East of Eden | Ben Shapiro’s Book Club

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John Steinbeck's East of Eden is a story about what it means to be an American, but it's about much more than that.

It's about the eternal battle between good and evil within the human soul, the question of fate and free will, the difficulty of sloughing off the bad decisions of the past in favor of better decisions today.

It's about guilt and forgiveness, faith and redemption.

We're going to to dive into all of that in just a moment.

First, let's take a look at some of your thoughts about this book from the amazing book club community we've built over here.

So Debbie says, hey, Ben, thank you so much for hosting this book club.

I've been enjoying it since its inception.

I use it for my homeschool daughter's literature class.

Thank you for all you do and the folks at Daily Wire.

So really appreciate that.

We're hoping that a lot of parents start using materials like this one to educate their kids because frankly, I think it's a better angle on a lot of what your kids are going to be reading than whatever their teachers are telling them in public school.

Lisa says, hey, Ben, love the book club.

I listen to the audiobooks normally.

Do you think I lose a lot by not reading them?

No, actually, I think audiobooks are quite wonderful.

Typically, I only listen to fiction books.

When I listen to nonfiction, I really like to take notes and make sure that I'm noting the facts that I want to bring up for further use.

But audiobooks for fiction, I think, can be terrific.

Whitney says, hey, Ben, would it be possible to create a database for DW book members to connect locally?

I think it would be fun to have in-person conversations with others as we read these books together.

I think that's a wonderful idea.

And obviously, we'd love to use this as a sort of community building tool.

All right, so let's jump into East of Eden.

This is one of my favorite books.

It actually is my wife's favorite book.

It's a beautiful book.

It's a beautiful book because as we have been pointing out on this book club over and over and over again, to truly understand most great Western literature, it has to concern things like life and death and eternity and meaning.

And really, in the end, in the West, what that means is a fundamental reliance on biblical principles and themes.

And you can see that in East of Eden, which is obviously based around the stories of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel.

Those are the two big stories that East of Eden is based around.

If you don't know those stories, then it's almost impossible to read East of Eden in any sort of literate or intelligent way.

Because the tale that John Steinbeck is telling here is about the universality of the themes of brotherly hatred and brotherly love, and about the love between a man and a woman or between a man and his son, right?

The sort of shifting.

of the stories and the weaving of these into Salinas Valley, which is where Steinbeck sets much of his work, it's quite beautiful.

It's quite moving.

When you reach the end of the book, if you're not moved, I think that's sort of a rarity.

So let's talk about East of Eden.

So according to Steinbeck, the Bible is not predominantly a book about God.

It's really a book about how families work.

And when you read the book of Genesis, you see this, right?

The book of Genesis is a very weird book because again,

in the Jewish faith, one of the big questions that gets asked in the Talmud is, why does the Bible begin with the book of Genesis?

It seems almost completely useless, right?

In terms of the biblical narrative, really you should start with Exodus, right?

Here's the formation of the people, or maybe you start with late in the book of Exodus, the giving of the laws, right?

You start with the actual Mount Sinai event, and then you learn all of the laws you're supposed to live by.

But instead, there's this entire first book, and it's all just about God's creation of man and familial relationships and the growth of the family of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and how that really starts at the very beginning.

Why does God start the Bible at the very beginning?

And the answer is because family, familial relationships, interpersonal relationships lie at the root of not just meaning in life, but also our place in the universe and our relationship with God himself.

So, according to Steinbeck, the Bible is a book primarily about family, which again, it's a surprising revelation because most people who deal with the Bible don't tend to think of it in that way.

But that's also why the stuff that you tend to remember from the Bible is the Bible stories, because we are creatures who are built for the art of storytelling.

Ever since people were sitting around in caves around campfires and trying to roast raw meat, they were telling each other stories.

And those stories are what unifies.

Those stories unify us.

So East of Eden retells the stories of Cain and Abel.

Samuel, one of the main characters of the book, who's not present in the movie, we can talk about the movie a little bit later because the movie really only covers the second half of the book and it's got a beautiful score, but it's not exactly, I think, a great representation of the book.

Samuel's completely left out of it.

Samuel points out, quote, two stories have haunted us and followed us from our beginning.

We carry them along with us like invisible tales, the story of original sin and the story of Cain and Abel.

And that seems pretty much right.

If you view the lens of politics, which we do daily, you know, on my show, if you view it through original sin and the story of Cain and Abel, namely sort of brotherly hatred, inability to learn a lesson, inability to recognize that your own shortcomings are your fault and not the fault of the guy standing next to you.

This has significant political implications.

And then the original sin story, the idea that we're not created good, that we have these desires and needs inside of ourselves that are directed at the bad and that one of the things that civilization is about is curbing those desires.

So much of politics has to be viewed through the lens of these stories, which is why they are eternally true.

I mean, as my friend Jordan Peterson is constantly talking about, even if you're not a Bible believer in the sense that you don't believe that God gave the Bible on Mount Sinai to Moses, you don't even have to believe in the divinity of the Bible to recognize the eternal truths that are embedded in its stories.

East of Eden retells the story.

Steinbeck says this, quote, humans are caught in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too, in a net of good and evil.

Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will will be the fabric of our last.

And this despite any changes we may impose on field and river and mountain, on economy and manners.

There is no other story.

A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions, was it good or was it evil?

Have I done well or ill?

It's a pretty biblical ethos from John Steinbeck.

And Steinbeck is sort of a fascinating character because his early career, he was a pretty loud, open, and proud socialist.

Most of his writings were very much directed toward class conflicts.

The grapes of wrath, of course, is this famous socialistic novel talking about why government needed to care for people during the Great Depression.

One of the great ironies of the Grapes of Wrath is that when they made that into a movie with Henry Fonda, that movie showed these very, very poor Americans driving across, these Okis driving across the United States in a Model T.

It was actually banned in the Soviet Union because the idea that poor people had Model T's was astonishing to the communist mind.

Communism was like, wait, hold up.

You're saying that the bad capitalists are way richer than the good communists?

That's very, very weird.

Anyway, Steinbeck, over the course of his career, sort of becomes more and more conservative.

He feels like the left leaves him because he feels like their manners and morals are moving away from the traditional underpinnings of the United States.

And this is something that you can see in the movement of the left across time.

And Steinbeck reflects this.

If you look at the manners and mores of even liberals of the 1950s versus manners and mores of liberals of the 2020s, they are widely different.

And it was those shared manners and mores that allowed for kind of rich and complex debate over a variety of public issues.

When you lose even that commonality, things tend to fall apart pretty quickly.

Politically, Steinbeck was really, really heterodox.

He started off as an actual fellow traveler of the communists, but by the time he wrote Winter of Our Discontent, it's a pretty conservative book.

And there's some themes in East of Eden that make it a pretty conservative book as well.

We'll get to that in a moment.

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Okay, so the Cain and Abel story is told over a couple of different times in the book.

It's first told in the form of the stories of

Cyrus, Charles, and Adam.

So Cyrus is the father.

Charles and Adam are his sons.

Adam, of course, becomes the progenitor of the next sort of Cain and Abel story.

Cyrus is both sort of God and the devil in the book.

He's described as something of a devil, wild by nature, a guy who likes drinking and gambling and whoring.

And of course, he's a congenital condo.

He's a liar, right?

He tries to play up his war wound.

He somehow promotes that into

high political office.

It looks very much as though he has built the United States Army out of significant sums of money.

Adam doesn't love Cyrus in the way that Charles loves Cyrus.

Cyrus is a disciplinarian, and Adam thinks that Cyrus is a fraud.

And this, of course, breaks his view of Cyrus.

And the book says, when a child first catches adults out, when it first walks into his grave little head that adults don't have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentence is just, his world falls into panic desolation.

The gods are fallen.

All safety is gone.

There's one sure thing about the fall of gods.

They do not fall little.

They crash and shatter.

They sink deeply into green muck.

It's a tedious job to build them up again.

They never quite shine.

The child's world is never quite whole again.

It's an aching kind of growing.

So Cyrus loves Adam.

He doesn't love Charles.

Adam doesn't love Cyrus, but Charles does love Cyrus.

Adam thinks that Cyrus doesn't love him because Cyrus is very harsh with him, but Cyrus tells him, you're not clever.

You don't know what you want.

You have no proper fierceness.

You let other people walk over you.

Sometimes I think you're a weakling who will never amount to a dog turd.

Does that answer your question?

I love you better.

I always have.

This may be a bad thing to tell you, but it's true.

I love you better.

Else, why would I have

given myself the trouble of hurting you?

Shut your mouth and go to supper.

I'll talk to you tomorrow night.

My leg aches.

It's that unjustifiable preference that Cyrus Cyrus has for Adam that leads to the conflict between Adam and Charles, right?

This is the Cain and Abel story.

The idea in the Cain and Abel story is that Cain and Abel both offer sacrifices to the Lord.

Cain is actually the first one with the idea to offer a sacrifice to the Lord.

And it says that he offers his animals

and that Abel offers

the best of his fruit, and God accepts Abel's sacrifice, but he rejects.

Cain's sacrifice and Cain doesn't know why.

And so he kills.

And so he kills Abel.

right that's the story in the Bible in this particular story it's because Cyrus for no reason that we can completely discern loves Adam that Charles decides that he needs to kill him because Charles is superior to Adam in pretty much every way but he doesn't have any instinctive goodness and so he can't understand why exactly his sacrifice has been rejected he says look at his birthday I took six bits I bought him a knife made in Germany three blades and a score and a corkscrew pearl handled where's the knife Do you ever see him use it?

Did he give it to you?

I never even saw him hone it.

Have you got that knife in your pocket?

What did he do with it?

Thanks, he said, like that.

And that's the last I heard of a pearl-handled German knife that costs six bits.

Meanwhile, Charles observes Adam gives Cyrus a mongrel pup.

You picked up in the woodlot.

That dog sleeps in his room.

So Charles becomes in exile in his own house.

He, at one point, tries to kill Adam.

He ends up marking himself like Cain after Adam leaves the house.

Adam sort of abscond.

East of Eden, right?

Adam leaves.

And Charles sticks around, but it's not Eden for him.

It's sort of hellish.

Charles is rooted to the earth, even though he's the one who actually ends up in sort of an effective exile.

He stays at the farm for the rest of his life.

Adam never believes truly that his father loves him, even though his father really did, but Charles really does love his father.

Adam

doesn't, he believes in his father.

He decides to sort of construct this image of his father, but he doesn't love his father.

Charles does love.

His father, Adam, says, quote, Maybe if I had loved him, I would have been jealous of him.

You were.

Maybe loves makes you suspicious and doubting.

Is it true that when you love a woman, you're never sure?

You're never sure of her because you aren't sure of yourself.

I can see it pretty clearly.

I can see how you loved him and what it did to you.

I didn't love him.

Maybe he loved me.

He tested me.

He hurt me.

He punished me.

Finally, he sent me out like a sacrifice, maybe to make something for myself.

But he didn't love you.

And so he had faith in you.

Maybe, why?

It's a kind of reverse.

And so the first Cain and Abel story is that Charles is unable to learn the lesson of what he's done wrong because he really doesn't think he's done anything wrong.

Adam never really understands that his father loves him.

And so he's unable, as it turns out, to sort of recover from that lack of

fatherly love okay so that that's the first iteration of the cain and abel story it's a tragic iteration because cain ends up exiled or he marks himself ends up exiled ends up dying alone even though he's wealthy he never gets married and of course as we'll see he ends up committing the gravest kind of sin against his brother worse than killing him he ends up obviously sleeping with his brother's new wife which brings us to the story of adam and eve so this is retold in East of Eden in the form of Kathy and Adam.

So Kathy is a fully fascinating and enigmatic character.

And Kathy is the embodiment of pure evil.

So critics of the the book have always said Kathy doesn't get sort of a full picture, but that assumes that you can't have a full picture of somebody who's fully evil.

Some people are just sociopathic, sociopathic, rather.

Some people are actually just evil.

Kathy is just evil.

He tries to sort of explain how damaged she is, but there's no rationale for her being as damaged as she is.

And there's no way he can really explain it.

That's one of the things, actually, I love about the book.

One of the things that we try to do.

in a lot of modern literature, I mean, stuff written right now, this is still modern.

This is written back in the 50s, but the modern, modern, like stuff written in the last five years is every anti-hero has to be treated as though there's a rationale for why they are the way they are.

One of the things that you'll notice actually in biblical literature is we don't do that.

We don't do a lot of backstory.

People's choices are what make them who they are.

We don't get Moses' childhood story, except for the fact that we know that he was put in a river by mom, but we don't find out how he grew up to make him who he is.

We don't really find out what made Esau bad.

And we don't find out these things.

We don't find out why Cain turned to the wrong side.

Because the idea in the Bible is you're responsible for your choices and your choices make you who you are.

When it comes to Kathy, we get her backstory, but there's nothing there that answers why she is the way that she is.

And so that remains mysterious.

And the truth is, there are a lot of human beings who are like that.

And we can try to suss out why they are the way they are and pretend we have solutions for all human beings, but we really don't.

And so when we see act of tremendous evil in the world, which we see on a fairly regular basis, right?

When we see a mass shooting, for example, the temptation is, how did the kid got like this?

Well, sometimes the kid was just like this.

And that's kind of the story of Kathy, right?

Kathy in the book acts as both the snake and Eve in the biblical narrative.

Steinbeck says that she was, quote, a total representative of Satan.

If you can believe in saints, you can believe somebody can be all good.

You've got to believe that somebody can be all bad.

So Steinbeck in the book describes her this way.

He says, I believe there are monsters born in the world of human parents.

And just as there are physical monsters, can there not be mental or psychic monsters born?

To a monster, the norm must seem monstrous since everyone is normal to himself.

To the inner monster, it must be ever more obscure since he has no visible thing to compare with others.

To a man born without a conscience, a soul-stricken man must seem ridiculous.

To a criminal, honesty is foolish.

It is my belief that Kathy Ames was born with the tendencies or lack of them which drove and forced her all of her life.

Some balance wheel was misweighted, some gear out of ratio.

She was not like other people, never was from birth.

And there are people who are like this.

And one of the points that he makes that, again, is very telling about our politics is this point about psychological projection.

If you're not normal, if you have real problems, you tend to project those problems onto everybody else.

In politics, this takes the form of what we call emotivism, which is I'm going to attribute a motive to you that actually I hold.

So you see this in politics.

You couldn't hold what you believe unless you're a racist.

And you couldn't believe that unless you're a bad person.

Or maybe we just disagree.

But if you are the sort of person who acts on the basis of emotion, you tend to attribute emotion to everybody else.

So Kathy has no sense of morality, no sense of remorse.

She really has no sense of regret.

She uses everybody around her.

She uses her lies for profit.

And of course, she uses sex as her chief tool.

And she's, Steinbeck says, what freedom men and women could have were they not constantly tricked and trapped and enslaved and tortured by their sexuality.

The only drawback in that freedom is that without it, it, one would not be human, one would be a monster.

And she's not.

She's the fully liberated woman, Kathy.

And believe it or not, there's been a, for those who read the book, this makes no sense, there's been a post hoc attempt to turn Kathy into a sort of feminist liberationist hero.

There's some analysts who say, well, you know, this is just a traditionalist book.

And Kathy really is good.

Kathy is just the liberated woman who doesn't wish to live under the patriarchy.

There's something deeper to be said about the fact that there are people who are literally trying to turn a satanic character into something good on the basis of feminism, but we can leave that for another time.

So from the very earliest, Kathy is using sex as a tool in her arsenal.

She seduces a headmaster.

She drives him to suicide.

She murders her own parents in their home.

She joins a whorehouse.

Kathy, it turns out, is too perverse even for the whorehouse.

Like Steinbeck has sort of a peculiarly time-bound vision of the whorehouse as sort of a place of warmth and laughter and light, which, again, whorehouses were a fairly common part of everyday American life back in the 1900s, 10s, 20s.

But Kathy is too perverse even for the whorehouse, right?

She's into BDSM and then photographing men and blackmailing them.

As it turns out, her big weakness is that she's unable completely to understand other human beings.

And so when people treat her with kindness, she treats them as weak, which is exactly what happens with Adam.

That's why Kathy's afraid of Charles, because Charles also seems to have

that kind of moral sentiment missing.

And so he fully understands her.

He says about her, there's something I can almost recognize.

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Charles can't see the flaw in himself, but he can see it in others.

But Adam is innocent, and so he can't see the flaw in Kathy at all, which is why Kathy is really able to destroy Adam.

Adam builds Kathy up into something she she really isn't, the sort of innocent and virginal character she isn't.

He keeps saying that she's a child, a helpless child.

He takes her to Selena's.

Kathy is so evil that she tries to get an abortion of her kids out of simple hatred for life.

A doctor says, quote, you must not destroy life.

I'm telling you this.

You're going to have that baby.

Do you know what the law in the state has to say about abortion?

Very pro-life book.

In modern parlance, the idea is, well, why shouldn't she be able to have the abortion?

I mean, after all, a woman's right to choose.

But those who have a moral bone in their body recognize that abortion for no reason other than pure malice is, in fact, a grave evil.

Adam ignores all of this.

He wants to build his Eden in Salinas Valley.

And even though Samuel

Hamilton sees him and tells him that Kathy's going to spoil his Eden,

he says, What does Eve say to that?

She has a say in Eve's delight in apples.

Adam says, Not this one.

Samuel sees through her,

but Adam totally cannot.

And so she plans and she plans, and then, of course, she betrays him.

On the day that she gives birth to both Cal and Aaron, her sons, she bites Samuel's hand, and

very snake-like imagery says her sharp teeth fastened on his hand across the back and up the palm there of the little finger.

Samuel cried out in pain, tried to pull his hand away.

Her jaw was set, her head twisted and turned, mangling his hand the way a terrier worries a sack.

Later, Samuel, of course, gets more obvious.

He describes it as a snake bite.

And then, of course, she shoots Adam on the way out the front door, stinging him, essentially.

She says, any woman can do anything to you.

You're a fool.

And effectively, the shot kills Adam, at least temporarily.

And Lee, his Chinese cook, is the person who ends up basically saving him.

He takes over the fathering duties for Cal and Aaron.

The two real heroes of the book are Samuel and Lee, actually.

And Samuel has to shake Adam physically out of his apathy.

He actually has to attempt to kill him, to teach him that he needs to essentially be a father.

He says, you've not bought these boys nor stolen them nor passed any bit of them.

You have them by some strange and lovely dispensation.

Adam wakes up and when he wakes up,

he sees both of his kids for the first time.

And this leads to the second iteration of the Cain and Abel story.

So the story of Cain and Abel, this is where the metaphor becomes full-blown and really not only beautiful, but quite deep, a little more deeply analyzed.

Lee does a full biblical analysis, again, in Jordan Peterson style, in the book.

He talks about Cain and Abel.

He says, I think this is the best known story in the world because it's everybody's story.

I think it's the symbol story of the human soul.

I'm feeling my way now.

Don't jump on me if I'm not clear.

The greatest terror a child can have is that he's not loved.

Rejection is the hell he fears.

I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection.

With rejection comes anger.

With anger, some kind of crime and revenge for the rejection.

And with the crime, guilt.

And that's the story of mankind.

I think if rejection could be amputated, the human would not be what he is.

But that's not the whole story because everybody is going to feel the pain, right?

Everybody's going to be, you can't just get rid of rejection and then hope everything is going to be all better.

Sort of a, from a political point of view, it's a left-wing point of view, right?

If we just got rid of all the bad things in the world, everybody would be happy, but that's not reality.

So Lee then actually translates the Hebrew for the Cain and Abel story, and he comes to this conclusion, and this is, of course, the conclusion of the book.

He says, don't you see the American Standard Translation orders men to triumph over sin, and you can call this an ignorance.

If you go back and you read the actual biblical text, right?

It says in the biblical text that after Cain

slay, after Cain does not have his sacrifice accepted by God, God says that you have the ability to triumph over sin.

He uses it as an object lesson for Cain.

And Cain rejects the object lesson and kills Abel.

So the question for human beings is, do you learn the object lesson?

So here's the analysis of the biblical text from Lee.

He says, the American Standard Translation orders men to triumph over sin, and you can call sin ignorance.

The King James Translation makes a promise in thou shalt, meaning men will surely triumph over sin.

The Hebrew word, the word Tim Shal, thou mayest.

That gives a choice.

It might be the most important word in the world.

That says the way is open.

That throws it right back on a man.

For if thou mayest, it is also true, thou mayest not.

Don't you see?

That makes a man great.

It gives him stature with the gods.

For in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother, he still has the great choice.

He can choose his course.

He can fight through it and win.

I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul.

It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe.

It is always attacked and never destroyed because thou mayest.

Again, deep biblical imagery and deep biblical and eternal lessons here.

And that is the lesson that Cal has to learn, right?

Cal has the same sort of drives that Charles does.

He's more intelligent.

He has more of a moral spine than Charles does.

He does have that same moral drive that he gets from Adam.

Aaron, oddly enough, seems to have kind of an instinctive moral drive that's almost immoral in the fact that it can't see another way.

It doesn't understand the moral struggle.

So, if you don't actually know the moral struggle, are you moral when you do the moral thing?

That's a serious question.

Cal struggles with morality and eventually triumphs.

Aaron never seems to struggle with morality, and so he seems self-righteous in the book.

You know, when

Cal acts out at Aaron out of that desire to hurt, you know, a person who he believes has sort of received unearned privilege.

But Cal also has the ability for remorse, and he has that from the time that he's a kid.

He said, a pain pierced Cal's heart.

His planning suddenly seemed mean and dirty to him.

He knew his brother had found him out.

He felt a longing for Aaron to love him.

He felt lost and hungry.

He didn't know what to do.

And

he prays.

I mean, right?

He gets down on his knees and he prays.

He says, dear Lord, let me be like Aaron.

Don't make me mean.

I don't want to be.

I don't want to be mean.

I don't want to be lonely.

Aaron is really not capable of true love aside from anything other than the visions in his head.

And so he ends up actually ignoring the girl that he should love in favor of a vision of her that he's built up.

Cal, meanwhile, is struggling between his sort of dark side and his light side.

And

Adam, when he rejects Cal, and he does so for bad reasons, okay, Steinbeck tries to make it clear why Adam rejects Cal, but there's no real good reason, right?

Cal doesn't do anything wrong.

When he presents the sacrifice to Adam of the money, Remember, Adam loses all of his money in an ill-fated attempt to freeze vegetables and ship them across the country.

And Cal decides to essentially make the money back up to Adam as a gift.

And he does so by buying vegetable, by grain futures.

He knows that World War I is coming.

And so he works with one of Samuel Hamilton's sons to buy futures.

And he invests in the futures market.

And so he ends up making money when the war breaks out.

And Adam says, well, I can't make money on the war.

And Cal says, well,

you didn't.

I did.

But Adam says, well, you know, it'll look bad.

I'm the one who's actually picking people to go to war.

You see why there's sort of a political vision here, but the rejection is unjustified.

The simple fact, by the way, the amount of money that he tries to give to Adam is pretty significant.

It's like $300,000 in today's world.

Adam rejects Cal, and he accuses him of robbing farmers, which, of course, is not true.

And then he compares him to Aaron.

This is truly unjust.

And so Cal takes away from it that Adam doesn't love him, but the truth is that Adam does love Cal, right?

Whereas it was clear that Cyrus does not love Charles.

Adam does love Cal.

And maybe Cal's understanding of that is why he is able, in the end, to redeem himself.

And

Adam ends up, Cal ends up essentially punishing Aaron by telling him that his mother is a whore and Aaron can't handle it.

And Aaron runs away to the army and he ends up being killed.

And Cal blames himself.

And Lee sort of tries to get him out of that.

mindset.

He says, we're a violent people, Cal.

If our ancestors had not been that, they would have stayed in their home plots in the other world and starved over the squeezed-out soil.

We all have that heritage, no matter what old land our fathers left.

All colors and blends of Americans have somehow the same tendencies.

It's a breed selected out by accident.

We're over-brave and over-fearful.

We're kind and cruel as children.

We're over-friendly, at the same time, frightened of strangers.

We boast, we're impressed.

We're over-sentimental, realistic.

We're mundane and materialistic.

Do you know any other nation that acts for ideals?

That's what we are, Cal.

All of us, you aren't very different.

And so that's why this is a very American story.

And at the very end, obviously, Cal seeks out forgiveness from his father.

And in an incredible, you know, moving segment at the very end of the book, this is the end of the book.

And it really is quite beautiful.

Lee brings Cal to see his father.

His father has basically

fallen into complete disrepair since the death of Aaron.

And he has a stroke and he's dying pretty obviously.

And Lee brings Cal to see his father to get his forgiveness.

And Lee says, Your son is marked with guilt out of himself, out of himself, almost more than he can bear.

Don't crush him with rejection.

Don't crush him, Adam.

Adam, give him your blessing.

Don't leave him alone with his guilt.

Adam, can you hear me?

Give him your blessing.

And says, Adam looked up with sick weariness.

His lips parted and failed and tried again.

Then his lungs filled.

He expelled the air.

His lips

combed the rushing sigh.

His whispered words seemed to hang in the air, Tim Shell.

His eyes closed and he slept.

So the blessing is recognizing that Cal is capable of redeeming himself.

So why is this such an American story?

It's an American story because, again, we struggle in America with exactly these impulses.

The impulse of good and evil.

We're a biblically believing country.

We're a country that believes in the power of the human spirit to triumph above its own flaws flaws and also in our ability to control the evil within ourselves.

We actually don't believe in America that people are born inherently good.

That is a completely foreign ideal.

When you read the Federalist papers, this is absolutely clear.

The Federalist papers say openly, right, James Madison says this.

He says, men were born angels, we wouldn't need a government.

If men were born devils, no government would suffice.

And Federalist 51,

that basic idea, which is a biblical idea, That's what makes us Americans, that we have these struggles, but we can still overcome.

Tim Schell should be kind of the slogan of the American experiment.

And that's the the story of the country.

This Steinbeck, again, I love his writing.

He's just a beautifully clear writer.

He says, they landed with no money, no equipment, no tools, no credit, particularly with no knowledge of the new country and no technique for using it.

I don't know whether it was a divine stupidity or a great faith that let them do it.

Surely such venture is nearly gone from the world, and the families did survive and grow.

They had a tool or a weapon that is also nearly gone, or perhaps it's only dormant for a while.

It's argued that because they believed thoroughly in a just moral God, they could put their faith there and let the smaller securities take care of themselves.

But I think that because they trusted themselves and respected themselves as individuals, because they knew beyond doubt that they were valuable and potentially moral units, because of this, they could give God their own courage and dignity and then receive it back.

Such things have disappeared because men do not trust themselves anymore.

And when it happens, there is nothing left except perhaps to find some strong, sure man, and even though he may be wrong, to dangle from his coattails.

That's pretty clairvoyant stuff there from John Steinbeck about the fact that when people lose faith in their ability, when they lose Tim Shell, they fall immediately for the demagogue.

And that really is the story of East of Eden.

Okay, so let's look at some of your questions and some of your answers.

So let's start with this.

What drives Kate?

This seems to activate a lot of the folks who

responded to the book.

Kate is really difficult to understand.

Kathy, again, is inscrutable.

So Pat has a response.

Greetings from Scotland.

I want to comment on what drives the character of Kathy.

Kathy obviously has a personality disorder characterized mainly by a lack of empathy.

She has no feeling for what other people feel.

As a result of this, she's a very dangerous person because she combines that quality with great intelligence and physical beauty.

So she is able to manipulate others very easily.

And this causes a complex of emotions to rise up in her.

One is contempt because she finds other people so easy to use as pawns.

But secondly, she also realizes that she is missing something in her emotional makeup.

She doesn't feel the warmth and the human connection that others do.

And this both angers her and frightens her.

So this combination of characteristics results in this sociopathic personality that is so very dangerous.

And as a side note, I was a prosecutor for 15 years in Orange County, California, and saw this personality many times.

These are the most dangerous people around.

And sadly, many of us are like Adam and don't see the danger and the darkness that lurks beneath the surface.

I mean, I think that's one of the best character analysis I've ever heard of any character, let alone Kathy.

That's really good.

And again, I think that the reason that you're able to see that is if you've dealt with criminals, then...

That's what Kathy is.

Another response on the same question from Kate.

Here's what Kate had to say.

I think Kate is motivated by pure selfishness, and this can be most easily seen when comparing her with Mrs.

Hamilton, as I did early in the novel.

Liza Hamilton represents many of the good qualities of womanhood, but most of all, she's defined by her selflessness.

She lives entirely for her family and her faith.

And Kate, on the other hand, lives entirely without consideration for the well-being of any other human being besides herself.

And this

this care for others, this

idea that you can put others above yourself, your own interests, is the something that Kate is missing, the thing that she can't quite grasp even in her final moments.

I mean, obviously, I think that that's also a good character analysis.

I mean, Kate is, again, the fact that she's so not mysterious is what has made people try to suss a mystery out of her.

And Steinbeck wasn't trying to do anything extraordinarily complex with Kate.

I think people are fascinated by the question of human evil, but sometimes that question doesn't have an answer.

And again, I think that one of the mistakes that we make in modern society is to sort of either pathologize everything and pretend that evil does not exist because it's all just mental illness, or on the other hand, suggest that evil has to be the outgrowth of some sort of mistreatment in youth and therefore justifiable or explainable.

I don't think that's always how human evil works.

One of the other questions that I asked was to compare and contrast Samuel Hamilton and Lee.

So in the movie version, Samuel Hamilton really is not a character.

He doesn't exist.

And Lee is much more peripheral in the movie than he is in the book.

Again, the movie is directed by Ilya Kazan.

It stars

James Dean.

And it's,

like I say, beautiful score, really lush.

Doesn't do justice to the book in any way, shape, or form.

Samuel Hamilton and Lee are both quite fascinating.

What makes them different, of course, is that Samuel Hamilton is able to act as sort of a patriarch for an entire family and take that upon himself.

Lee is never really able to do that.

Lee is so ensconced in his own ideas, and he's happier with his own ideas that he's never able to make the human connection with a woman that Samuel is able to make, even with all the sacrifices.

It's clear that Samuel and his wife see the world in completely different ways, but they're able, because they

share a set of values, particularly with regard to their kids, to build a family.

Lee is an indispensable part of the household.

He's the person who really does raise Cal and Aaron.

He acts as their surrogate dad.

But by the same token, Lee is really not capable.

I mean, there's one point where he leaves and he is able to,

there's one point where he leaves to try to form his own family and he's unable to do that.

He's been too crippled by sort of his experiences being ostracized by society.

He has to return to Eden, even if Eden tends to be a place where he is a little bit infantilized.

And in fact, he has to deliberately infantilize himself in Eden

in order to be what he wants to be.

One of the questions asked was whether passivity was a sin.

And this is one of the main questions of the the book with regard to Adam.

Adam is a very difficult character to like.

He's incredibly passive throughout the entirety of the book.

He's not active.

The portions where he is active, it's for very short periods of time, and he seems delusional when he's being active.

And that passivity,

very often we treat passivity as though it's not a sin, but it seems to be treated as though it is a sin here.

Joshua has a response.

Hey, Ben, I think this is an interesting question that this book raises.

Is passivity sin?

And it reminded me of the verse in the book of James in the New Testament that says, so whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.

So how do we square that with this sort of postmodern age cry that says, silence is violence?

And obviously that's a moniker that the left loves to use and champion.

Is that the same thing we're talking about here?

Silence is violence?

Or is the New Testament and maybe even this book presenting a different take on that kind of question and thought.

Yeah, so I mean, I think that the idea here is that passivity can be a sin, but isn't always, right?

It's not necessary that you sound off on everything.

It's not necessary you get involved in everything.

But when you see a true human evil taking place, or when you have a responsibility, then when you have a duty, then obviously passivity is a sin.

I mean, typically in American law, that's the way that this works.

If you have no duty, you have no duty.

But when you do have a duty, then passivity becomes a sin.

You have obligations to take care of your kids, even though legally you don't necessarily have an obligation to take care of other people's kids, for example.

In this particular case, Adam's passivity is most obvious when he ignores his own children because he's so upset about what happened with Kathy, and that is treated as an overt sin worthy of almost death at the hands of Samuel.

Let's go to some of your questions.

Ray says, hey, Ben, thanks so much for picking this book.

I've been a fan of Steinbeck since high school.

Cannery Rose, still my favorite.

Have read about a dozen of his books.

Somehow I never got around to East of Eden.

This is a real treat.

I appreciate your putting it on the list for the month.

While there are many things I could talk about, I was shocked at how demonic Kathy Ames was.

I haven't seen a villainist so chilling since Lady Macbeth for almost opposite reasons.

Lady Macbeth's brand of horror is that she wishes to defy nature, unsex herself, and become like a man to do her foul deeds.

Kathy is subtler and leans into her femininity, but perverting it for her own malicious means.

She really herself isn't human, not just in character deficiency, but she's effectively the serpent.

She might wear the face of an Eve, but she'll shed that mask like a snake sheds its skin.

She does that with her identities again and again and again.

That, of course, is exactly right.

And this says something about femininity, by the way, is if a woman does not hold sex to be a valuable thing, she is unsexing herself in the same way Lady Macbeth is.

Like, this is comparing and contrasting Lady Macbeth with Kathy, because Lady Macbeth says she wants to unsex herself.

I wish that I were a man, right?

All of this kind of stuff.

But the reality is that there are two ways for a woman to unsex herself.

One is to denounce sex, try to act like a man.

The other thing is to treat sex like a man would, meaning treat it as dispensable and disposable and to use it as a tool and to victimize others with an inherent power that women have over men.

Both of those are really, really dangerous things.

Society pretends that both of those are actually active goods now.

There's something good about a woman acting like a man.

There's something good about a woman who treats sex as though it's a commodity, which is, again, counter to evolutionary biology.

Women treat sex, evolutionarily speaking, with much greater choice and with much greater depth than men do.

Because again, for evolutionary reasons, men are designed to spread their seed.

I mean, this is why

the idea of

polygamy exists in most of the ancient world, but it's men with multiple women, not the other way around.

That is not because of sexism.

That's because, again, of the way that human biology and mammalian biology very broadly tend to work, right?

A woman has to gestate the child in her womb for nine months, and this means she must be much more careful about her sexual partners than a man would be.

And so when a woman divests herself of the connection between sex and emotional intimacy or sex and relationships,

that's a way of, it harms her.

predominantly.

But for those who don't care, like Kathy, it can certainly be used as a tool to harm others.

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest-paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

AKA Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

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So Bryce has a question.

Here's Bryce's question.

I'm happy to say this is now my favorite book of all time.

The way Steinbeck puts human conflicts within themselves on paper that make you feel and think so deeply is unmatched.

I'm now diving into all of his works.

My question is centered around Kathy or Kate.

I have struggled with this during and after the reading.

Do you believe that Kate was ever redeemable?

I understand that she is somewhat the Satan figure in many ways, and from her introduction, it is basically implied that she is a monster from birth.

But, and correct me if I'm wrong, would this not go against the theme of Timshil?

Thou mayest, or if thou mayest, it is also that thou mayest not.

It does not appear Kate, being predestined as a monster, was capable to exercise thou mayest, but rather a thou shall situation, as in, thou shalt be a monster and nothing but thoughts.

I understand God can give someone over to their sins, like in Romans 1.24.

But did she ever have a choice?

Am I asking too much of the story?

Is my question loaded?

I don't know.

Let me know.

Well, Bryce, first of all, appreciate the question and also the White Sox hat.

So

that is a great question.

You're right.

It does cut against the message that every person has the ability to rise above themselves.

But one of the things that I think you see at the very end, right, where she, for a moment, she kind of emotionally breaks at the very end of the book, she commits suicide, obviously, and she gives all of her money to

Aaron.

When she does that, then

I think that there are two ways of reading that.

One is it's an attempt to harm Adam.

The other is that it's almost this cathartic attempt to try to redeem herself for her life of sin.

So I think that even for Kathy, the very end of her life is supposed to be in some ways.

an attempt to buy back some of the things that she's done.

Now, you can see that as a way of maliciously buying it back, or you could think, well, maybe, maybe not.

Maybe there's always the possibility, even for the most evil people, of redemption.

Scott says, the novel ends with Lee pleading with the bedridden and dying Adam to forgive his only remaining son.

Adam responds by forgiving Cal non-verbally and then saying the word Tim Shell, giving Cal the choice to break the cycle and conquer sin.

What does it mean to conquer sin?

Whose choice is it?

Well, I mean, I think that the basic idea of free will is that it is your choice to conquer sin.

And one of the great things that I think that we've failed about in our culture is there's this idea that if you have a temptation towards sin, therefore it's not sin.

And this is just not true in any way, shape, or form.

One of the great messages of the Bible is you are created, yes, with the temptation to sin, that Satan lives within all of us.

In the Jewish faith, this is actually called the Yitzer Hara, meaning the evil inclination.

And it says directly in the Talmud that the Yitzher Hara is stronger than the Yitzer Hatov.

You actually have to condition the Yitzher Hatov, like the good inclination, to fight the evil inclination.

These are forces battling in cartoon fashion.

You've got the angel on your shoulder and the devil on your shoulder, and they're fighting each other.

And to conquer sin means.

Not that you never have the temptation again to sin.

It means that you're constantly having that temptation and you stop yourself.

And that's always the hardest battle.

And that also allows you to forgive people who fail.

Because if you understand that that's a battle and you understand that people sin, but that that doesn't change the standard as to whether sin is good or not, then of course you're going to be incredibly sympathetic toward people who fall short.

Because again, we all fall short.

This is what I think non-religious people very often don't understand about religious people and sin.

You hear this very often.

Non-religious secular people, they will say about people who are religious.

Well, he's so, you know, he's just so rigid.

Why can't he just be forgiven?

Probably they hate me or they hate me because I sin.

No, you understand.

Because we understand what sin is, we don't hate you because you sin.

We separate you from the sin.

It's you in identifying with the sin who's condemning yourself to a more difficult spiritual and emotional life.

I don't know a single religious person who believes they're perfect.

And if they do, I think by definition, you're not a religious person.

I think by definition, if you believe that you are sinless and perfect, then you actually have made an idol of yourself.

That cuts directly against biblical ideas.

Aaron says, hey, Ben, East of Eden is my favorite book we've read so far.

I couldn't put it down.

I finished it quickly and took your advice and started improving my biblical literacy.

I read Genesis from the Revised Standard Version.

Before I get any deeper, I wanted to get your advice on which version you recommend.

I asked because in chapter 24, we learned that Lee and the other wise men spend years parsing the meaning of 16 verses of different versions of the Bible.

Looking forward to next month, keep up all the great work.

So I'll tell you that there are a couple of good kind of Jewish translations that I appreciate because they take the Hebrew very, very seriously.

They're not translating.

Some of the English translations, like the King James, they're not actually translating the Hebrew.

They're translating the Greek, which is translating the Hebrew.

So you know you're a couple of layers removed.

So

if you are looking for sort of a good translation of the Hebrew version, there's one called the Living Torah that's pretty good.

There is another one called the Hertz Humash.

Chumash is, it means five because there are five books of Moses.

And Hertz is spelled H-E-R-T-Z.

It's kind of an older version of the translation that I really like.

Going for a more modern version, Orthodox Jews read the Art Scroll version very often.

There are a bunch of different translations.

Steinsalt has a translation.

But any of the ones that basically take the Hebrew seriously, those are the ones that I would recommend.

Melvin says, East of Eden, the title and reflection of the land of Nod, the themes throughout that explore the exile from God and the definition of traveler, I'd like to explore those choices.

According to some scholars, the belief is that Nod was the area of monsters, of the evil on the land.

And somehow over time, it became a term for children going to sleep, to dreamland going to the land of Nod.

Yet we cannot return to Eden.

We're stuck east of it.

Was that Steinbeck's point?

I think that is Steinbeck's point, that maybe all the places that we try to build for ourselves that are Eden, they're destined to fail because Eden doesn't exist.

We're always destined to live just east of Eden.

And the best you can do is try to make a paradise out of the hard land.

That's what Samuel does.

The best you can do is try to, and if you think that you're ever going to achieve Eden in your life, you're not.

You can always quest to go back to Eden, but the way, as the Bible says, is barred by the angels with the flaming swords.

That's just the nature of humanity.

Julie says, I like the idea that God may have preferred Abel because he liked the offering better.

I'm the youngest of four girls.

My father definitely admired one sister in particular.

She's had several vacations alone with him.

It makes sense to me he had a preference because I know he loved me just as much.

Thanks for the book club.

So, you know, the idea that it's about the offering, not about the person who's making the offering,

is an interesting one.

So, I have an analysis of Cain and Abel that I think is sort of unique, which is that I think it's pretty obvious from the text that actually God likes Cain better than Abel.

I know this is counterintuitive.

The reason I say this is because the story of Cain and Abel, as East of Eden suggests, is about the redemption of Cain.

Abel's a very minor character in the story.

All we know about Abel is that he's born, he offers a sacrifice, Cain kills him.

Those are all the things we know about Abel.

He exists.

In fact, his name in Hebrew, Hevel, means nothingness.

It means a breath.

That's why actually the language in

Ecclesiastes is Hevel Hevelim, right?

It means literally vanity of vanities, right?

Or breath of breaths.

It means like it's transitory.

It means nothing.

So Abel is named that.

So the idea that God prefers Abel, it doesn't say that.

It says he prefers Abel's offering.

But why does he deny Cain's offering?

Maybe it's just to teach Cain the lesson.

Maybe that's the whole point.

And when Cain rejects the lesson, God doesn't even reject Cain, right?

The idea there is then God goes to Cain and gives him the ability to repent immediately.

It says, your brother's voice is blood is crying out to me from the ground.

The language of Genesis is just incredible.

It's just incredible language.

It puts Shakespeare to shame, the language of Genesis.

And I love Shakespeare.

We'll do some Shakespeare this year.

But the language that God uses, where is your brother, is he's giving him the opportunity to repent.

And Cain does repent.

One of the contrasts between the Adam and Eve story and the Cain and Abel story is that Adam and Eve are both asked by God, so what's the deal, guys?

I noticed that you're you're dressing yourself.

You did something wrong, didn't you?

Like, no, Adam's like, it was her.

And Eve's like, oh, it's the snake.

Well, me.

And so God has to expel them.

Cain is expelled, but God puts his protection on him.

And this is the part we forget.

The mark of Cain protects Cain,

right?

The idea is that he's going to punish anybody who kills Cain.

But we thought that from the Bible, if you kill somebody, you're put to death.

God doesn't put Cain to death.

Why?

Because Cain actually does repent.

He realizes, he says, I've sinned, right?

I've done something wrong.

Cain is able to correct himself.

That's, I think, one of the great ideas here.

So, maybe the whole story of Cain and Abel is that rejection doesn't mean that God prefers the other person or even the other offering.

Maybe it means that God is trying to make you a stronger and better person.

And that's, I think, the story of Cal, right?

Cal ends the story a much stronger and better person than he started it.

Noah says another excellent pic.

Steinbeck is such a masterful writer, weaving in societal biblical themes with rich characters and great plot development.

However, my takeaway and what I will remember from all those pages of writing boils down to Tim Shall Thou Mayest, aka free will, God's way of giving us his children some control in his plan.

Free will and what one does with it is what I feel enables Cal to do what's right versus Charles who does what's wrong.

We as humans have the ability to make many choices in how we live our lives.

We may not have control about certain events in our world, but how we act and behave is all up to us.

We can choose to follow good or evil, even if at times we do make the wrong choice, we have the ability to correct it in future decision-making.

That's what Cal has done and what Charles never thought to do.

Cal chooses to acknowledge his wrongness and makes the effort.

For Charles, he's okay with being bad.

If anything, places blames on other places blame on others for not going his way.

We are born, flawed, and broken.

How we address address it in our lives is solely up to us thanks again for a terrific read now how about just 400 pages for next month i know i know i keep giving you guys really really long books but unfortunately most of the great books are long i'm going to try and bring you a couple of shorter books this year sometime in the near future i don't think that next month is one of them sadly for you although it is a great book phillip says hey bon hey bon the violent scenes of the story were well written i particularly liked the part where charles beats up adam and returns with a hatchet to finish him off it was terrifying to know how close adam was to being murdered and thrilling to see his will to survive i found myself sympathizing with the prostitutes and vagabonds in the novel.

Adam was Charles' victim, just like Abel to Cain, but I failed to see Adam's virtue to mirror Abel.

It seemed his virtue was to be pacifist, which might not be so terrible if he wasn't completely withdrawn or lazy.

His time wandering around the country, exploring the world, essentially doing nothing, sounded more valued than Charles' industriousness from working on his homestead because Charles had a temper.

Although it was nice to see Adam attempting virtue upon meeting Kathy by caring for her and starting a family, moreover, the horror houses also were written like they were a cornerstone of society where lonely men found attention.

Each horror house had their audience and purpose depended on the healing the customers needed.

The description reminded me a bit of the idea from the Purge movies.

Steinbeck was named in a speech by Fulton Sheen about inspiring false compassion, compassion for the criminal instead of the victim, for example, in today's terms, compassion for the would-be mother pursuing career instead of the murdered unborn baby.

These examples of vagabonding and whoring Finn.

Overall, the story was an enjoyable read.

The writing reminded me of Huck Finn.

Yeah, I mean, the sort of most stated portion of the story, obviously, is Steinbeck's.

Sympathy for the whorehouses.

I think the idea there is not just sympathy for the whorehouse.

I think the idea is that Kathy is too perverse even for the whorehouses, which just shows how bad she is.

I don't think that Adam is meant to be a completely virtuous character.

Adam is meant to be a very difficult character to love or even to like.

And that's why the final words of the book go to Adam, right?

It's Adam's story pretty much from beginning to end.

And so the story of Adam, we build it around Cal, we build it around Charles, we build it around all the active characters.

But the story of Adam is that he is capable.

of taking action that betters the lives of people around him, even if he has largely failed to do so throughout his life.

Martha says, Amen.

I I have not finished the book yet.

I'm thoroughly enjoying it.

I can't remember if I read Grapes of Wrath in high school or if I didn't.

If I did, it didn't leave an impression.

Had you not challenged us to read East Venezuelan for the book club, I may never have picked it up myself.

The valley is described so beautifully in a way that could only be done by someone who is intimately familiar with all its good and bad and loves it all the more for the depth of its understanding.

The insight that comes from the thoughts and words of the characters is astounding.

When I read the chapters where Samuel, Adam, and Lee discussed Genesis, it gave me chills.

I caught myself saying wow out loud to no one.

I kept dog-earing pages so I could go back and reference passages that blew my mind.

I think Steinbeck had all that understanding in his head is remarkable, and and the way he puts it into words is beautiful.

Thank you for the book club and everything you do.

I'm glad that you really enjoyed it.

Oakley says, Hey, hey, man, I love the book.

It's been a breath of fresh air for me, and it's changed how I see the world.

Wanted to get your thoughts on Tom's suicide and Desi's death.

How does that play into the overarching theme and narrative?

While beautiful and tragic, it almost seems out of place with the main story.

So, one of the things that happened while Steinbeck was writing the book is he originally meant it to be the story of his family.

And the Hamilton family is his family.

Like, literally, he talks about this in the intro in the book.

And then, gradually, it becomes far broader.

It becomes the Adam's story and Cal's and Aaron's and Charles and Cyrus and Kathy.

But the Hamilton side, I think some of it is him just writing the story of his family.

But the story of Tom's suicide is one of the reasons that it's so tragic is because, again, I think the idea there is that squandered potential is really a tragedy.

Tom is a person, he keeps talking about how Samuel keeps saying, Tom can be great, Tom can be great, and Tom never is great.

Tom instead ends up imploding in on himself and killing himself.

You know, the idea of

Dessey and her death is incredibly tragic.

And unfortunately,

how we deal with tragedy in life may be the most important thing about us.

I mean, these are the things that we remember about family members and friends.

Tragedy, I don't know a single person in life who has not been struck with some sort of life tragedy.

The people, one of the lessons you learn as you get older is that the people who you most admire, the people who you think have the happiest lives, the rich, the famous, like everybody you know, literally everyone you know or have heard of has had significant tragedy in in their life how they deal with the tragedy is what what marks the quality of the human being and um and you know

if if you believe that that people are universally happy or universally sad that that is not the way that that works Joel says wow what a book I haven't read Steinbeck in years this brought back my love of his writing few write as descriptively as he does with deep insight into people's souls and human nature Steinbeck sees into the innermost consciousness of people both the good and the bad he helps us see the core of devils as well as the halos of angels it's interesting how the story of fathers and their sons repeats itself Cyrus with Adam and Charles, Adam with Cal and Aaron.

It's disappointing Adam couldn't see his father in his own actions and how he treats his son so differently.

Adam and Aaron both created images of loved ones in their heads and couldn't see the reality of people as they really were.

Steinbeck offers caution in recognizing people as imperfect versus manufacturing false characters.

There's wisdom in seeing the reality of human nature.

That's why I loved Lee and Samuel Hamilton.

They saw the truth.

They saw true characters with personality flaws.

They weren't afraid to call them out.

They were the leaven that balanced the excessive good and bad of the other characters in the book.

They were the truth and reality needed to keep life moving forward.

Thank you again.

It was an exceptional read.

So I,

you know, totally agree, obviously.

And this is something that we should remember, again, when it comes to both politics and personal relationships.

People are flawed.

People are shaded.

People are generally not universally good, and they're generally not universally bad.

Saints and Satan are very rare in life.

And Kathy's an outlier because she's an outlier.

Most people have these flaws.

And to depict people in entirely good tones means that you can't see them for what they are.

It makes you less accurate in your predictions.

It makes you you less able to deal with the real world.

It means that you are more likely to buy into demagoguery.

It means that you're more likely to buy into conmen.

It means that you're more likely to buy into

deprivation of the other as a person of complete evil.

If you think in binary terms about human beings, you're less likely to make good judgments.

Cliff says, hey, Ben, Clifty here.

Firstly, thanks for the book club.

I've been enjoying reading along with you and everyone else.

You asked, what is the more important story, the expulsion from Edom or Cain and Abel?

As a Christian, I think one of the most important stories to understanding all of the Bible is the story of the expulsion from Eden or the fall.

It informs the readers of how all things began and how all of creation was meant to be, in right relation with the Creator, God, and in right relation with itself, others, and nature.

There's no sin, death, sickness, greed, or other things that ail the world today.

The expulsion from the garden is caused by the rebellion by man against a holy God.

The meta-narrative of the Bible moves from creation to the fall, redemption in and through hirag and then restoration.

The story of Cain and Abel is a product and symptom of the fall, in my opinion, subordinating itself in importance to the exile of man from the presence of God.

Through the redemptive work of Jesus on the cross, God is making a way back to Himself and restoring us of fallen humanity to each other, effectively restoring Eden.

So, I think for a lot of Christians, that rings true, right?

The idea of the fall being the most important story, I think that rings true to a lot of Christians.

I think for Jews, you know, there's

an open debate about which is the more important story.

For myself, for myself,

I think that the idea of

Cain and Abel,

because I'm a political person, because politics is the art of dealing with others, I think that the Cain and Abel story, in some ways,

is the deeper story on a regular level, right?

The story of the fall is important because it sets the stage.

Human beings are frail.

Human beings use free will in the wrong ways.

Human beings can't see the totality of God's creation, so they don't understand what God is doing all the time, and that leads them into sin.

Human beings have a different vision of what good and evil is than God's vision of good and evil, right?

All of that is really important backdrop.

And then sort of in terms of the day-to-day, the day to day is Cain and Abel.

The day to day is

today,

you fell short.

Whose fault is that?

Is it the guy next to you?

Politically speaking, this is the easiest game in the world.

You fell short.

You didn't succeed.

You failed.

Is that the system?

Is that Abel's fault?

Is that God?

Or is it you?

The taking of personal responsibility.

I think that

you also can't read the two stories separately.

I think that there is a clear parallel between Cain and Abel and Adam and Eve.

As I said before, the idea is that Adam and Eve are expelled because they can't redeem themselves.

Cain actually ends up living, and God preserves his life and protects him from others because he's able to redeem.

Cain is the first true, in some ways, hero in the Bible, right?

Adam's not a hero.

Well, what makes Adam heroic?

Adam fails.

Cain fails, but then Cain...

redeems himself and he goes on to build cities.

So I think that the reading the two in tandem, I think, is really the answer.

And it's a cheap way out, but I think that's the answer.

From a political point of view, Cain and Abel, maybe the most important story ever written because, yeah, people are supposed to treat each other like brothers, and they do not.

And the reason is because they are unable to see into themselves deeply enough to recognize that many of our own failures are of our own making.

Gail says, I was very glad to see East of Eden is this month's book.

I read it for a lit class in high school.

I enjoyed it so much.

I usually read way past the assigned stopping point.

I'd like to answer study question number eight, which is the more important story, the expulsion from Edom Eden or Cain and Abel.

I think the story of Cain and Abel is more important to this book.

Steinbeck highlighted this himself in the name of the characters.

The initial C and A, pointing to Cain and Abel, begin the names of his characters, Adam and Charles, their father Cyrus, his wife Alice.

Kathy enters the story.

Her first initial C indicates she's a very evil person.

After the twins are born, she waits to recover before shooting Adam and leaves him to become a prostitute and eventually run the whorehouse.

Adam is devastated.

He ignores his sons until Samuel Hamilton gets wind of the fact that boys have no names.

He goes to wake Adam up.

They get into a long discussion of Cain and Abel.

Sometimes I can't manage to read the book in the time between minutes announcing when the book club gathering happens, but do what I can, rather like Caleb, rather like Cal.

Ken says,

this selection really shifted my thinking on the question of Cain and Abel versus the fall.

God provided Cain the unique human endowment of free will, which offers us the path back to paradise.

Agree.

Michelle says, hey, Ben, I'd like to respond to study question nine.

Compare and contrast the relationship between Adam and Kate with Cal and Aaron's relationship with Abra.

Adam and Kate, though Adam cherished Kate, he was a dunce in making the decision to move to California, purchasing property, planning how to use it without even involving Kate or determining if she liked California.

He could have given her money to decorate the house or hire an interior designer.

They could have moved somewhere else.

He was on shaky ground and ignoring her needs.

Aaron and Abra.

Aaron likewise cherished Abra.

He fell into a similar situation in that while they were children, he cherished her, but he never really considered her as a separate person, but more as an appendage to his dreams.

The death knell of their relationship was his celibacy decision.

He apparently did not consider delicately breaking the news to her.

It was painful to watch him become increasingly self-absorbed.

Cal and Abra.

This one is more intriguing, but was no surprise.

Cal's self-image of being a bad person with bad thoughts found natural expression with Abra, who admitted the same, essentially freeing him.

Perhaps him seeking out his mother and coming to terms with her helped him make terms with the truth.

And I think that that last is really the telling point, right?

The reason that Cal and Abra have a good relationship is they see the evil in each other and they acknowledge that and then they determine to fight that evil and to help each other and to fill in the gaps left by the other.

That's sort of the idea of biblical marriage.

And the idea of biblical marriage is that you were one and now you are two and now you'll be one again, right?

That's the idea of of God taking a rib from Adam to make Eve is that

what you should be seeking is your complementary other half who's going to fill in the gaps in you and make you better.

Autumn says, hey, man, I'm really enjoying the book club.

I couldn't get through who used to be.

Eden Steinbeck is talented and so depressing.

I rented the movie and the novel from my local library.

The story is so depressing.

I felt like I need a warning watching the movie.

It's so sad.

The boys are disasters.

The father is sad.

I hope next month is encouraging to humanity.

Yeah, I've got some bad news for you on that one, but I don't want to give away the book.

But yeah, I don't find the book sad.

I find the book really, really uplifting, which is why I love it.

Amos says, hey, Ben, I'm enjoying the book club.

The cool thing is that it has increased my reading speed.

My theory is that Adam's wealth was detrimental and that allowed him the luxury of focusing solely on himself.

Without Lee, the twins would have starved right in front of Adam.

Even the most self-absorbed person would surely have shaken off the grief of unfulfilled expectations and taken up the responsibilities inherent in having kids.

What are your thoughts?

Well, the thing is, I think that Adam's sort of laziness predates him having money.

One of the things that the book says about wealth is that wealth doesn't make you a worse person.

It just exacerbates your sins.

Wealth can't make you a better person.

Wealth can't make you a worse person.

Wealth just makes you more of what you are.

This, by the way, is knowing very poor people and knowing very rich people, I think this is exactly right.

There's this weird idea in the left-wing community that being rich makes you evil.

I know a lot of wonderful people who are very, very wealthy, and I know a lot of crappy people who are very poor.

I also know a lot of crappy people who are very wealthy and a lot of

wonderful people who are very poor.

Your monetary status is not a good predictor of your moral status.

A final comment from Laurie says, Hey, Ben, I very much appreciate it and I'm thoroughly enjoying the book club.

I read East of Eden back in 1992 when I was 30 years old.

I enjoyed the book immensely.

I especially thought the writing and the prose was the most beautiful work I'd ever read.

I was impressed by Steinbeck's storytelling.

Perhaps I was blinded by the beauty and not ready to see the truth.

Here it is, 30 years later, having experienced so much in life.

Upon the second reading, I'm more affected by the disappointment the story can bring.

I can't fathom why Adam would reject Cal's offer of $15,000.

Why was Adam's response to reject the money so different from the money his own father left him, which he accepted and used throughout his whole life?

Cal went to a man more experienced than he was, learned as an apprentice, worked hard, and made a business deal for that money, so its source was not a mystery.

Cal paid the farmer 60% more for the bean crop than they would have made, so Adam's response that Cal stole the money is unreasonable.

Why couldn't Adam have complimented his son on being successful instead of crushing Cal and then wallowing in his own Adam pity?

I really don't respect Adam at all.

And with the help he received from Lee and Sam, he would have died early on.

I see Cal as a figure representing the United States, and though he is flawed and is constantly reflecting on his imperfection, Cal is open to ideas, asks for help from people wiser than he has, and learns.

Cal hears criticism and uses it to better himself, much like the early times of the United States and how Americans learned, failed, adapted, changed, and succeeded.

Listen, Adam is the hardest character in the book.

Kathy is not.

Adam is.

Adam is very difficult to understand.

And that's why the true redemption at the end is not Cal's.

The true redemption is Adam, who realizes that he has to see people as flawed and capable of redemption.

That's been his flaw throughout the entire book.

People are either all good or all bad.

He blinds himself to Cyrus.

He can't just say, he was flawed.

but I loved him.

He can't do that.

By the time he gets to Cal, he learns his lesson.

That's, I think, the final message of the book.

All righty, folks, we've reached the end of today's show.

We'll be back here tomorrow with much more.

I'm Ben Shapiro.

This is Ben Shapiro Show.

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