The Eric Metaxas Show - Spencer Klavan

Episode Date: March 17, 2023

Spencer Klavan shares ideas from his important new book, "How to Save the West: Ancient Wisdom for 5 Modern Crises."

Folks, welcome to the Eric Mataxis show, sponsored by Legacy Precious Metals. There's never been a better time to invest in precious metals. Visit legacy p.m.investments.com. That's legacy p.m. Investments.com. Welcome to the Eric Mataxis show. Do you like your gravy sick and rich and loaded with creamy mushrooms? If no one was looking, would you chug the whole gravy boat? Chug, chug, chug, chug.

Stay tuned. Here comes Mr. Chuggalug himself, Eric Mattaxas. Hey there, folks. Welcome to the show. Yeah, it's just a show. It's not real. My name's Eric Mataxis, and I usually have the joy of talking to interesting people, many of whom have written books. Today is no exception.

The book I'm holding in my hand is called How to Save the West, Ancient Wisdom for Five Modern Crisis, by Spencer Claven. Who is Spencer Claven, you ask, other than the son of Andrew? And we're going to get to that, don't you worry. Spencer Claven is a scholar, writer, podcaster, lifelong devotion to the great works and principles of the West. After studying Greek and Latin as an undergraduate at Yale, I don't normally read book copy, but this is so good. After studying Greek and Latin as an undergraduate at Yale, he spent five years at Oxford earning his doctorate, in ancient Greek literature. Now he's an editor for the Claremont Institute.

He's written for this and that and the other thing. And he's my guest right now. Spencer, welcome the program. Eric, thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here. Well, it's great to meet you even this way. And I was saying to you before we began that your father, Andrew, whom I revere, was my guest at Socrates in the city not very long ago.

and tells the story of how he came to write the book that we discussed, the truth and beauty and how his son, who turns out to be you, just shared this extraordinary insight with him. We won't talk about that now, but it got him going on the journey to write what is a genuinely magnificent, vital book. So thank you for helping your father at a time when obviously he needed a little push

in the right direction. is almost putting it mildly. My goodness, just extraordinary. Oh. Now, this. I will say, I'll admit on air, although I'll never tell him in person, that I also revere my father. So it's an honor to be involved in that book at all, which I agree is really, really beautiful. And I'm lucky that I'm not just, you know, a son who loves his father. I'm also, I'm lucky to be friends with my father.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, your father's obviously extraordinarily, extraordinary person. Well, look, you've written a book with a title no less daunting, with the thesis, no less daunting than the one that your father wrote in which we've spoken about a couple of times on this program and also at Socrates and City. Your book is How to Save the West, Ancient Wisdom for Five Modern Crisises. That's a big one, how to save the West. Why don't we begin with why should we save the West? Why is the West in need of saving before we begin to figure out what it is that we might do toward that end?

Yep. Great question. And I think that the kind of extreme nature of these two titles, they're related in a certain way. You hear a lot these days of people questioning whether the West is past saving, whether it's worth saving. The most, the loudest version, I would say, of this critique, at least, is that Western civilization is, based on lies and moral evil, based on forms of deceit and power, colonialism, racism, sexism, all of these, you know, deep wrongs, these sins, essentially, that are at the heart of our civilization. And, you know, when I talk about the West, I'm talking about the inheritance, the tradition that comes down to us from Athens and Jerusalem,

the philosophies of Greece and Rome and antiquity and the wisdom literature, the scrolls, of the Jewish and the Christian traditions. And if anything is under fire, at the moment, I would say that it's those two kind of pillars of civilization, which really do contain between the two of them, everything that has built the world we live in. And so the accusations that are made against this, you know, this kind of tradition that we inherit are always so interesting to me as just forms of exercises and self-contradiction because they usually proceed along some sort of line like, you know, America was founded on a sin against human equality.

You think, wow, who taught you to criticize people for not living up to the idea of human equality? Who taught you that actually all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? None other than the founding fathers, who themselves were steeped in the traditions I'm writing about in this book. It's not just a given. It doesn't fall out of the sky that people should believe in human equality. In fact, when you study history, you realize that most people, most places haven't believed in that at all. And when we jettison the traditions that have taught us to believe in this, the guys that have wrestled with these ideas, fought for them, died for them over centuries and generations. It's not just an act of arrogance.

It's an incredible act of self-sabotage because we cast ourselves into this kind of lonely darkness. where it's not a guarantee that we're going to just have a nice, happy utopia, but actually we're just simply going to revert to the kind of pagan tribalism that we see all over the news every day. You only have to open up your phone to see this. And so I'm suggesting in the book, I'm suggesting the radical idea that the past actually has something to say to the present. That's the basic premise. I've lived in my life in reverence of these traditions and these texts. I was very lucky to grow up in a house full of books, which meant I grew up. a house full of friends. And I wanted to offer people a sense that they're not alone, that the problems we're facing, even though some of them have to do with new technology, actually aren't new in themselves. They're foundational questions. And we have a whole company of great thinkers to guide us and accompany us on that journey, which is worth saving, is worth preserving. I always want to get to know people a little bit. And I just have to ask you, you know, I went to Yale.

I was an English major at Yale, and I often find that, you know, unless you know what you believe before you go to a place like that, you're going to get in trouble, which I certainly did. You're going to get pulled away from the truth and from these traditions

and the wisdom that you're talking about. I just want a little bit of your story. How is it that you ended up going to Yale and being, sounds like a classics major there? How did it, what was your upbringing like that led you to that? that's a pretty radical thing for a teenager to do to say, I want to go to that place and study classics. Yeah, and it's weird because I do remember having that really definite sense that that's what I wanted to do.

But you're absolutely right. I mean, I always think about this moment in Homer's Iliad where Ajax, the great giant, is striding from ship to ship because he's so big he can walk across the prows. And my education almost felt like I was doing that, but the ships were sinking behind me. like there was always the sense that I was kind of getting the last of a great academic tradition that was kind of starting to crumble or to suffer from capture. And what saved me, what rescued me was what I alluded to before. And that was just a childhood surrounded by great works. I had to realize that wasn't normal.

I was gradually as I grew up, I came to understand that I was lucky to know these minds that live between the covers of these books. A lot of people think of this as kind of like, you know, these are dusty tomes, they're primitive, they're superstitious, they're backwards, or what have you. I knew from a very early age that none of that was true. I knew that these were friends. And that meant that, you know, of course, some of these books are difficult. Some of the stuff I'm writing about in my book is not, you know, obvious or easy. But it's not there just to provide to furnish material for PhD thesis.

It's not there just to interest eggheads like me. these are, right? I mean, these are like, these are the best, these texts contain the best that has been thought and said about how to be excellent at being human. And that wisdom is more urgent, not less with every day. Whatever else I did wrong, I sort of always clung to that. I always had that sense that I wasn't there just to get a fancy degree. I was there to enter as deeply as I could into this communion and hopefully to offer an inroad for other people as well. which is why I wrote the book. It's funny you say that because when I went to college, there is no question that I was looking to do exactly the same thing. It's why I was an English major. It's not like I was particularly conscious of this idea that I'm on a search for truth, but I somehow inherently knew that these great books are a path to truth and wisdom. And, of course, I'd arrived at a time when that very idea was, was underwent.

under attack. So it's funny. I feel like you kind of, you did a side faint by going to classics. You kind of get out of that, the loop of the English departments and literature departments, and you go right to the source. But it's fascinating. We'll be right back, folks. I'm talking to Spencer Claven, the new book, How to Save the West. In case you haven't been paying attention, the Biden administration has caused a financial crisis and they have no clue how to fix it. Oil prices have skyrocketed. And when oil prices go up, the cost of transportation and tipping spikes, leading the prices of goods to rise. And when we're already seeing record inflation, that's the last thing we need. Our economy is in trouble and you need to take steps to protect

yourself. If all your money is tied up in stocks, bonds, and traditional markets, you are vulnerable. Gold is one of the best ways to protect your retirement. No matter what happens, you own your gold. It is real, it is physical, it's always been valuable since the dawn of time. Legacy precious metals is the company I trust for investment. investing in gold. They can help you roll your retirement account into a gold-backed IRA where you still own the physical gold. They can also ship gold and precious metals safely and securely to your house. Call Legacy at 866-528-1903 or visit them online at LegacyPMinvestments.com. Hey there, folks. Today we are partnering with food for the poor to provide urgently needed food

to some of the most impoverished countries in our hemisphere because of interrupted planting cycles, rising food prices and the lingering impact of COVID, the list of families unable to feed their children grows longer by the day. But you can make a difference in these families today. A meal-for-meal match means that your one-time gift of $144. That's the meal-for-meal match. Your one-time gift of $144 provides a family of four with food for a year. That's two meals a day for the next year for a family who struggle to get even a handful of rice

or enough corn for tortilla, knowing your gift will never have more impact than right now. Would you rescue one family, three families, or even 10 families by going to Metaxistocot.com and click on the red Send Food Banner. You can also text the keyword Eric to 91199. You'll get a link to make your life-saving gift. Text Eric to 911-99 or to give your gift by phone. Call the toll-free number 844-866. Hope 844-863 Hope.

844-863 Hope. God bless you. Folks, welcome back. I'm talking to Spencer Claven, who has written a new book, How to Save the West, Ancient Wisdom for Five Modern Crisises. There's only one other book with the plural word crises in it that I can think of written by Richard Nixon. Did you know that?

Six crises. I'm trying to rack my brain. Six crises written by Nixon. Yeah, I think it was the late seven. his saddle river period. You mentioned before we're talking about the classics, which inevitably come up when you're talking about the West. We're talking about the ancient Greeks and what does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?

And just a fun fact, just because no one else will care about this, but I think you might. You mentioned, first time on this program, anyone has ever mentioned Ajacs, Telemonian Ajax. There you go. chalk it up. I want to knock that in my mouth. Beef-witted Ajax in the words of Shakespeare. But what I loved is when I realized that Ajax was the anglicization of the Greek ayas or aias, depending how you pronounce it, right? And then I realized, oh, yeah, in the 1920s, whenever they came up with Ajax, you know, the cleanser that people use to clean their sinks and whatever, it's because it's strong. So there was once a culture in the 1920s and 30s when people were so literate in the classics that every one knew. Ajax was like Hercules.

He's strong. Yeah, that's depressing. Right? Okay, but it gets weirder. Oh, yeah. It gets weirder. I went, I was in Greece because I'm Greek, and I saw a canister of Ajax. And you'd think that what would the Greek version of Ajax, the blue dot cleanser,

what would the Greek version be called? Of course, it would be Ayas, right? Right, well, naturally. No, no, it's Ajax. It was Adzax, A, Zeta, Alpha, Kappa, Azax. Oh, wow. And I thought, okay. No one in the world cares about this but me and someday in the future.

Maybe I'll have Spencer Claven on and I'll let him know that I had this crisis. All right. Here we are. Forgive me. But it's just, it's so funny to me because we're, you know, that just brings up so many things. The idea that there was once a world where Ajax, this cleanser, when you use the term Ajax people, they all, they knew, everybody knew the Iliad. Everybody knew that Ajax was powerful. And so that's, that's part of.

where we are is we've lost the knowledge of the way. This was this was a common knowledge. I mean, so that's to me part of this conversation, Spencer, is that there was once a West that was celebrated. These books were celebrated. And every decade that has declined to the point where it's almost non-existent. Yeah, you know, I'll tell a story of my own since you told one. I remember in, actually it was in grad school.

I had never read the sword and the stone, the kind of original Arthurian, those great kids novels. And I remember working my way through this book and thinking, man, this is kind of like Harry Potter for grownups. You know, it's got this whimsy, a little bit of magic and adventure. And, you know, I love Harry Potter, actually. But this, nevertheless, this feels like it has a kind of sophistication, a richness of reference, a kind of frame. And I suddenly realized with this sinking feeling that it's not Harry Potter for grownups, it's Harry Potter for school children in the 1950s who are simply more deeply educated, right? And that's kind of part of what you're talking about, right?

I mean, you know, the ancient way of understanding education, as I'm sure you know, especially in the Greek text in Plato's Republic, for instance, we have this idea that it just boils down. Conservative, especially can sometimes make this mistake. It just boils down to learning your facts and figures. reading, writing, arithmetic. Classically speaking, that's just the beginning. That's the trivia, logic and rhetoric and, you know, and language grammar. But at a deeper level, education is soul formation.

It's shaping the soul to love for good and to hate what is evil. Absolutely. It's everything, really. And the left, or at least, you know, the new left of the past century, understood this very well. And so when you look at the, you know, a culture that knows. longer understands the name Ajax. You're not just looking at a piece of trivia that's lost. You're looking at the result of the long march through the institutions to deprive people of his heritage, to teach them to hate it. And that's one reason why it's actually really, you know,

it's not just a matter of kind of minor academic interest. It's crucial to everything we're facing. And it's not something that happened overnight. I mean, it has to do with the Enlightenment project. It's almost like I see it as the digitization of things. It's kind of like there was once this analog idea of wisdom. And so you have ideas and facts and things that make up what ultimately leads to, what does it mean to be alive? What does it mean to be human? Questions that really are, there are questions that deal with this concept of what is

wisdom, what is goodness, what is truth, what is beauty. But something happened over time. And, you know, you can point to Isaac Newton and the Enlightenment. but somehow these ideas crept in that we don't have answers to those bigger questions. So we're just going to focus on these details. And it took a long time for us to get there. But that's certainly where we have been for some time. That difference, I mean, digitization right, from digit, from the ones and zeros,

the difference between an understanding of the whole and an understanding of breaking things down into their parts. I mean, there is a portion of the book where I talk about this. Like, whoever said that the best way to understand something was by holding it up an inch from your face, well, that comes out of this switch from analog to digital. It comes out of, you know, in the sciences, I think, the problem here is not science, which is a noble endeavor to understand the physical world. And it's ancient, natural philosophy that that endeavor is well attested. The notion of scientism, which says that, not only is science good and virtuous, it's an exhaustive description of reality.

Everything that's real, right, boils down into facts and figures, ones and zeros, mathematical equations. G.G. Simpson, the paleontologist, says a version of this when he says that all the good answers to all the important questions were discovered after Darwin, and everything was then obsolete before then. But there's a really important parallel here in government, and that's the capital P progressive movement, which in many ways just is taking this idea that everything can be cashed out in terms of equations. If it can be measured, it's real. If it can't be measured, it's not real. If you take that and you translate that into human affairs, what you get is the bureaucracy. You get this idea that we're going to write a government equation, an administrative state that will outsource decisions, political decisions, decisions about ethics to a system or a machine. And then there'll be no more need for this outdated constitution thing than the people who are

kind of messy. We don't have to deal with them. We'll just feed it into the machine. Now, that's not a good idea even in science to reduce everything to numbers and zeros. It's a terrible idea in human affairs, which as Aristotle points out, don't admit of that measure of determinism and have fundamentally to do with the human heart and the individual choice. You just said so much, I want to rewind a little bit just so people are tracking because this is so central to everything we're discussing ultimately. The idea of scientism. I was just reading a book of essays from Ignatius Press on C.S. Lewis.

And somebody references the famous line from one of the Narnia Chronicles about a star being a ball of gas. And I believe it's Aslan who says that that's what a star is made of, but that's not what a star is. I remember when I was growing up in the 70s some science teacher said something like you know the chemicals in your body are you know if they would be sold someplace it would be like $1.98 you know. In other words you're made of these chemicals

but that's not what you are you know each of us is a walking poem we are I mean how do you describe what is a human being but to be reductive in this way. And that's what scientism does. It reduces everything. Where that takes us on so many levels, and you've just touched on a number of them, is horrifying. It's wrong.

It's neelistic. It's just awful. It's not true that science is the only way you can know anything. But that is really a radical departure when we talk about the class. and this pursuit of wisdom. It's a very radical departure. And again, there are many places you can point to where these ideas began, but these are bad ideas. And I think in books like yours, we're discovering why they're bad.

So when you talk about five modern crises, is it worth mentioning what each of these crises is? I think it might be. And we can do it through the lens that you've just very ably kind of laid out, I think. You mentioned Lewis, one of my great intellectual heroes, and that line from Narnia, you know, I really think that in that moment he's distilling almost the whole corpus of his dear friend Owen Barfield, who was such an important member of that society, the inklings. He was, unfortunately, not the writer that Lewis was. And so it's less easy, I think, to grasp what Barfield is saying. but a lot of the stuff, a lot of the prophetic stuff in Lewis, you know, the abolition of man is the text that really hits this head on. But that hideous strength, you know, the third book of the space trilogy, which is a magnificent, you know, a magnificent novel.

It kind of captures this idea. We're going to go to a break. We'll be right back plenty more talking to Spencer Claven, how to save the West. Tell me why Relief Factor is so successful at lowering or eliminating pain. I'm often asked that question just the other night. I was asked that question, well, the owners of Relief Factor tell me they believe our bodies were designed to heal. That's right, designed to heal.

And I agree with them. And the doctors who formulated Relief Factor for them selected the four best ingredients, yes, 100% drug-free ingredients. And each one of them helps your body deal with inflammation. Each of the four ingredients deals with inflammation from a different metabolic pathway. That's the point. So approaching from four different angles made, be why so many people find such wonderful relief.

If you've got back pain, shoulder, neck, hip, knee, or foot pain from exercise. They're just getting older. You should order the three-week quick start discounted to only 1995 to see if it'll work for you. It has worked for about 70% of the half a million people who've tried it and have ordered more. On one of them, go to Relieffactor.com or call 800 for relief to find out about this offer. Feel the difference. My pillow is excited to bring you their biggest betting sale ever. Get the Giza Dream bed sheets for as low as 299.

A set of pillowcases for only $9.98 and rejuvenate your bed with a my pillow mattress topper for as low as $9999. They also have blankets and a variety of sizes, colors, and styles. They even have blankets for your pets. Get duvets, downcomfitors, body pillars, bolster pillows, and so much more. All the biggest discounts of the year are happening right now, so don't miss out. They're also extending their money back guarantee for Christmas until March 1, 2023 making them the perfect gifts for your friends, your family, and everyone you know.

So go to mypillow.com and use promo code Eric or call 1-800-9757 and you'll get huge discounts on all my pillow betting products, including the Giza Dream Bedsheets for as low as 2998 and get all your shopping done now while quantities last. Again, use code Eric and save mypillow.com. Folks, welcome back talking to Spencer Claven. Yeah, he might be related to Andrew Claven, might be his son. And we're not going to say. The book, new book is How to Save the West, Ancient Wisdom for Five Modern Crises.

You were just referencing C.S. Lewis's abolition of man and then the third book in the so-called space trilogy, that hideous strength. Talk more about that. You were just going someplace and we had to go to a break. Yeah, yeah. Those works are, as I was kind of alluded to, there are almost acts of prophecy. And the famous line that we cut the, you know, we castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful. We make men without chests and expect courage. This, I think, is really getting onto what we were beginning to talk about with scientism, the evaporation of the whole and the dissolution of everything into material parts, which, as you indicated with that quote from your science teacher, right, it totally blinds you.

It makes it impossible to see the realist things there are, things like truth, beauty, and goodness, right? human virtue. You said, what's a human being? You're right, there's a million definitions. The one I would give, besides rational animal, is embodied soul, right? That we are form in matter. We're hyalomorphic beings, you might say. And I've not, I've not heard that word, hylomorphic. Yeah. Hilo-morphic. And yeah, it's a beautiful word. We might have to bleep that out. I'm just being honest with you. Hylo-morphic. Albin, we'll look into that, look into that. If you bleep it out, it'll

sound like I'm embarking on a string of curse. Exactly. Exactly. Well, okay, so this is from the Greek word hulae, meaning matter, and morphae, meaning form. And so the word hyalomorphism is the combination of the two indicating kind of the aristotelian idea that these two things are always threaded together. They're never separate, except perhaps in some rare and extreme cases. And in some ways, you might characterize these five crises.

that I write about in the book. You ask me what they are. Each one of them is a kind of different consequence of losing sight of this idea, of losing sight of the fact that the whole is a real thing, even though it has no location in the physical parts. You know, the first crisis is the crisis of reality, just what is real? And we see this in the news all the time with, you know, virtual reality

and things like fake news. But at a more fundamental level, we see it in arguments over my truth in your, truth, is there anything good or bad or does thinking make it so? This is founded, I think, on an inability to claim the reality of things other than physical events or just, you know, physical interactions. Truth, beauty, and goodness, which are real, which is kind of Socrates through Plato helps us to see in the Greek tradition. That's really the basis on which all of this is founded. Then, you know, if that's true, you end up kind of with the flip side of the problem,

which is the body crisis. And that is, okay, if the world is, you know, it contains these eternal truths, these beauties, these verities, why the hell do we have to break down and die? What's up with this physical flesh we have? And that revulsion, which is very, very ancient, it goes back at least to the Neoplatonist probably earlier. That's on display in transgender extremism, in transhumanism, this notion that maybe it would be better if our bodies could be left behind and our humanity could be dissolved into the machine. And that's where hyalomorphism really comes in as the antidote, this sort of savior ideology in some ways that rescues us from this.

Our bodies aren't a mistake. Our souls aren't an illusion. Our bodies are the language of the soul in which the soul is. But what's so interesting to me is what you're talking about. Obviously, C.S. Lewis talks about this a lot. But this is this biblical idea. This is a particularly Hebraic idea. This is way more.

Jerusalem than Athens, I would say. I mean, I'm not trying to be, I don't want to reduce my people and their tradition to dualism. But there's something holistic about the biblical view of reality. We got Tertullian over here, what half Athens to do with. Well, right. Right. And so there's always this question, you know, about, wouldn't it be good you're, you've just brought it up, you know, to transcend the body, right? We want to transcend our physicality. And I understand, we all understand kind of where that temptation comes from, that idea. At the same time, it can lead to really bad things and bad ideas and being comfortable with the idea that we are enfleshed souls or and sold creatures of flesh. It's, you can see how people would just say, no, I

I'd prefer something simpler. We're just meat robots. We're just this. We're just that. Because it is a conundrum when you're talking about life. I mean, after I interviewed your father at Socrates in the city, my next guest was James Tour, the nanoscientist from Houston, who talks about, you know, the origins of life. And there's one moment in the conversation where he talks about, you know, if you take a single cell and suddenly the cell dies,

you say to a scientist, okay, all the parts are still there. What do we just lose? What just happened? It wasn't the soul, but what is life? You're talking about ineffables. You're talking about mysteries. And there's some people that are so fundamentally uncomfortable with those mysteries that they have to insist. There's no mystery.

There's just parts. And we'll figure out what we lost. But, you know, and the point is that we have at least 25 centuries of history, much more than that, if you look at the ancient Israel, that says no, that there is more than just these parts. That's, it's kind of funny because we don't normally think of that as being a central issue of our time, but you've just pointed it out and it is. If you, yeah, if you kind of dig under the skin of the news cycle a little bit, you find that in fact, it's there everywhere. You kind of can't unsee it. But I want maybe to return to this question about, well, you know, is the, is the

Gnosticism, the separation of body and soul, is that can we lay that at the feet of the Greeks? Okay, hold on. They're telling me we're going to a break. When we come back, more Gnosticism, more Spencer Claven, How to Save the West. We'll be right back. Folks, I'm talking to Spencer Clavin. How to Save the West is the book. You were just talking about what I threw out this idea that Gnosticism can be laid at the feet of my people, the Greeks. more about that. Yeah, I want to exonerate you guys a little bit, actually. I mean, it's definitely true that there's a tendency in platonic thought to draw this dividing line between body and soul, and this becomes really exaggerated and extreme among the neoplatonists, guys like platinus.

And I talk about this in the book in the body crisis section. It's also true, though, that that concept of hyalomorphism, the fusion of that's also a Greek idea. I'm getting it from Aristotle and from his work on the soul. And of course, it's really it's Thomas Aquinas who kind of baptizes Aristotle, brings this guy into the fold in a certain way, and adopts hyalomorphism as one of his governing mechanisms for understanding what we are. But there's this point that I make in the book that I think is kind of important. It's, you know, we think that people say Aquinas baptizes Aristotle as if like that just means he's kind of claimed this foreign tradition for himself. And he's kind of ignoring the scripture at this point.

But in fact, if you look at what Aquinas is doing there, it goes right back to Genesis, where there is a remarkable feature of the description of man that gets overlooked. And that's, you know, God takes the dirt, ha Adam, and he molds it. And then he breathes into it the breath of life. And at that moment that the fusion of the two becomes a nefesh chayim, a living soul, that it's not actually the dirt. and it's not even the breath of life, the kind of disembodied air that makes up man or the soul. It's the combination of the two, and it's perfectly hyalomorphic. So there's kind of an amazing marriage there of Athens and Jerusalem. Well, that's very nice to know.

That's actually beautiful to hear you say nefesh haim. But it is a radical concept, the breath of God coming into the dirt. And then the two become one thing somehow. that's kind of the history of the of the world after that obviously but what a what a radical idea in many ways and a stumbling block in fact you might say a scandal well certainly it's a stumbling block and it's it's becoming more of a scandal with every day because we're living in a world as you mentioned earlier that it's kicking against these goads of what I like to think of as reality trying to square the circle. I don't know how you put it. So when you say ancient wisdom for five modern crises, that's the subtitle of how to save the West. Talk more about what these crises are. We've been talking about a couple of them. Yeah, we've covered the first two now. And the second two are also kind of a pair. They're the crisis of meaning and the crisis of religion. And the meaning

crisis is where the stuff we were talking about earlier about scientism really begins to make itself felt. Dawkins, the famous new atheist in his book, The Selfish Gene, he invents our modern word meme. He talks about all of life as if it were governed by kind of evolutionary rules, imitation, mimesis, that's the Greek word, of kind of repeating constantly the same patterns again and again and mutating them. Memima in Greek means a replicated thing. And so meme becomes our word for the things you share online. This is a vision of the world that's almost lifted out of Plato's Temeus, the sort of literary

sequel to the Republic, the notion that we're all kind of copies of copies of copies is there in the tradition. But what Dawkins does is he takes away the original model. He says there's nothing outside of this evolutionary battle. And that means that there's nothing that the replications are replicating. There's no object of imitation. There's just constant imitation all the way down. And I argue in the book that this just doesn't work.

It doesn't work if you want to retain what Dawkins and a lot of other atheists want to retain, which is morality. See, that's the key. And I take him to task, unlike anything I've ever done really taking him to task. Because when you read Dawkins, what a scandal that he basically. basically says everything is utterly without meaning. There's no such thing as meaning. And then he praises Shakespeare and the works of Christopher Wren and Bob. And he thinks, where do you get that from?

Why do you want that? How can you talk about beauty? You just basically said that there is no such thing and there can be no such thing. So the intellectual poverty of folks like Dawkins, I find it a statement. astonishing. I cease to be anything but astonished by how very quickly you see how they defeat themselves. They don't have a leg to stand on. There's nothing there, but they have a huge audience, evidently, for what they're selling. Yeah. I mean, in the selfish gene, he basically just helps himself to it, right? He has a passage where he says, well, why should we be good? And then he

waves his hands around and says, well, we should. It's just because. And this is a remarkable moment, right? Like, yeah, exactly. The argumentation is so flimsy. It doesn't, it doesn't really suffer rational scrutiny. There's no there there. But there is an important, I think, result of all of this, of the success of this argument.

And that's the flip side, the crisis of religion. Because the truth of the matter is that nobody, what Dawkins shows is that nobody can live like this. Nobody can really act or live as if there were no meaning to anything. There is a line in the Bible, which I'm sure you're well familiar with. The fool has said in his heart there is no God. And it's very easy. We read that line a lot. I used to read that line and think, you know, this just means atheists are dumb.

It's stupid to be an atheist, which fair enough. I'm happy to knock on atheists. But I do think that there's something much more profound going on there. And that's this. If you tell yourself you have no God. If you say that you don't worship, then you are fooling me. yourself. I think that's the meaning of the line. You are deceiving. It's an act of self-deceit to believe that you are an atheist. And what you will end up doing instead is simply worshipping by other means under other names and without realizing that you're doing it. And that's been the result of the new atheism stuff, even though that was never the intention, is that now we see people like kneeling for in prayer for absolution at Black Lives Matter rallies. We have science itself becomes a kind of idol, right? The science, capital S. And Dr. Fauci represents it, i.e. is its priest. I mean, This is really recognizable as pagan worship, as pagan submission, but only if you understand

from the outside that that's what worship is. It's just placing something in the position of a highest good. We now have many people who place multiple things in the position of highest good, meaning they're polytheists, and those kinds of contradictions are rife. You know, I mean, it's just the minute you do that, as Socrates already observed, you become trapped between multiple competing imperatives. So the point of the book is like- repeating imperatives. I wanted to end on that phrase. And I have, but we've got plenty more with Spencer Claven. The book is How to Save the West. Don't go away.

Hey there, folks. Hope you enjoying today's crazy special show. I've been in North Carolina, Albin. Yes. That's often where I am. If you ever want to know, I'm in North Carolina. I spoke, last night, I spoke on my book, is atheism dead. Normally, I'm speaking on a letter to the American church. wherever I go, I'm speaking letter to the American Church. Last night I spoke on, is atheism dead? And I got two things to say. Several people came up to me in the book signing line and said, thank you for putting this in your newsletter. Because I get your newsletter, I'm here tonight.

I drove like from an hour or two away. Amazing. So if you're not signed up for my newsletter at Eric Mattaxas.com, I'm traveling all around the country. We try to keep you updated Socrates in the city events, wherever I'm going to be, please sign up for my newsletter. And speaking of his atheism dead, because I don't get to talk about that as often. So last night I'm talking about the archaeology chapters in there.

And I keep saying to the crowds that I'm talking about, I can't wait to go back to Israel. Writing this book just made me flip out over wanting to get back to actually see what I'm writing about in the book as atheism dead. So I've mentioned a few times I'm going to Israel next year, at least one. At least once. I may have to go back twice because we want to film a TV streaming TV series based on his atheism dead, in which case I'm going to go to the sites and film it and whatever. But anyway, if you're interested in going to Israel and why wouldn't you be, of all the places you could visit where Jesus walked, that would be the one. You can go to a website. It's holyland.israel. We recommend that you go to

holyland.israel. It will reinvigorate your faith. I think most of us need that in more ways than one. But that's something you can do that would be fun and beautiful. Another thing you can do that would be fun and beautiful

is you could help us out in our campaign with food for the poor. There are starving kids who depend genuinely on your generosity. We do a campaign once a year. And this is sort of a big deal because most of us, even going through hard times, are relatively blessed.

There are kids and families in Central America. That's where Food for the Poor is focused on right now. In Central America, that they're starving. We do this campaign because we, We believe it is our job to do what we can for folks who are suffering like this. And it's just an unmitigated good. It's a beautiful thing. The only question is how, where, that's why we teed it up for you.

Food for the poor. There's reputable as a guest, an amazing Christian organization. There's a number of ways you can give. And I hope everyone listening will feel compelled to do something, a little thing, whatever you can do. A few dollars helps. If you can give $72, that feeds two children for an entire year. This is how Food for the Poor leverages our funds.

That's why I'm pushing everyone to give something, because they leverage it so far that it's amazing. I want to hear Food for the Poor's CEO, Ed Rainey. We have a clip. Let's play that. work in 20 countries in the Caribbean and Latin America. And people who have no other resources, except the incredible generosity of typically Americans who, you know, time and time again, you know, really just give from the bottom of their heart and through their love for the,

for thy neighbor. And so this is a faith-based organization. And through our church networks and all these countries, we're able to get the aid to where it needs to be. Okay, so you can text the word Eric to 911-9-99. Text the word Eric to 911. The easiest thing is go to metaxis talk.com and click on the banner. We genuinely need your help. We need your help. Please go to metaxistalk.com. Click on the banner. We're behind. If you want to call, you can call 844-863 Hope. 844-863 Hope. We need your help. 844-863. Hope. God bless you as you give. Thank you.