TrueLife - Dr. Salomon - 7 Deadly Sins “LUST”

Episode Date: March 15, 2022

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Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scar's my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark. fumbling, furious through ruins

maze, lights my war cry Born from the blaze The poem is Angels with Rifles The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Kodak Serafini Check out the entire song at the end of the cast Dr. David Solomon

Welcome back to the True Life podcast I am so thankful you're here with us We had a great first episode And we are moving right along into something that I think all of us are guilty of, that all of us kind of enjoy a little bit, you know, sometimes, and something that truly moves the needle when it comes to human behavior. And it's this idea of lust that you draw out.

And why don't you go ahead and just jump in and let us tell us a little bit about it? Sure, George, good to be with you again. Thanks for having me back on. So the, this issue of lust, Lust is really an interesting one because it has in many ways shifted over time from a question of morality to a question of legality. And really, I think that most of our contemporary discussions about lust look at the moral, the legal issue of lust, not the moral, which is the medieval mind would have looked at this as a purely moral issue. But then we passed laws that basically made lust illegal, for lack of another way of putting it. And as a result, that's what we're dealing with now.

But it also, as you mentioned in the intro, it's part of being human. And so you take that away and we become a little bit less human. But once again, lust deals with. excess desire. So it's not the idea that we are not supposed to feel desire. Of course we are. But the excess of the feeling of desire is the problem. Yeah, you started off this chapter was one of the world's greatest philosophers, Camus.

And he says, I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for mine. man. He fornicated and read the papers. Can you tell us why you set up with that and what that leads into? It's a great line. It really is. You know, as a devoted New York Times reader every morning, I don't know if I can relate or not. I fulfill 50% of his definition. I think that what Camus is partially tapping into is that so much of modern life, and by that use of that phrase modern, I'm going to sort of reframe that as being post-World War II, which is really what I think we're looking at here, is driven by our desire, our desire for power, our desire for sexual gratification,

our desire to have more things. So much of it is driven by desire. And of course, that's one of the main issues behind the seven deadly sins is this problem with excess desire. And lust is excess sexual desire. Excess desire for things we'll deal with when we get to greed in a later chapter. But I think Camus hits it on the head. You know, it really, I mean, if you look at,

the state of modern human beings. And again, it kind of feeds into what we were talking about last time about that issue with object and subject. And, you know, I was rereading Paul Valerie the other day, actually, because I'm getting ready to give a keynote address. And he said something really interesting, which touched exactly on what we were discussing. He says, cut off from experience, isolated from the constraints, imposed by direct contact, the mind engenders what it needs in its own fashion. So we become completely subjective human beings. And as a result, then, we sort of lack the ability to appreciate others and appreciate and be empathetic with what others are going through.

And, you know, really what this chapter on lust comes down to is the question of, of our humanity and the humanity of those around us and how we treat them. And lust seems to violate both of those sort of tenets. It makes us a little bit less human by dehumanizing the people around us who are the subjects of our lust. Wow.

It makes us a little bit less human by dehumanize. Can you just say that part? That was beautiful. Can you say that part again? Dehumanizes us by making those around us, making us a little less human and turning those around us who are the the subjects of our lust and makes them a little bit less human as well. Okay, so I just want to tell everybody, I've got to pause to everybody right here. The book is called Seven Deadly Sins and it's by Dr. David Solomon and

there's so much in here, you guys. This is why we're doing seven parts on this. It's, there's a lot in here and it's really well researched. It's really well done. And you'll spend a lot of time thinking not only about the seven deadly sins, but how they affect your life and those around you. And, you know, it leads me into, you were talking about a keynote of Paul Valeret and the cutoff. And since we're talking about cutoff, can you tell us a little bit about Matthew 1912? Yeah. It would be the eunuchs. Yes. So there's a line in Matthew about human beings being. being eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who've been made eunuchs by men,

and there are eunuchs who have been made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He who is able to receive this, let him receive it. And the issue when it comes to that particular verse is that origin of Alexandria, who is an early Greek philosopher theologian, second century, a brilliant mind, who really was the first one to kind of formulate a new way of reading the Bible, but really reading any texts. He basically misread the verse and in an attempt to just become more, to become closer to God.

He had himself castrated, which has to be one of the biggest oops moments in the history of men. And his whole goal was to curb himself of his feelings of lust by having himself castrated. And the story I should note is maybe apocryphal. We don't know. It's mentioned by several people, but the veracity of it is still up for debate. But nevertheless, it becomes a sort of a trademark story when you're talking about origin. Yeah, it's the way you've structured it,

this particular chapter, I really felt like it flowed. So we go from origin of Alexandria, and then we can move into the lust, the etymology of the word lust is derived from the Latin luxuria. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah. So, and that's a cognate for our, for our modern English word for luxury. And it really does sort of connotes luxury, excess, debauchery. and it really isn't an English word until really we get to about the 19th century. It doesn't really come into English per se as the word lust. In fact, there's a dictionary from the early 19th century that links it to a Latin word, Luio or Luxem, which relates to dissolving and loosening the powers of the body and the mind.

So again, it's this sort of unbridled, unrestricted, drained desire. Yeah, and it, like that part right there makes me, you really begin to understand the spirituality of you, when you say things like it dissolves that part of the humanity. And you start to really understand why it is a sin. Because when you think about it dissolving that part of yourself, you begin how it loosens your morals, your thinking, and it gets into your life and how it, you know, if it can loosen that, it can loosen your relationships, you can loosen your love on the people.

that you have and the respect you have for people. And I got to be honest with you, I didn't really thoroughly understand how dangerous it was until I read this chapter right here. And then it brings us back to, you were talking about how we've moved into the legality of lust. And as you painted such a beautiful picture of us moving through the times, you can see the definition changing. And it is slowly morphing into, hey, it's just a legal thing.

It's not that bad. And it takes away all the sting out of there. Yeah. And the ideal example of that is to look at, sadly, to look at politics in America. And so, you know, if we go back to Jimmy Carter, which some of us remember when Jimmy Carter was running for president, famously he gave an interview to Playboy magazine. and in that interview he mentioned that he had often lusted in his heart, which meant that he had lustful feelings, but that he had not acted on them.

People went bananas when this was published and said, oh, my God, this is such a horrible thing, and he's admitting that he feels lust. Well, I mean, if you deny that you feel lust, you're rather foolish to begin with. and he claims actually that his polling numbers went down after that interview. And then if you contrast that, of course, with Donald Trump and his escapades, least of which the inside, what's it called inside? I can't remember the name of the show.

Inside the actor's studio? No, no, no. Inside Edition. Well, maybe he should have been on Inside the Studio. I don't know. We probably would be better off. Maybe Inside Edition. Oh, Access Hollywood, I'm sorry, Access Hollywood.

With the tape from Access Hollywood where he admitted to, you know, grabbing women and said that basically he had power and so he could do whatever he wanted. A couple of weeks later, he was elected president of the United States. And so we've really, even just in the last 40 years, moved from the reaction to this being one of moral outrage to one of, well, legally, He didn't do anything wrong. And so it must be okay. But, you know, the issue there is that, as I tell my students, there's a lot of behavior that's ethical and isn't legal. And there's a lot of legal behavior that isn't ethical.

They don't necessarily equal out. And I think that what's happened is as our great country has moved forward in its history and developed and codified such a vat. last legal statutes, it has become rather cloudy. And it's become more of an issue of, well, is it legal? Okay, it's not moral, but is it legal? Because that's really what we're concerned about. You know, if I'm going to sue you, it's going to be over something that's a legal issue.

I can't sue you over a moral issue, at least not in court. I can take you to church and sue you there, but it's not going to get me very far. And so I think that that's a big part of what we're talking about. And it is a big part of what really, I think, contributes to that kind of dehumanizing of us. And I say in the chapter, I'm not passing judgment on Donald Trump, but I am suggesting that the fact that millions of people still voted for him after that says something about our attitudes towards this topic. Yeah, I wanted to ask your on that note between Jimmy Carter and Trump, like it seems that people got, maybe they got mad at Jimmy Carter because he was admitting to them something they don't want to admit about themselves. Like, yeah, I do. And then he's saying, in a way, he's saying like, this is wrong and I feel bad and you should too. Where Trump is saying like, yeah, I did it. Who cares? Exactly. Which is like the, it's kind of like the fall of man almost. You know, you can kind of see it.

Well, on the one hand, there's contrition, and on the other, there's none. And we tend, I think, to feel more sympathy and empathy with folks who are contrite about their behavior, truly contrite, rather than people who basically don't care and say, well, as you just said, you know, I did it, so what? And that attitude is is phenomenally dangerous to us just as a species. Never mind the daily morality of how we treat each other, which I really think is fundamental to this. You know, when we talk about pornography, yes, pornography is terrible. It is in many instances and in many ways illegal. It is clearly in most ways immoral, but the biggest problem with it is is that it dehumanizes and it sets up women in most cases as just objects.

It takes away their humanity. And if I engage in that, it also strips me a little bit of my humanity. Yeah, I agree. It forces you to see, it forces you to strip the divinity out of the other person. You can't, and if you can't see the beauty or God or the spirituality in somebody else, and that means that little light in you is dying, you know, it's going out. And it kind of makes me want to cry a little bit. You know, it's pretty sad to think about.

It is, it is. But I think that, you know, in studying the history of this idea, it's, it, you find some solace. For example, you know, in the, in the, in the, in the Jewish Talmud, um, lust is one of of the four things listed that God is said to have regretted that he created. And so it's interesting that we can go back and sort of look at. And when I discovered that, it made me go back to the Bible then and say, okay, well, where do we get these stories? Right? I mean, there really isn't any lust in the story of Adam and Eve. As much as our culture wants to make it seem like it's about lust and it was a temptation and, oh my God, the horrible woman, if you look at the Genesis text, there's

nothing of that. The actual Genesis text says she brought the fruit to Adam and he ate. That's it. It's the apocryphal. It's the additional stories that we have about the fall, mostly from St. Augustine, really, is where it starts, that we get more of this kind of backstory about what happened and what was going on. But I went to the story of David and Bathsheba to look at a sort prototype of this story in the Old Testament. And it was, I was really surprised at what I found. Of course, David supposedly falls in love, and I'll put that in air quotes, with Bathsheba, when he sees her sunbathing, essentially, on her rooftop, and he demands that he has to have her. He essentially, what a lot of interpreters read as rapes her, he sends her husband off to

war to be killed and he marries her and they have a child who is the result supposedly of that first encounter and um the bible text is is there's no punishment um in fact i believe in the following chapter um i think it's nathan the prophet says you know god is not happy with you or something to that effect but that's it um and so i started to look at some of the second mature, some of the commentary on the Bible, especially in the Middle Ages, to see, well, is there any more elaboration about this? Does anybody talk about this? And it seems to really be glossed over as more of a reach for power than it is about sex. So that David's act is more about his power as a leader and his power as, well, in this case, as a Jewish king eventually, as the Hebrew king,

then it is about his lustful feelings for Bathsheba. And of course, I mean, in the text, Beth Shiva, I don't know if she has any words, if she ever says anything for herself, which is, of course, prompted an entire generation of writers in the late 20th and early 21st centuries to start writing these stories in the Bible from the female perspectives, right, to give them more agency and to hear about what would their perspective have been. So it's incredibly complicated, but it was really kind of troubling to me as a reader of the Bible as a child to go back and read that story of David and find that there's no contrition, there's no punishment. It just is sort of.

lost over and we move on. It's such a fascinating story in so many ways. I have so many questions. Do you think that it's just the beauty and the magic of scripture that the story, we keep finding new stuff in the story? Or do you think that maybe we are changing as a species, so we keep finding new stuff in the story? I think we're changing and we read things differently.

I mean, it is the nature of reading a text. You know, I mean, many have said, you know, you can't read a text twice for the first time. I had a professor when I was an undergraduate who claimed that every June he re-read Wuthering Heights. And he said every time he read it, he saw something new, that he hadn't seen before. And so I do think part of that is our changing as readers. Certainly someone reading the story of David and Bathsheba today is not going to read it in the same way that someone did. in the Middle Ages or even in the 19th century.

And that's not necessarily a bad thing. The danger, and I discuss this when I teach the Bible as literature with my students, is what historians call presentism, which is reading something that is old or reading an event that is old or reading a situation that happened in the past through the lens of today and being critical about it in that way. because that's not fair. It's not fair to the writer.

It's not fair. It's folks who reread Shakespeare today and say, well, you know, Shakespeare was really a misogynist in this play. And you're like, well, but you're reading that through the lens of 21st century feminism. That didn't exist in the 16th century, 16th, 17th centuries. And so it's really not fair to whip that on him because he wasn't aware of that. And so we always have to sort of adjust for, you know, how are we approaching this? And that's why so many, especially when you read books that are commentary on the Bible, have to set up sort of, you know, okay, what's your methodology?

What's your angle here? How are you approaching this? Are you looking at it from the perspective of today? Are you reading it through the medieval Catholic Church? Are you reading it through the Reformed Church? You know, how are you approaching this? Because that's going to color the way. read the text, and it brings us back to poor origin, who, you know, lost his, lost his goods.

But origin detailed four different ways of reading the Bible, right? And one of them was the allegorical way, which is the way that we often do now, which is essentially what we were referred to as reading between the lines. What, what, just if we jump back for a moment, what is your interpretation of why God was upset about creating lust? It's interesting because, again, the Talmud doesn't reflect a lot on the why. It just says that there are four things that God is sorry that he created and lust is one of them. And don't ask me but the other three because I can't remember the top in the head. And, I mean, why would we think of that?

It's interesting because the biblical commentary on the Genesis fall story, certainly does imply that Adam is partly driven by feelings of lust, that Eve is, as the usual story goes, tempted Adam to eat the fruit, tempted him with her wily feminine ways. And as a result, cast all women as being evil through the Middle Ages and being responsible for the fall. and the eventual redemption of man by Mary through the birth of Jesus is looked at as the parallel there. So by woman man fell, by a woman man is redeemed.

But it certainly poses one of those conundrums, not unlike the problem of evil. You know, why does evil exist? Why does lust exist? why do we need to have it? Now, on one level, from a biological standpoint, you would say, well, we need it in order to procreate, that it would be difficult to keep the species alive without some sense of desire, sexual desire, which again, not bad, it's an excess that it becomes bad. And so perhaps it's just part of our human nature that when we get handed, you know, five M&Ms, we want 20.

You know, I was listening to a podcast yesterday and somebody kept repeating the phrase that we all remember our parents probably saying to us, which is, you know, you give an inch, she'll take a foot. Right. You know, and it's that same sense that we just, we can never have enough. And so maybe that's part of what goes on here as well. Although certainly there's an entire contingency of people who historically have distanced themselves from any kind of sexual desire. Now, most of those folks have, of course, led what we would call a religious life, folks like origin and people who live a cloister of existence. but there's also, you know, a pretty strong attitude that just by entering into a religious life, it doesn't mean that your lustful feelings are necessarily going to go away.

It just means that you, in some ways, learn to curb them a little bit better. But as, of course, what's gone on with the Catholic Church in the last 100 years, it's now revealed, maybe that's not the case. Yeah. It brings me to another point that you point out on your book, lust has both positive and negative connotations. And most people, when they think of lust, they think about what we've talked about so far as in like a sexual or an excess of objectification. But can you maybe talk a little bit about how there's a lust for life and how maybe there's a positive connotation for it? Yeah. And I love that phrase lust for life because it makes me think of the Irving Stone novel about Vincent Van Gogh. which I foolishly tried to read in high school. It's about a thousand pages long, and I couldn't get through it,

even though I love it's Navajo. But this lust for life. So the idea that we really yearn to, and I'm going to fall into cliche here, take the biggest bite that we can out of the apple to keep the Genesis metaphor going, to enjoy. life to its fullest, to have that kind of desire to get the most that we can out of every day.

It's difficult. It's more difficult for some people than others, more difficult at some times than others, I think. You know, I have to hand it to my friend George here, who's in Hawaii and living his best life and certainly having a lust for life. but it is oftentimes difficult. And I think that's one of the challenges that we confront as contemporaries is keeping that going. And just from a practical standpoint, there was an article on the front page. I think it was of the Sunday Times this week about the new, I think it's 998 number,

the suicide prevention line that's supposed to be going into effect nationally. And, you know, it's a fact that numbers of suicides are continually on the rise. And so what is it about balancing that lust for life with the incredible depression that some people have? I mean, they seem like polar opposites, right? You know, I describe myself to a friend the other day through an email as a cynical Bronx Jew. And she answered me back by saying, well, people have often accused me of being a Pollyanna. So I'm not really sure what that means. And I think that there are, you know, there's a variety of people.

But, I mean, I enjoy being around people who have that lust for life. and certainly I think that's I mean it's ironic that in fact Stone names his novel lust for life considering Van Gogh's end and the film is very good with Turk Douglas Yeah I had always figured

Better to be Pollyanna than Cassandra But I thought you'd better be Pollyanna than Costanza To shame I friend, well played. I think sometimes one thing I think about when I think about lust is that it's such a powerful thing. And maybe what we, maybe what people can do as we talk about the epidemic of suicide and the rising numbers, maybe if somehow people could harness this lust and see, and this lust for life and in the darkest moments think to themselves, gosh,

I'm so lucky to be alive. And maybe try to harness that power of lust. and see the sunrise or just see the birds singing. Maybe that powerful emotion could pull them out of there, but it's sad to see that people are doing that. And I think you're right. I think that the only danger there is in comparing us ourselves to others. So let me explain what I mean by that. So we're going through this horrible time with this war in Ukraine.

And a lot of people are reflecting on that and say, saying how grateful they are to live in America and the freedoms that we have and et cetera, et cetera. And I always cringe a little bit when people say that and don't include the fact that millions of people are suffering. Because it's a very solipsistic approach. It's almost narcissistic, right? you know, well, and, you know, for years I taught, I taught a course on, on, in women's studies at a women's college. And it was a freshman course. And we looked at the plight of women around the world. And the problem that surfaced after some time was that students weren't learning about this in order to understand what was going on.

Instead, they were coming out of it with, well, I'm glad I don't live there. And it was, okay, that is the polar opposite of what we're trying to achieve here. And so we had to reframe what we were doing in order to make sure that they had that understanding and an empathy for what women were experiencing in other parts of the world and not just come out with, well, you know, thank God that's not me. And I think that that's the problem at the moment that I see with what's going on in Ukraine and some of the reactions that we're seeing. here at home, which is, you know, well, I'm glad I live in the U.S. It's like, but there are millions of people over there who are really suffering. And, you know, I'm glad I live in the U.S. too, but that doesn't negate the suffering that those people are experiencing.

And it doesn't negate the fact that I should show some, some feeling of empathy for what they're going through. Now, maybe that means balancing my day and, you know, not watching CNN, for 10 hours of coverage of what's going on and instead going out and appreciating a sunset. And maybe that's the balance there. I don't know. I haven't found it myself, so I can't say.

I haven't found out what that balance is yet on my own. I tend to carry too much weight of the negative that's going on. But I think that's just my Bronx roots. Yeah, it's well put. And the more that we talk about this, It makes me think, you know, we see what's happening over there, but I wish everybody could see what's happening in Ukraine is causing people over here to commit suicide.

Like, we're so connected. And we don't think about that. Like, this is the reason there's so much, there's this dark cloud of despair hanging over us is because our brothers and sisters are dying and we're connected to them. We think we're not. You think you're separated, but you're not.

Like, you can feel their despair, you know? And it's a spiritual malaise that sort of just settles over us. And it's the same kinds of things that some folks like Paul Valfa Free and D.H. Lawrence, who I talk about a lot in the book, wrote about in the wake of World War I and then during World War II, that we're experiencing in many ways a lot of that same sense. but what's missing and having not lived through World War II, I can't say this personally. I can only say this from what I've read. But if you go back and look at newspapers that were published during the war years and look at the tenor of the conversation, the tone of the editorial page, the attitudes, even in advertising, it was more of,

of it's we got a band together here i mean george you probably remember victory gardens and remember what those are people planted victory gardens right this idea that you grow your own food and it would it would help us win the war because it wouldn't take resources away from the troops um i could not imagine um us today having a a kind of a project like that again where everybody would join in we're too polarized. I mean, I guess the closest we came to it was probably after 9-11, but it wore off fast, didn't it? And it took such a tremendous thing to get us there, to wipe away. Right. It's sad that that's what has to happen in order to make us kind of wake up. I mean, it's a similar thing with COVID, right, for the two years of COVID,

is now making, you know, big larger companies starting to realize that, But, oh, you mean we have to pay our employees better? Or, oh, we need to treat our employees better. Or we can let people tell our work and it's not going to be the end of the world. And, you know, COVID had to happen in order for us to realize that. That's a tough, a tough price to pay, you know. It really is. And I wish we didn't do that.

I wish we listened more to each other, but the fact of the matter is, and I don't know if it's the nature of our capitalist culture, that we don't do that until it hits people in the pocketbook. Perhaps, I don't know. I don't know. Yeah, this whole topic of advertising and lust and going back to the 20s and seeing the beginning of, hey, let's make women smoke cigarettes, you know, by by dressing up models and having them walk down the street. On a side note, as we talk about technology, as we talk about lust, as we talk about advertising, isn't it interesting that the logo for Apple is an Apple with a bite out of it that symbolizes

that. Oh, yeah. Gosh, darn it. Like, I have Apple. I like my Apple stuff. Me too. Every time I see that, every time I see it, I'm like, what am I doing, man? My pain.

I know. I don't know the history. behind how they came up with that as their logo. It would be interesting to look at. I don't know if it was a conscious connection to the Genesis story or not. I don't know. Yeah, it's interesting to think about. But in your book, you do get into the advertising and how they've commodified lust

and kind of tapped into this driver of human behavior. Can you speak to that a little bit? Yeah. You know, one of my favorite things is to Google old advertising, right? either on YouTube or images. And they're humorous. So they're also kind of horrifying because you look at it. Oh, my God.

In fact, last week I went, we had the Beatles tribute. Rain was here on campus. And I went last Wednesday night. I'm a big Beatles fan. And during one of the set changes, they showed commercials from 1967. The audience was roaring. But they were so inappropriate.

And they included my beloved Flintstones when they did a cigarette commercial. You know, it's just, it's hilarious. These commercials are hysterical. And a lot of them did mostly make women into objects. And ads still do that today. I mean, you know, if you look at, oh, there was an ad campaign for Carl's Jr., which is a hamburger chain a couple years ago. And it was Paris Hilton in a bikini washing a car. I mean, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it still goes on and all you have to do is pick up a fashion magazine and thumb through it and you'll see it on both sides really men objectified and women objectified and advertising you know goes back i mean it goes

back to the the madmen era of sex cells that draws people in it draws their attention You know, one of my favorite commercials is this ad. I think it's Norwegian. And it shows a young guy, maybe he's in his late 20s, in a grocery store. He's got his grocery cart, and he has a little boy with him. And the boy starts throwing a tantrum that he wants candy. And he just has a full-out, I mean, he's on the floor of the grocery store flailing around. He wants his candy, he wants his candy.

And the hilarious thing is the ad is for condoms. It's perfect, though. Yeah. But, you know, so, I mean, we also have learned how to use sex for humor, right? And I think that, you know, many people oftentimes get into trouble when, you know, again, there's that razor's edge, right, where you're, you go over the line. But it's, it's, it, we have a funny. attitude towards this, especially in our country in the U.S., right? You know, I mentioned in the book, you know, it's like I called it nipplegate, right? I mean, when Janet Jackson's nipple was

exposed in the Super Bowl halftime show for about a millisecond. And people went nuts. And part of that is because in the United States, we so sexualized the breast that if you look at the debate that's going on at the moment over public breastfeeding, you can see what that's all about whereas if you go to other countries go to Europe go to you know African countries of South Africa I mean it's not an issue and so why is it what what has happened here that has made that made the breasts such a sexual target in in the United States I can't say in the West because it really isn't in the West it's the US and I'm not sure you know myself how that developed but you can certainly see it

Yeah, yeah, it's, I don't know if it's our Puritan roots or if maybe, I think that it's sad for me to think about this. However, I know it to be true that there's so many problems with abuse, you know, be it sexual abuse or molestation with kids. And you can see it in our news all the time. And for anybody who's ever been a victim of that, my heart goes out to you. Me too. it ruins the family because then there's this idea of, hey, let's not talk about this. Hey, let's not do that. And I think that it's so prevalent that that's one reason we're so objectified here. And we don't know how to handle it because no one talks about it. We're in Europe

or maybe in Africa where civilization has deeper roots or a little bit older. They figured out a way to not to deal with it in a better way or talk about it. Yeah, you may be right. And of course, you know, the issue is that that kind of abuse has been going on for a long time. You know, it seems like it has increased in recent years, but studies have shown that really the only thing that's increased is the reporting of it. It's happened for a long time behind closed doors where no one ever knew and didn't talk about it. I wonder without, without, you know, making the mistake here of falling into an unpolitically correct whole of looking at certain parts of African cultures and noting the more tribal nature of the

family unit. And that may have something to do with it. But I'm completely talking off the top of my head. I'm not a sociologist. I'm not an anthropologist. So I don't know that for sure. But certainly there is a different dynamic in the American family than there is, say, in an African family who is still living in a tribal village.

Yeah, I would agree on that. It seems so sad to me that in the West we take our Kapun, our older generation and we put them in a home. We take our kids and we put them in an institution. And the parents go to work, it's just a separation. And so much more happens when you separate the family like that versus my beautiful wife, who is the most beautiful woman in the world, and I love her, she's Laotian in her family

and even in the east you see this tight family unit where the kids take care of the mom and dad and the mom and dad can take care of the house and you know it's so beautiful in a way that I think so many people hungry maybe they lust for that or you could have like a good lust for that maybe yeah

I mean and I mean you're right I mean look at most of most Chinese culture which really reveres the elderly yeah whereas as you say you know we we put people in homes and we do it in many ways. And sometimes it's in the name of expediency.

You know, if somebody has to work a full-time job and can't take care of an elderly person, you would say, you know, well, you would be better, you know, in a home where someone can watch after you and the like. but maybe we need to sort of back that up a little bit and say, well, why do we have to work so many hours a week? Why is that necessary that we can't spend more time with family? It's one of those curious things about work-life balance, right? Which has become a catchphrase in the last few years and which no one I know has been able to really figure out. It's very hard to do, right, to make sure that you've got a balance there. For most people, work is their dominant mode, their dominant mode of existence. And I'm as guilty

probably as anybody. But it's, I think you're right. It would do us well to look at a lot of those cultures in the East. And a lot of them tend to be in the East. And they, a lot of them tend to be in the East who really have figured out how to retain that family unit and not really splinter out, which, yeah, you know, here the kids are in nursery school or in daycare as soon as you can get them in daycare, right? Because people have to go back to work. Now, do they, you know, as one of my professors in grad school would say, do they have to go back to work or do they want to go back to work, right? And that's, I guess, what it comes down to. You know, I used to say to him, I have to go to the library. He'd say, no, you want to go to the library, right? You don't have to.

You don't have to do anything. But I guess that there is that part of maybe we need to kind of reframe. And I think COVID is also challenging us to do that, right? What do we really need to be doing? And what do we want to do? Yeah, I think it presents this with a beautiful opportunity. Whenever there's a breakdown like this. And I think conversations like this, and especially your book, The Seven Deadly Sins, it gives us an opportunity to restructure the world and the way we would like to see it. And I think what you spoke about, about us, you know, getting to go to work or having to go to work is, that's where the lust is able to creep in. It's like when you let go of the things you care about most and allow someone else to teach them, they're going to be touched by lust

or be more open to the suggestion of lust if you weren't there to protect them. And I just think that in your book, you talk about lust as the enemy of serious thought. And I think that's kind of what it is. Can you continue to go down that road a little bit? Yeah. Well, and it's also, you know, Augustine says lust disturbs the whole man, right? It really, in many ways, the commentators remark about the fact that the feelings of lust and in particular more than the feelings but the acting out of it really does

get in the way of rational thought and the conventional idea that as human beings our gift is our is our reason that if we let our lustful feelings get out of control it then dominates reasons. So this goes back to a debate in the 17th century between reason and passion. And so as far back as Thomas Aquinas in the 12th century, there's this idea of something called faculty psychology, right? And the idea is that in your mind, there are several different faculties at work. So you've got reason, you've got passion, you've got faith, you've got all these different sort of compartmentalize, they imagine them, areas in your brain. When you have to make a decision, the faculties basically battle it out together to try to come to a conclusion.

John Milton in Paradise Lost says that God gave man conscience as an umpire in that battle. It's beautifully written the way that he says that. So he gave us a conscience in order to umpire to referee that battle. In Paradise Lost, in John Milton's Paradise Lost, Adam experiences a battle between reason and passion when he decides whether or not to eat the fruit. And the reason that that is a debate is in Paradise Lost, God has told him exactly what to do. He knows he is not supposed to eat from that tree. It's not a mistake. He knows where the fruit came from. But he also has been told that if they eat from the fruit, it means they're going to die. And he knows that Eve has eaten the fruit.

And so what he rationalizes, what he works out in his mind in this wonderful interior, it's almost a soliloquy in the poem, is so Eve will die and I'll get another Eve? And he says, that's terrible because he's so in love with Eve. He can't imagine being away from her. And so that's what causes him to eat the fruit. His passion for her overrides his reason, which tells him, you're not. not supposed to eat the fruit. But his passion and his desire to be with her, it trumps anything else that he's been told, even what he's been told by God. And so it does get in the way. It can get in the way of our rational thinking. But on one level, then, you know, we might not be married,

George, you know, not to each other. Thank you. I love you, George. I love you. I love you. too. But you know, we wouldn't, you know, so there's something we need to have desire. It's just it can't get out of our control. And when it gets out of our control, then any kind of rational thought goes out the window and we start doing things that we should not be doing. But because our reason has been subjugated, our passion, our lust takes the driver's seat. Wow, that's really well said. It makes me think, you know, what a gift it can be to have this idea of lust. And it's almost like it's incomprehensible in some ways because it's such a great power. It's such a great driver of behavior. And to come to that conclusion of like, wait a minute, I love this woman more than anything

in the world. And if she's going, then we're going. And it just symbolizes the unity of them. And it's a beautiful idea, but such a dangerous idea. That's love, though. We need to sort of figure out what's going on here in the relationship between love and lust. So, you know, in the history of theology, you know, love,

good thing, right? Spiritual love. Spiritual love for another human being. And that's what the love that two people have for each other when they get married is theoretically supposed to be about.

right? I love my wife's spirit. I love her soul. You know, yes, I'm physically attracted to her, too. That's a bonus. But I am physically, I'm attracted to her soul, and that's the spiritual love that has to be there. If that's not there and you only have the lust, it's not going to work. Yeah. It reminds me of what Herman Hess says in Siddhartha, where Siddhartha comes up on the first girl bathing in the stream, and he's just drawn to her. Another beautiful writer and a beautifully well done. And isn't it interesting how it comes up that this particular subject, I guess subject object comes up in different writings, be it spiritual or something like that. Do you know, can you be compare and contrast that in different literature a little bit for us to kind of flesh it out? Um, yeah, let me think for a second

Yeah, it's kind of a... I mean, I suppose that, you know, if we look at some of the stereotypes of lusty or lustful behavior, D.H. Lawrence, one of my favorite writers, his novel, Lady Chaddle's Lover, which was deemed obscene when it was first published, went through a big case and went to the U.S. Supreme Court in this country because it was imported and thought to be obscene. it has a lot of scenes of really incredible sexual desire in it, as do many of Lawrence's novels. And Lawrence often accused of being pornographic in that sense. And he was very much in tune with what he would refer to as kind of the primitiveness of our humanity. Right. That, yes, we can't be all intellect.

we are physical beings. We have physical urges, whether that's, I'm hungry and I want to eat lunch, or I'm feeling feelings of lust and I want sexual desire, I want sexual release. He would respond to that by saying, again, there has to be that middle road. You have to find a balance. there has to be some way to still retain our respect and our humanity and still experience the physical pleasures of our bodies. That, I think, is something which we struggle with. I mean, again, if you go back to the Janet Jackson thing, I mean, you know, who got hurt by seeing Janet Jackson's nipple for a millisecond?

They cut away to a commercial so fast you weren't even sure what you looked at. In fact, it wasn't until it started showing up on the internet where you could replay it over and over again that people were like, yeah, I saw her nipple. It's like, okay, so are you scarred for life now because you've seen a woman's nipple? What is that gun to you? Now, it's not, and the interesting thing, of course, is that in the two decades almost since that happened, there's been a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking, no pun intended to the NFL, about that incident because it seemed that, at least initially, Janet Jackson was punished more heavily than Justin Timberlake was when he was the one who actually was the one who ripped the piece of clothing off of her that exposed her nipple. But I think what we're doing in looking back on it now is realizing, you know, I mean, did anybody die because of that? And it was, wasn't it more about my, and as you mentioned earlier, perhaps puritanical attitude of female breast that should be blamed, then Janet Jackson should be blamed. So it's, it's complicated.

as they would say on Facebook, it's complicated. Yeah, it is. It says so much about us. I want to be mindful of your time, Doctor. How are you doing on time? Yep, we're good. Okay. Do you mean we're good as then we should continue to talk for a little bit?

Yeah, we can do another five minutes or so. Okay, perfect. I just had a, towards the end here, I had, um. God, you got great cats going back there. Oh, these guys are such rascals. We love them. There's so much fun to be around. And you can see the animalistic lust when they want to go outside or they want to get their food, which, you know, I think something important to talk about maybe to end up here is some of Charles Taylor's work about sources of self and in the inner.

And can you maybe just kind of flesh that out before we go? Sure. So Taylor's Canadian philosopher. And he wrote this, well, he's written two mammoth books. One is called the secular age and the other is called sources of self. They are not easy reads, but both certainly worth your time, if you're willing to put it into it. And he really, especially in sources of self, elaborates a good deal on what I see in Augustine and in Carl Jung, which is this focus on inner self and outer self.

and the interior and the exterior and our relationship between those. And so what I mean is, and I keep coming back to this really in just about everything that I write, is part of our issue with modern life, with the speed of modern life, some of which we can blame technology on, is it has really prevented us from taking the time to reflect, to contemplate, to sit quietly and just think. We are constantly bombarded with data. It's difficult to get away from it. And without that, we are losing as a result that sense of who we are, our sense of self. because we live almost an entirely exterior existence.

It's all about my relationship to the world and to others. And I've moved away from thinking about, what about my relationship to me? And perhaps, as we mentioned, I think last time, this is the cause of all of the increase in people meditating and doing yoga. And isn't it interesting that so much of the practice that people engage in when it comes to this comes from Eastern thought and not the West.

And I think there's a reason for that. And it's a fundamental sort of difference between Western religion and Eastern religion. Western religion tends to focus much more on the exterior, what is beyond you, and the Eastern religion is more on the interior. And the easiest example of that is that in the three major Western religions, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, you pray to God. In most Eastern religions, when you meditate, it is looking within. So if you want to make a change, make it. You're not praying to a divinity.

The divinity is within you. And so you have the power to make those changes. it's just somehow you have thrown off obstacles to being able to do that. And in many cases, I think it's just one of the obstacles is our inability to really look within and to look at ourselves. You know, we mentioned, we were talking last week about the subject, object divide. And I think it's really interesting because mirrors at just the metaphor of a mirror, right, of sitting and looking at yourself.

There's a great scene in Hamlet where Hamlet wants his mother to sit down and look at herself in a mirror, to look at her soul. He wants her to look at her soul because he's implying that she is somehow involved, was involved in the death of his father. And it's a wonderful scene

because he makes her sit down and look at her, self in the mirror and then he drills it down further and he says you know essentially i want you to look at your soul look past the surface look at what's inside and we can't do that if we never have the time if we never disconnect um and many people don't uh you know i could walk through my office on campus here is in our library, beautiful building, filled with students working. And I could walk through here, and I could probably count on one hand the number of students who are sitting working, either just with a book and a pad and no earbuds in. There are very few, I'm sure. And again, I'm not,

I don't want to come off as being hypocritical. I'm guilty of this as anybody. I can't work in silence, I have a hard time doing that. But I do realize the importance of it. I realize that it is important to disconnect because it's really the only way that I'm going to get in touch with what's really important. Yeah, that sums it up. I mean, it's really well said, and it's something that we can all work on ourselves, and it's something that's also a beautiful thing to do, and it takes a lot of courage to do. It does. It really does. Dr. I really enjoy our conversations, and I've gotten a lot of great feedback from it so far. And I just want to let everybody know the book again is called Seven Deadly Sins.

All his links are below. He's got an awesome blog that I'm going to put down there. Maybe who knows, he might have a newsletter coming someday or something, but can you tell people where they can find you if they want to. Sure. My website is David A. Solomon, S-A-O-M-O-M-N.com. And you can contact me through there. And if you have the book and you would like me to sign it for you, I'd be happy to do that.

just contact me through the website and we can arrange that. Sadly, I don't have enough copies of the book to sell them on my website, but you can get them from Amazon and any other place where you can order books. I encourage you to do that in other places where you can possibly order a book and not just on Amazon. Fantastic. And we'll be back next Tuesday to do it again. And we'll be back at 7 o'clock Hawaii Standard Time. Yes.

Thank you very much, Dr. for spending time with me and my audience today. We had a great conversation, and I will look forward to seeing you next Tuesday. Thanks, George. Really appreciate it. All right. Aloha. Bye-bye.