In this interview, Dennis Prager and author Sohrab Ahmari discuss the erosion of wisdom in contemporary society. Ahmari argues that modern education and the secular world have elevated factual knowledge to the status of truth, reducing education to disconnected trivia and neglecting the deeper questions of how to live a good life. He contends that this fact‑centric approach has been supplanted by a second wave of ideological distortion, especially around gender and sex, which further degrades public discourse. Both guests agree that science, while valuable within its domain, cannot answer moral and existential questions; these require the resources of Western tradition— the Bible, the great books, poetry, and the arts. The conversation turns to the Sabbath, with Prager sharing his 35‑year personal practice of weekly rest as a source of sanity, and Ahmari describing his Catholic understanding of the commandment to keep the Sabbath. The interview also references Ahmari’s recent Wall Street Journal piece on the Sabbath and promotes his book, The Unbroken Thread, available at DennisPrager.com.
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Your book is an ode to what I have lamented the death of all of my public life, and that is wisdom. The book is that important because it is about wisdom. It's very engaging, and it is exactly as he just described, about a given thinker on any given subject. There is no wisdom in our educational system. The secular world I'm only saying this for you to react to. The secular world has embraced knowledge and rejected wisdom. Is that an unfair characterization?
No, it's a brilliant characterization. Knowledge, or let's say facts, is the one lodestar of modernity as such, of liberal modernity as such. I think what's lost in our obsession with facts, not that facts aren't important, but facts are narrow, and facts are just collections of things that we observe about the world, either with our senses and with our scientific instruments, and are able to express them, generally speaking, in mathematical formulae. Now, those are very important, but at some point in the West, now we can debate where the deformation or the wrong path was taken, but at some point, we came to equate all of truth or all of wisdom with these kinds of facts, which is the result of it in a practical way is how our educational systems deform young minds, where they just learn these kind of disconnected little trivia, you know, how much magnesium does Uzbekistan produce, which is maybe an important thing or maybe not be, but it's not wisdom as in how do you live a good life, what's the source of a happy life. That question has true or false answers and the answers to it don't take necessarily scientific form, and the reduction of all truths to these kinds of factoids has really impoverished us. Now, unfortunately, as you'll agree maybe, we've even gotten rid of the factoids and replaced them with just pure kind of race, gender, sex ideology, which is like a kind of a second layer of degradation. That's right.
They're not even— they say follow the science, but they don't even follow the science. As I ended my last hour, I said people who say follow the science also tell us that men menstruate, right?
I mean, yes, yes. I mean, uh, even kind of scientific empiricism gives way to just kind of pure ideology. And we see so many men menstruate. And so many other phenomena of this kind. Um, and I argue that that's, uh, because science itself cannot give answers to the fundamental questions of life.
That's right. If they get— if we go on, please.
Yeah, no, no, science is a very kind of legitimate thing in its own domain. So absolutely.
Well, if we follow science, then, then, then we should follow survival of the fittest. We shouldn't, we shouldn't have hospitals for the, for the, the truly sick. We should just let them die. That, that's what science recommends.
Precisely. So there are these questions that we constantly face in life, little moral dilemmas in our individual lives and as a society, whose answers don't take scientific form. Now, also, thank God we do take care of the seriously ill, and we don't, uh, you know, just throw away children with profound disabilities, although some, some ideological would even do that. But the reason we don't do that is we still recognize there are certain questions about ultimate meaning whose answers can only be found in things like the Bible, in the Western tradition, in the great books, in great novels and poetry. And all of those things cannot be kind of cast aside without our society paying the price as it is now with this kind of scientific managerial governance, which is also extremely ideological.
That's exactly right. You wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal this weekend, a very long piece on behalf of the Sabbath. I'm sure you wouldn't know this, but I have been pushing Sabbath observance all 35 years of my broadcast career. I regularly tell people it is the source of my sanity, that I leave the world one day a week. That I am with friends or family every single, every single week, including the lockdown. I've been with about 16 people every Friday night for Shabbat dinner from the beginning of the lockdown, maskless and enjoying life, singing and talking. And I've had this as a result of having a Sabbath. And The loss of it is profound. You will find this of interest in light of your being Catholic and writing this piece. I have asked priests and ministers, that is Catholics and Protestants, all of my life— well, not nearly all of my life— I've asked them, as a Christian, are you bound to keep the Sabbath? Are you commanded to? And The answers have been literally 50/50. I have no— I had no way of predicting what they would say. They would say, well, it's the only one of the Ten Commandments that really doesn't apply any longer. It was, you know, specifically to the Jews, and it's not a universal commandment. What do you say to that?
So, speaking as a Catholic, and again, not being a theologian or an ordained priest, I will say that if I look at my Catechism of the Catholic Church and my little Roman Missal, where I carry when I go to church, Mass, with me, uh, the commandment to keep the Sabbath and go to church that day and try to avoid servile labor is still there. And so therefore, when I go to confession, one of the questions I have to ask myself is, have I broken the commandment to keep the Sabbath and avoided servile labor unless absolutely, absolutely necessary? So that's the theory of it. In practice, you're right though, my serious Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jewish friends, their Sabbath, let's put it this way, is a lot more of a Sabbath even compared to mine.
Back in a moment. His book The Unbroken Thread is up at DennisPrager.com.
