Speaker 1 (0s): Everybody welcome to the true life podcast. I have an amazing guest today, Dr. David Solomon, he's the author of several books. He is his new book, the seven deadly sins. How sin influenced the west from the middle ages to the modern era. He's the director of undergraduate research and creative activity at Christopher Newport university in Newport news, Virginia. He is an expert on the Flintstones amongst many other things. And I just want to start off by telling everybody this book is well worth your time.

It is so dance. It's got so much good information and it crosses, it crosses like millennia. It seems like it, it goes way back to, to mysticism and so many contemporary philosophers, and it ties so much together. And I just want to say thank you doctor for leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for people to follow the ideas of those that inspired you. I think that's a great way to start a book and allow people to see where you came from. Is there, is, would you like to maybe introduce them a little bit more about yourself?

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (1m 18s): Well, thank you, George. And thanks for having me. And I love that, that, that metaphor of the breadcrumbs, because that really is kind of the way that my Mo my own mind works. So, but yeah, as you, as you say, I'm here in Newport news, Virginia down near Virginia Beach came here five years ago to open up the office of undergraduate research and creative activity. After about two decades, as a professor of English. And my area of specialization is medieval and Renaissance, literature, religion, and culture. I've written now four books.

The most recent one is this book on the seven deadly sins. And I do love the Flintstones.

Speaker 1 (1m 57s): What do you think it was about grand Poobah? They were like the loyal order of the water Buffalo.

Speaker 2 (2m 1s): Yes, they weren't very good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I aspire to be the grand Poobah someday, someday. I will be like, we're in Poobah.

Speaker 1 (2m 9s): Well, if you're the grand Poobah, then I want to be a loyal order of the water Buffalo. So I wanted to maybe start off with, you know, in the, in the, I thought maybe we could start off with the introduction again, the introduction that you wrote was really well done, and it was almost like two books in one. It was like a little bit of an autobiography. Yeah. And I, I think that that's important to thoroughly understand one's ideas. You must understand where they came from. So could you tell us a little bit about the introduction? Yeah,

Speaker 2 (2m 36s): Sure. I, I do think that it's helpful to know that about the author and there's some debate in the academic world about that. And of course I was, I was raised and trained. And in the academy to think that you, you don't bring in the personal, in an academic study and then Stephen Greenblatt wrote a book called Hamlet and purgatory. I, I don't know when it came out, I forget it must've been the 1990s maybe.

And in that book, he sort of established the reason for him writing it in the introduction with an incredible personal story about his own life. And I was really struck by that. And I said, oh, you, you can do that. And of course, you know, eventually then realized that while it's my book, I can do whatever I want, but I think it is helpful to understand how I got interested in this, in this topic I grew up in, in the Bronx in New York, raised a Jew, a faithful Jew.

I'm a cultural Jew, more than a religious Jew, more, more interested in, in, in bagels than, than Torah, and probably still am, which is probably my downfall. And, but I was very, very interested in religion as, as a child and was a very faithful to my, to my Jewish faith ended up being bar mitzvah'd from an Orthodox synagogue in the Bronx. Not because my family was Orthodox, but only because that was the, the synagogue in the neighborhood.

And up until the time, I was really about 12 years old, a lot of my teachers thought I was eventually going to be a rabbi and a colleague of mine pointed out a couple of years ago that that, that I am a rat rabbi means teacher. And that's what I do when my grandmother died. When I was 13, that kind of changed the earth under my feet. And in many ways, I, if, if I didn't lose the faith, I started questioning my faith and questioning the nature of faith.

In general, I knew nothing about anything really, other than Judaism. At that point, I went to school at a public school in the Bronx and directly across the street, not 50 yards from our front door was, was our lady of refuge parochial school in the Bronx. I had no idea what went on over there other than the fact that they wore uniforms and they got different holidays off than we did. But then when I started college, I went to Fordham university, which was not far from, from where we were living. We had since moved to New Jersey and always wanted to go to Fordham.

And at Fordham, of course, got a, a great Jesuit Catholic education and theology courses were required. And so I remember sitting in the foundations of Christian theology course freshman year with father Baldwin, man would the largest years of any human being I've ever met. And it was me and 29 Catholics. And I didn't know what the hell they were talking about. I had no idea what was going on. I will never forget the day that we discussed the Trinity.

I completely baffled. And I still have the textbook from that class sitting on my shelf here in the office. It was, it was, was a formative moment from there. Then the following year, I took another, another required general education course, and we read John Milton's paradise lost. And that changed my life. He was able to describe not only the narrative of the fall of man and the garden of Eden, and then the, the, the redemption, but also with a depth into these characters where we got to understand what was going on in Adam's mind, what made him decide to eat the fruit when he offered it to him, what was going on in Satan's mind?

Why did he fall from heaven? And so all of that kind of grew then into this incredible self-training more or less in Catholicism and the history of the Catholic church, which I then pursued some more in graduate school as a media of A-list wrote my doctoral dissertation on Jesuits in the 16th century, and got very involved in, in the world of, of Catholic study and Catholic academics.

And that's where I'm at down. I, I still teach, I teach a course on the Bible as literature, which I'm teaching this fall and teach a course on heaven and hell and all sorts of topics like that. So that's kind of the thumbnail sketch of how I got sort of set on this path. Of course, there's a lot of, a lot of stories in that introduction that I'm sure that you probably picked up on that, that I could relate of specific things that happened, which were, were really, if not formative, really kind of ground shaking to me, changed my life.

Speaker 1 (7m 54s): Yeah. It, it, I often see a similarity in people's paths and it is that questioning faith that begins people's path. And, you know, I, I live by this idea that is really come to, to build in my soul lately. That is like our greatest tragedies or our greatest gifts. And it's so hard when those tragedies happen to you to understand that that's your gift. But if you, like you said, you know, I, I wish you could say a goosebumps when you, when you said, oh, well, you know, when she passed away, it's like, it made me question my faith.

Like, that's God like reaching out to you and say, listen, I need you. I need you to start learning, pay attention, you know? And it reminds me too, of, you know, without giving away too much of the introduction, you told a story about an elderly man with his cane going up and practicing. And, and could you share, would it be okay if you shared that story?

Speaker 2 (8m 50s): Totally. Absolutely. So at my very small Orthodox synagogue where I went to Hebrew school every day after public school, we had a contingent, very small contingent of old men who would come in for evening services as we were leaving from Hebrew school around five o'clock when the sun would set. And oftentimes I would be sitting on the stairs. There are waiting before I left and this old man, I wish all these years later, I knew his name.

I, I don't, I'm not sure I ever knew his name. I'm not sure I ever actually talked to them, but he came every night for evening services and he had a hunchback. He was stooped and Jewish practice. When you enter into the, the synagogue is to reach up on the door sash and touch the MRSA and kiss the MRSA with your, with your, with your lips and, and to your hand and your hand to the mezuzah. Well, he really struggled to do this as hunched over as he was, the MRSA is usually about three quarters of the way up the door sash.

And he was profoundly hunched. And I would watch him standing in that doorway each night and he would sort of inches weigh up the door sash with his fingers until he could reach them as, as a, it may have taken him 10 minutes, but he did it, it was part of his face. It was part of his belief system. And it was part of the reason that I became sort of intrigued by the whole nature of faith in general, what would drive someone to do that on an everyday basis?

It wasn't as if someone was standing there giving him any kind of confirmation or affirmation of his, of his activities. He did it because he believed and it made him feel better and more full inside. And, you know, I think you, you you're right. You know, some of the greatest tragedies we see as the greatest gifts, we need the distance oftentimes to notice and, you know, bring that up. I'm thinking about, you know, how preoccupied many of us are right now with what's going on in the Ukraine and the, the horrible things that are happening.

And, you know, God, I hope that someday, you know, the people who are experiencing this incredible tragedy, see it as, as, as a gift on the other end and that things will work out. But sometimes, and I, and I suppose, you know, that is the, the funny nature of faith is, is believing when belief seems ridiculous.

Speaker 1 (11m 29s): Yeah. Yeah. I couldn't agree more in it. It's, it's, it's so inspiring to hear the story about that gentleman and then have hips, how the man that you saw inspires another man in Hawaii, you know, 60 years later, 50 years later, you know, it's, it's, it's that kind of power. Like I probably smiling right now, you know, or, or not another few points that you brought is I just want to tell everybody how well-documented the book is. And getting back to this idea of breadcrumbs, you know, I was not even aware of Paul Valerie or the prophetic nature of DH Lawrence.

Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Speaker 2 (12m 6s): Yeah. I, I, I'm a sort of a devotee of, of two particular writers that kind of follow through and, and, and weave themselves through the entire book. And one is that the French symbolist poet, Paul Valery, which some people know from his poetry and some of his poetry is really outstanding, but not, not easy, not an easy read. He is not, he's not Robert Frost. He is, he's incredibly difficult, even in translation, but Valerie who lived in at the end of the 19th century into the 20th century also wrote an incredible amount of pros.

In fact, he, he wrote, he kept notebooks throughout his life and he wrote, I think there are 287 notebooks that have never been translated. Well, they've been translated, but they don't only have been been available for a long time. In fact, similarly in the French, some of them have been translated now and he always thought that his greatest thought went into the notebooks, but the reason for my using him and then DH Lawrence, the great English novelist, who also wrote incredible essays is both of these men were commentators.

They were, they were what we today call public intellectuals. They were able to work in their own discipline Lawrence, primarily as a novelist, Valerie, primarily as a poet, but they also had the ability to write and comment about what was going on in the world, what was going on with humanity, what they saw as the future. And so I really mind both of their, both of their work for these little kernels that kind of helped me get through the discussion of sin in the book.

Speaker 1 (13m 56s): Yeah. It's, it's, I've often wondered, and maybe you could put a little light on this. What is it about spirituality that allows it to transcend time from the present to the past and to the future?

Speaker 2 (14m 7s): Yeah, no, I think that's a great point. I mean, I think it's because we are talking about spirituality and not religion and they're two different things, right. You know, I mean, right now at this point in my life, after, after decades of studying various religious traditions and, and experiencing things in religious traditions of all kinds from, from sitting in sweat lodges in native American, on a native American reservation in South Dakota to, you know, attending a Hindu temple, all of those things.

I mean, I describe myself now as more of a Judaist right. I, I was the combination of, of being a Jew and a Buddhist because I really have adopted a spiritual nature more than a nature. And so I think that spirituality does transcend time. Whereas religion tends to be a little bit more constrained about time and even place. Right. I mean, are you, are you a Roman Catholic? Yes. Okay. Well, are you a second Vatican Catholic or are you that, you know, they're, they're, they're a very sort of pigeonholed ways that religion will, will try to narrow us into a little bit of, of a tight spot.

And I think if we look at ourselves as spiritual human beings, that gets us out of that, that danger of, of being stuck in that pigeon hole,

Speaker 1 (15m 32s): That's a great way to put it. It's these it's these labels that, that, you know, they continue to foster the hobgoblin of small-mindedness, right? Yes,

Speaker 2 (15m 43s): Absolutely. I mean, just look at, look at, look at the, all the conflict, you know, the conflict around the world, which so much of it is based on, on, on labels. I mean, even again, not to not to belabor it, but to go back to what's going on in the Ukraine to, to, to label the, the, the Ukraine and Russia and say that, well, you know, this imaginary arbitrary line divides the two countries and the labeling is what always bothered me about, about Sigmund Freud is Freud loves to love to label people and, and put them in a little bit of a, of a tight spot.

It's it's, it's what the diagnostic manual does today in many ways, which is why in the, in the book I really do instead embrace more of a union approach. I really liked like Carl Young's psychology, and I've done a lot with this archetypal work and think that that is a lot more usable to us as moderns, because it allows me to look at myself, young does and say, okay, I'm a little screwed up and there's a problem there, but I can fix it.

Freud tends to say, you're screwed up and you're kind of screwed, you know, that's just going to be the way that it is. And there's no real way to get out of that. And that seems like a, like a, a no win situation to me.

Speaker 1 (17m 11s): Yeah. You know, looking back on it, it kind of explains why Freud was the way he was like, that's his, he was, he was diagnosing himself. Oh yeah. In a weird way, just to take it off you you'd said about like the DSM and all these things, and they're like, it's, I have the DSM. And I think it's fun to read in a way, like the way I read it as like a bunch of people getting around and like, you know, who, I don't like these people, we should try to get rid of,

Speaker 2 (17m 39s): You know, Robert, Robert Burton's great work in the 16th century, 17th century, the anatomy of melancholy, I don't know, the anatomy of melancholy is, is, could be labeled as sort of, of the earliest psychology books. It's almost a precursor. The DSM and the anatomy melancholy is, is big thick, thick book. And it is based on one particular question. Burton wants to answer the question, why are we depressed? Why are we melancholic as a, as a, as a species?

And one of my favorite sections of it is where he comes out and says that we're depressed because Adam ate the fruit. And we're still really kind of bummed about that. And famously Samuel Johnson, Dr. Johnson of the English dictionary, supposedly had kept, kept a copy of Burton's book on his nightstand. It would read a little bit of every night. It's it's, it's, it's very interesting. Ah,

Speaker 1 (18m 37s): I have definitely gonna have to check it out. Yeah. I couldn't agree more on young, like it's in your book too. You do some work with the shadow. I think in the, in the, in, when we start talking about pride, which is the first thing that we're talking about, you do talk about young and the shadowy. Can you maybe talk a little bit about that?

Speaker 2 (18m 54s): Sure. So, I mean, if you're not familiar with youngian psychology, young part of Young's theories is that each of us has an aspect of ourselves that he calls the shadow self, and this isn't necessarily entirely negative. It is something which we need to explore in ourselves and which may uncover things that we are uncomfortable with, uncomfortable dealing with.

But until we deal with them, we can't progress on the road to what young calls, individuation, where we really realize and understand ourself and who we are. And the best example of the shadow self is, is a fantastic scene in the empire strikes back where Luke has to go down into the cave and he doesn't he's, he feels apprehensive about it. He, he doesn't feel good about it. Yoda tells him that, you know, he probably shouldn't go.

And Luke famously starts to put on his, his, his belt with his lightsaber. And Yoda says, you, you won't need any weapons down there. There'll be of no use to you. And he goes into the cave, which is a youngian device, and he has to confront his shadow self. And in the empire strikes back, his shadow self shows up in the form of Darth Vader. Who of course, eventually we learn this as father and he has to fight Vader in a, in a, a lightsaber battle in the cave.

He finally cuts off Vader's head. And when the head rolls on the ground, the mask disappears and the face is Luke's. So what he's got to deal with the shadow self is him. The shadow self has us. It's the things in us that we don't want to admit. You know, I don't want to admit that I am a prideful person, but until I do that, I can't transcend that point and get up to a, a more advanced level of who I can be as a human being.

Speaker 1 (21m 5s): That's a great point and a great metaphor. It, it makes me, I was talking to Simon Critchley a week ago and we were talking about his

Speaker 2 (21m 12s): Work

Speaker 1 (21m 13s): That great. I think, I think he might be he's wa he's probably my favorite philosopher and terrific. Yep.

Speaker 2 (21m 19s): Yes. He really is.

Speaker 1 (21m 20s): He's he is so well read and so funny and so deep. Like, I feel like if I read one or two sentences, there's like five jokes in there, you know, it's so good. And we were talking about philosophy and time. And when you spoke about Luke going into the cave and facing his father, we were to add to that. We were saying that, you know, we're kind of ghosts of our fathers, like, and we, it transcends our time and I just want it to bring that part up. Cause I, I do feel that sometimes the shadow is those who came before us that are still on us, that we're trying to work with.

Speaker 2 (21m 57s): And that's, that's the young in collective unconscious, right? It's, it's everything that's come before us that we have as a part of us in some way, because we all are part of that collective unconscious. And so, I mean, I don't have any family who lived through the Holocaust. Luckily my family came to the United States before world war two, but that doesn't mean that my history, my heritage as a Jew, doesn't include some trauma from those kinds of events because young would argue that's part of the collective unconscious.

Speaker 1 (22m 36s): Yeah. I, I would argue that that trauma has affected everybody and it's

Speaker 2 (22m 41s): No, it is on a human level,

Speaker 1 (22m 43s): On a human level. And part of it is because we, we don't really address it. It seems like, you know, it's like, we don't want to admit, which brings us back to pride. You know, it's what, what is it about this thing pride that makes us so fearful?

Speaker 2 (22m 58s): Well, it's interesting because pride, you know, the reason why it's the first sin that I address in the book is that traditionally it's been looked at as the source because pride is the sin of which Adam and Eve are guilty in the garden of Eden. We're trying to be like, God. And then again, when you delve further in and go into paradise lost, and it's a Catholic theology, sin is also the PR the pride is also the sin that Lucifer is guilty of, which causes him to fall from heaven and become Satan.

But today it's interesting because, you know, we tell people, be proud of yourself and that's a good thing. And I'm like, well, wait a minute. I thought pride was a bad thing. And so what it comes down to really with all these sins is that none of the seven deadly sins in and of themselves are bad. They are bad in excess. It is about moderation. So you can be proud of yourself and proud of doing a good job, but it's when you become excessively obsessed with yourself and obsessive really obsessed with your own importance.

That's when it becomes problematic. And we'll eventually talk about this when it comes to the other sins as well. You know, I mean, because if you go back to Aristotle, Aristotle says, pride is the crown of virtues. Like, wait a minute. Pride is a bad thing. And every, and every high school kid will say, well, I haven't learned about, about hubris, right? From Aristotle. And they're almost sort of two sides of the same coin, right? That the excess of pride then would come become uberous, whereas pride in it of itself.

He says, it's the greatness of soul. It's the crown of virtues. It should be something that we should celebrate. But I would argue that today we could be proud without being guilty of pride. If that makes any sense. You know, some philosophers, contemporaries have called pride, the essential advice, the utmost evil that it's, it's still at the root of all of our problems. But I think, you know, if you go back and look at CS Lewis, somebody like CS Lewis, who has some really great stuff to say about pride.

I mean, he, he says a proud person has to be better than everybody else. That's a problem, a proud, person's never satisfied and a proud person, craves power. And if you want to assess our current state of the world, politically, socially, economically take those three things and, and, and look at the, look at the world through those, through that lens, a proud person has to be better than everyone. He's never satisfied and craves power.

It sounds like a lot of people we probably know and could couldn't name easily, you know, and, and a lot of them are our leaders who, you know, to be, to some extent, have to have a degree of that in their personality in order to be a leader, but it has to be tempered, right. It has to be tempered. And, and I think that that kind of temperance, that's the trick. That's the, that's what we're all looking for the sweet spot, right.

We want to be the best that we can without being obnoxious and without being overly meek. Right. And so the, the, the, the Hindu upon, Ashad say, you know, the, the line between love and hate is like a Razor's edge. Right. And I love that always loved that image of the Razor's edge, walking the Razor's edge. And so much of life seems to be about walking the Razor's edge.

Speaker 1 (26m 53s): Yeah. I agree. Sometimes I often wonder when we talk about our leaders, I can't imagine what it's like to be a type of Jeff Bezos character, that how can you not become corrupted when you have so much, and everyone around you probably wants something from you and no one sees you as a person. So then you in turn, see everybody as a number, you know, there's, it's, it's almost a curse that I really wouldn't wish it on anybody to be that person.

Like, I can't imagine how destructive it is to your soul. Right.

Speaker 2 (27m 28s): It has to be, but, but part of the problem, I think is with a lot of folks like that, it is destructive to their soul, but they are so ingrained in a kind of narcissism that they can't see. They don't see it. They're unable to see it. They can't be objective because they live a completely subjective existence. And, you know, it's interesting when eventually we get to talking about the sin of greed, you know, we can talk about somebody like Jeff Bass also.

And then we can talk about the, the bunch of billionaires who have vowed to give away a lot of their money. And, you know, it, it, it, I think that's really been interesting, especially in the last two or three years, as we've gone through COVID Jeff Bezos is making more money than anybody can imagine through COVID. He has made, he has made out just fine, you know, and, and we're probably many of us guilty of, of, of putting money in his pocket. But I think you're right.

You know, it does come down to this question of what does that do to your soul. But then for me, all I can do is be concerned about my soul. And so do I continue to buy from corporations that I don't agree with or from, you know, companies which have leaders that I don't agree with. We've seen all these corporations and companies pulling out of Russia and doing business in Russia. There's been so much backlash just in the last 72 hours about the fact that companies like Coca-Cola.

And McDonald's, I still think, have not said that they're, they're not going to do business in Russia. And, and a lot of people are very upset about that and very upset about that.

Speaker 1 (29m 13s): Yeah. I wonder what the Russian Orthodox church has to say about what's going on there. That would be interesting to hear their plans.

Speaker 2 (29m 20s): Yeah, it would be very interesting. I think the sad thing is that we don't know a lot about what is being actually reported in the news. I was reading an article. I think it was in the New York times yesterday, and they were talking to some citizens in Moscow, and apparently they didn't even know about the invasion because Russia is controlling the media entirely and now Putin passed that log and spreading false information, whatever that means. And so I think a lot of the citizens, they don't even know what's going on.

So it would be interesting to hear what the, what the Russian Orthodox church has to say about this, but we can look back and see what the Catholic church did during the Holocaust. Not much. So, you know, it's, hindsight's 2020, and it's difficult when you're living through something, to be able to figure out what the right thing is to do, because these are really complicated, moral questions. I mean, thankfully places like Poland have ever been receiving refugees with open arms, but this is a humanitarian crisis that's brewing.

And I don't know what's going to happen eventually. I mean, I it's, it's so sad as someone who has studied the Holocaust and talk the Holocaust to see these images of people, you know, trying to cram onto trains and Kiev to try to get out of the Ukraine and get across the border into Poland. And my gosh, if that doesn't look like what happened during the Holocaust, I don't know what does,

Speaker 1 (30m 58s): Yeah. I think maybe you could, you could say that a lot of what's happening in the middle east look like the Holocaust. You know, I think that what we're seeing in Kiev is a lot of what we didn't get to see in the middle east. And, you know, it's just, there's so much tragedy around the world. And my heart goes out to every one of these people that are just struggling to survive in, in this steam roller up an economy that's coming over. And I think it brings us back to pride, which in a really amazing point that when I was reading the chapter on pride was this idea of how it affects the subject object relationship.

That to me is amazing. Can you tell people a little bit about that?

Speaker 2 (31m 39s): Yeah. So we're talking about that subjectivity and objectivity, right? And, and my ability to be objective about myself, which is extraordinarily difficult. And that is one of the, kind of the goalposts on the way to youngian individuation is the ability to look at yourself objectively. It's almost impossible because we see everything through a subjective lens. I mean, I, I view the world through my eyes as the only eyes I have.

And so I have to hope that others around me will either be honest and Frank enough with me to point things out. But then it's up to me to take that and do something with it. And that might be through contemplation, through meditation, through therapy, to explore aspects of myself that, you know, they're kind of ugly, but you gotta deal with them because otherwise they just get worse.

And so some of that is about the difference between objective self and subjective self. And this is something which philosophers have been dealing with for a long time. You know, it, it, it, it borders on discussions about perspective and how I see the world. How do I see the world? Do I see the world? And do I see every human being as inherently evil, inherently? Good. How do, what is my view of existence in humanity?

Because that many ways is going to reflect on me and how I'm going to react to folks. You know, it's the simple things, isn't it? It's, it's, it's, it's the most simple things. Do you hold the door open for somebody, right? Do you do, do you help somebody out? If they're, if they've dropped some things in the street, do you help them pick it up recently? I've seen this, this series of videos that have been showing up on Tik TOK. My, my daughter got me onto Tik TOK.

It's a, it's a black hole. I got to tell you, you go down, you go in it and you come out and it's like two hours a year for shot. But there, there is a series of videos where somebody walks up to a person in what looks like a supermarket and says, you know, I, I, I don't have any money, but I'm really thirsty. You know, can you buy this bottle of water for me? And they've got their grocery cart full of stuff. They're about to check out. And the person in every video gives the person the dollar for the water or whatever it is.

And in response to that person says, well, now it's a, it's a, it's a come on and says, I'm going to, I'm going to pay for all your groceries. And the person said, well, why? And it was because what you're willing to help somebody else out someone then should help you out. I mean, some of it's that, that kind of goofy pass it along thing that people do at Starbucks, which, you know, quite honestly, if you do that, you're better off putting money in the tip jar because the Reese's could use it. If people are in line at Starbucks that can already afford their coffee, help the baristas out instead.

But, so I think it's so much of this. And so much of the book is about how we treat each other as human beings, how we exist. And of course, in the last two years during COVID, we have been challenged to the max. Now the book was finished before COVID, I call the COVID years now, like the last weekend, because I've, you know, the book came out right before COVID. And so I haven't had a chance to really do much with it. And so I'm grateful for this opportunity with the George.

Speaker 1 (35m 19s): Yeah. Are you kidding me? I am. I am grateful for it too. I think, you know, getting back to there's a reason the things happen. I think your book is, it was like, Hey, hang on a second. We're going to need this. We're going to need this book in two years. So just hold on, you know, it's coming because I think that there's so much great information in here and it's so dense. It's like I said, it's to everybody listening to this, the book is called seven deadly sins. Do yourself a favor and pick it up because it is, it's one of the books you can read through.

I can read, I've already read the first chapter multiple times. And I keep finding to take a new notes and writing stuff down and, you know, just to stay on the topic of the subject object relationship. Yeah. You know, you bring up a lot of, I think it really shows your expertise to talk about maybe the early years of, of spirituality and religion. And you bring up a lot of mystics from the mid medieval times. Yeah. And I was wondering, do you think maybe the reason that the definitions of pride have changed is because the English language in the subject object relationship has changed through the time

Speaker 2 (36m 27s): To be sure. And I think what has also changed is the way that we understand ourselves and our, and other people, you know, early on in, in the history of literature, for example, if you read 12th century, French romances, things are theory and romance is like, , they're pretty much the first things that really delve into character before that the stories are, you know, George went here, George went there, George killed this guy, George got into a battle.

It was very sort of see spot run. the first one who really sorts of starts to delve into what does character mean? What does the interior, what does our interior look like? And without that, I mean, we wouldn't have somebody like Hamlet. We wouldn't have Harry Potter, right. Who is able to, to really look within and, and, and study himself and share that with the reader.

You don't get that prior to about the 12th century, French romance genre. And I think by the time we get to something like the 14th century mystics, like Richard Roland, Marjorie Kemp, and Julian of Norwich and Walter Hilton, the English mystics, and then on the continent and in Europe, people like Meister, Eckhart, you know, so there are others, but by the time we get to them, they have fully now been invested in studying the self as an object and the self as a subject and its relationship with the divine.

And so, you know, there's a great line in Richard roll's book called the fire of love, which is essentially a memoir. And he's recalling a situation where he really kind of, he was guilty of pride. He, he, he, he became too big for his own britches. My grandmother would say he, he really became self-important and a woman really chastised him. And it forced him to kind of withdraw, pull back and really think about what he'd done.

And the line in the English translation is when I came to myself and in the original Latin, it's interesting because the Latin word for myself is actually one word and you have to parse it out. But when I came to myself and I think that that's just so intriguing that he was able to pull back and really look at himself as an object, from an objective perspective and come to his self and realize, you know what, I was a bit of a twit and I shouldn't have done that.

And I was really guilty of, of, of the sin of pride, of, of, of being more important than I, than I am or thinking I'm more important than I am. And I think so many of us are, are guilty of that today. And there's always that danger of, of thinking we are more important than we really are. Right. I mean, we have all these phrases, right? Oh, he thinks he walks on water. Right. I mean, you know, and we w we apply it all the time. So we've got a lot going on in the world.

And part of that, I think, as I discussed in other parts of the book, we can chalk up to a, an increasing focus on technology. And with that, then an inability to take any time to actually do that contemplation on that reflection, where we disconnect, where we're not connected to our phone, where we shut off the computer and we shut off the TV and it's difficult to do because I mean, the, the studies have shown in psychology that we get dopamine hits from these things, right.

We get a high from these things. And so it's difficult because it becomes addictive, but it is so important for us to take a moment to stop and reflect, reflect on who we are, what's going on, what can I do? And you can't do that in the midst of what David shanks, one called data smog, right. Where you've just got all of this incoming data, and this is a whirlwind of things going on and there's no time.

And so that's probably partially responsible for the incredible growth we've seen in the last few years. And people engaging in meditation, right? I mean, how many meditation apps can you download now, ironically. Right. But I've got, I've got a good friend who was a Cistercian monk, a Trappist monk in Massachusetts. And they constantly have people coming to visit to do retreats. People want to have that opportunity to kind of shut down.

And it gives them the opportunity, I think, to become more thoughtful people, right. Full of thought. We tend to be rather thoughtless in the way we operate on a day-to-day level. And we're partially to blame, but you know, the world that we have built around us, ain't helping.

Speaker 1 (42m 6s): Yeah. I couldn't agree any more. I, I w I'm a big fan of Mercedes Eliod and, you know, he talks about the, the terror before the sacred and when my daughter was going through COVID and I, I I'm willing to bet most parents with young kids felt the same way. My daughter is seven. So she was six and trying to zoom and do all this stuff. And you know, what, what I came to the conclusion of after reading Lei during that time was like, there's no felt presence of the other.

And that's so important to have, but when you talked about reflection, like how well can you see yourself, your mistakes, your pride, how else can you see the good and the bad in you, unless there's someone to reflect it back at you?

Speaker 2 (42m 53s): Well, and, and, and I think you're right, but I also think it is, it is possible to, to conduct that kind of inner study in solitude with the guide of those who've come before us. So you probably have guests from reading the book, George, that I'm a book from that. I have more books than I can count. My library is huge. And you know, I'm thinking about, you know, you want to go off into the woods, like some folks have done, then, you know, go off into the woods, but maybe bringing Ignatius, Loyola, spiritual exercises with you, right.

And he'll guide you. It's a guide book on how to conduct spiritual exercises. Now it's, it's intended granted the Jesuits do it with, with, with a, a person directing you. But there are lots of guides like that from the desert fathers. If you want to go back centuries from medieval mystics who have done this kind of work, where they have essentially cut themselves off from the world, in order to Edify their, their spirituality, their souls, Julian of Norwich, did it.

You know, I wouldn't recommend becoming an anchor right. These days. Some people do, but that's a pretty tough existence, but there are ways to do it. You know, I have a, a good friend from high school. Who's an artist living in Paris now. And once a year for a month, she on what she calls a Facebook sabbatical. She posts a note on Facebook and says, I'm gone for the next month. Don't contact me here cause I'm not logging on. And I got all the respect for that. You know, if you're a viewer, a daily user of Facebook, that's a difficult thing to do.

But I think it shows how, how reliant we are on these things. And you talk about your daughter. My daughter is 18. And you know, I've been observing college students for over 30 years and oh my gosh, they are connected to their phones in ways that there's no way this is healthy. But part of it is we can't be the, the old fogies who say, oh, well, you're really should, you know, go read a book because that's not the world that they're growing up in.

That's not the world they live in, you know, year, many years ago. Dean said something to me, which was incredibly impactful so much so that I'm repeating it. Now it's stuck with me. I was teaching introduction to philosophy in South Dakota. And I, I saw George somewhere along the line, you were reading a lot of Nietzsche. And when I taught the course, I modeled it on the course that I took when I took introduction to philosophy at Fordham, which was a deep dive into several philosophers.

It wasn't a survey. So we read all of, one of Nietzsche's works. We read, you know, all of, you know, one of David Hume's work. And I, I set the course up like that. And it was a disaster, an absolute disaster. And a Dean said to me, David, they're not you. My daughter's not me. Your daughter's not you. They're living in a different time.

The world is a completely different place from what we remember. And we could remember that fondly and try to pass that along to them, but expecting them to be updated versions of us is, is foolhardy. You know, it's interesting. I mean, I was born two weeks to the day before Kennedy was shot. My father was a little older when he had me. And so as a result, I've always felt like I had one foot sort of back in the era that my father grew up in and then one foot in the sixties and seventies.

And it's interesting because I'll talk to people. And as a result, my references are all over the place. And I think a lot of that, and I thank my father for that. I mean, if it weren't for my father, I wouldn't have been introduced to Benny Goodman. Right. My father saw Benny Goodman when he was a kid and, and loved Benny Goodman. And he played the Carnegie hall concerts for me. And I was a kid and, oh my God, that was the greatest thing, but I'm not him and kids today are not us.

And I think we need to acknowledge that the world has changed. Maybe it hasn't changed from our perspective in a better way, but we can't do anything about that. And we can't hide our kids away in a, in a, in a closet and try to protect them from a dangerous world, as much as we want to. We were doing them no favors when we do that. And so I always found that odd when, when parents would say, you know, well, you know, I've got middle-school kids and I don't allow them on social media.

And I only allow them to watch TV for two hours a day. I'm like, okay, do you do realize that when they get to college, they are going to be the oddballs. They're not going to understand any of the pop culture references. They're not going to have the same of ref, same frame of references that our colleagues do. Now, you could say, okay, who cares? You know, maybe that's not such a bad thing, but we got, we have to be a part of the world that we live in. You know, I would love to shut off the news and not hear anymore about what's going on in Ukraine, but that would be ignorant.

And, you know, the, the root word of ignorant is ignore. Right. I know it's there, but I choose to ignore it. That I be talk about pride. Right. I mean, there there's pride. Right? I'm, I'm above that. I don't need to know about that. Those people they're suffering. Oh, well, that's, that's, you know, that's their problem. I'm above their problems,

Speaker 1 (49m 10s): The human being. And some ways though, like if I could just push back on that for a moment, like what, isn't it kind of prideful to think that we can do anything to help them. And we have so many people here that need our help.

Speaker 2 (49m 22s): Sure. Yeah. I mean, there's always that, that conundrum, right. And people will say, well, you know, we should help the people in our backyard first and they may be right. And maybe, maybe shame on us for not, not realizing that sooner and not helping the people in our backyard sooner. I think the fact of the matter is we need to be, we need to be humane. So let me, let me reframe that in the time that we have here, George. So I'm not talking necessarily about helping people in monetary ways or helping people even in necessarily intangible physical ways.

I mean, sure. I would love to get on a plane today and fly to, you know, key of and, and, and help people at that train station. I dunno what I can do. I would love to do that, but I also am aware enough that I really can't be any help there. So what can I do? Well, I can look to places where maybe they need funding to help. And I do that from my backyard as well. I can look to reaching out to people. I know I have a colleague here who is from Ukraine.

Her family is in one of the towns, which has been under siege. And I reach out to her almost daily to say, you know, checking in with you, how you doing it's that humanity that we seem to have in some ways lost. And that is just incredibly sad that we have, we, we we've lost our ability in some ways to treat each other as human beings. I don't know if we forgot how to do it. If technology got in the way. And certainly as you say, I mean, you know, the two years of being on zoom calls through COVID certainly didn't help the kids because there was no relating to human beings.

And we're seeing it already as the kids come back to school, that there are different kinds of issues popping up now, not only in their intellectual development, but in their match maturation, in their, in their personal development and how they relate to people. So, you know, this, this, this bit about, let's think about each other as human beings. And as you said earlier, not as numbers, not as this faceless sponge, you know, last night I was watching CNN and they were showing that train station in Cuba.

And they were showing these, these kids sitting in the trains and the train, you know, with their windows, their faces pressed up against the windows. I mean, how terrifying. But then Sunday, I did a, a virtual tour of Auschwitz blind and, and the, the presenter showed us photos of Jews, Polish Jews, getting on trains, little kids with yellow stars, sewn onto their coats. And it was the same photo, the same picture that I saw with people on that train and cube where humans.

And so if we can get away from the labeling, if we can get away from the pigeonhole and just say, you know what, you're another human being. And that's how I'm going to relate to you. I don't care about your belief system. I don't care about your nationality. I don't care about what you look like. You're a human being. And so am I, we would do well to take our cue from dogs and cats and see the way that they cats treat each other and dogs treat each other. And the way that dogs and cats that aren't even related.

Well, most of them up against each other.

Speaker 1 (53m 3s): Don't you think though, that like, if we want to treat each other, like human beings and, and the media shows pictures of the Holocaust and then the Ukrainians aren't they trying to show the division, like, we're not human. Like this is one group and this is the other, like, that's the opposite of seeing each other as equals. And it continues that,

Speaker 2 (53m 21s): But I think what they're trying to do, and I don't want to get into the mind of the media because

Speaker 1 (53m 26s): I know

Speaker 2 (53m 27s): A thinker place. I think the ultimate goal there is to show us about what power unchecked looks like and how that affects all people. You know, th th th there there've been several terrific books written just in the last couple of years on tyranny and the dangers of tyranny, political tyranny, philosophical tyranny, I've been reading Hannah or rents. The human condition rent was the, the, the reporter at the Nuremberg trials and the great philosopher.

And it's, it's an incredibly dense read about political theory and the dangers of a tyrannical society. And, you know, if we're not living through that right now, I don't know who did we are living through a tyrannical situation in Ukraine. We, we, and I was saying to her friend of mine the other day, and, and, you know, I, I don't want to, to, to walk over the line here and get too political, but, you know, I mean, what's happening now in Russia with Putin was the danger of what would have happened.

If I believe if Donald Trump had been elected to a second term, it would have been power unchecked and, and just an ego unchecked, and S and both figures who are incredibly guilty of the worst kind of pride possible, which again, is that excessive preoccupation with the self and one self-importance

Speaker 1 (55m 5s): Man. That is, that is a lot to think about. It is a lot to think of.

Speaker 2 (55m 11s): That's why I don't sleep well.

Speaker 1 (55m 15s): Well, I'm glad I want to be mindful of your time doctor. We're almost in an hour, and I'm sure you have some things you've got to handle, but I want everybody to know that this is a phenomenal book and Dr. Solomon and I are going to be back, I think next Tuesday at the same time, and we're going to, we're going to cover more of them. Like, I really hope everybody goes out and, and just, just pick the book up. It's seven deadly sins by Dr. Solomon. It is well worth the read. You will learn a lot about where the, the ideas of sin came from where they're going, and you, if you pick it up, now, you can see, you can talk to us about what you think and ask us questions.

And all of us, Dr. Solomon's links are below. And is there anything you want to leave us with? Where can people find you and what would you like to leave us?

Speaker 2 (55m 60s): Sure. Well, my, my website is, is David a solomon.com and Solomon is spelled S a L O M O N. I may have the wisdom of Solomon, but I don't have the moon. And all of my, my, my work is up on that page and links to my blog and, and links to other things. And I guess I could tease next week and say, we're going to talk about

Speaker 1 (56m 21s): Last. Yes, I'm so excited for it. Thank you so much for spending time with us. I feel like I learned a lot and I really enjoyed the book. And I'm looking forward to speaking to you again. I hope you have a phenomenal day and your family is doing well. Thank you so much for everything.