The Daily Signal - INTERVIEW | How Ancient Wisdom Can Help Us Tackle Today's Crises

Episode Date: February 13, 2023

What can ancient wisdom teach us about today's crises? According to Spencer Klavan, author of "How to Save the West: Ancient Wisdom for 5 Modern Crises," it can teach us a lot.  "Whenever you call a book something like 'How to Save the West,' you have a certain imposter syndrome, or it's impossible not to feel a kind of trepidation, but that's actually why I wrote the book in a certain sense, that feeling of just overwhelm and despair that I think we all can relate to," Klavan, associate editor at the Claremont Institute, says on today's podcast.  Klavan adds:  What's the role of a human being? What's our place in the universe? What is good and what is evil? Those sorts of questions actually are human-sized.And so I wanted to give people just a taste of some of the wisdom that we can get if we access these great texts and incorporate their wisdom into our lives, because we think of these things as kind of inaccessible or beyond us, but actually they're there for you, and the book is designed to equip you with some of that. Klavan joins "The Daily Signal Podcast" to discuss his new book, what he thinks the West needs to be saved from, and what he views as the biggest threat to the West. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Monday, February 13th. I'm Samantha Sherris. And joining today's show is Spencer Claven. He's the host of the podcast, Young Heretics, and author of How to Save the West, Ancient Wisdom for Five Modern Crises, which is available on February 14th. Spencer breaks down the five crises he writes about in his book, where he sees the biggest threat against the West, and what exactly the West needs to be saved from. We'll get to my conversation with the Spencer right after this. Looking for quick conservative policy solutions to current issues from America's outpost here in Washington, sign up for Heritage's weekly newsletter, The Agenda. You'll get top conservative research, a rundown of important events happening here at Heritage that you can watch online and hot takes from our experts. Sign up at heritage.org slash agenda or at the link in the show notes. Joining today's podcast is Spencer Claven.

He is an associate editor at the Claremont Institute, and he's also the author of a newly released book, How to Save the West, Ancient Wisdom for Five Modern Crises. Spencer, thanks so much for joining. It's so great to speak with you again. It is a real pleasure. Thank you for having me, Samantha. Of course. Now, Spencer, this is your first book, and it is quite a big undertaking, right? How to Save the West.

So first and foremost, what was your inspiration for the book? Yeah. You know, whenever you call a book something like How to Save the West, you have a certain imposter syndrome or like, you know, it's impossible not to feel a kind of trepidation. But that's actually why I wrote the book in a certain sense. That feeling of just overwhelm and despair that I think we all can relate to, you know. Last time you and I talked, it was about my podcast, Young Hair. And through that podcast, I got to know so many wonderful people, just everyday folks, that were connecting with the great works of the Western canon, with classics like Aristotle and Plato and, you know, the Bible, patristic literature, all that wonderful tradition that comes down to us. And I heard from a lot of them, from so many of them, that there was just this sense of helplessness when they read the news. You know, every day you get barraged by story after story that seems to kind of forebode disaster. It's like today, the economy

seems to be falling apart. Tomorrow, the kids are going crazy. Everybody seems to be trans. You know, I mean, there's just, everything seems to kind of threaten these vast structural problems. And I think the natural response to a lot of that is for people to say, well, what can I do? How can I contribute or help in this kind of moment of crisis? And typically, I think we ask ourselves that question, like, kind of as if we were Ron DeSantis. Like, we think about what law could we write that would save the country or how are we going to tomorrow, like, rearrange the state legislature to fix this problem? And that's when that paralysis sets in, because in fact, we're not Ron DeSantis. We have the vote, thank God, but that, you know, we don't control vast swathes of history.

and we're not going to, you know, muscle the world into shape just by sheer force of will. And so I wanted to write a book for people about how they personally, regular folks in their individual daily lives and communities, can preserve these traditions that come down to us from Athens and Jerusalem. And the wonderful thing about Western civilization, Western culture, is that it actually doesn't depend on getting the perfect outcome in the 2024 election or fixing all these massive structural problems that we do. don't have personal control over. What it really depends on is what Harry Jaffa called the rescuing of the individual human heart from the black knight of nihilism and despair. And these questions that we're up against now in this tumultuous era are so fundamental. What's the role of a human being? You know, what was our place in the universe? What is good and what is evil? Those sorts of questions actually are human-sized. And so I wanted to give people just a taste of someone

of the wisdom that we can get if we access these great texts and incorporate their wisdom into our lives because we don't we think of these things as kind of inaccessible or beyond us but actually they're there for you and the book is designed to equip you with some of that yeah absolutely and I wanted to ask you uh you know just a follow up with you know how to save the west what exactly do you see the west being saved from is it a person is it an institution multiple people people, like, in your mind, where do you see the biggest threat to the West? Well, I think the forces that are at play are bigger than any one person or institution. I mean, the closest thing politically that we're up to what we're up against is something like

oligarchic decay, just this, you know, real breakdown in social relationship, social fabric, the way that, you know, these sort of power brokers that we don't fully understand have taken control of so much of our public discourse and our politics. But, you know, at an even deeper level than that, he starts to ask, well, why is it that we can't get along, that we can't have civil conversations anymore in politics? And I think the answer is because digital technology, the revolution that we've gone through in just the way that we communicate with one another and relate to the world, has deeply unsettled our sense of ourselves and has raised up all these fundamental questions that are actually quite ancient. And that's where those crises start to

emerge because we, you know, we've done a lot in the past several decades to kind of scrap the Western canon to say it's chauvinist or racist or evil to study these great works and hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go. But the problem with that is that when you come up against these problems that are raised in the digital era, you then find yourself with no footing, no, no resources and none of those treasures to draw on. So, you know, I outlined these five crises in the book, the crisis of reality, is there objective truth? The crisis of the body, you know, should we all kind of upload our consciousness to the cloud or become, you know, post-gendered or what have you? Or is there something, you know, meaningful about our bodies?

The crisis of meaning and religion, how can we know that anything is really worthwhile and is it possible to believe in the wake of the scientific revolution? And then finally, the crisis of the regime, how do we proceed as American? when the country seems to be in such bad shape. And I think that all of those questions are raised by the digital revolution, but they point us back to those ancient texts that we supposedly were supposed to throw out because they're backwards and superstitious. And I kind of try to offer some of the resources that come from that tradition for people to try to answer those questions. Yeah, I'm so glad you brought up these five crises because I have them written down here.

I wanted to pick your brain about them. You talked about the crisis of religion, the regime crisis, the crisis of meeting, the body crisis and the reality crisis. From your perspective, which do you think is playing the most significant role in today's society? And is there a way to kind of counter that role, that influence that you think we're seeing? Yeah, I think that the most urgent one of those crises that you listed is the body crisis. It's expressed in so many different ways. Obviously, you know, the rise, the sudden uptick in gender dysphoria and the rise of, you know, people talking about feeling uncomfortable in their bodies and their sex as male or female. That's the most obvious one.

But you hear people saying all sorts of things that go even beyond that into, well, we should become post-human. We should actually upload, you know, we should put chips into our brains. should be adding on digital appendages to ourselves until we just don't really suffer the limitations of the human body anymore. And what I argue in the book is that's actually a very, very ancient impulse. It goes back to the Neoplatonists and to these philosophers in ancient Greece who just wanted to, you know, float up out of their flesh and be free in this kind of spiritual, you know, nether region, essentially. And what I suggest is that, you know, that kind of anxiety, that horror at the body, which is making itself felt in the digital age, is threatening to kind of

disconnect us from everything that makes us happy and fulfilled, that our joy, our virtues, our fulfillment are actually in our embodiment. They take place in this kind of union of body and soul, which makes us what we are. And so what I propose in the book is something very simple to kind of move away from this, and that is to regain ownership over our actual embodied experience. I think we've been taught to distrust and, you know, revise and wish away the evidence of our own senses. You say, well, do you have a source to show that, like,

actually beauty is beautiful and strength and health are good? And the answer is, you know, the source is in my own experience, is in my daily practice and, you know, getting up and going to the gym and, you know, eating three meals a day. and these kind of basic encounters with how it actually is working out for us. How is it actually working out for us? Not just in some imagined utopia in the future, but in real life in the here and now. How's it working out for us to kind of, you know, upload all of our conversations to Zoom

and just shut our schools down and do everything digitally? You know, it's actually not working very well. And the promise that someday it's going to make us all happy and free is a very dubious one. And so I would suggest that that's where we kind of start is re-encountering the just hard and fast reality of embodiment in the here and now. Yeah. And also, too, do you think that these different crises are intertwined? Like, how do you see them playing out in the modern day and in society today? And, you know, how can people recognize if they are experiencing any of these crises that you address in the book? Yeah, well, I definitely think they're intertwined. I think that they're, you know, in some ways you could view them as, you know, five sides of the same five-sided coin, if you can picture that. But what binds them all together, I think, is, you know, underlying everything, this crisis of religion, this sense that there, that maybe we can't believe in, you know, in a God anymore, in any sort of absolute truth and any sort of higher power.

And one of the things I try to argue in the book is that once you see that people are searching for a higher power, are searching for a source of absolute meaning, then the answer to your second question is everywhere. You can see everywhere how people are grasping for that, reaching out. The way that, for instance, in 2020, people, you know, started kneeling at Black Lives Matter rallies, started worshipping capital T.S. The Science, right? And you have people like Dr. Fauci coming forth and saying, I represent the science. Like I am this kind of embodiment of occult wisdom and knowledge. I think that once you see this, it's everywhere. And that's part of the point of the book is, you know, you take each of these news stories that in isolation seems kind of incomprehensible and bizarre, the COVID pandemic or, you know, the Black Lives Matter riots.

And you start to realize that actually these are expressions in a certain sense of this underlying need for the confidence in absolute truth and the existence of a true and false that doesn't depend on, you know, just what anybody thinks, you know, or the consensus that we all reach, but is actually objective. And the need to recover that and the need to invest ourselves in something that has, you know, real meaning. So, so yeah, I think that that's kind of the underlying thread that binds all of these things together. And I think that it is also, you know, a way to understand and explain a lot of the things that are going on in our news and in our daily lives. How long do you think it will take for society to combat these crises?

Is it even a possibility to be able to have a counterpunch, so to speak, to, you know, go against these crises that you talk about? Well, the good news and the bad news is that we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. And I really do mean we don't know. I mean that I'm not going to predict doom and gloom and despair and disaster to you, but I'm also not going to sit here and say that everything's going to be great if we just follow the five prescriptions in my book. You know, that's not what I'm selling. And I say kind of at the outset that, you know, I would be dishonest to promise to people that, you know, there is some surefire way for things to go well today. You know, that in our lifetimes we're going to see a revitalization of the West and, you know, a full-scale rescue of all the political programs that we want to see happen.

You know, it could be, but it very well might not be. And so one of the things that I try to do is to suggest, you know, the West as a tradition, as a great conversation, has endured way, way longer. than even America, much though we may love America. I mean, it goes back to Athens and Jerusalem are the two sources of this tradition and the two pillars of this civilization. And throughout the history of that tradition, there have been great moments of civilizational success

and really wonderful times. And then there have been times of collapse and disaster. And this is really the theme of the fact. fifth section, the crisis of the regime, that nations do rise and fall. And there is such a thing as decline and decay. And our republic, America's republic, is unfortunately showing, I think, a lot of symptoms of the kinds of decay that republics go through, the investment of a lot of power in a very few, the kind of occult status of some of our self-anointed leaders. This is all kind of looking, at least, like a threat to the immediate endurance of our nation, which is not something to sniff at or wave

away. You know, that's a tragedy. That's a serious problem. But one thing that we should understand, if only to stave off despair, is that many of the great achievements of Western civilization were made, you know, at exactly the moment when everything seemed bleakest. And one example I always give is Cicero, Marcus Tullius Cicero, the great Roman statesman who was one of the last great men of the Roman Republic and left behind this fabulous wealth of political philosophy in defense of Republican government essentially. And in the immediate term, in the here and now, Cicero failed quite terribly because he was a casualty of the new regime, which was the Roman Empire. And, you know, he could never have known that it would be.

be many, many hundreds of years before, you know, a new republic rose to sort of dominate the earth. But in point of fact, you know, fast forward to the 1770s and in walks John Adams, you know, the man who has been pouring over Cicero's own speeches since he was a lad and who stands up and makes his great speech in defense of the Declaration of Independence, sets this country on the road to its birth, you know. And so when you're talking about that kind of time scale, you know, when you're looking at a tradition which endures through that many catastrophes. And when you understand that you yourself are an inheritor of that tradition, you know, we don't really have a right to despair. Despair is not really an option. What we have is a job, and that is to wake up every morning

and to seek the good, the true, and the beautiful as we understand them insofar as possible, insofar as it's within our grasp. And after that, you know, we really do have to leave the rest to God. Because otherwise, you know, these are the sorts of things, those bigger questions, when is, when are things going to get better? You know, when is, is America going to be okay for the next 50 years? Those are outside of our control. What's in our control is to carry that torch, to carry the light of this civilization forward for future generations. Now, obviously, I don't want to give away any spoilers for our audience members. You do want to buy your book.

but if you could just lay out maybe one or two of the most significant takeaways that you hope people, you know, take from the book. Obviously, no spoilers. But, yeah, your thoughts on this. Yeah, well, I won't reveal which characters die and, you know, how many cameos there are. No, yeah, I'll say two things. First of all, one thing I really hope people take away is a sense of ownership. over their inner life. This is something that we have been talked out of,

you know, the reality of things like goodness, right? Which can't be mapped anywhere on a brain scan, which don't boil down to atoms bouncing off one another, that don't boil down to chemistry sets in meat sacks, that are actually what philosophers call qualia, the qualitative reality of life. Everything important lives there, loves, our desires, our virtues, our fears, our memories, right? And in order to understand

ourselves, not just as kind of consumers or as, you know, material beings that just move through space, but actually as human beings, right, who seek virtue and who love the good, we have to recover a sense that our inner lives have real meaning and are not arbitration. And are not arbitrary just because they're subjective. We use the word subjective sometimes to mean like, oh, that's just your opinion, man. But actually, the inner life, the subjective encounter with the world is fundamentally a part of reality. And I think people, I hope, will come away from this book with a renewed sense that that's true. And then the other thing I'd like to give people ownership over is the tradition itself. You know, I hear from people all the time who say

these funny things to me, like, I'm not that smart or like, I can't read these big texts or something. And the minute somebody says that to me, I know I'm about to have a really interesting conversation because I'm about to talk to somebody that isn't bound by whatever kind of pieties that the academy has instilled in its latest, in its latest graduating class. And what they really mean by that when they say, I'm not that smart is, you know, I for some reason have been sort of have been sold the idea that the barrier to entry is too high for one. works like Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics or even, you know, direct interpretation of the Bible, let's say, or Thomas Aquinas, you know. And I am here to tell you that with, you know,

effort and dedication and with a receptive mind, you actually, these books are actually for you. They have endured not because they furnish material for PhD Theses, but because they are some of the best things that have ever been thought or written or said about how to be good at being human. And I think we all innately have an urge to seek that virtue to do rightly and love justice. But again, it's something that we've been talked out of and we've been told these books are too complicated or they're somehow evil and wrong and backwards. And instead, you know, what we ought to be saying is, no, these things are there for you. They were written in some sense with you in mind.

And they are the best guide still to the challenges we face, even in the wake of, you know, all our modern gurus and gadgets. Yeah, Spencer, thank you so much for joining us. Just before we go, can you tell our audience members where they can buy your book? Absolutely. I'd be delighted. Yeah, I hope people will go and check out how to save the Westbook.com. And you can also, of course, get it on Amazon and Barnes & Noble,

and at the website of my publisher, Regnery. And you can even just follow me on Twitter at Spencer Claven, and I'll tweet links at you constantly. But, yeah, wherever books are sold, really. And I hope people enjoy it. Awesome. Spencer Cleveland, thank you so much for joining us. And for everyone listening, make sure you check out the book,

How to Save the West, Ancient Wisdom for Five Modern Crises. Spencer, thanks so much. Thank you. It's been such a pleasure. And that'll do it for today's episode. for listening to my interview with Spencer Cleveland. If you haven't gotten a chance, make sure you subscribe to the Daily Signal wherever you get your podcast. You can hear even more interviews like you heard with Spencer and help us reach even more listeners by leaving a five-star rating and review. We

read and appreciate all of your feedback. Thanks again for listening. Have a great day and we'll be back with you all this afternoon for top news. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to by more than half a million of the Heritage Foundation. Executive producers are Rob Luey and Kate Trinco. Producers are Virginia Allen and Samantha Asheris. Sound designed by Lauren Evans, Mark Geinney, and John Pop. To learn more, please visit DailySignal.com.