The Michael Knowles Show - The Progressives Push Porn on Kids & Politicians' Faux Religion | Matt Fradd

Episode Date: August 9, 2021

Matt Fradd, the host of Pints With Aquinas, joins the show to talk about the staggering numbers of politicians claiming religion to defend their actions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Michael Knowles, and this is the Michael Knowles Show. There are many devout Catholics in our national political landscape these days. I'm thinking, of course, of people like Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi. Now, they might not agree with the teachings of Holy Mother Church. They might not believe the central tenets of Christianity, or at least very important tenets of it. They might not practice their faith, but they are devout, nonetheless, because words have no meaning anymore. Well, fortunately, I am joined by a very serious. practicing Catholic. Now, one of my favorite people out there in the Catholic media landscape,

very sharp fella by the name of Matt Frad. Matt Frad is the creator and host of Pines with Aquinas. He's also the author of How to Be Happy, St. Thomas's Secret to a Good Life. Also, does God exist, a Socratic dialogue on the Five Ways of Thomas Aquinas, and he's got lots of other wonderful commentary out there. Matt, thank you for joining me. It's great to be on. Thanks I haven't. So you, I think some pretty important issues would probably diverge from, say, a Joe Biden or a Nancy Pelosi. And yet, I'm to understand you're both devout Catholics. So can you help me wrap my head around what these words mean? Yeah, it's difficult. I think a faithful Catholic should submit to what the church teaches authoritatively, but also not demand uniformity where the church allows diversity of opinion. or custom. So I think you can fall off on the left and you can fall off on the right as far as being a faithful Catholic. I try to be a faithful Catholic. I try to repent when I'm not. But

Joe Biden promotes and celebrates the slaughtering of the unborn. And I know that people might be tired of hearing that, but I imagine if the unborn could be tired of being slaughtered, you know, that would outrank your concern. So yeah, it's disgusting. Not to mention his promotion of of children being able to say castrate themselves or getting a double mastectomy. He seems ambivalent on that topic. So, yeah, he should repent before Almighty God. And look, I've done some kind of soul searching on this. And I've thought to myself, what would I rather, Joe Biden repent or be refused Holy Communion at mass and be super embarrassed?

And to my shame, sometimes it's the latter. Yeah. You know, I really as a Catholic, what I ought to be doing is praying for him and his conversion. But of course, you know, keeping someone from receiving Holy Communion, refusing to give them the Eucharist, is an act toward repentance. I mean, that is the point. It's not just to make someone feel bad about himself. It's to stir and promote repentance because it's not just the private sin of his support for abortion. It's the public sin. I mean, it's the scandal as well. It's a real scandal. Joe Biden is nominally the second Catholic president. and yet he is so out of step with the church's teaching here. I'm also really glad that you brought up this issue of being able to disagree on certain matters, but not others.

You know, it's not all just a blanket, five bullet points on a napkin. Here's what you've got to believe. For instance, on the issue of the death penalty, though especially modern popes have been quite opposed to the death penalty. Pope Benedict put it very well when he said that Catholics may reasonably disagree on the practice of the death penalty, and it's a complex issue. Obviously, some popes have carried out the death penalty. I'm thinking of blessed Pope Pius the 9th, and yet other popes are vociferously opposed to it. St. Paul defends the death penalty. Other writers in the Catholic Church have been opposed to it. And so we can have a reasonable disagreement here. Even Pope Francis, who's so, so against the death

penalty, he stopped short of calling it intrinsically evil because he could not do that because it's defended even in the Bible. On an issue like abortion, that's true. just not the case. The church's teaching on abortion goes back to the didache. It goes back to the second century at least, and if not even further back. So there just seem to be some lines in the sand that are getting much, much bluer, at least in the political sphere. Yeah, if it's not atrociously wrong for big, strong people to kill little weak people, I'm not sure what atrocious or wrong would mean at that point. So yeah, and it's important to point out, too, that this is not just a matter of us, as you say, making Biden feel bad. In the code of canon 915, it says that those who

are obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin should not receive, should not be permitted to receive Holy Communion. And to my fellow Catholics out there who disagree with that, I would ask them this, suppose Donald Trump was in office and Donald Trump converted to Catholicism. I'm pretty sure you would say that he should not receive holy communion because you think he's a sexist or a racist or something else. But of course, as awful as being a racistist or these sorts of things, it's actually far worse to slaughter innocent human beings. Of course. There's no real comparison here. And I think very often, you know, the left, it is the left that's doing it. I understand there are extremists on the right too, but it's the left that is really calling for this inversion

of standards and this bizarre view of vice and virtue. And I'm reminded of, I don't want to beat up on the reporter too much, but there was a journalist who very quickly deleted the tweet, so I've gone light on her. But she tweeted out that we need porn for children because, here's her argument, and I mean, it has a kind of perverse logic to it. She's saying that kids are accessing porn. We know that. They're accessing porn. I think the average age is something like 11, you know, and some kids are accessing it even at a younger age. And the porn is violent. And the porn is and extraordinarily perverted and violent very often. And so her argument is, since kids are going to be exposed to porn, we should have a sort of nicer porn, you know, where they're not quite so violent and they're not, it's sort of a little bit more gentle or something like that.

It didn't go over very well and she deleted this. But I suspect a lot of people hold to this kind of bizarre view. Yeah, I'm of the opinion that pornography, say consuming pornography, the distribution of it, the production of it is intrinsically evil, which is just to say, say it's not evil because of the intentions of those viewing it, say, nor is it evil merely because of the consequences of viewing it. I think it's just wrong in and of itself. So I would say under no circumstances should people consume pornography. But I think we could agree that some things are less bad than others, right?

So it would be less bad to view pornography that was not violent and terribly degraded than to view, you know, rape porn. But just because something is less bad than something else, it doesn't make it healthy or good. If I say, I only smoke one carton of cigarettes a day, not five, well, that's better, but it's not good. Not healthy. And yeah, and over the last 40 years, there's been a lot of studies that have come out of academia from different branches of science, like neurology, sociology, sociology and psychology, and all of it is saying unambiguously that porn is detrimental to the health, the emotional health. even the sexual health of the consumer, our relationships, and society as a whole. So just a couple real quick.

There are over 70 studies that show a correlation between porn use and sexual dissatisfaction. So there you go. According to science, if you'd like to remain sexually frustrated, porn's the ticket. There are 56 neuroscience-based studies on porn users. All but one lend strong support for the addiction model. Just one more. We have 40 studies that show a correlation between porn use and sexual dysfunction, like premature ejaculation, erectile dysfunction.

Twelve of those 40 studies show not just correlation but causation, since in these studies the one factor of pornography was removed and the subjects regained their sexual functioning. So we've got really good reason for thinking that pornography is bad for us. And so introducing it to children is a terrifically wicked idea. I think also, I agree with your view on porn, and I know that some people are trying to make everything relative. They want to deny that anything is absolutely evil other than perhaps Donald Trump.

He might be the incarnation of evil. Everything else is on a relative scale. But I think what it also gets to is an error in the way that the human mind works and the human soul works. I think for a very long time, at least since Freud, we've been operating under the steam engine model of the mind and the soul. Namely, we've got all this pent-up sexual energy. And young teenagers are certainly going to have lots of pent-up sexual energy. And so they've just got to blow off a little steam. And, you know, all of us, we all just need to blow off a little steam, whether that means, you know, doing some drug or, you know, overindulging and drink or looking at some porn.

You just, look, if you just blow off a little steam, then it's going to make you ultimately healthier and balance you out. So you don't explode. But this would seem to contrast with, oh, I don't know, old Uncle Aristotle or St. Thomas Aquinas, who recognize that virtue is a habit, right? virtue is a practice. And so the, and I think we all know this in our own lives, whether it's going on a diet or whether it's exercising or abstaining from something that is harmful to us. The more that we practice a virtue, the easier it becomes. And the more that we practice a vice, whether it's drug addiction or porn or whatever, the more we practice that, the easier that becomes as well. And those two views of how the mind works, they're completely at odds

with one another. Yeah, exactly. No, if it were the case that pornography merely relieved your sexual desires, then people who watch pornography ought to be sort of sexually carefree in the sense of satisfied. But that isn't what we see happen. What we see is the more you consume it, the more you desire to consume it, you build up a tolerance, what you have already seen, and then feel the need to view more deviant forms of pornography and to view more of it. So actually, I was struck by an analogy recently. It was a by Norman Doidge, who wrote the best-selling book, The Brain That Changes Itself, and to your point of habits and vices, the more we're learning about the brain and say

neural pathways in the brain, he has this great analogy. He says, suppose you find yourself in a forest, you have two paths ahead of you. One path represents looking at pornography, the other path represents abstaining. If you keep going down the path to look at pornography and have been doing that since you were eight, that path will be very well worn. The other will be overgrown and more difficult to walk down. But as you say, with time, with habit, if you choose to break free from pornography by getting good books, good accountability, good software, that this will begin to be easier to walk down. I know that from my own experience, whereas that the path to look at pornography, you don't just slide into it as you once did.

And that's really good news for those. Well, that's right. I mean, mentioning your own experience, you're one of the few people who have come out and said, look, I dealt with this problem. This is a problem that I've seen one study that said it afflicts 91 or 93% of men. men and the caveat to that study is that seven or nine percent of men are liars. You know, really, you see it throughout the culture, especially for young men. And you said, I've dealt with this. It's an embarrassing problem, but there is a way out of it. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, honestly, I was, maybe it was a grace from God. I was never terribly embarrassed to share about it. Maybe because I encountered so many other people who said, I struggle, but nobody knows. Pornography feels good. I'm still tempted to it from time to time. If I have a couple of drinks or if I'm very stressed out, these sorts of things. I think pornography and masturbation become for many a sort of pacifier to regulate our emotional turbulence. We turn to it when we're upset or bored or feel invisible or unsuccessful

or emasculated or something like that. But it doesn't give us what it promises. You know, we might go for excitement. We end up bored. We might go for, you know, adult entertainment and become increasingly juvenile. It just, it just, it doesn't just not give us what it promise. It kind of gives the opposite. So it's entirely unsatisfying. So that's why I love speaking to men and women who are hooked on this and say, hey, look, you're a lovely person, I'm sure. Or if you're not, you ought to be and you desire to be. And you don't need to let porn stand in your way, you know.

And compared to other temptations and vices, this is the one that is ubiquitous. You can do it entirely, almost entirely in the privacy of your own, you know, darkest closet. though it's not totally private because big tech is looking at you. And, you know, there are records of these things. But, you know, it's not spoken of. And when it is spoken of, it's spoken of positively so much so that people say that kids should have good porn. And I love the point that you're making here on satisfaction because, of course, yes, like all sin and vice, it promises you one thing and it gives you the opposite. And this especially so. But people are historically dissatisfied. You're seeing the average life expectancy in the United States dropping, not because of

the Wuhan virus, I mean, perhaps then too, but this was happening for years now. It's dropping because of deaths of despair, because of drug addiction, because of suicide. You've seen a huge spike in suicide, actually, in some quarters during the lockdowns. So people are unhappy. You measure the happiness of women since the women's movement in the middle of the 20th century. What happened? Women's happiness, if you can measure it, has declined both in relative terms. to men, but also in absolute terms. So everyone's unhappy. No one's having kids. You know, we've got a very, very low birth rate now. We've got the life expectancy declining. So, Matt, I need the answer. In, you know, the five or six minutes we got, what is the secret to a good life? How does one have a good life?

RBC Training Ground has discovered potential in over 20,000 Canadian athletes and counting. Your story could be next. If you've got the drive, they'll help you find your path to the Olympics. Let's see what you've got. Sign up for free at rBC training ground.ca. Well, first of all, let me say something about pornography, and I'll get into the good life through it. The problem with pornography, it's been said, isn't that it shows too much, but that it shows too little, right?

It reduces the beauty and mystery of sex and femininity and masculinity to a sort of two-dimensional thing for my consumption. So I'm against porn because I'm pro-sex, not because I'm anti-sex, and because I would like a beautiful, fulfilling sex life in my marriage, and I think people should want that if they're married, and that porn only gets in the way of that. Yeah, so I just wrote a book called How to Be Happy, St. Thomas's Secret to a Good Life. Thomas Aquinas, people often think of him.

They might think of metaphysics or his arguments for God's existence or just war theory or these sorts of things. But he had a lot to say about human flourishing. And he follows Aristotle in that sense, where he understands happiness to be an excellence of human beings. And he distinguishes between two types of happiness. He calls one beatitude, one felicitis, that's the, you know, that's the Latin of the Greek aristotle used. Namely, what he's saying is to be perfectly happy will not happen in this life, but we can have a high degree of happiness through virtue in this life.

So if you want any chance of being happy, you have to grow in virtue, flee from vice. But since we've been made ultimately for God, Thomas Aquinas would say, we will not be fully satisfied until we behold him, as it were, face to face in heaven. Aquinas even goes through a list of the certain things we turn to to make us happy, like honor and physical pleasure and even spiritual pleasure, money and these sorts of things. And he shows, he doesn't he doesn't just say, can't make you happy. He offers arguments for why they can't make us happy. And I find myself really convicted by it.

So, yeah, it's neat. I think for too long we've thought about morality is thou shalt not, right? Don't do what you really want to do. But actually morality is about how to be happy. Like, how do I live a life of human flourishing? And that's how Thomas understands it, how Aristotle understands it, and that's what I try to put in this book. You know, I just read a book, very old book, about 500 years old, by Dom Lorenzo Scupoli, called the spiritual combat. And in it, he lays something out that I know a lot of people are grappling with.

And he just lays it out so simply and so clearly. It's sort of what St. Paul's getting out when he says, the things I want to do, I don't do. And the things that I don't want to do, I do. And you think, well, how on earth does that make any sense? And yet we all know that that is true. And what scrupoli points out is we have a lower will. We have certain desires, but they're base desires, they're appetites. You know, it's the appetite for the addiction.

It's the appetite for more, more food, more cigarettes, more whatever. Then we have the higher will. That's a rational will. So we can be conscious of that. We recognize that there's some objective standard that we're trying to come into line with. And the rational will mediates between the appetites, which every animal has, and the divine will, which is perfect and right and just. And so the whole process, it's so funny how much we forget in our society,

because the whole process of a liberal education was once understood to be getting that base will to come into alignment with the rational will so that you can actually be a free person, not free in the sense that you've got an iPhone and you can go look at porn or you've got a syringe and you can shoot up, but free in the sense that you can master those appetites and really pursue what you ultimately desire. Yeah, in the catechism of the Catholic Church, under chastity, it has this wonderful line, probably my favorite in the whole catechism. It says, the alternative is clear. Either man governs his passions and so finds peace, or he lets himself be dominated by them and becomes unhappy. You see this in Dante, probably the most famous cantoe of Dante's, Paulo and Francesca,

these adulterous lovers. And their punishment is that they are with around on wins. They can't, they can never control. They're just going to be brought along on the winds and the gusts of lust and passion. That's exactly right. So it is counterintuitive. Sometimes we think, or perhaps we've been told that if I just engage my passions without restraint, that's the path to happiness. But it seems to me that you only have to live to the age of 14 to realize that that doesn't work. And so, yeah, maybe try a different route. What are you seeing happening? I actually have a bit of hope here, not only because it's a, a demand. and a theological virtue, but I actually think things might be improving in as much as for a long

time, at least in the United States, the conservative movement adopted this, you do you kind of approach to politics. Oh, yeah, we're the cool party. We're the free party. Yeah, whatever. Look at porn or do drugs. Or there was a famous essay by P.G. O'Rourke, who's a conservative humorist, which was called the Republican Party Reptile, had to drive fast on drugs while getting your wing-wang squeezed and not spill your drink. And it, you know, it sort of, it's sort of, embodied that 1980s, 90s vision of what it means to be a conservative. And I'm noticing now the people who still embrace that thing, do whatever you want, just don't make me pay for it. It's kind of the boomers, you know, it's kind of this older, Gen X, it's kind of this older

crowd on the right. And the younger crowd, the youths that they think that they're appealing to, that I've spoken to, Gen Z and even millennials, they don't want that. They actually do want some moral order. They do want some standards and they do want to pursue virtue. Are you seeing that as well? Or am I just holy? No, I'm seeing that as well. It feels like for so long, people who have been more conservative have tried these sort of incremental approach. And I'm not poo-pooing that. I see that there's a reason for that. But almost like, well, I don't want to come off as too radical. So yeah, maybe abortion except for rape and incest and, sorry, just for rape and incest, but no other reason. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it seems like more and more, it's like, no, we need to speak the truth and speak it clearly. There is a way to live. There is a way not to live. And if society and culture becomes poisoned with intrinsically evils, the fruit, the children, the families out of that are going to be dysfunctional and unhappy as well. So it seems to me that we have an obligation for the common good and that we should act in such a way

and even legislate in such a way to bring that about. Of course, a republic refers to the things we hold in common, the public things. I mean, there's no, we have a constitution to promote the general welfare. We do live in a society. We're not just Adams floating around in the world, born pure. with rights. We have obligations. We're in a family and a community. We want to live in a nice place and we want to have a nice country. And one of the people helping to guide us back there, I think, is Matt Frat. And I would recommend that everyone go get the book, How to Be Happy,

St. Thomas's Secret to a good life. And really, and follow Matt's other stuff too. I think you write so clearly, you write so clearly, you speak so clearly. You've got a lot of moral courage, you know, even to talk about very difficult issues that a lot of people don't want to talk about that is just pervading our society. And I think just that simplicity, that clarity is really a way to snap people out of it. I often go back to Ernest Hemingway's description of bankruptcy as a thing that happens gradually and then suddenly. And, you know, things can happen suddenly. There can be big shifts. We might be in one of those shifts right now. And I hope we have a good life and human flourishing for our whole country. Matt, thanks for being on the show.

Thanks, Michael.