was out to something with that. 'Cause that's the truth. He's just observing the world around him. That's all we do is buy stuff. And I was sorry to cut you off then, but we do have to take a break real quick. And then we come back, 'cause I want to stay on, I want to stay on freedom when we come back for a second and get your thoughts on my take. So Dan Leroy is joining us here at The Frontline with Joe and Joe. Why? We think, what we think. That's available at Sophia and Superpress. Dan, is it available also with the larger retailers? - It is all the usual places. You can find it from Amazon on down, and it'll also be available on my website. It isn't available yet, but it will be soon. That's Dan Leroy.com. And there will be an option through my website where if you want to order signed copies, then that'll be available to you as well. So look for that right after the first of the year. - Absolutely, Dan, this is a great conversation. Please, everybody out there at the Veritas Catholic Radio Network, stay with us for another segment on why we think, what we think, basically Catholic philosophy. Stick around, we'll be right back. - Catholic Radio works. And now we have it here in Connecticut and New York. It's been seen around the country that there's no better tool for evangelization. Where there's Catholic Radio, the folks who listen deep in their faith, families are strengthened, perishes and communities flourish. So, let people know you're listening to Veritas, tell your friends to tune in, and let's make an impact here for Jesus and his church. This is Steve Lee for Veritas Catholic Network. - Welcome back everyone to the front line with Joe and Joe, Joe Priscilla and Joe Risenllo. We're way in the breach with a friend of the program, Dan Leroy, we're discussing his new book, Why We Think, What We Think. It's available at Sophia Press. Dan, before the break, we were talking about freedom. If you don't mind, I wanna stay there for a second, okay? Now, I'm gonna make a statement, I'm gonna give you a couple examples, I'm gonna throw it over to you, okay? Can you have beauty without, well, let's say without restrictions? In other words, this idea of freedom, which is not really freedom, it's license, okay? Freedom requires restrictions on your behavior, but that leads to something beautiful. I'm gonna give you two quick examples, I'm gonna throw you over. And I think this is irrefutable, okay? You get a bunch of Derek Jeter's, gone on a base, go out on a lawn somewhere, okay? And they're studs, bats, balls, all the equipment and everything else, okay? And they're just hanging around, throwing the ball around, they're not really, there's no sense to it. There's nothing beautiful about it. The second you put down a foul line, now you got rules. When you put down the other one, that's another rule. When you put the mound down in the home plate, the outfield fence, okay, now you got rules, but what do you also have now? You have a thing of beauty, a baseball game. One more example, a violinist. Violinist can't do a damn thing once the composer starts putting down notes on a piece of paper. Those notes that the composer's writing down, those are rules. Dude, violinist, you ain't going outside those rules, 'cause if you do, now you're not playing a thing of beauty, okay? In other words, the rules are what provides what is going to lead to something ultimately that is very, very beautiful. Tell me if I'm wrong, your comments, please. - No, you're not wrong. Of course, you know, I love a good baseball analogy and having grown up, you know, from the cradle, the Yankees fan, I'm with you in particular there with your analogy. But let's go back to, let's go back to Aristotle, even though we could go back further and then let's go back to Aristotle and what he says is that final cause of a person, like what is it, what are we made for? And this is Aristotle talking, of course, in the days before the Christian tradition. We're talking here in the time before Christ, but Aristotle saw that man's goal is to be happy. But what does happiness mean? You know, a lot of people will say that today, well, my goal is to be happy. I want to be as happy as I can. But Aristotle didn't believe that happiness was untrammeled freedom. Like I get to do whatever I want there are no rules. He said, we are made in a certain way, we are made as creatures that have reason, and therefore, we are made to seek the truth. And the truth, as Aristotle saw it, was also tied up in virtue. So the equation goes something like happiness equals virtue, equals seeking for the truth. And as Aristotle saw it, there was a truth. There's an objective truth. There's not a million different truths for everybody. There's one truth and it is everyone's job to seek after that truth and find it. So you can see how Thomas Aquinas didn't really have a difficult job to do as they say to baptize Aristotle's idea, because that's very similar to what we teach in our tradition, that you're not gonna be happy unless you are following the truth. And following the truth, of course, to go back to your analogies there, that means following rules. You're not going to find the truth and get there. And it says, guess what? The truth is there are no rules. Nobody in any tradition anywhere has said anything like that. You know that the truth involves rules. So you asked about beauty, but I think you go back to, if you wanna go back to the romantic poets, you wanna go back to Keats. Truth is beauty, beauty, truth. That's all you need to know. Now, Keats falls a little bit outside of the Orthodox Christian tradition, but nevertheless, the idea, I think, speaks to what you're saying. We are made to be happy. We are not going to be happy unless we seek virtue by seeking truth. And the truth is going to entail a set of rules that we're going to have to follow. And out of that does come beauty. So- - I think it's undeniable, Dan. I think it's undeniable. If you think you're gonna go through life without rules, we'll go look at the modern culture. And that's the result of no rules. Joe, Russ and Elo. - I wanna get to the root problem but what both of you just said. I mean, I completely agree with it. You talked about authority. We talked about freedom. But ultimately, when you step down rules, there's someone doing it. And I think that's the root cause of the issue. Don't tell me what to do. You see, that's what people are saying but not saying. Don't tell me what to do. And that's pride. You see, we have to come to the end of ourselves as a society. Ultimately, you can't change minds and hearts but that's the problem. I think men have a big problem with that. I think very successful people have a problem with that. Very poor people, some do, but they've been told what to do their whole life. They accept it. Children don't have a problem with that. And that's why Christ says, "Until you become like a child, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven." 'Cause a child who has a loving father and a loving mother accepts what they say because they trust them. They acknowledge their authority. But somehow along the way, we believe that we know best, no one has the authority to tell us anything even if it's blatantly good for us. We reject the authority. Talk about that because in order for those things to take place that both of you just said, which I agree, there has to be rules and there will be no freedom without rules, but there has to be authority. And that gets to Aquinas, who basically says there has to be a starting point to everything. Everything has a starting point and that starting point has authority and that starting point is truth itself. What do you think, Dan? - Well, let's take that and let's jump ahead to one of the most famous of the modern philosophers. That's John Locke. And John Locke is a guy even though he's British and works toward the end of the 17th century. Locke is a guy who we owe a lot of these freedoms that we take for granted as Americans, we owe them to him. However, one of the things that he doesn't get credit for, which we've also imbibed, is this idea that to get maximum freedom, we have to make sure that we're not entangled in any way we don't have any real commitments that we can't break. And what not a lot of people realize about Locke, some people do. Patrick Denine wrote a lot about this in his book, "Why Liberalism Failed." Locke was saying, in essence, look, any kind of commitment, whether that's a commitment to a church, whether that's a commitment to your spouse, whether that's a commitment to your kids, these are just their voluntary obligations we take on. But if it becomes inconvenient, these obligations, then we gotta break 'em because that is the bedrock of freedom. So to go, Joe, to your point there, about you mentioned a loving father and mother, well, we'll certainly see less of that than we used to. And one of the roots of this thing, which is a very real phenomenon that you talk about, which is people who say, don't tell me what to do. Well, some of that, if a kid grows up and watches his parents violate the kind of commitments that we know that they ought to be making to their kids, that kid is going to grow up probably, I don't wanna say rightfully, but understandably, they'll tell me what to do because I saw what my parents did and they didn't do what they're supposed to do. They weren't there for me, they abandoned me, they followed their own desires because I was just a voluntary commitment. And when I became inconvenient, then they jetted. So a lot of the roots of this, don't tell me what to do, they're pretty deep. And I think kids, more of them probably now, than ever before have that, but where did they have it? Well, they have it from watching, we could go through the whole litany of people in positions of authority who have forfeited their right to authority because they've been selfish, because they've been individualistic. But that also happens in the home, that happens with parents who are supposed to be the first and best example. And they've treated their kids, like Locke said, as a voluntary commitment. Well, when you're treated that way, it's probably, as I say, understandable, that you're gonna walk around and say, "Don't tell me anything." I saw my parents go for theirs, I'm gonna go for mine, and that's how it ought to work. And so you're absolutely right to point that out. The roots of that are deep, deep, deep. But again, where the roots come from? That's not a problem from 50 years ago or 100 years ago. That's a problem from 300 some years ago. That was written into a philosophy which we took on as a country. We took on big chunks of that philosophy and sometimes the payoff for that stuff doesn't happen immediately, but we're starting to see the check come due now, for sure. - Yeah, no, no, we're showing them the receipts, you know? It's like Joe Restonellis is on the show all the time, Daniel, go look out the window. Don't tell me not to believe my lion eyes, okay? 'Cause I can look out the window, I'll give you a perfect example, you could be whatever you want, right? Like you mentioned, Anthony Kennedy mentioned that, right? You could define the very meaning of human existence, okay? Which can't. And now we get men who, well, like Joe's mentioned, men who believe they're cats or teenage girls who believe they could be, don't refer to me as she, refer to me as furry. And then they're dead by the time they're 40. And then they blame people like us, okay? And we just say, no, no, no. We told them the truth with love, okay? You lied to them, you lied to them. And that's that disorder, that idea of this disordered freedom. And that's what, at least, and that's just one example. You just mentioned the home, the home in so many communities in America. Where's the mother and father? Damn, real quick, just to give our audience a little bit more of a broad overview, okay? Because we really want them to, we don't wanna go too in depth because we want folks to go out and buy the book and go and read it, why we think, what we think. This is available at Sofia Press. So who are, obviously we mentioned Thales and Aristotle and Aquinas and others, who are some of the other philosophers in the Western tradition that you cover in the book? - Well, if you talk about the Greeks and you have the big three Greeks, you have Socrates, you have Plato and you have Aristotle. Socrates is Plato's teacher, Plato is Aristotle's teacher. After that, of course, things kind of splendor into different groups. The next great guy who really emerges is Augustine toward the end of the Western Roman Empire. And then really, the action kind of falls outside of the Christian tradition for a while. And it's really folks in the Arabic tradition in the Muslim tradition. And in some cases in the Jewish tradition who are really moving the ball forward, that kind of sets the stage for Aquinas during the medieval period, the scholastic period. We talked about how the rupture there begins at the end of that period. And then we get into what we would call the modern. So we have guys like Machiavelli, a name that I think is familiar to a lot of people. We have Thomas Hobbes, who maybe isn't as familiar, but certainly was a great political theorist, not a very cheerful guy in his outlook, but certainly saw, I think, a lot of the things that are predicted, maybe, a lot of things that we're seeing today. We move on to Renee Descartes, who is a guy who gets a lot of blame in a lot of cases for this rupture in the philosophical tradition Descartes. There's a guy who was, by all accounts, more or less, sincere Catholic, who set out to do this thing. How can I find knowledge that we can be absolutely sure of? And he does this famous experiment where he rejects the evidence of the senses. He rejects the idea that we can know for sure that this is a dream or isn't a dream. And he finds himself at the bottom of this philosophical pit. And he comes up with that famous phrase, "I think, therefore I am." Magito Air goes soon. And that's the one piece of sure knowledge. I can be sure that I am a thinking thing. But what a lot of people don't remember is, without God, Descartes never gets out of that pit because all the rest of the steps that lead him out of this pit are predicated on the idea that there is a God. And if there is a God, he wouldn't trick me by making my life a dream. And if there is a God, this and that. So without God, we're stuck in the bottom of that pit only knowing that we can think, but not having any connection to anybody else, not having any other piece of sure knowledge. So that's sort of the gold standard for what happens when you try to achieve sure knowledge without God. If we can't get out of the pit, we're stuck just like we would be in the Matrix. - Well, we're not staying in the pit because we got Dale and Roy here. All right, and we're talking about his new book, Why We Think, What We Think. Joe Russinello, where do you wanna go? - I wanna circle back to the natural law. Critics of the natural law basically say that it doesn't apply because people interpret nature differently. Now, I wanna attack that and then I'm interested in both your thoughts on this. I think what we're seeing now is the populace is trying to change reality. And you can't, like gravity, gravity's reality. You could argue all you want, but it ends in frustration. It ends in yelling because ultimately it's gravity. You can't change it, it's immovable. And I think that's what we're seeing in the debates of today. These folks are saying, no, the natural law doesn't apply. It's not written on the hearts of every man and woman. Nature is different to each individual, but they come against the law of that thought. And then the frustration comes in and then the projection comes in and then the self-hatred comes in and then the yelling comes in and then the killing comes in because you're trying to change something that can't be moved. - Joe, you just pretty much summed up the 20th century. Go ahead, brother. - Please, Dan, you know much more than I. I'm just eyeballing it. And I think that's exactly what we're seeing. It's frustration. - I mean, go back, go all the way back to the Greeks. Go back to Protagoras, whose catchphrase was, "Man is the measure of all things." And he was part of this group of sophists who were essentially legal advisors who would help you win your case in this court system that had been developed in Athens. We developed this court system. We gotta have legal advocates, law years, if you will. And his big thing was, look, I can make the bad argument good, but the bad argument better. I can make it good enough to win your case. So the roots of this idea that, hey, there's a whole bunch of truths. Everybody has their own truth. You've got cheers, I got mine. I mean, that's old, that's 2,500 years, more or less old. That idea keeps resurfacing throughout history. It starts there in the Western tradition, but it keeps coming back to us. And the great paradox at the heart of that idea is, there is no objective truth, except for the fact that there is no objective truth, which sort of invalidates the whole proposition. The only truth thing is the one thing that I believe is true that will liberate everyone. - So Lee and I gotta cut you off. You want to get into an argument? You point that out to a moral relativist. I have gotten into some of the worst arguments I had. I said, they say, "Well, there is no absolute truth." I said, "Is that absolutely true?" And then it's not smart, okay? All right, but I tell you, is that absolutely true? Well, what do you mean? Well, you just said, you said, "All truth is relative." So I'm asking, is that statement absolutely true? And there's a lot of those, I call it slogan earring. Like a lot of those slogans, your thoughts. - Well, protagonists all the way back in the day. You know, people called him on that BES too. And he came up with the defense of it, which isn't really a defense. It's something on the order of, well, if you say, if you say that you believe that the statement that there is no absolute truth is untrue, that just means that it seems untrue to you. It's a terrible defense. So people have been having the same argument that you've been having, again, for 2,500 years, and it keeps ending up in the same way because there isn't any other way for it to end up. But what's the reason for having this argument? What is the reason for arguing that there are many truths instead of just one truth? It's the same reason. So the people can do what they want to do. It's not an accident that the guy who thought this up was essentially advising people in the court system, "Hey, listen, I can help you win your case. "Here's what you gotta say. "It might not be true, but if it seems like it's true to you "and if we get a jury to buy it, "then you got away with what you want to get away with." It's always the same thing. That part of human nature, I don't think it ever changes. So it's an old, old idea, this idea that there can be many truths that everybody can have their own truth. What is the reason for it? It's always the same reason. I want to do something and you told me that I can't do it. So I'm going to tell you that I have a different truth than you so that I can get to do what it is I want to do. And if we can abolish it for everybody, then we'll all get to do whatever we want. - Well, that's all you hear out there. That's all you hear out there. Now, I'm not going to go to the nitwits in Hollywood, okay? But Sam Harris, I'm going to go back to him a second, he does have a brain. He's an intelligent guy. He says what he's saying is BS when it comes to these things. He wrote a book called "The Moral Landscape" and I've had an argument with an atheist friend of mine. You can't have morality if you're an atheist. Morality's got to have a source. And if the source is the material world, there is no morale. Well, I have a moral compass and I say fine. You have a, I agree. I'm not telling you you're a bad person. You have a moral compass. Your moral compass comes from God. It doesn't come from you, okay? And they blow a gasket, brother. Leg is it because the idea, this is where I'm leading to and I want to throw it over to you. Philosophy, philosophical, the love of knowledge. All God is the source of all knowledge. If you're truthful, if you're a true seeker of the truth, it will always lead you to God. Through all these different philosophies, through the last 3000 years, if you're truthful, it will always lead you, at the very least, to the transcendent, something that transcends the material universe. If you're being truthful with yourself, talk about that then. - Well, you know, the guy who probably among all modern philosophers, who saw this the most clearly, was Nietzsche, who you mentioned a little bit earlier. Now, the conclusions he drew are conclusions that I don't think we want to sign off on, but he saw very clearly that without any kind of God-thy view of morality, then all morality's down here on the ground. And it can only be worked out among people. And what it ultimately ends up being is not law, not rationality or reason. It always ends up with a club or a gun or fists. There's no other way to solve those problems. If you want to confound a room full of intelligent teenagers, then ask them the question, do we have human rights? And if we have human rights, where did it come from? So everybody will come up with a long list of stuff, or we have the right to food and shelter and to be treated fairly. Okay, where does that come from? And most people will say, because it comes from the law, because we have a law that says this, we can from the United Nations, okay, fine. What happens when I decide that I'm going to violate the law, 'cause I like it, I don't wanna observe it. And if I have enough tanks and enough ammunition, I'm gonna win, and you're gonna have no rights whatsoever unless they come from someplace else above all the tanks and the clubs and the guns. Nobody wants to think this, because you can see why. Nobody wants to believe that all of their cherished human rights are only as good as the police force or the army or whoever is protecting and forcing the laws. But if they don't come from somewhere above down here on the ground, then that's what it is. Nietzsche saw that. - He was very prophetic. We only have about three minutes left in or so. I wanna hand it over to Joe for a final question for you, brother. - What you're saying makes perfect sense, but what a person is faced with is themself. I was thinking of Dorian Gray, as you were talking, the mirror, what he sees in the mirror is different than what is. And this is our society. We see something different than what is, because it requires us to change. I am not changing. I won't do it. Even if what you're saying makes perfect sense. And I think that's, again, another root cause of it all. There's a lot of smart people out there a million times smarter than me. But they won't change. I'm not gonna change. What are your thoughts on that? 'Cause I also think that is at the root of it all. - Isn't it crazy that one of the great moral writers of the modern year is Oscar Wilde? Like that story has a moral right out of the Bible. And of course, Oscar Wilde was, you know, deathbed Catholic and maybe it was more than that. But that's for another day. Look, I would say this, you're right. I'm not gonna change. What is it going to take? Well, absent the kind of revival that I would love to predict, but which I think, you know, being fair, it's unlikely. When does it change? When Amazon stops delivering stuff. When you run out of toilet paper. When the food trucks aren't on the road anymore and you can't be fed for three days. You know, somebody said it, I can't remember. Like we're always 72 hours away from like a complete reevaluation of everything. We saw the beginnings of it during the pandemic. We saw some of the veneer of civilization. It didn't come up, but it started to pee a little bit. What will it take? I'm afraid that's what it's going to take. I hope that it is. And I hope, of course, read my book and avoid complete societal collapse. But realistic. And I don't know a faithful Catholic during that whole time. And Joe and I, by the grace of God, know a lot of them. I don't know a faithful Catholic who was running to Costco to go pick up 50,000 rolls of toilet paper and 5,000 cases of water, okay? Because again, it goes back, see, when you do this, you're probably going to have to end it here, Dan. You give you for a final thought. This mirror that Joe was talking about, a lot of this what we're talking about, a lot of this is that there's no hope. Is that when you just have your own self, okay? There's no hope. And when you're faced with a crisis like a pandemic that threatens your very existence, okay? You don't have the hope of heaven. You don't have the hope of salvation. You just think it's a here and now and you're clinging to every second of this life. 'Cause you have no hope. I'd love a final thought in 30 seconds, Dan. Yes, a final thought is if you are clinging to hope and you are faced with the idea that I have no toilet paper and that is going to be the end of my existence, that pretty much tells you exactly why we are, where we are. Might not tell you exactly why we think what we think but it tells you why we are what we are and we got to know where we are to start changing it. - Dan LeRoy, it's always a pleasure to talk to your brother. Everybody out there, go please go out and buy his book. Why we think what we think is available to Sophia Press, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, all the usual suspects. But we encourage you, please go and buy it from the publisher, Dan Needless, to say, you know you're welcome back here every any time. I hope it's sooner than later, man. - Me too, me too. God bless you both for doing this and I hope that we will get to talk again very soon. - Awesome, thanks, Dan. And thank you all out there for joining us at the Veritas Catholic Radio Network, 1350 on your AM Dial 103.9 on your FM Dial. Spreading the truth of the Catholic faith in the New York City metropolitan area. Download the app, share it with your friends. You ever see Joe and I on social media, particularly if you're watching this video on social media, please share it and please help us out, all right? If you like what we do, only if you like what we do, share it, let's get the word out there, like, subscribe and all that fun stuff. Thank you again and remember, until the next time that our conversation is your conversation and that conversation is going on everywhere. 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