The Michael Knowles Show - August 09, 2021


The Progressives Push Porn on Kids & Politicians' Faux Religion ｜ Matt Fradd

Topics
abortion and Catholic teachings pornography addiction
Hosted by
Michael Knowles
Guests
Matt Fradd
Mentioned
Matt Fradd Joe Biden Suppose Donald Trump Uncle Aristotle Thomas Aquinas Lorenzo Scupoli Dante Gen Z Ernest Hemingway Norman Doidge P.J. O'Rourke Nancy Pelosi Benedict Francis Paolo
WOKE OLYMPICS! What ANNOYING Term Will Michael Knowles CANCEL？ Ep. 818 - Destruction For Us, Discos For Elites

Episode Stats


Length

21 minutes

Words per minute

196.56

Word count

4,157

Sentence count

289

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Matt Fradd joins me on The Michael Knowles Show to talk about why Joe Biden should repent for his support of abortion, and why he should be refused Holy Communion at Mass. He also talks about why Catholics should be able to disagree with the Church on some matters, but not others.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
00:00:08.500 There are many devout Catholics in our national political landscape these days. I'm thinking,
00:00:14.340 of course, of people like Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi. Now, they might not agree with the
00:00:19.960 teachings of Holy Mother Church. They might not believe the central tenets of Christianity,
00:00:25.840 or at least very important tenets of it. They might not practice their faith,
00:00:28.780 but they are devout nonetheless because words have no meaning anymore. Well, fortunately,
00:00:34.160 I am joined by a very serious practicing Catholic. Now, one of my favorite people out there
00:00:39.040 in the Catholic media landscape, very sharp fella by the name of Matt Fradd. Matt Fradd is the creator
00:00:45.860 and host of Pints with Aquinas. He's also the author of How to Be Happy, St. Thomas's Secret to a Good
00:00:51.600 Life. Also, Does God Exist, a Socratic Dialogue on the Five Ways of Thomas Aquinas, and he's got lots
00:00:57.760 of other wonderful commentary out there. Matt, thank you for joining me. It's great to be on.
00:01:02.060 Thanks for having me. So, you on, I think, some pretty important issues would probably diverge
00:01:07.720 from, say, a Joe Biden or a Nancy Pelosi. And yet, I'm to understand you're both devout Catholics. So,
00:01:15.060 can you help me wrap my head around what these words mean?
00:01:19.680 Yeah, it's difficult. I think a faithful Catholic should submit to what the church teaches
00:01:26.740 authoritatively, but also not demand uniformity where the church allows diversity of opinion or
00:01:32.540 custom. So, I think you can fall off on the left and you can fall off on the right as far as being
00:01:36.980 a faithful Catholic. I try to be a faithful Catholic. I try to repent when I'm not. But Joe Biden promotes
00:01:43.580 and celebrates the slaughtering of the unborn. And I know that people might be tired of hearing that,
00:01:50.360 but I imagine if the unborn could be tired of being slaughtered, that would outrank your concern. 0.96
00:01:56.640 So, yeah, it's disgusting. Not to mention his promotion of children being able to, say,
00:02:03.940 castrate themselves or getting a double mastectomy. He seems ambivalent on that topic.
00:02:08.120 Like, so, yeah, he should repent before Almighty God. And look, I've done some kind of soul searching
00:02:15.540 on this. And I've thought to myself, what would I rather, Joe Biden repent or be refused Holy
00:02:21.260 Communion at Mass and be super embarrassed? And to my shame, sometimes it's the latter.
00:02:26.180 You know, really, as a Catholic, what I ought to be doing is praying for him and his conversion.
00:02:30.200 But of course, you know, keeping someone from receiving Holy Communion, refusing to give them
00:02:35.640 the Eucharist, is an act toward repentance. I mean, that is the point. It's not just to make
00:02:40.700 someone feel bad about himself. It's to stir and promote repentance because it's not just
00:02:46.280 the private sin of his support for abortion. It's the public sin. I mean, it's the scandal as well.
00:02:52.360 And it's a real scandal. Joe Biden is nominally the second Catholic president. And yet he is so, 0.94
00:02:58.480 so out of step with the church's teaching here. I'm also really glad that you brought up this issue
00:03:03.040 of being able to disagree on certain matters, but not others. You know, it's not all just a
00:03:09.700 blanket, five bullet points on a napkin. Here's what you've got to believe. For instance, on the
00:03:14.420 issue of the death penalty, though, especially modern popes have been quite opposed to the death
00:03:19.040 penalty. Pope Benedict put it very well when he said that Catholics may reasonably disagree on the
00:03:25.400 practice of the death penalty. And it's a complex issue. Obviously, some popes have carried out the
00:03:30.860 death penalty. I'm thinking of blessed Pope Pius IX. And yet other popes are vociferously opposed
00:03:36.260 to it. St. Paul defends the death penalty. Other writers in the Catholic Church have been opposed to
00:03:41.520 it. And so we can have a reasonable disagreement here. Even Pope Francis, who's so, so against the
00:03:46.300 death penalty, he stopped short of calling it intrinsically evil because he could not do that
00:03:51.160 because it's defended even in the Bible. On an issue like abortion, that's just not the case.
00:03:56.820 The church's teaching on abortion goes back to the didache. It goes back to the second century, 0.77
00:04:02.340 at least, and if not even further back. So there just seem to be some lines in the sand that are
00:04:07.160 getting much, much blurrier, at least in the political sphere. Yeah. If it's not atrociously
00:04:13.560 wrong for big, strong people to kill little weak people, I'm not sure what atrocious or wrong would
00:04:19.740 mean at that point. So yeah. And it's important to point out, too, that this is not just a matter of us,
00:04:24.660 as you say, making Biden feel bad. In the code of canon law, canon 915, it says that those who are
00:04:32.340 obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin should not receive, should not be permitted to receive
00:04:39.400 Holy Communion. And to my fellow Catholics out there who disagree with that, I would ask them this.
00:04:46.840 Suppose Donald Trump was in office and Donald Trump converted to Catholicism. I'm pretty sure you
00:04:52.980 would say that he should not receive Holy Communion because you think he's a sexist or a racist or
00:04:57.680 something else. But of course, as awful as being a racist or these sorts of things, it's actually far
00:05:05.460 worse to slaughter innocent human beings. Of course, there's no real comparison here. And I think very
00:05:13.060 often, you know, the left, it is the left that's doing it. I understand there are extremists on the
00:05:19.760 right, too, but it's the left that is really calling for this inversion of standards and this
00:05:24.160 bizarre view of vice and virtue. And I'm reminded, I don't want to beat up on the reporter too much,
00:05:30.740 but there was a journalist who very quickly deleted the tweet. So I've gone light on her.
00:05:35.320 But she tweeted out that we need porn for children because, here's her argument, and I mean, it has a
00:05:42.080 kind of perverse logic to it. She's saying that kids are accessing porn. We know that they're
00:05:45.960 accessing porn. I think the average age is something like 11, you know, and some kids are accessing it
00:05:50.680 even at a younger age. And the porn is vile and extraordinarily perverted and violent very often.
00:05:56.740 And so her argument is, since kids are going to be exposed to porn, we should have a sort of nicer
00:06:01.760 porn, you know, where they're not quite so violent and they're not, it's sort of a little bit more
00:06:06.900 gentle or something like that. It didn't go over very well and she deleted this. But I suspect a lot
00:06:11.880 of people hold to this kind of bizarre view. Yeah, I'm of the opinion that pornography,
00:06:17.840 say consuming pornography, the distribution of it, the production of it is intrinsically evil,
00:06:22.360 which is just to say it's not evil because of the intentions of those viewing it, say,
00:06:27.260 nor is it evil merely because of the consequences of viewing it. I think it's just wrong in and of
00:06:33.300 itself. So I would say under no circumstances should people consume pornography. But I think we could
00:06:40.160 agree that some things are less bad than others, right? So it would be less bad to view pornography
00:06:45.920 that was not violent and terribly degraded than to view, you know, rape porn. But just because 0.86
00:06:53.240 something is less bad than something else, it doesn't make it healthy or good. If I say I only smoke one
00:07:00.920 carton of cigarettes a day, not five, well, that's better, but it's not good.
00:07:06.560 Not healthy. And yeah. And over the last 40 years, there's been a lot of studies that have come out
00:07:11.560 of academia from different branches of science, like neurology, sociology, and psychology. And
00:07:16.400 all of it is saying unambiguously that porn is detrimental to the health, the emotional health,
00:07:22.520 even the sexual health of the consumer, our relationships and society as a whole.
00:07:26.640 So just a couple real quick. There are over 70 studies that show a correlation between porn use
00:07:32.480 and sexual dissatisfaction. So there you go. According to science, if you'd like to remain
00:07:36.480 sexually frustrated, porn's the ticket. There are 56 neuroscience-based studies on porn users.
00:07:42.620 All but one lends strong support for the addiction model. Just one more. We have 40 studies that show a
00:07:48.460 correlation between porn use and sexual dysfunction, like premature ejaculation, erectile dysfunction.
00:07:54.060 12 of those 40 studies show not just correlation, but causation. Since in these studies, the one
00:08:00.500 factor of pornography was removed and the subjects regained their sexual functioning. So we've got
00:08:05.000 really good reason for thinking that pornography is bad for us. And so introducing it to children is a
00:08:12.580 terrifically wicked idea.
00:08:14.160 I think also, I agree with your view on porn, and I know that some people are trying to make everything
00:08:20.320 relative. They want to deny that anything is absolutely evil, other than perhaps Donald Trump.
00:08:24.600 He might be the incarnation of evil. Everything else is on a relative scale. But I think what it also
00:08:30.540 gets to is an error in the way that the human mind works and the human soul works. I think for a very
00:08:37.080 long time, at least since Freud, we've been operating under the steam engine model of the mind and the soul.
00:08:43.680 Namely, we've got all this pent-up sexual energy, and teenagers are certainly going to have lots of
00:08:49.260 pent-up sexual energy. And so they've just got to blow off a little steam. And all of us, we all just
00:08:54.160 need to blow off a little steam, whether that means doing some drug or overindulging in drink or
00:09:00.160 looking at some porn. Look, if you just blow off a little steam, then it's going to make you
00:09:05.700 ultimately healthier and balance you out so you don't explode. But this would seem to contrast with,
00:09:10.600 oh, I don't know, old Uncle Aristotle or St. Thomas Aquinas, who recognized that virtue is a habit,
00:09:18.120 right? Virtue is a practice. And I think we all know this in our own lives, whether it's going on a
00:09:23.460 diet or whether it's exercising or abstaining from something that is harmful to us. The more that we
00:09:29.840 practice a virtue, the easier it becomes. And the more that we practice a vice, whether it's drug addiction
00:09:35.860 or porn or whatever, the more we practice that, the easier that becomes as well. And those
00:09:40.440 two views of how the mind works, they're completely at odds with one another.
00:09:45.760 Yeah, exactly. No, if it were the case that pornography merely relieved your sexual desires,
00:09:51.980 then people who watch pornography ought to be sort of sexually carefree in the sense of satisfied.
00:09:56.860 But that isn't what we see happen. What we see is the more you consume it, the more you desire to
00:10:00.740 consume it. You build up a tolerance, what you have already seen, and then feel the need to view more
00:10:05.380 deviant forms of pornography and to view more of it. So actually, I was struck by an analogy recently.
00:10:13.700 It was by Norman Doidge, who wrote the bestselling book, The Brain That Changes Itself. And to your
00:10:18.060 point of habits and vices, the more we're learning about the brain and say neural pathways in the
00:10:23.760 brain, he has this great analogy. He says, suppose you find yourself in a forest, you have two paths
00:10:27.740 ahead of you. One path represents looking at pornography, the other path represents abstaining.
00:10:31.500 If you keep going down the path to look at pornography and have been doing that since you
00:10:35.340 were eight, that path will be very well worn. The other will be overgrown and more difficult
00:10:39.540 to walk down. But as you say, with time, with habit, if you choose to break free from pornography
00:10:45.580 by getting good books, good accountability, good software, that this will begin to be easier
00:10:51.180 to walk down. I know that from my own experience, whereas the path to look at pornography, you don't
00:10:56.040 just slide into it as you once did. And that's really good news for those struggles.
00:10:59.180 Well, that's right. I mean, mentioning your own experience, you're one of the few people
00:11:03.340 who have come out and said, look, I dealt with this problem. This is a problem that I've seen
00:11:07.780 one study that said it afflicts 91 or 93% of men. And the caveat to that study is that seven
00:11:14.980 or 9% of men are liars. You know, I've really, you see it throughout the culture, especially
00:11:19.800 for young men. And you said, I've dealt with this. It's an embarrassing problem, but there is
00:11:24.680 a way out of it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I honestly, I was, maybe it was a grace from God. I was never
00:11:30.440 terribly embarrassed to share about it, maybe because I encountered so many other people who
00:11:34.500 said, I struggle, but nobody knows. Pornography feels good. I'm still tempted to it from time to
00:11:39.260 time. If I have a couple of drinks or if I'm very stressed out, these sorts of things, I think
00:11:43.100 pornography and masturbation become for many a sort of pacifier to regulate our emotional turbulence.
00:11:48.720 We turn to it when we're upset or bored or feel invisible or unsuccessful or emasculated or 0.99
00:11:54.280 something like that. Um, but it, uh, doesn't give us what it promises. You know, we, we might go for
00:12:01.080 excitement. We end up bored. We might go for, uh, you know, uh, adult entertainment and become
00:12:07.180 increasingly juvenile. It just, it just, it doesn't just not give us what it promises. It kind of gives
00:12:12.700 the opposite. Um, so it's entirely unsatisfying. Um, so that's why I love speaking to men and women
00:12:18.340 who are hooked on this and say, Hey, look, you're a lovely person, I'm sure. Or if you're not, you
00:12:23.080 ought to be, and you desire to be, and you don't need to let porn stand in your way, you know? So.
00:12:28.360 And compared to other temptations and vices, this is the one that is ubiquitous. You can do it
00:12:34.480 entirely, almost entirely in the privacy of your own, uh, you know, darkest closet, though it's not
00:12:39.620 totally private because big tech is looking at you and, you know, there are records of these things.
00:12:44.540 Uh, but, uh, you know, it's not spoken of. And when it is spoken of, it's spoken of positively
00:12:50.000 so much so that people say that kids should have good porn. And I, I love the point that you're
00:12:54.140 making here on satisfaction because of course, yes, like all sin and vice, it promises you one
00:13:01.740 thing and it gives you the opposite. And this especially so, uh, but people are historically
00:13:06.920 dissatisfied. You're, you're seeing the average life expectancy in the United States dropping,
00:13:11.380 not because of the Wuhan virus. I mean, perhaps then too, but, but this was happening for years
00:13:16.720 now. It's dropping because of deaths of despair, because of drug addiction, because of suicide.
00:13:22.000 You've seen huge spike in suicide actually in some quarters during the lockdowns. So people are
00:13:27.140 unhappy. You look even, you measure the happiness of women since the women's movement in the middle 0.99
00:13:31.040 of the 20th century. What happened? Women's happiness, if you can measure it, has declined both 0.98
00:13:35.980 in relative terms to men, but also in absolute terms. So everyone's unhappy. No one's having
00:13:40.980 kids. You know, we've got a very, very low birth rate now. We've got the life expectancy declining.
00:13:45.780 So Matt, I need the answer. And you know, the five or six minutes we got,
00:13:50.800 what is the secret to a good life? How does, how does one have a good life?
00:13:54.900 Well, first of all, let me say something about pornography and I'll get into the good life
00:13:58.100 through it. The problem with pornography, it's been said, isn't that it shows too much,
00:14:01.520 but that it shows too little, right? It reduces the beauty and mystery of sex and femininity
00:14:05.860 and masculinity to a sort of two-dimensional thing for my consumption. So I'm against porn
00:14:10.820 because I'm pro-sex, not because I'm anti-sex and because I would like a beautiful, fulfilling sex
00:14:16.500 life in my marriage. And I think people should want that if they're married and that porn only 0.57
00:14:20.640 gets in the way of that. Yeah. So I just wrote a book called How to Be Happy, St. Thomas's Secret
00:14:25.120 to a Good Life. Thomas Aquinas, people often think of him, they might think of metaphysics or his
00:14:30.080 arguments for God's existence or just war theory or these sorts of things. But he had a lot to say
00:14:34.360 about human flourishing. And he follows Aristotle in that sense, where he understands happiness
00:14:39.140 to be a sort of an excellence of human beings. And he distinguishes between two types of happiness.
00:14:45.620 He calls one beatitude, one felicitous. That's the Latin of the Greek Aristotle used. Namely,
00:14:53.000 what he's saying is to be perfectly happy will not happen in this life, but we can have a high degree
00:14:58.440 of happiness through virtue in this life. So if you want any chance of being happy,
00:15:02.600 you have to grow in virtue, flee from vice. But since we've been made ultimately for God,
00:15:08.880 Thomas Aquinas would say, we will not be fully satisfied until we behold him, as it were,
00:15:13.200 face to face in heaven. Aquinas even goes through a list of the certain things we turn to to make
00:15:18.280 us happy, like honor and physical pleasure and even spiritual pleasure, money and these sorts of
00:15:25.060 things. And he shows, he doesn't just say, can't make you happy. He offers arguments for why they can't
00:15:31.200 make us happy. And I find myself really convicted by it. So yeah, it's neat. I think for too long,
00:15:37.080 we've thought about morality as thou shalt not, right? Don't do what you really want to do.
00:15:42.500 But actually morality is about how to be happy. Like how do I live a life of human flourishing?
00:15:48.040 And that's how Thomas understands it, how Aristotle understands it. And that's what I try to put in this.
00:15:51.360 You know, I just read a book, very old book, about 500 years old by Dom Lorenzo Scupoli called
00:15:56.600 The Spiritual Combat. And in it, he lays something out that I know a lot of people are grappling with.
00:16:02.960 And he just lays it out so simply and so clearly. It's sort of what St. Paul's getting at when he
00:16:07.500 says, the things I want to do, I don't do. And the things that I don't want to do, I do. And you
00:16:11.060 think, well, how on earth does that make any sense? And yet we all know that that is true. And what
00:16:16.080 Scupoli points out is we have a lower will. We have certain desires, but they're base desires,
00:16:22.880 they're appetites. You know, it's the appetite for the addiction. It's the appetite for
00:16:26.400 more, more, more food, more cigarettes, more whatever. Then we have the higher will. That's
00:16:30.720 a rational will. So we can be conscious of that. We can, we recognize that there's some objective
00:16:36.880 standard that we're trying to come into line with. And the rational will mediates between
00:16:41.540 the appetites, which every animal has, and the divine will, which is perfect and right and just.
00:16:47.880 And so the whole process, it's so funny how much we forget in our society, because the whole process
00:16:54.080 of a liberal education was once understood to be getting that base will to come into alignment with
00:17:00.360 the rational will so that you can actually be a free person. Not free in the sense that you've got
00:17:05.180 an iPhone and you can go look at porn, or you've got a syringe and you can shoot up, but free in the
00:17:09.300 sense that you can master those appetites and really pursue what you ultimately desire.
00:17:14.820 Yeah. In the Catechism of the Catholic Church, under chastity, it has this wonderful line,
00:17:18.740 probably my favorite in the whole Catechism. It says, the alternative is clear. Either man governs
00:17:24.760 his passions and so finds peace, or he lets himself be dominated by them and becomes unhappy.
00:17:32.460 You see this in Dante, probably the most famous canto of Dante's, Paolo and Francesca,
00:17:37.940 these adulterous lovers. And their punishment is that they are whipped around on winds. They can't,
00:17:45.880 they can never control. They're just going to be brought along on the winds and the gusts of lust
00:17:50.920 and passion. That's exactly right. So it is counterintuitive. Sometimes we think, or perhaps
00:17:56.260 we've been told that if I just engage my passions without restraint, that's the path to happiness.
00:18:01.480 But it seems to me that you only have to live to the age of 14 to realize that that doesn't work.
00:18:06.360 And so, yeah, maybe try a different route. What are you seeing happening? I actually have a bit of
00:18:10.880 hope here, not only because it's a demand and a theological virtue, but I actually think things,
00:18:15.880 might be improving in as much as for a long time, at least in the United States,
00:18:21.140 the conservative movement adopted this, you do you kind of approach to politics.
00:18:25.840 Oh yeah, we're the cool party. We're the free party. Yeah, look, whatever, look at porn or
00:18:29.940 do drugs. Or there was a famous essay by P.G. O'Rourke, who's a conservative humorist,
00:18:34.860 which was called the Republican Party Reptile, how to drive fast on drugs while getting your wing
00:18:39.340 wang squeezed and not spill your drink. And it, you know, it sort of embodied that 1980s,
00:18:44.780 90s vision of what it means to be a conservative. And I'm noticing now the people who still embrace
00:18:50.280 that thing, do whatever you want, just don't make me pay for it. It's kind of the boomers, 1.00
00:18:54.700 you know, it's kind of this older Gen X, it's kind of this older crowd on the right. And the
00:18:59.640 younger crowd, the youths that they think that they're appealing to, that I've spoken to Gen Z
00:19:03.400 and even millennials, they don't want that. They actually do want some moral order. They do want
00:19:08.740 some standards and they do want to pursue virtue. Are you seeing that as well? Or am I,
00:19:12.380 am I just hallucinating? No, I'm, yeah, no, I'm seeing that as well. It feels like for so long,
00:19:17.600 people who've been more conservative have tried these sort of incremental approach. And I'm not
00:19:22.340 poo-pooing that. I see that there's a, there's a reason for that, but almost like, well, I don't
00:19:25.620 want to come off as too radical. So yeah, maybe abortion except for rape and incest and, um, or sorry,
00:19:31.480 just rape and incest, but no other reason. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, but, um, it seems like more and more,
00:19:36.420 it's like, no, uh, we need to speak the truth and speak it clearly. There is a way to live.
00:19:41.720 There is a way not to live. And if society and culture becomes poisoned with intrinsically evils,
00:19:47.880 the fruit, the children, the families out of that are going to be dysfunctional and unhappy as well.
00:19:53.360 So it seems to me that we have an obligation to, for the common good and that we should act in such
00:19:58.560 a way and even legislate in such a way to bring that about. Of course, a Republic refers to the
00:20:03.060 things we hold in common, the public things. I mean, there's no, we have a constitution to promote
00:20:07.640 the general welfare. We do live in a society. We're not just atoms floating around in the world,
00:20:12.260 born purely with rights. We have obligations. We're in a family, in a community. We want to
00:20:16.720 live in a nice place and we want to have a nice country. And one of the people helping to guide
00:20:21.340 us back there, I think is Matt Fradd. And I would recommend that everyone go get the book,
00:20:24.280 How to Be Happy, St. Thomas's Secret to a Good Life. And really, and follow Matt's other stuff too.
00:20:29.600 I think you write so clearly, you write so clearly, you speak so clearly, you've got a lot of moral
00:20:36.880 courage, you know, even to talk about very difficult issues that a lot of people don't want to talk
00:20:41.900 about that is just pervading our society. And I think just that simplicity, that clarity is really
00:20:48.120 a way to snap people out of it. I often go back to Ernest Hemingway's description of bankruptcy
00:20:53.920 as a thing that happens gradually and then suddenly. And, you know, things can happen suddenly.
00:20:58.700 There can be big shifts. We might be in one of those shifts right now. And I hope we have a good
00:21:03.340 life and human flourishing for our whole country. Matt, thanks for being on the show.
00:21:08.200 Thanks, Michael.