Dr. Cary Gress (28:40)

Yeah, no, I think that's a really great insight. You know, I've been working on this issue. I've been writing on it for more than 10 years. And in the last two years in particular, it's really, it feels like it's really come to a head. And I think part of the issue is, is that men are finally finding their voice on this issue. I think up until recently men have felt like, oh, it's a, you know, we just want to support women, we'll do whatever. And that was just kind of the way things went. And I think simultaneously women are beginning to realize that, you know, there's some pushback here, that they're doing a lot of things that are not helping themselves. They're not helping men, their families or even the country for that matter. When you look at what's going on with our voting situation and of course the birth earth is another major issue. But women have been in this very privileged place for a long time and so it's hard to sort of start looking at that and, and, and realizing there's some vulnerability here and that kind of these front row seats that women have had might be taken away from us and might also require us to rethink the things that most of us have held dear and sacred for, you know, really all of our lives because the indoctrination is so deep. So, yeah, I think your summary of it couches it properly because men have gone more conservative and women are not moving the needle very much at this stage of the game.

Dinesh D'Souza (29:58)

Now, is that. Because the kind of feminization of our education system at the elementary, but also at the college levels has caused women, in a sense, to expect men to be more feminine, which is to say more like them, more relational and so on. Whereas men, who are typically the targets of this kind of attack, or propaganda, if we can call it that, are revolting in the opposite direction and basically saying we flatly refuse. And in fact, we are going to kind of turn our fire on women. I mean, I don't think it's very healthy what's going on. And yet, as you say, it might be a necessary reaction to the ideological battering ram that has been going on now for several decades.

Dr. Cary Gress (30:51)

Yeah, yeah, I think this has been going on for a long time. And for. It seems like since it started, women have had the capacity to really tear into men, and men haven't said anything. You know, it's actually kind of remarkable that you haven't had the rise of people like Andrew Tate's until recently. And I think Andrew Tate is. Is kind of the mirror image of the radical feminist. He's just coming at it from a different and more extreme, you know, angle as a man. So I. I think that's what's going on. It's like watching a bad divorce, you know, where. Where the women are siding with the women and the men are siding with the men. And that's not really a way to. To navigate it or to heal it. So I. I think this is the bigger issue, is we need to look at the ideology behind it. So we also need to look specifically at the way in which women have been indoctrinated. And, you know, most women, if you talk to them privately, will say, well, maybe there's something wrong with this, or maybe we can think of this in a different way, but we've never been shown a different way. You know, anyone who doesn't agree wholeheartedly with a feminist agenda is really labeled as a doormat, or, you know, someone who doesn't have the capacity to think. And so that. I think that's what's driving it so much, is that women haven't had real models of what authentic feminine femininity can actually look like. And so I think that's incumbent upon us as conservatives to really start presenting a different view of what womanhood looks like, than the predominant view that's, you know, seems to be everywhere. And the only way in which we can think. So that's really what's driving it, is women have been told and, you know, our emotions have been formed. In fact, this is one of the things I talk about in the book extensively, is just the way women have been pushed to be. Instead of the Christian virtues of faith, hope and charity, women have been really focused on exercising the vices of rage, contempt, and envy. So those are the things that have been stirred up in us a lot. And that's what's creating a significant amount of the acrimony. And a lot of this is on purpose because the fact that women who are angry are a lot more politically expedient than women who are not angry. So if you look at something like the Women's March, this isn't populated with very reasonable, calm, rational women. It's clearly something meant to even stir up anger further. So all of those things are at play. But I think finding a way to model authentic femininity is a really important thing that we need to do on the right.

Dinesh D'Souza (33:22)

It seems to me, just thinking back over the last several decades, watching this feminist debate play out, that even the conservative men, and maybe this is for reasons of chivalry I'm not really sure, were pushed back into a kind of endorsement of the feminist ethic. I mean, I think, for example, I'm not thinking of people who are all that political. I'm thinking about the guy who says things like, happy wife, happy life. Or I'm thinking about the guy who says, my wife is always right. Now my wife is actually here, and she's nodding vigorously, but she's right. You know what? You know what I mean? What I mean is that men have been sort of reluctant to get into it, particularly with these angry feminist types. And so they tend to bow out of the debate and sort of talk about something else. And I wonder if that has contributed to the problem. I mean, young people do seem to be. Do not seem to share this kind of ethic. They're going back to, I think, a much more tell it like it is. You know, you can be frank, but so can I. And so we get a lot of mutual bashing on social media. Now, there's one new wrinkle that's come up, and I want your take on this, and that is that I find that from some of these angry young men, even conservative women are getting bashed. And I think here, particularly of Ali Stuckey, but also Lila Rose, recently Both of them said what I think, to your mind and mine would be pretty innocuous statements like we need men to be loyal and virtuous and stay off the porn. And then you get this procession of men saying, stop telling us what to do. You're supposed to be subordinate. You haven't learned about the patriarchy, so you're now getting this kind of. So what do you make of this idea that somehow these young men are only willing to take instruction from older men and not from conservative women?

Dr. Cary Gress (35:22)

Yeah, I think, you know, there's, it's a challenge because of the fact that you've got these younger men who are trying, trying in a certain respect to do what their parents or their fathers didn't do, their grandfathers didn't do. They're trying to right the ship. But the problem is, is that they're going too far and they're actually not embodying what the patriarchy is. They're embodying a kind of machismo or something. Andrew Tatus Tatish Something very disordered. And so I think that's the problem is, you know, this doesn't mean that you get to be rude and awful to every, every woman. That's not what the patriarchy is or how it, how it works. And wisdom is wisdom. You know, we need to pay attention to it from, from whence it comes. But I think that the issue is, is that because men have not wanted to engage with feminists, and frankly, I don't blame men at all for this because we all know how, what it's like to argue with a feminist. You know, you're, you're usually not going to win. There's usually going to be revenge and it's going to be, you know, come back to you when you least expect it. Because this is. Women can hold grudges. So I think that that's. All of these things are problems. You know, you don't have to listen too long to men who are in positions where they've got kind of a girl boss or a mean girl above them in a career, and they just bow out. They don't want to engage. They just try to stay under the radar until they get that next promotion or have a different kind of boss. And women can do the same thing, too. But this has been part of the problem, is that, that the feminist culture has really taken over in a way where there's not an authentic engagement of the human person. So I think that's the fundamental problem. But younger men are trying to right that and that's their problem is they're going too far in one direction instead of saying, okay, what does it really look like to be a good man and to really understand that, you know, the word authority is connected to the word for cultivating and gardening. You know, that there's a kind of image of a man who's able to bring the best out of people and provide for them in a way that they can grow to be the people that they're meant to be, instead of it being about power. And that's what feminism is about, is about power. And so this is just the. The pendulum swinging the other direction. And it's clearly about power as well.

Dinesh D'Souza (37:39)

You know, I wonder if part of it is that there is not a good understanding of what the old world looked like. When I think of the old world, I think of my parents generation, but I think even more of my grandparents generation. And in that generation, I had two extremely feisty and somewhat bossy grandmothers, and yet they were fully within a patriarchy, and they accepted the patriarchy, but they were always very sneakily navigating around its edges, kind of wryly playing my grandfathers, even as they kind of acknowledged their authority. So the patriarchy was hardly. It didn't resemble an army where my grandfather was the general and. And my grandmothers were the soldiers taking orders. And that seems to be, I think, the false expectation now that that is what it means to submit to your husband. So can you say a word about your scholar? You've looked at this in a historical lens and say a word about what does, in fact, you could call it decent patriarchy look like?

Dr. Cary Gress (38:48)

Yeah, I mean, I think we have examples. Someone like George Bailey and It's a Wonderful Life is a great example of this. Someone who has to forego things that he may want in his life, but because he's providing and caring for others, not just his family. But in the case of It's a Wonderful Life, it's really the whole community that you see the way in which he's cultivating these relationships and taking care of people such that they can have a much better life than what it looks like under, you know, his. His nemesis. So I think, you know, the big thing, too, is also to recognize the egalitarian nature of feminism. And the hierarchy and the patriarchy are kind of one and the same. They're the structure by which men organize themselves. And one of the things that's really beautiful about it is that if you look at something like the military, men don't exclude people. They find a place for them in the hierarchy. And this is what women don't do. We want everybody to be equal. And if you're too above us, we are going to pull you down. And if you're beneath us, we get rid of you. This is obviously in a vicious form. Of course. Women have incredible virtues, but those are not really used and demonstrated much today. But so the point being that there's something about the beauty of recognizing the gifts that everybody has, but it's a structure through which everybody kind of knows their place. They have a role in it. And we have to recognize that that's really what Mary Wollstonecraft and the Enlightenment thinkers like her husband, William Godwin, and then, you know, coming down through all of the godless egalitarians was to get rid of all of that. And so what you're missing out then is. Is certainly the place for everyone, the roles and the capacity that men have to see very easily, the gifts that people have. And this is what a good father does. Also, there's a reason why matriarchies always end up in a kind of ghettoization, and it's because women want to nurture and hold their children close to them, but they don't. We don't always see it's the. The way in which we can help our children best by either pushing them out of the nest or telling them, you know, to protect certain gifts that they have, like sexuality of young women. If a lot of the women in the culture today who don't have fathers had role models that said, you need to stop abusing your sexuality and being promiscuous as young women, we would have. We live in a very different culture. And I think this is what a good father does, is help children understand what needs to be protected and then what needs to be let out into the world in different stages and. And, you know, use their gifts. So it's almost like a. I've heard the image of a. Like a hydraulic dam, that the father is the one who sort of holds things in and then releases them when they need to. You know, children need to be. Go out into the world. So I think there's a lot of incredible ways to look at it. We. We've been beating up on the patriarchy for so long, you would be able to really say what it is other than kind of this machismo, but that's really not what it is. That's really a. A characterization or a mischaracterization of it that has, you know, been perpetuated for so many Decades and even centuries, that it's. It's hard to really know the good of it until it's gone. And then we really see what's missing when it comes to things like police and military and the order that it brings to our lives.

Dinesh D'Souza (42:06)

I take you, Carrie, to be saying two things, and maybe we can close out with this question. I think one thing you're saying is that leadership has a very strong component of servant leadership.

Dr. Cary Gress (42:19)

Absolutely.

Dinesh D'Souza (42:19)

Which is a very Christian idea, isn't it? That the job of the leader is just not to drag everybody behind him, but rather to serve the people that he is put in charge of. And I think that's a very important point. But the other point you're making, which I think is a little more controversial, and that is you're saying that the problem is not that the first wave of feminism was good and then the second wave of feminism went off the tracks. I think you're saying that feminism, from the very beginning. This is Susan B. Anthony and Mary Wollstonecraft. They began with an attack on the idea of subordination or hierarchy or patriarchy. And thus early feminism, or some people call it first wave feminism, sowed the seeds of the chaos of second wave feminism. Is that right?

Dr. Cary Gress (43:11)

No, that's absolutely right. And I think it goes much deeper than just kind of philosophical ideas. There are actually theological ideas involved. And one of them, which Mary Wollstonecraft was very involved in, was this idea of Unitarianism that she. She started as an Anglican, then went to becoming a dissenter, and then became a Unitarian. Like a lot of the men around her, either they were unitarians or atheists. Dr. Richard Price, who's considered the first leftist thinker, Thomas Paine, William Godwin, Joseph Johnson, all of these different men were Unitarians. And so she took on this idea because Unitarians don't believe in the divinity of Christ. They just believe in kind of an abstract God that you get to through reason. And Wollstonecraft believed that if you had any man as a mediator between you and God, that that was. That was thwarting the potential of a woman. So even Jesus is actually going to act as a way to. To block the potential of a woman. And it's only through a woman's reason that she's going to be able to reach God. Well, this idea was really perpetuated throughout the 1800s, and it was something that was believed in very much by the first wave women. Women like Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan. Susan B. Anthony, who did eventually say she was an atheist. So these theological ideas are at play and certainly very much at the beginning of the movement and created this cornerstone stone of idea for what would become the second wave. But the second wave never would have happened if the first wave hadn't really paved the way for it theologically and philosophically.

Dinesh D'Souza (44:49)

This is really fascinating stuff. The book is called Something Wicked. I've been talking to Dr. Cary Gress. Follow her on X at Carrie Gress or the website carygress.com Carrie, as always, thank you very much for joining me.

Dr. Cary Gress (45:04)

Thank you.

Dinesh D'Souza (45:05)

Really good stuff. Thank you.

Dr. Cary Gress (45:06)

My pleasure. Thank you.

Dinesh D'Souza (45:09)

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I expect today to finish my discussion of life after death in the context of modern physics. This chapter is called the Physics of Immortality. I've talked about Einstein, I've talked about the universe having a beginning. I'm now going to talk about one of the other spectacular findings of modern science. And this is called the anthropic principle. The anthropic principle is sometimes called the fine tuned universe. And what does it really mean? Well, what it means is that the universe is constructed in such a way not just the Earth, not just our planet, the entire universe. It is constructed on a plan or on a program where if you were to adjust the dials even slightly, you would Get a completely different universe and you would get a universe with no life at all. So in other words, the point being that if we want to have life and our kind of life, human beings in a world, the world has to be made this way. It cannot be made any other way. The, the physicist Stephen Hawking says this in his book A Brief History of Time. If the rate of expansion, he's talking about the rate of expansion of the universe one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have recollapsed before it even reached its present size. The astronomer Martin Rees, who's the astronomer of the Royal Laboratory in Britain, has a book called Just Six Numbers. And he puts it somewhat differently. He goes, the numbers, by the way, are some key constants that govern the laws of the universe. And he says the nature of our universe is remarkably sensitive to these numbers. If you imagine setting up a universe by adjusting six dials, the tuning must be precise in order to yield a universe that could harbor life. The point being that you can imagine, like God sitting at the dials, if God were to spin the dials at all, move them even to the slightest degree, no universe, no life. Now, this is a big problem for modern atheism. In fact, the physicist Leonard Susskind, who is also an atheist, calls the anthropic principle quote, a huge embarrassment. He says it is, quote, hated by most physicists. And he gives the reason. He goes, the principle points to a creator. And so he goes, real science requires explanations that do not involve supernatural agents. Now, some of the physicists who don't like the idea of a fine tuned universe, and they don't like it for one good reason, and that is that a fine tuned universe implies a fine tuner. How else do you get it? Why are the dials set like this when of course, there are an infinite range of possibilities? So how do you get around? How do you escape from this idea of a fine tuned universe? Well, the answer is kind of simple and also at the same time outrageous. And that is science can posit. And by posit here, what we mean is assume or make up or conjecture other universes, many universes, what is sometimes known as multiple universes. But nobody by multiple universes means like three or seven. What they mean by multiple universes is a whole bunch of universes, possibly an infinity of universes, a sort of massive smorgasbord of universes in which our universe is only one. Now, when you say something so outrageous, so outlandish in the literal sense of the word, you need to have some evidence for it. And so I ask, what is the empirical data? What is the slightest evidence that we have multiple universes? I mean, forget about multiple universes. What's the slightest evidence that there is a single universe other than our own? There such evidence? Answer no. And so now we are in a very odd situation because we are living in what we know to be a fine tuned universe that seems to point to a creator. And to get out of that, scientists and atheists are positing many universes that by the way, they have no evidence for in order to explain away the fine tuning of the one universe that we do in fact inhabit. Now, how does the many universes idea get away from the fine tuning? Well, the answer is kind of simple. Let's say, for example, I call out a number and that number is a very complex number. And then I spin a roulette wheel and that number comes up. Wow. It's a massive, massive coincidence. And this coincidence demands some explanation. How was I able to call out this single number in advance? Did I know something? Is the whole system rigged? But let's say, for example, I call out a really remarkable number and we have a roulette wheel that we spin an infinite number of times. Well, at some point that number is going to come up. So if you have an infinity of universes, then any single universe, however odd, however remarkable, however fine tuned, is going to at some point turn up in the great roulette wheel of universes, so to speak. So, so this is the way that atheists and scientists who are atheists try to say, well look, it's, you know, it's kind of surprising. We live in a fine tuned universe, but if there's an infinity of them out there, then ours just happens to be the one that has these characteristics that gives rise to creatures like this. But it's not all that surprising because the roulette wheel is having, you can say an infinite number of turns. But now it's, it's easy to ridicule the idea of multiple universes by basically saying you've just made the whole thing up. And, and that is actually true. But in some ways you could say that the idea of multiple universes is interesting. And it's interesting for this reason. The Harvard astronomer named Owen Gingrich, who is a Christian believer, has an essay on this idea of multiple universes. And he goes, listen, he goes, as a Christian, he goes, this doesn't really bother me at all. And here's what he writes, quote, christians have long envisioned a world with which they have no physical contact. Not the heavens, which is. People talk about the heavens very generically, but heaven, the emperor. And then he says this. It is a totally other place without evil and suffering, where the inhabitants never grow old. It thus cannot be our present world embodied. For the remodeling would strike at the very heart of our physical understanding. To suspend the rules of our cosmos would be tantamount to being in another universe. So what is this guy really saying? What he's saying is, look, if there's only one universe, ours, then it's kind of hard to get our heads around the idea of heaven or hell. How can we. How can there be these other realms? If Carl Sagan is right that this universe is all there is, all there was, all that there ever will be, well, that's it. The rules of our universe are the only rules. But Professor Gingrich is saying if there are multiple universes, then these universes, by the way, are going to have their own laws. They're going to have their own rules, they're going to have their own principles. They're going to. If they have matter, if they have matter at all, it's going to be a different kind of matter. And the mathematical principles governing these universes will also be different. So what he's getting at is that heaven becomes a very understandable possibility under this notion, multiple universes. And so my conclusion of this chapter can be put this way. Certainly the idea of heaven and its own laws is not contradicted by anything that we know about modern science. What modern physics has really done is expanded our horizons. It's shown how life after death is possible within our existing framework of physical reality. The materialist objection has proven to be kind of a dud. The idea that matter has a sort of predictable course of behavior. Matter, the matter in the universe, is exactly like the matter that we experience. All of this has been shown to be speculative nonsense, even though it comes from eminent philosophers like Bertrand Russell. And so, at least in the realm of physics, next time we're going to move into the realm of biology. Modern science has proven itself not to be the enemy of religious believers, but their unexpected ally.

Dinesh D'Souza (56:20)

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