If This Clip Doesn't Make You Cry, I Don't Know What Will

Folks, today I'm going to show you what I believe to be maybe the most meaningful clip in the history of the Internet. I'm not kidding. It's why America and the West are good, why the West is great in one clip. And no, it's not a clip of F-35s or a booming American business. As much as I love those things, they're outgrowths of something deeper and more meaningful. We are a culture, we are a civilization that values the individual soul. I'm going to show you this clip in just a So maybe I'm just a sucker for this stuff right now. My wife obviously had a baby on Sunday morning, watched my fifth child be born. He's at home. My kids are just loving him and spending the day with him, wanting to hold him, wanting to hug him. And let's be real, when it comes to small babies, they are extremely cute, but also deeply dependent. Of course, they're very demanding. They're up at all hours of the night. My wife, obviously more than I am. But there is something incredible and eternal and magical about having a child. And I have many of them and watching them grow and watching them change over time, watching them become independent, interact with the world, interact with each other. It's just an unbelievable thing. So maybe that put me in a sort of emotionally vulnerable place, not a place I'm used to, but emotionally vulnerable place. Maybe I'm just a sucker for this clip right now. So I promised you this clip, which I saw yesterday. I was browsing the interwebs and I came across this clip from a Daily Wire show, Pines with Aquinas, with our own Matt Fradd. He was interviewing a man named Dr. Peter Kreft, who is a professor of philosophy at Boston College. But here, Dr. Kreft is not talking about philosophy as much as he is talking about what it means to be a good human being and what love for another human being means. Just watch this. This clip is about a minute 40, so it's a little bit long. There are some pauses in it. And when you listen to it, you will see why you should go watch the clip. If you're only listening, you should actually watch it happen because it's pretty astonishing. What advice do you have someone watching this who's newly married or who is about to be? Do you think that when you are very old and your wife is very old and ugly and wrinkled and fat and not very bright or even nasty, that you will still find her beautiful? If so, marry her. The last view I had of my wife in the nursing home about an hour after she died, I fell in love with her again. Here is a wasted, emaciated, wrinkled, suffering body. It's as beautiful as a crucifix. That body ain't gonna last, but the soul is. So if you don't love her soul but just love her body, don't get married. I mean, so an astonishing clip. Again, I just got to watch my wife have our fifth child. And I have to say, just on a normal level, obviously, when you watch your wife have a child, it is a physically demanding process, shall we say. And it's not when, if I ask my wife, is that when you've looked your best? The answer, of course, is no, that is certainly not when she has looked her best. But it's when she is at her most beautiful, for sure. In our marriage, whenever she has the baby, the day of the birth, the moment of the birth, that is when she looks the most beautiful to me as a human being, when the baby is put on her chest and she's holding the baby. And that's not because that is when she is at her most physically beautiful. Of course not. Of course not. It's because it's when her soul is at its height, because here is a new soul that she's just brought into the world and she's holding the baby and she's looking down at the baby and she has the same expression every time, this kind of expression of astonishment and joy and bewildered happiness all at the same time. And I'm watching this happen and I'm just looking at her and I'm not seeing her face or her eyes or her body at that point. I'm seeing something different. And that is what makes the world a beautiful and astonishing place, the soul. That's the concept. It's not just something that we need in order to explain why we're here or why we matter. It is, in fact, why we as individual human beings matter. It's not our bodies. It's not the physical condition we're in. It's why whenever people talk about the purpose of life is human flourishing, they have to mean something more than flourishing in the physical sense, because the soul is the thing that matters in the world. And all of that's inspiring because it says that you can have a lifetime of meaning. It's available to you regardless of material circumstance if you can see the soul of another person. And that's doable. It doesn't require magic. It's a plan of action. It's not just pretty words, as Dr. Kreft is saying. It's a way of actually navigating the world. You can make decisions based on that. You can decide who to marry based on that. You can decide whether to have kids, how many kids to have based on that philosophy. Now, I know there are a lot of young people right now who are blackmailing. They've decided that they've basically given up on Western civilization or on agency in their own lives. They say things like they can't find a woman. It's impossible to get married now. You can't have kids now. No, it really, really isn't. It is eminently doable. It is available to you. Be that guy. Find your faith. Find your wife and fall in love. Fall in love with her soul and have kids and build a life and honor the God who created you. The world is an incredible, beautiful place created for us by a loving God. But it's also a place of heartbreak and tragedy. What Dr. Kreft is saying there is that it's the same place. He's talking about the beauty in his wife looking at her at her body after she passed away. It's not possible to navigate the tragedy of life without also trying to understand the beauty and connect with that beauty. That's what Dr. Kreft is talking about right there. If he can see the beauty in the broken body of his elderly wife after her death, can't we find the beauty in the world around us? A world that's not just filled with physical beauty, but actual spiritual hope and with faith and with family. That's the stuff that life is made of. It's the stuff that makes the adventure so wonderful. It's finding the soul in another human being and recognizing that you have inherent value as a human being, inherent value as a creation of God. Obviously, this has biblical background. Dr. Kreft is a biblical thinker. He's Catholic. Obviously, I'm Jewish, but this always goes back to the Bible. Let's talk about your business because, let's see, one aspect of you being made in the image of God is that you are made as a creative human being. That means you have creative output. You want to control that creative output. That's part of what modern free market economics is all about. This is why you should be working with Shopify. The truth is, most businesses don't start with venture capital and a boardroom. They start with one person deciding to give it a shot, and that's what Shopify is built for. At The Daily Wire, we use Shopify for our storefront. Whether it's facts, hats, books, Daily Wire merchandise, Shopify helps make the buying process simple for our customers. Because Shopify handles the checkout experience, customers can buy quickly and easily. Because Shopify handles the back end, business owners can focus on growth instead of technical headaches. The same platform used by brands like Mattel and Gymshark is available to anyone with an idea and the willingness to start. With Shopify, nothing stands between your idea and a real business. So, go make it one. Start your free trial at Shopify.com slash Shapiro. That's Shopify.com slash Shapiro to start your free trial today. Shopify.com slash Shapiro. When God creates man in Genesis 2.7, the Bible says, then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. These are two different things. The dust of the ground, that's how it makes the man. It's the combination. It's the dust of the ground and the breath that God breathes into the human being. What is that breath of life exactly? Well, the Hebrew word for the breath of life is ruach, which also means spirit. And actually the first reference to that word describes God's spirit, right? It describes earlier in the Bible, first couple of verses of the Bible, it says that God's spirit was hovering over the unformed waters. And the idea here is that there is something spiritual, something to the universe beyond just the physical things that we see, beyond the material. And we can see it manifest most clearly when we look into God's creation, it's a clue. We have the spirit of God, and then God infuses spirit into man. Human beings are special. And it's God's infusion of us with value that makes us special. It's also what makes the West particularly special. And it makes America particularly, particularly special. Because you want to know where the American concept of rights that attach to you as an individual human being came from, from that line of biblical thinking, that you are made in the image of God, that God infused you, a person, with spirit. This is why it means something when the Declaration of Independence says, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that governments are instituted among men because they require the consent of the governed. This is what Abraham Lincoln meant when he said that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor are favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately by the grace of God. When the founders or Abraham Lincoln talk about the equality of human beings, they mean in the sight of God, we all have a soul. Now, of course, this doesn't mean that we don't have collective interests or collective identities. Human existence is a bunch of different layers. There is you as an individual, there's you as a member of your family, there's you as a member of your community, there's you as an American. And we as Americans have collective interests. But the most important interest we have is in preserving this worldview where the individual soul stands at the center. And that worldview has to win because it actually has some very powerful rivals. And those rivals are powerful and they are terrible. Now, historically speaking, there have been two large scale threats to this idea of the individual soul as a thing that is filled with worth. So again, go back to the Bible. Genesis has all this stuff. In the book of Genesis, God posits a few different forms of human civilization. One is the family. That's the one that God settles on. God says that human civilizations that are rooted in family are the ones that survive. Noah takes his family on the ark. He survives. God chooses Abraham and his family to generate the children of Israel, that it is a familial based system. But there are two rivals. One is the anarchic civilization of the pre-Noah flood era. The Bible before the flood describes that civilization as corrupt and filled with lawlessness. But what does the Bible mean by that? It means that in that civilization, people treat other people as means to their own ends, that human beings are just tools. You use them because they are useful to you. You just do what you want with them. They don't have any inherent value. They're instrumental. The second form of civilization is sort of the bizarro world reverse of that. That's the tyrannical civilization. That's the Tower of Babel story. An entire civilization that's built for a single goal, build a giant thing, but designed without reference to either God, right? It's designed to attack God or without reference to individual human beings. The Midrash, which is sort of a Jewish commentary that Adam breaks the Bible, suggests that the building of the Tower of Babel took so long and was so arduous that it would take weeks for bricks to move from the base all the way up to the height. And so workers would actually cry when a brick would break. When a brick would fall, they would cry. But if an individual human being died, that was not a big deal because the labor could easily be replaced. And these two rivals to the soul filled civilization of the American way, they still exist. The secular utilitarianism that says that all human beings don't have a soul, basically a nihilistic universe in which everyone is either an obstacle or a tool. And tyrannies, tyrannies that see the collective as the chief mechanism by which the world moves. It's a French revolution idea that the revolution eats everything in its path, right? That would be Chinese communism or Russian tyranny or the Iranian malocracy. All of these things are very live, right? These are not old examples because all old pathologies are simply poured into new bottles. Well, it is an increasingly modern world, but the reality is that if you look in your garage, there's a bunch of stuff that ain't modern there, like a bunch of old photographs that are falling apart, film reels that are falling apart. Yeah, that's your family history. And when it's lost, it's just gone. These formats don't last forever. And again, once they're gone, they're gone permanently. Legacy box is your solution. I've used legacy box myself. I send in all my family memories from when I was a kid, VHS tapes, me growing up, and I can watch those tapes with my kids. Now, me as a child with my parents, my parents can do the same with their parents because we did it for them as well. Legacy box is the world's largest digitizer of old home movies and photos. The process is incredibly simple. You pack your box with all your old media, VHS tapes, film reels, photos, DVDs, and then you ship it in. Their team professionally digitizes everything by hand right here in Tennessee, and they send it all back to you as digital files on the cloud or a thumb drive along with your original items. No media gets lost. Nothing gets outsourced. Just your memories preserved the right way. Over 2 million families have already trusted legacy box to do exactly that. Don't let your family's story disappear on your watch. Right now, you can shop legacy box incredible. America 250 sale. Visit legacybox.com slash Shapiro. Get started today. That's legacybox.com slash Shapiro. Take, for example, that first secular utilitarian view that human beings only have value if they have value to you. They don't have any inherent value. So a truly horrifying story that is sort of indicative of this worldview emerged from Canada. This this story is about a Canadian same-sex couple, as reported by the New York Post, suing a woman who carried their now two-year-old son because she refused their demand to abort the fetus because of a minor birth defect and a cleft lip. According to the lawsuit, which was filed in Ontario Superior Court in May and obtained by National Post, the parents claimed the surrogate did not adequately keep them informed about the baby's health, put the child at risk, violated confidentiality and caused them emotional distress. According to the New York Post, the relationship started off strong, but soured in June twenty twenty four when she told the couple about an ultrasound revealing that the baby had a cleft lip, possibly a cleft palate and a minor heart defect. The surrogate said she would have agreed to an abortion if the child was unlikely to survive after birth, but would not abort a twenty two week old fetus. And twenty two weeks is essentially a survive a survivable outside the womb fetus. I believe the earliest surviving fetuses are at twenty one weeks. Certainly by twenty three, twenty four weeks, you actually have a survival rate among fetuses. The parents agreed to proceed with the pregnancy after doctors in Mount Sinai said the baby was generally healthy and had no major problems beyond the cleft lip. After the child got treatment, the parents took the child home and ceased contact with the surrogate who asked them to cover around ten grand in outstanding expenses, lost wages, transportation costs and skipped contributions to her pension plan. So, again, it sounds as though originally she was willing to agree to an abortion demanded by them if it hadn't been so late and the and the defects had been more severe. The fact that this is the way that we're discussing a human life demonstrates the sickness here. Again, my wife and I just had a child. One of the decisions that you make in the religions that believe in the individual soul when you have a child is that God infuses soul into children well before birth, that human beings with potential are human beings with potential and that you cannot deprive that individual human soul of its interests in the world out of convenience for yourself. And yet this is obviously a child being treated as a convenience. This is not why you have children. This is not how human beings ought to be treated. And a civilization that treats human beings with this sort of disposable mentality is a civilization that loses its moorings utterly. It is a culture of convenience and a culture of convenience when it comes to other human beings is a culture of death because it turns out human beings are not convenient. Human beings are highly inconvenient. The people you love the most are by necessity the most inconvenient people you know. My children are highly inconvenient to me. I love them more than anything. My wife, highly inconvenient to me. I love her more than anything. Doesn't mean that they deprive me of something. No, the inconvenience is the point because the inconvenience generates obligations that matter in the world and those obligations matter even more than it would to a normal, non-familial human being because I care deeply about these human beings and that's because they have inherent value, value beyond what I ascribe to them. You want a civilization that's worth its salt, you have to reject this viewpoint that human beings, particularly unborn children, are somehow just tools for you to use. That is one threat and that threat exists all over the political spectrum. This idea that human beings are simple conveniences for you to sort of do away with when they get in the way. That individual souls are to be discarded at will and then you have the collectivists, people who believe that individual souls don't matter because the only thing that matters is the collective. The only thing that matters is the sort of great common good collective. Now again, this isn't to imagine that communities don't have communal interests. Obviously they do and sometimes individuals have to lose to a communal interest but the key rule there has to be that that communal interest is in line with what God wants from a civilization that values the individual soul. This is why rights matter. This is why immunities to government power matter because your life has value, inherent value, not just as an instrument of the collective. Well, if you find yourself on the same side as regimes that disparage the idea, the very idea of the soul, that treat individuals as simply cogs to be worked into the machine, that resemble the Tower of Babel civilization, you're on the wrong side of doing civilization. Which brings us to China and Russia. So China and Russia, these are not places that respect the individual at all. At all, at all, at all. They do not care. For China, it's all about the Chinese collective, the power of the Chinese Communist Party. They're willing to discard literally millions of human beings to kill off tens of millions of unborn children, and in many cases born children, in the greatest infanticide in human history. They're willing to do that all in the name of the collective. Russia is all about the power of one man, Vladimir Putin, and his oligarchic buddies, and they are willing to sacrifice the well-being of tens of millions of their own citizens for the simple power of Vladimir Putin, or for an idea of a collectivist Russian power in the world. That's the thing that really, really matters. Not on behalf of a vision of the world in which individuals matter, in which rights are spread. One of the weird things about American foreign policy is that American foreign policy is not purely about preserving America's interest in the same way that Greek foreign policy is about preserving Greek interests, or Russian foreign policy is about preserving Russian interests. There's always been a moral component to American foreign policy because we take seriously our role as a lighthouse on behalf of certain values. That's not true for China and Russia. So I would humbly suggest that if you find yourself on the same side as China and Russia in any debate, you've sold out your civilization. What an amazing video you just watched. Wasn't that amazing? Well, you know, if you think so, head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe to watch the full show ad free or check out this crazy story here.