"Lions & Scavengers" Audiobook: Chapter 1

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All righty, folks, I hope that you're really enjoying your Labor Day weekend.

I have a brand new book coming out this week, and I wanted to give you, our listeners, a sneak peek of what that book sounds like.

The audiobook is available at amazon.com on Tuesday.

You can get a signed copy of the book over at Daily Wire as well.

So, without further ado, here is the introduction and first chapter of my brand new book, Lions and Scavengers.

Introduction, London, England.

A tension lies at the core of our being.

It roils us, it churns our guts, it boils our brains.

That tension lies between two opposing forces.

Those forces beat within every man's breast.

They fight for supremacy within every civilization.

One must triumph and one must fall.

The spirit of the lion, the spirit of the scavenger.

I write these words in London, England.

I write them in disappointment and horror and dismay.

For London has been conquered by the scavengers.

Just last week, London saw a massive river of protesters, hundreds of thousands strong, marching, their banners unfurled, the banners of terrorist groups and of communists and of transgender activists gathered together to revolt against the civilization that has given them their rights and their prosperity and their power.

These marchers have gathered to protest in favor of the terror group Hamas.

It has been just a few weeks since the slaughter of 1,200 Jews and the kidnapping of 250 others on October 7, 2023, in the envelope surrounding the Gaza Strip.

Members of Hamas and Palestinian civilians flooded into villages, a music festival, homes.

They dragged out men, women, and children.

They live streamed their crimes.

And the scavengers have risen risen in rage in support of Hamas.

As the savagery, mass murder, rape, and kidnapping took place, one commentator posted on social media, what did y'all think decolonization meant?

Vibes, papers, essays, losers.

Her comment received nearly 100,000 likes, and it spoke to the very core of the scavengers.

All inhumanity against the lions is justified.

And so the scavengers have gathered here in the beating heart of what was once the center of Western civilization to bay for more blood and to scream at a West that insists that defense against terror is the first right of all men.

They march with their red flags held high, ecstatically singing the praises of murderers and rapists for this is their opportunity to castigate the pride to bring it low.

The British Communist Party issued a statement in solidarity with Hamas condemning the Israeli government on the day after October 7th before Israeli military action had even begun.

Jeremy Corbyn, former leader of the Labor Party, appeared at rallies flanked by Palestinian flags.

The hilariously bizarre group, Queers for Palestine, quickly formed in solidarity with people who would throw queers off buildings at the first available opportunity if given half a chance.

Many of the most ardent libertines have thrown their support behind Hamas, claiming solidarity with those who would throw them off roofs at the first opportunity.

Anything to tear down the pride.

This is not mere anti-Semitism.

Antisemitism is an age-old hatred rooted in a conspiracy theory.

It takes many forms and has countless victims.

This is something different.

It is a united coalitional hatred of the West.

In The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R.

Tolkien wrote of the hordes of Mordor, stand-ins for the Nazis and their allies by way of metaphor, gathering on the plains outside the gates of Minas Tirith, the last redoubt of mankind.

The plain was dark with their marching companies, and as far as eyes could strain in the murk, there sprouted, like a foul fungus growth, all about the beleaguered city great camps of tents, black or somber red.

All day the labor went forward while the men of Minas Tirith looked on, unable to hinder it.

So it goes today in London.

The marchers march, their numbers increase, and the scavengers cast their avaricious, ravenous eyes across the landscape and see no one to oppose them.

The lions are gone, and without the spirit of the lion, our civilization collapses.

What is the spirit of the lion?

The spirit of success, of responsibility, of duty.

The lion understands that the universe is constructed by a set of rules he can discern.

He thrills in his capacity to choose, knowing that it lifts him above beasts.

He embraces his moral duties in the world, revels in his responsibilities.

The lion comes in many types.

The lion is a hunter, creative, audacious, innovative.

He bends the world to his will.

He forges new paths and crafts new solutions.

When faced with a problem, the lion does not complain about the unfairness of life.

He seeks an answer.

The lion is bold and persistent.

Failure does not unnerve him.

It teaches him.

The lion knows that boldness of purpose and willingness to undergo risk are the driving forces of any successful civilization.

He believes in the words of proverbs, where there is no vision, the people perish.

The lion is a warrior.

He is steadfast in defending himself, his family, and his culture.

He understands that the spirit of the scavenger is always abroad and that only strength can defend against it.

The lion knows that the universe was created dangerous and that courage and steadfastness in the face of risk is the only proper response.

The lion lives by the words of C.S.

Lewis.

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality.

A chastity or honesty or mercy, which yields to danger, will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions.

And the lion is a weaver.

He is prudent, merciful, and strong, dedicated to the construction and maintenance of the social fabric, the ties that bind.

The lion weaves together the disparate strands of family and society and holds them together with love and prudence.

They often go unnoticed and uncelebrated, but the weavers are the true heroes of our civilization.

The weaver lives out the credo of Seneca.

It is a sacrilege to harm your country.

It is therefore sacrilege to harm a citizen too, for he is a part of your country, and its parts will be sacred if the whole commands veneration.

And therefore, it will be a sacrilege to harm even a human being, since he is a citizen in that greater city of yours.

Together, the hunters, warriors, and weavers form a pride.

That pride is governed by rules, rules that ensure the flourishing of a community and a civilization.

The lions know that within them, the spirit of the scavenger still lurks, and so the pride constructs a system of rules.

Those rules protect individual rights and foster public virtue.

They replenish and reinvigorate the spirit of the lions that comprise it.

If lions fall, so does the pride.

If the pride falls, so do the lions.

A pride of lions can accomplish nearly anything, unless the pride falls to the pack.

To the spirit of the scavenger.

The spirit of the scavenger is the spirit of envy.

That spirit animates those who destroy successful men and and civilizations.

The scavenger is driven by a burning impulse, the impulse to escape his own failures and shortcomings by blaming others.

The scavenger believes that his own failure is the fault of the stars, of the fates, but mostly of the lion.

The scavenger is a creature of frustration, alienation, and vengeance.

The scavenger does not believe in an understandable universe in which success is the result of performance of duty.

Instead, the scavenger believes that any such argument is a guise for power and power alone.

The scavenger in his perverse projection believes that there is a great conspiracy against him, and that the only path to success lies in tearing away at that great conspiracy with tooth and with claw.

The scavenger lives by the credo of Satan in John Milton's Paradise Lost.

Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.

And how many hells on earth have the scavengers created?

The scavenger comes in many forms too.

The scavenger is a looter, greedy, jealous, and violent.

He claims the innovation and work of others as his birthright.

He sees those who are productive and who are therefore successful as oppressors and himself as a member of the oppressed.

The only way the looter believes to free himself of his shackles is to wreck the very systems that allow for innovation and productivity.

The looter has no qualms about utilizing violence to seize the means of production, to bleed the hunter dry, to crush him beneath the grinding gears of a great hideous machine.

The looter relies on the great conspiracy to justify himself.

He lives by the mantra of Mao Zedong.

Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

The scavenger is a lecher, rebellious, perverse, and leering.

The lecher believes that his own alienation from society and his consequent failure of soul is the fault of a system shot through with false piety.

The lecher understands that perhaps the strongest human drive, lust, can be weaponized against the lion and the pride.

The lecher believes that his own fulfillment will arise from the destruction of those very systems of morality that undergird a thriving social fabric, that he can only be free when all of society embraces the perverse at the expense of the virtuous.

And the scavenger is a barbarian, jealous, enraged, and violent.

The barbarian is an outsider to Western civilization who believes that all of his own maladies and ills can be laid at the feet of the colonizers of the West.

In fact, the barbarian argues, only violence against his purported victimizers can free him of the servile mentality that these very colonizers have instilled in him.

The barbarian speaks in the language of mass-murdering communist monster Che Guevara, whose visage still graces the t-shirts of thousands of misbegotten American college students championing the power of hatred.

Hatred as an element of struggle, unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine.

Together, the looters, lechers, and barbarians form a pack.

At first, the pack forms in opposition to the pride.

It forms a coalition, modeled and kaleidoscopic, ever-changing in its internal power dynamics, but rigid in its orientation against the pride.

The pack exists to overthrow the existing order.

Only later do the survivors learn the horrors to which they will be subjected.

Those horrors come in many forms, but they all add up to one universal truth, human suffering.

If the pack triumphs, everyone pays the price.

The fall of London is symptomatic not merely of the growing power of the pack.

It is a symptom of a civilization that has lost the courage of its convictions.

Any civilization that loses its confidence opens itself to predations from those who would tear it down, from within and without.

Lions build civilizations.

Those lions must maintain constant vigilance, never-ending deterrence, eternal strength.

If they weaken, the scavengers attack.

The scavengers gather at the gates waiting for any sign of vulnerability.

The gates must be bolstered.

Once a crack appears, it quickly becomes a breach.

That external threat will become matched by an internal one.

Lions must pass on their ways to their children.

They must teach their traditions, their purpose, their roles.

They must instill their values and then demand virility.

For if we all have two impulses beating within us, the spirit of the lion and the spirit of the scavenger vying for supremacy, then the failure of the lions is the success of the scavenger.

If the lions fail their children, their own children join the scavengers.

Unmoored from a civilization their parents refuse to defend, they become rabid and go in search of revenge on those who left them adrift.

They lead a rebellion of privilege, bred into unearned prosperity, but taught ignorance and dependency, they look close at hand for monsters to destroy.

They become the hellish mutation of a spent culture.

The children of lions can become scavengers.

The civilizational lions, if they give up their virility for cowardice or timidity, collapse before the frenzied mob of their children.

Enraged at the churches their parents abandon, incensed at the free market system that handed them wealth they never earned, livid at the men and women who defend the very countries and towns they inhabit.

A generation of newly turned scavengers now threatens civilization from within.

They open the gates.

they welcome in their fellow scavengers, and the scavengers run amok.

The West was warned, of course.

In 1897, Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem for the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria.

The British Empire was still at its height, but Kipling wrote a warning to his civilization, a warning that they must not for a moment forget the values that had animated them and brought them here.

The tumult and the shouting dies, the captains and the king depart.

Still stands thine ancient sacrifice, and humble and contrite heart.

Lord God of hosts be with us yet, lest we forget, lest we forget.

Yet the British did forget.

Abandoning the values of their ancestors, wooed by the promise of a post-civilizational welfare utopia, Britain slipped into her dottage.

Edmund Burke warned of the temptations of a vast welfare state designed to ameliorate complaints at the cost of dynamism, innovation, and self-reliance in 1795, lamenting any system in which governments attempt to feed the people out of the hands of the magistrates.

If once they are habituated to it, though but for one half year, they will never be satisfied to have it otherwise.

And having looked to government for bread, on the very first scarcity, they will turn and bite the hand that fed them.

To avoid that evil, government will redouble the causes of it, and then it will become inveterate and incurable.

The warning went unheeded.

In the post-World War II era, Great Britain turned inward in shame and exhaustion, away from both her empire and her principles, in search of a sterile redistributionism.

Robbed of its initiative, a civilization of lions turned towards senility.

In 1969, poet Philip Larkin pointedly described the new malaise of his civilization.

Next year, we shall be living in a country that brought its soldiers home for lack of money.

The statues will be standing in the same tree-muffled squares and look nearly the same.

Our children will not know it's a different country.

All we can hope to leave them now is money.

Yet, even that hope has gone unfulfilled.

The scavengers never rested, they never surrendered, they never stopped, they sought entry, and they found willing allies within.

As it turns out, the beneficiaries of a managed and sterile civilization are not grateful for what they have been given.

They turn on it with snarling fury.

All of this was predicted by George Orwell in 1940 when he wrote of why young Europeans had turned to Hitler.

Whereas socialism and even capitalism, in a grudging way, have said to people, I offer you a good time, Hitler has said to them, I offer you struggle, danger, and death.

And as a result, a whole nation flings itself at his feet.

Yesterday, they marched with Hitler.

Today, they march with Hamas.

The world continues to spin, but human nature does not change.

And so Britain has been remade from without and within.

The gates were opened by the children of the lions.

The scavengers stormed the streets of London together.

They stand together, hundreds of thousands strong, waving the flags of the enemies of our civilization, tearing down those old statues from the tree-muffled squares.

Despite what Larkin wrote, the children certainly know it's a different country.

And so here we are, in London.

The shadows grow long.

The darkness encroaches.

The monuments of our past stand covered in graffiti of terror supporters, communists, and lechers.

The streets are filled with the stench of civilizational decay.

Innocents fear to go about at night.

Predators do not.

The lions move slowly, their limbs weary, their breath labored.

They are vulnerable.

The scavengers lurk in the shadows.

They gather in the darkness.

And then they attack.

One by one, they kill off the lions, the lions who are too tired to fight, too divided to unite, too old to roar.

Soon, very soon, the scavengers will master the world.

Unless.

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Chapter 1, The Way of the Lion, Rome, Italy.

You can feel the ghosts, and they stir.

Italy is one of the most beautiful countries on the planet.

And Rome is a treasure chest of a city.

It is a city of layers, layers of history piled atop one another, a glorious and haunting archaeological tell that serves as a living city.

Stroll past the Roman Colosseum, where Christians were fed to lions, under the Arch of Titus, where the Roman Emperor commemorated his destruction of the city of Jerusalem, and toward St.

Peter's Basilica, where Michelangelo's heartbreaking sculpture of a Jewish mother cradling the body of her sacrificed son still brings you to tears centuries later, and then make your way toward the Sistine Chapel.

The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel was controversial in its time.

Now it has become so well known that you would expect it to feel kitschy and overplayed.

Instead, in an age in which we have forgotten the voices of our ghosts, it speaks.

The depiction of God, that muscled old man in the sky, reaching down to Adam, the first man made in his image, the finger of the divine, nearly touching the finger of man, passing into him the power of creation, the unique power of man to shape the world in which he lives, the knowledge that with that power comes both risk and opportunity.

That gap between the fingers of God and Adam, some three quarters of an inch, reminds us that while man is made in God's image, he can never reach God's perfection and that man's understanding and God's remain forever separate.

The creation of man lies at the root of our civilization, for in creating man, God gave him both power and responsibility.

On this day, we are taping in the ruins of Ostia.

Our company, the Daily Wire, has commissioned a series on the ideas and history of Western civilization, starring Jordan Peterson.

Jordan has taped with me in ancient Jerusalem, with religious symbolist Jonathan Pago on the Via de la Rosa, with philosophy scholar Spencer Clavin in Athens, and with Bishop Robert Barron in Rome.

Today, we are to sit together and speak about the big ideas of the West, the things that make the West unique.

The history of the city goes back centuries before the birth of Christ.

The ruins that can be viewed today date back to the 3rd century BC.

Ostia became a vital port for the Roman Republic, but Ostia became most famous for her part in the religious awakening of St.

Augustine.

In his confessions, Augustine writes of speaking with his mother near the day of her death in a garden in Ostia, probably within sight of where we now talk.

Nearly two millennia later, we are in the city of Augustine, separated only by the passing breath of time.

It is cool as the sunlight diminishes.

In the quiet of the burgeoning evening, we discuss the value of revealed religion and Greek reason, of ritual and ideal, of the communal and the individual.

Citations of Aristotle and Augustine and Maimonides and Kant fill the round.

It's exciting and wonderful and joyous.

It makes me think of the Socratic notion that a good afterlife lies in an eternal search for true and false knowledge, as in this world, so also in the next.

The arena is empty, but the voices reverberate.

These are ideas that feel new, even though they have been put aside or forgotten in favor of glib existentialism or ironic nihilism or resigned determinism.

These are the ideas that formed the civilization that brought us everything from private property to the moon landing, everything from democracy to modern medicine.

These are ideas with meaning.

As the sun sets, we walk back to our cars thinking about the ideas that have animated a civilization.

Later, we'll meet up for dinner, talk about those ideas long into the evening.

But as we walk back to our cars, the sight is quiet.

We all feel the weight of Western civilization.

Rome and Greece and Jerusalem and London and Washington, tours and Lepanto and Vienna, the profane and the holy, the violence and the the peace, the bank and the cathedral.

You can feel them all.

Mostly, what you feel is the ghosts, the ghosts of the lions, and they stir.

Philosophy of the Lion

Lions have a philosophy, a deceptively simple one.

Often, it is not held as a philosophy, but rather as a way of life.

Few lions spend time thinking about the deep roots of their actions in the world.

They act in the world as lions, confidently and without compromise or apology.

Ask them their philosophy, and they may laugh at you.

They know, deep in their bones, what it is they believe, even if they cannot articulate it.

It does not take a philosopher to be a lion.

Yet lions do have an unstated, implicit philosophy, a set of principles by which they live.

It is a philosophy developed over the ages, handed down father to son and mother to daughter, a chain of teaching stretching back thousands of years.

That philosophy can be summed up in the contrast and symbiosis between Jerusalem and Athens.

Jerusalem, in the typical philosophical parlance, represents faith and revelation.

Athens represents reason and logic.

One could write an entire book on the interplay between Jerusalem and Athens.

In fact, I did.

Check out The Right Side of History for a more comprehensive investigation into the topic.

To boil down that broad philosophical investigation, however, the philosophy of the lion is based on three central principles.

One, there is a master plan, a logos, behind the universe.

Two, you are made in the image of God.

3.

You have true and meaningful moral duties in this world.

The first principle of the lion, there is a master plan.

In the time of the ancients, man was seen as a mere victim of the conspiratorial gods.

In the Iliad, human characters do their best to wage war and make love, to forge peace and protect their friends, but all their actions are thwarted or dictated secretly by this cadre of higher beings with their own corrupt motivations.

This divine conspiracy theory is enervating, and as we will see, it is still quite commonly held.

If you have no actual way to navigate a chaotic world controlled by external forces, resignation is the most plausible response.

As Achilles tells Priam, whose sons have been slaughtered at the hands of the Greeks, so the immortals spun our lives that we, we wretched men, live on to bear such torments, the gods live free of sorrows.

The pagan outlook leaves us with an inevitable choice between stoic resignation, depressive acknowledgement, and impotent rage.

If we are simply buffeted by the whims of the gods, there isn't all that much we can do about it.

In this vision, we are all inescapably weak and powerless, searching among the ruins for our daily bread.

In the words of Gloucester and King Lear, as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods.

They kill us for their sport.

By contrast, the first principle that there is a logic to the universe lies at the heart of biblical thinking.

It springs from the rejection of chaotic paganism.

The biblical worldview says that God stands at the heart of creation, that there is a master planner who stands behind the world, that the world we inhabit is his creation, and that God himself is unendingly concerned with our lives and our fates.

In the biblical vision, God is the source of all things, but he is good, and so is his world.

This first principle, the understandability of the universe, cannot be proven by science.

During the early 19th century, so the story goes, French astronomer Pierre-Simone de Laplace was having a conversation with French Emperor Napoleon, explaining to him his theory of the beginnings of the universe.

Where does God fit into all this?

Napoleon supposedly asked.

I have no need of such a hypothesis, de Laplace replied.

But de la Place was wrong.

Ironically enough, the starting point of science is the totally unprovable precept that the universe is understandable and logical.

Without an understandable universe of predictable rules, searching for such rules would be a waste of time.

That was Isaac Newton's point when he stated this most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets could could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being.

This being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all.

This does not mean that God's physical intervention is required to move the spheres, as ancient and medieval philosophers believed.

It means simply that the very notion of a causal universe of discernible rules is a faith assumption, and that anyone who seeks answers in the universe relies on that assumption, whether explicitly or implicitly.

Those who proclaim the uselessness of the divine rely on the divine in order to define their own purpose in life.

Every thriving civilization has a foundation in the first principle.

It is upon that foundation that lions build.

Lions build because they know that there is a foundation upon which to do so.

The second principle of the lion, you are made in the image of God.

The second principle that man has a personal capability again stems from biblical thinking.

Other cultures had vested great leaders with the power of creativity and choice.

Epic heroes and kings were given freedom of action, but the common man was either ignored or treated as a plaything of the fates.

The Bible, however, devolved authority and responsibility to each and every human being.

Genesis 127 dictates, God created man in his image.

In the image of God, he created him.

Male and female, he created them.

What does it mean to be created in the image of God?

It means to be stamped with the attribute that makes God unique, the capacity to take take creative action in the world.

This is the message of the story of Cain and Abel, in which God tests Cain by rejecting his sacrifice and accepting Abel's.

God asks Cain, why are you angry?

And why has your face fallen?

Surely, if you do right, there is uplift.

But if you do not do right, sin crouches at the door.

Its urge is toward you, but you can master it.

In the world of the biblical God, in short, man is capable of choice.

His success and failures are, in the main, on his own head.

God is not a conspiratorial force.

God is good, and so is the universe that he created, even if it is filled with difficulty and pain.

To thrive in the face of the challenges we face makes us a success.

To blame others, or nature, or God, is to fail to live up to our humanity.

As Moses tells the Jews in Deuteronomy, see, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction.

For I command you today to love the Lord your God, to walk in obedience to him, and to keep his commands, decrees, and laws.

Now choose life so that you and your children may live.

This principle, the capacity and responsibility of men and women, is deeply embedded in Greek thought as well.

Plato stated, managing, ruling, and deliberating, and all such things, could we justly attribute them to anything other than a soul and assert that they are peculiar to it?

Further, what about living?

Shall we not say that it is the work of a soul?

To the biblical admonition to choose wisely, the Greeks added the importance of acting rationally.

As Aristotle suggested, the work of a human being is an activity of soul in accord with reason.

Lions act with deliberation and reason.

Lions understand and shoulder their power of choice.

The third principle of the lion, you have moral duties.

The third principle, that we have a defined moral duty, a purpose in the world that is not our own and that we inherit, is the final piece of the philosophy of the lion.

The lion understands that we do not create our own moral system, that our very identity represents the intersection of personal autonomy and external duties we owe to God and one another.

The lion knows that there are objective moral duties in the world, proper ways of acting.

Again, this is implicit in the biblical worldview.

God gives us commandments because there is a right and there is a wrong.

The Bible does not believe in a morally relativistic universe in which men decide what is good in their own eyes.

The book of Proverbs states, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

Fools despise wisdom and discipline.

My son, heed the discipline of your father and do not forsake the instruction instruction of your mother.

The West relies not on free-floating reason in matters of morality, but on received tradition.

Society, says 18th-century British philosopher and politician Edmund Burke, is indeed a contract, but it is not a contract between free-willing atomistic individuals who come together only for some designated purpose from some phantom state of nature.

Society is, instead, the result of rules and rights evolved over the course of generations.

And this means we are bound to act rightly by a set of morals that precedes and will long outlast us.

Society and the state are to be looked on with other reverence, because it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature.

It is a partnership in all science, a partnership in all art, a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection.

As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

This does not mean that the rules of a society must never change, or that the third principle demands fundamentalist theocracy.

After all, every moral principle requires interpretation, but it does mean that morality must be pegged to something beyond the malleable reason of individuals.

This means respect for moral tradition.

G.K.

Chesterton explained the concept with something that came to be known as Chesterton's fence.

Foolish reformers see a fence in a field and not knowing what it is, quickly demand its removal.

The intelligent reformer, says Chesterton, answers, if you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away.

Go away and think.

Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.

We in the West are recipients of a moral tradition.

That tradition has proved its value over the course of millennia.

One need not be a God-believer to recognize this truth or to recognize the value of that tradition.

As economist Thomas Sowell writes in his masterwork, Knowledge and Decisions, history is a vast storehouse of experience from generations and centuries past.

So are traditions which distill the experiences of millions of other human beings over millennia of time.

Even myth can act as a transmitter of effective wisdom, says Sowell.

Science is no more certain to be correct than is myth.

Many scientific theories have been proven wrong by scientific methods, while great enduring beliefs which have achieved the status of myths usually contain some important, if partial truth.

Or, as Frederick A.

Hayek writes, men use tools called traditions and institutions because they are available to him him as a product of cumulative growth without ever having been designed by any one mind.

And neither Seoul nor Hayek could properly be called a biblical believer.

In the viewpoints of both Jerusalem and Athens, acting consonant with moral duty is the obligation of a human being and brings with it fulfillment.

As King Solomon says in Ecclesiastes, the sum of the matter, when all is said and done, revere God and observe his commandments.

Both Plato and Aristotle believed in the natural law, that nature itself was designed toward a telos, an end, by an underlying logic, a logos.

To achieve happiness was to order oneself in coordination with the universe through the use of reason.

This was Plato's answer to the challenge of Glaucon, who asked why a person ought to bother being moral.

Human beings are improperly ordered if they act immorally.

Lions fulfill their purpose.

As Aristotle put it, what then prevents one from calling happy someone who is active in accord with complete virtue and who is adequately equipped with external goods, not for any chance time but in a complete life.

Virtue can only be instilled through practice.

Some are born with fewer temptations towards sin.

They are certainly lucky.

But everyone has the capacity to cultivate virtue.

This is Adam's first task in the Garden of Eden, to serve it and to guard it.

Virtue does not grow wild.

It must be cultivated.

Whether building or destroying, lions take responsibility for their actions.

Ethics of the Fathers teaches, in a place where there are no men, strive to be a man.

We are all called to the work.

Rudyard Kipling writes in his poem, The Glory of the Garden.

There's not a pair of legs so thin, there's not a head so thick, there's not a hand so weak and white, nor yet a heart so sick, but it can find some needful job that's crying to be done, for the glory of the garden glorifieth everyone.

To sacrifice in the name of cultivating the garden, no matter your personal feelings, in spite of your own interests, this is the way of the lion.

In August Wilson's play, Fences, Troy, a disappointed former Negro League star relegated because of racial discrimination to life as a blue-collar garbage man, is confronted by his son Corey.

Troy and Corey constantly buttheads, particularly because Troy opposes Corey's desire to seek a football scholarship.

In the most memorable scene in the play, Corey demands to know why Troy doesn't like him.

Troy's answer is a perfect embodiment of the third principle.

Like you?

I go out of here every morning, bust my butt, putting up with them crackers every day because I like you?

You about the biggest fool I ever saw.

It's my job.

It's my responsibility.

You understand that?

A man got to take care of his family.

You live in my house, sleep you behind on my bedclothes, fill you belly up with my food because you my son, you my flesh and blood, not because I like you, because it's my duty to take care of you.

I owe a responsibility to you.

Don't you try and go through life, worry about if somebody like you or not.

You best be making sure they doing right by you.

Of course, one could describe fulfillment of the third principle as love.

As Golda sings in Fiddler on the Roof when asked by her husband, Tevya, whether she loves him, for 25 years I've lived with him, fought with him, starved with him.

If that's not love, what is?

Duty is love, and love duty.

In Hebrew, the word for love is written ahava.

The root of the word is hav, to give.

Love and duty are not merely intertwined.

They are one and the same.

The book of John makes the same point.

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

We have no greater love.

than to live our lives for our friends, our family, our children, and our civilization.

The world is a place filled with those who shirk duty, who blame the world for their own failures.

In that world, the lions are those who do the opposite.

They take the load upon their own shoulders.

They bear the burden and reap the rewards of that task.

They look in the mirror and ask, what more can I do?

While visiting Jerusalem, I prayed next to a 21-year-old soldier in the Israel Defense Forces, or IDF.

He was a kid, closer to the age of my 10-year-old daughter than to my age, and yet he had been called to serve.

While in Gaza fighting Hamas, he had been gravely wounded in an explosion in Zaitoun.

He'd been airlifted to Siroca Medical Center, where both of his legs had been removed as well as one hand.

Doctors placed him in a medically induced coma where he remained for two months.

After praying next to this young hero, I turned to leave.

He tapped me on the arm from his motorized wheelchair and asked, I have a question, Ben.

I nodded and gestured for him to go on.

How else can I help?

He asked.

What's your advice for what more I can do?

This attitude isn't unique to Israel, of course.

It's the attitude of every parent who goes the extra mile, every worker who stays the extra hour, and every Western soldier who looks into the face of evil and mounts up.

It is the message of Isaiah when he takes up the challenge of God.

Then I heard the voice of my sovereign saying, whom shall I send?

Who will go for us?

And I said, here I am, send me.

These are the lions.

The philosophy of the lion is clear and direct and good.

There is a logic to the universe.

You are created in the image of God, which means that you have the creative power to choose.

And that means you have responsibility for your choices.

The world is a place filled with moral duties, duties that spring not from your own desires and feelings, but from God, from tradition, and from reason.

Fulfill those duties, and you will fill your life with meaning.

All of this presupposes a society.

But who are the lions who comprise this society, this civilization?

We turn to that question next.

Alrighty, folks, I hope that you really enjoyed that.

The rest of the book, I think, is really important.

I would really appreciate you picking up a copy, sharing it with friends, family, your kids, everybody else.

And we'll see you here on Tuesday for more.