Spencer A. Klavan is an American author, essayist, and literary critic. He was born on March 14th, 1991, in Los Angeles, California, and grew up in the nearby city of Santa Monica.
Klavan graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in English, where he also pursued his passion for the performing arts as a member of the renowned sketch comedy troupe, Mask and Wig.
As a writer, Klavan's work has appeared in a variety of publications, including The Wall Street Journal, National Review, The Weekly Standard, The New York Post, and The American Conservative. He is also a regular contributor to the online cultural commentary website, The Federalist.
In addition to his essays and articles, Klavan is the author of two novels, "How to Read Superhero Comics and Why" and "Without Exploding: The Mindful Writer's Guide to Harnessing the (Explosive) Power of Your Emotions."
Klavan is known for his incisive critiques of contemporary culture and his ability to weave together philosophy, literature, and popular culture in his writing. He is also an accomplished public speaker, having given talks on a variety of topics, including creativity, culture, and politics.
Currently, Klavan lives in New York City, where he works as an editor at the Claremont Review of Books and continues to write and publish his work.
But I did spend some time yesterday watching some interviews, like the episode you did with Michael Knowles and your interview of Ted Cruz.
And I do feel like I have a bit of a sense and context around this work, but I don't really know much about you, Spencer.
I just know that you wrote this book.
And the book is actually the reason that I wanted to have you on the podcast because I'm working on a book about Americanism and I'm trying to figure out how to save the West.
Sometimes I feel like I was thinking about this the other day.
I feel like imagine if you were trapped in a room and you were told, you know, in this scenario, that there is a way out of the room, right?
It's just incredibly difficult to figure out.
And in order to save the world, you have to figure out in the next five years how to get out of this room.
Like, when it all comes down to this one thing, like, there's this incredible moment in the second, I think it's the second book of C.S. Lewis's Space Trade.
It gets a short shrift because Narnia, very famous, yada, yada.
I'm not knocking Narnia, but this is kind of more, a little bit more for grown-ups, at least it's more for grown-ups than kind of the, you know, first, the line of wisdom, the work.
And one of the cool things about it is if you read Lewis's nonfiction, like Abolition of Man and some of his big essays about like, which are very prophetic about techno-futurism and scientism and all this stuff.
If you then read this trilogy, you'll find like the same ideas, but in literary form.
So kind of like that quote you just said, the lie that tells the truth.
Like that's a lot of what fiction does sometimes is sort of embodies or it puts puts things in front of you in this different way so that you can kind of feel the truths as well as well as knowing them.
And there is a moment in the second one without giving away any spoilers where the hero has flown to Venus and he's like out in the, you know, he's doing space travel.
It's kind of this weird mix of science fiction and fantasy.
And he has to get in a fist fight basically that's going to determine the future of the planet.
And he's like, this is insane that it comes down to like me, this little weirdo, this Nebus.
And he has this line where he says, and yet somewhere light years away, the fate of Europe hung on the actions of a boy no older than 20, you know, because it's during the Great War, or it's actually, I think it takes place during the Second World War.
And this is how life works.
Like these giant questions, these enormous cosmic battles come down to like, you're in a room, you have five minutes.
Can you figure out how to like flip the switch that opens the door?
Like these things are even when we think in these big grand terms like the West or Americanism, which we need to do, we need to think in those ways.
But ultimately, one of the big arguments in the book is all those ideas are going to cash out in terms of like really small, human-sized actions, the way you show up for your kids, the way you put the way you pray in church, like the interactions you have with your neighbors, all that stuff.
So, I suspect you'll actually really like the last portion of the book, which I know you haven't gotten to yet, The Crisis of the Regime.
And that's about like what is America?
What is America supposed to be?
Where does it fit into the history of classical philosophy?
And then, what does that mean about just like tomorrow on the school board, the vote that you take?
You know, I think understanding the one like big first step and kind of why I wrote the book is that people think about philosophy or the great books or the you know Western culture or whatever, and they think like this is somehow beyond me.
It's for academics, it's like too abstract, um, but actually or even that it's for douches because the middle American people hate academics, and I understand why, but I minor in philosophy, so I appreciate the texts.
Like, all academics kind of act like douches sometimes, but like, especially right now, shallow and pedantic.
The joke position movement like twirling the Chardonnay glass or whatever.
And, like, uh, and I mean, my feeling about this is like, I'm always going to be one of these guys.
I mean, one of the things that is really important for Americans to grasp, I think, at the moment is like we have such a corrupt elite.
Our elite are just like the picture of corruption.
And if you read classical accounts of elite corruption, they're kind of eerie in how precisely they conform to this sort of self-interested, double-dealing and just weirdly decadent coterie, cadre, whatever you want to call it, of cronies who have their like grasp on the level of power.
All of that having been said, it's very easy for conservatives or people who just recognize this to feel like, well, we should just do away with the elites altogether.
And that's never going to happen.
Like, that doesn't exist because even in like a meritocratic, virtuous society, some people rise to the top and become leaders and have particular skills.
So, really, it's like my feeling is I'm auditioning to be America's new elite.
Like, I am, yes, I'm one of these eggheads.
Yes, I went to fancy schools, but I was driven there by a genuine feeling that this stuff is for you and that, like, whatever gifts anybody may have intellectually are like put there by God to make things known to people.
And one of the things that that can do is it can put your life into a context that is grander and bigger and more ennobling than you ever thought.
So, you're all you're going to be doing a lot of the same things, but it's it matters that you wake up and understand that by putting food on the table for your family, you're not actually just like, you know, sloughing along as a workout course, you're actually like embodying some of the most important and core principles of classical political philosophy.
Like, the family is the core unit of all of all healthy regimes.
And so, this is sort of the point of the book is not to tell you, like, oh, you're doing everything wrong and you need to like go away and read Aristotle, but rather, like, Aristotle can help you understand why what you are already doing matters so very much and why you should think of yourself as like aiming at this kind of eternal cosmic truth of virtue.
And basically, what I'm trying to do is make the case for populism, but reframe populism as something that's not collectivism, as it has often traditionally been, but as individualism.
So you can't truly be a populist unless you're an individualist because the populace is made up of individuals.
Individuals aren't made up of the population, right?
And so, the first step to populism is actually self-actualization.
And then the other side of that is the only way to really reach self-actualization is to have as much freedom as possible because you have to have the freedom to do the things that it takes in order to become the best version of yourself.
So, it's sort of like a hierarchy of needs kind of psychology thing, self-help thing meets populist.
And I'm trying to make it come together in some coherent way, but I really resonate with this theme of the real way to save the West is to do your best to sort of reach this self-actualization or become the best individual that you can.
When I say I hate academics, I'm talking about when I go into a social issues class or sociology class and they tell me that I can't ask any questions because I'm white and I've had enough time to speak.
Like, nobody, like, no white man that grew up in the 90s or 2000s was like favored in class because of his whiteness.
Like, what world are you living in?
Um, yeah, no, I mean, this is so important.
Um, are you familiar with that Abraham Lincoln quote: God must have loved the common people, He did make so many of them?
That's, I really, I've always loved that, um, because it says to you, like, the kind of, you know, if this thing called America means anything, it means that those people get to be free, like, not your kind of ideal of what the people might look like and not some, you know, upper crust chosen from among them.
Like, you have to genuinely, in your heart, be not only like cool with, but actually happy about the idea that like the guy in the Norman Rockwell painting standing up in that meme, you know, like and speaking, yeah, yeah, that guy has a unique embodied soul that he's made in the image of God, like irreducibly.
And, you know, that his inner life is irreplaceable, has something to contribute.
I mean, these are crucial American ideas.
And I think they can neatly, I mean, your project and my project are similar in one way, which is like, you know, you're focused in the American sphere, but you're obviously thinking in this bigger philosophical sense as well.
And one of the things that I argue in the book is, you know, that America, the American regime as envisioned and founded, really is kind of the height politically of what the West has produced, these traditions of Athens and Jerusalem that came together in Europe, built this civilization.
I mean, this is it, man.
This is as far as we've gotten is the American regime, which is why it's so important to preserve it.
And that idea of individualism in community.
I mean, the Greeks would have talked about a distinction between two different types of koinonia, which is like a word that means togetherness or things in common.
And Aristotle has this great passage where he talks about this.
He says, you know, Plato in the Republic, he proposed that the elites should like all share wives and they should have all their property in common.
And that's because they will, that way they'll all love each other.
They won't have any envy.
Nobody will get too much money or whatever.
And Aristotle says, This is this is crap.
Because in fact, if you take a little bit of wine and you dissolve it in a big vat of water, you don't get a big vat of wine.
You get a big vat of water with like a little tiny flavor.
And love is like this.
Like all love also takes place in these kind of human to human interactions.
And so if you dissolve love, you know, in into the koinonia, into this sort of formless mass, then you've basically destroyed it.
You've destroyed, you know, all the basis for human freedom, human interaction.
There's a different kind of koinonia, and that's what we would translate as like real community, which takes place in relationship, this idea of justice as like the right relationship between individuals who form some, you know, you and I have this conversation.
This is another kind of Petersonian point.
You know, you and I are here having this conversation.
I have a perspective and a background.
You have a perspective and a background.
We've never, you know, we've talked for five minutes before, we've never met, but some third thing exists between us that is different from either of us.
It's more than any of us could have produced alone, but doesn't dissolve us into this kind of like Marxist blob, which seems to be kind of the going aesthetic at the moment.
You ever notice that like all of these kind of calls for like liberation, they always end up with people in this kind of like non-binary burrito where they're like just dissolving into sort of some sort of like empty formlessness, formless mass.
That's this is why.
It's because that's the opposite of individualism.
Individualism is like the kind of populism that you're proposing is the like central idea of all justice, of all regimes.
Well, and this ties right into the problem with communism is that everybody thought it was going to make everyone equally rich, but really what ends up happening is it makes everyone equally poor.
Well, except for maybe one or two people at the top, like in North Korea, there is one incredibly free man.
That's it, right?
No one else has any freedom.
His freedom is directly proportional to everyone else's subjugation or inversely, right?
So that's really fascinating.
And I think it ties into a lot of motifs and themes throughout history, namely like Tolkien, right?
That was one of my favorite things about Lord of the Rings is that it was the little people, literally the little people that save the world.
And I think that he was sort of reinforcing this idea.
And I think it's interesting how in, I just watched the Hercules cartoon with my daughter.
And it's almost as if the Greeks had this like idea that way in the past, there were these evil, corrupt, godlike creatures that were destroying the world.
And then the real gods came along and subjugated the Titans and put them underground so that they would never come back again.
But really, it's not a sustainable problem, like you said, just to wipe out the corrupt if the system isn't corrected.
And I think one of the problems, one of the mistakes that we make as Americans is sort of out of hubris, we have an inclination to think that our leaders are less evil than leaders all over the world, whether it's in the Middle East, whether it's in Russia, whether it's in Ukraine or China or whatever.
We think for some reason, our leaders are less evil.
And it's not that our leaders are less evil.
It's just that we have a system in place that sort of checks that evil in a way that most other systems don't.
I firmly believe that there's an equal amount of greed.
Human nature is the same across different cultures and just universally across the world.
And Milton Friedman said this.
He's like, do you think there aren't greedy people in communist countries?
He's like, you think that we're greedy because we're capitalists, but they're not greedy.
So greed is everywhere.
It's just a matter of which system is able to sort of check that greed so that it has the greatest good.
I mean, like, this is like, as you talk about the Titans, it's like in the Bible, too, there are these giants.
I mean, Nimrod is a mighty man against God or in face of God, in sight of God.
Yeah, this whole thing is like the whole idea is that is not that our people are so virtuous and good, although I do think the American people have, you know, a lot going for them.
But the whole point is not that we're going to be so good.
The point is that our ideas are so good.
Our system works so well that it kind of safeguards against or it cabins in or redirects certain certain vices.
That's the idea.
But then you see, right, like, you know, you see people during COVID, like, oh, well, our, you know, officials, our authorities would never lie to us.
It's like, what?
Where did you get that?
Who told you that?
Like, their officials are going to be the first people to lie to you because they've been given carte blanche.
I mean, this is what Machiavelli says, the great kind of famous for his, for the prince, obviously, and for his sort of ruthless real politique.
I mean, like this kind of, you get this adjective Machiavellian, but actually, like, he's got this other book, The Discourses on Living, which is kind of in the spirit of my just whole life that he has this sense that, you know, the great works are kind of companions and that being surrounded by books means you're not alone.
It means you're surrounded by friends.
And so he looks into the great Roman historian Livy, who writes about the Roman Republic and, you know, all of sort of to examine how it was that this regime came into being, but also crumbled.
And so one of the things he says is when the elites do what they did basically during COVID, where they betray the trust of the people, they commit a double crime because on the one hand, they've, you know, betrayed the trust of the people at a personal level, like the elites have failed, but they were also supposed to represent the system.
They were supposed to represent like the best of what the regime had to offer.
And so in failing, they've destroyed people's faith in that whole thing as well.
You get kind of disillusioned.
But from our, from our perspective, from the perspective of conservatives who have this criticism of the current situation, this is actually good news.
Because GK Chesterson said, before you get the good news, you have to get the bad news.
And I think the more people are like, oh, wait a second, they will just lie.
Like the press, the quote unquote, the science, like the official bodies that are supposed to be kind of apolitical and remote, like they will just lie to you.
That is a core insight.
And the founders got it crucially from the Bible.
It was from this tradition of Jerusalem that they got this idea that we are all fallen, right?
There's no one righteous, no, not one.
And so put not your faith in princes.
And I think, you know, famously, John Adams said this is a constitution built for a moral and religious people.
And that's one way in which that's true.
Moral and religious people know that everybody kind of sucks and that we've all fallen short of God.
And so then you can say, well, okay, so how am I going to keep a watch on the leaders and hold them to account because they're, in fact, they're no better than me in any fundamental sense.
So that's kind of weirdly hopeful to me.
I get weirdly hopeful whenever I see people being like, oh, like they just lie.
Like with this new lab leak thing, have you seen this thing where like they're basically going to just like they're admitting that it came from the Wuan lab.
I mean, they all are also making noise now about the fact that Russia is asking China for exactly.
So yeah, I mean, if what we take away from this is like, yeah, oh, now they're telling the truth, that would be the wrong lesson.
Because in fact, as we've seen, that they'll sort of say whatever.
This is the reality crisis section of my book, by the way, is kind of like that people who don't believe in absolute truth will just sort of say whatever for power.
That's kind of how that works.
And so the right lesson to take away from this is to continue.
I mean, for those of us that are, you know, in media or whatever, is just to continually hammering the fact and naming names of people who went out there and said lab leak theory is a conspiracy theory.
It should be banned from YouTube.
It should be taken.
I mean, they did all of this stuff.
There's a great book about it called Viral about just how ferociously they persecuted people for even floating the lab leak idea.
And so now that they're coming out with it, it's like the message for just people that love the country is like, yeah, so they lied.
They just lied and lied.
And they will now pretend that they never did it and they will erase it as much as they can, put it down the memory hole, but they genuinely lied because they suck.
And I agree with everything that you just said with the caveat that I've been exceedingly surprised ever since I've been involved in the political conversation over the last couple of years, just trying to grow this podcast.
I've been exceedingly surprised the extent to which the obviousness of the lies does not change the opinions of the masses.
So I still think that what's going to happen is half the population is going to vote Democrat and the other half is going to vote Republican, even though we saw this like massive state lying over the last two years where countless businesses went out of business, especially in like the restaurant industry.
People became dependent on the government.
People were told that there was a certain level of efficacy and certain approaches to this thing that may or may not have actually been the case.
We were lied to so many times and economically ruined in so many ways over the last couple of years, yet so many people still sort of lean on or trust the science.
The same number of people watching, well, not the same number of people watch CNN, but quite a few, right?
And so how does a people learn a lesson?
Because it seems, and even I had Alex Epstein on the other day, I think it's actually Epstein, I can't remember, but I had him on my podcast and he talked about how after it was obvious that communism was not a more productive economic system than capitalism, instead of not being communist anymore, the communists just sort of switched to saying, well, capitalism is worse for the environment.
I mean, you read Gramsci, you read Michael Knowles' book, Speechless About All This Stuff.
Like this totally did happen.
And that's the most disappointing thing, the kind of thing that you're talking about, really, the tragic thing is like, that's kind of the default human setting is not like, oh, I was wrong.
Let me change my mind.
But like, oh, all my predictions were false.
Let me just like sort of readjust.
Let me like rebrand basically.
Like, let me take this same idea and just like color it in a slightly different way.
And I was just recently kind of watching a documentary about, you know, the shift in New York's fortunes during the 90s and the growth of the Manhattan Institute.
And I was like, the most amazing part about this is that like so many of these guys were sort of like great society liberals who realized it wasn't working and changed their minds.
Like they actually were just like, this isn't working.
And like, to me, that's the greatest mystery is like, how is it that they did that rather than just dug in their heels and doubled down or whatever.
So yeah, I mean, we're kind of, we're talking about the infamous like pill conversation.
Are you taking the white pill or the black pill?
And I am a big advocate of a pill that I think I made up, which is the quantum pill, because like quantum entities exist in a state of kind of unknowable multiplicity superposition until observed.
And that is how I feel about all predictions about the future.
I like insist that we do not know what will happen in the future.
And that genuinely means we do not know.
It's good news and bad news because good stuff might happen, bad stuff might happen.
Take the quantum pill.
And so the question then becomes like what, not sort of will people wake up or however you want to put it, will people take the red pill or the blue pill?
Because really it's like, we won't know until it happens.
The question is like, what is our job?
This is how I feel about all sort of pessimism, optimism predictions.
It's like, you might be a pessimist, I might be an optimist, vice versa, whatever.
I'm not going to be able to argue you into a different prediction about the future.
And you're not going to be able to argue me into a different prediction about the future.
What we can do is say, what is our hope?
Where do we have hope?
And what does that mean our job is?
So I would suggest like a few things.
Asking people how their philosophy is working out for them, I have found is a very concrete way to kind of bring these conversations back down to earth.
And it's so funny because it's like, I actually, in my heart of hearts, I want to know, like, I'm genuinely curious, like, what are you getting out of this?
Somebody, you know, you obviously somebody's getting something out of that.
And I have some theories.
I think, you know, people get a kind of cheap sense of meaning and belonging.
They get the sort of illusion that now they finally matter in the world, right?
If I'm part of the non-binary, trans, disabled, whatever community, if I'm, if I'm this, then like I have some position in human life.
So even though I think it's a really bad idea to seek meaning in the LGBTQIA plus star borg, like I still think that I can work with that because I do believe that we need meaning.
I think a lot of what people are doing, the way people are lashing out, the way they're acting out is a longing for meaning and specifically for religious meaning, for reference to a higher power.
This is the crisis of meaning section in the book and of religion in the section in the book, is that people are offloading the religious impulse into all of these like political and materialist realms.
And that is just not working out that well for them.
It's making them miserable.
It's making them sadder.
It's making them uglier.
I mean, it's literally doing all of these terrible things.
So I would suggest, like, do I predict that this will work definitely or not work definitely?
I don't because I'm an average quantum pill taker and I have no predictions, but I have a lot of hope based on my own experience of interactions with people in just the question, like, how's it working out?
That's a good test of all philosophies.
How's it working out for you?
Because it's not working out well for people.
And if they can be made to see that, that is one good way into people changing their minds.
And it's recently sort of with, I guess, and I'm not a mathematician, so I could be wrong about this, but my understanding is that in the context of Einstein's theory of relativity, we sort of discovered that calculus is not perfect.
However, it is good enough to get us to the moon, right?
It is a very useful, practical thing.
So if you sort of translate that concept to philosophy, you're not going to find a perfect economic system.
You're not going to find a perfect philosophy, but some are, some are better than getting us to whatever place we want to be than others, right?
So I'm not saying that capitalism is perfect, for example, or even that freedom is perfect, but it seems to be much better for things like ending poverty than communism or collectivism or much more just than sort of autocracy or fascism, right?
And so it, and that's, it ties into Nietzsche, right?
Nietzsche said God is dead.
And then of course, throughout the 20th century, we saw so many people turn to the state instead of turn instead of to God.
And that resulted in our Mussolinis and our Hitler's sort of coming to be, I think, in the 20th century is a lot of this absence of God.
So we have to psychologically replace it with the state.
We saw this with communism as well.
And it turned out that that was really a less efficient approach than just, I don't know, putting your faith in higher ideals and higher power and not relying on government.
So I do think that's really fascinating that this is where we lean.
The whole debate over like trusting capital T S the science or whatever has totally obscured this point.
And it's actually really important.
Like if you read early philosophy of science, and I'm talking really early, like medieval or ancient, you will find this strain of thought.
It's basically called saving the appearances, that when we build scientific models, when we build mathematical models, what we're doing is we are getting the best possible approximation in mathematical language of what's going to kind of, of how this stuff is, of how the patterns are playing out.
Because if you know how the patterns are playing out, then you can make good predictions about what's going to happen in the future.
And these guys were super aware, like precisely aware in a way that we were not until Einstein, I think, like super aware that these were just working models, that they would get us closer and closer to the truth and would often deliver good predictions, but that they weren't like the sort of final reality of the world.
Materialism totally obscures this because if there's all there is in the world is just matter moving around, then there's no reason why math and equations shouldn't be an exhaustive description of all things.
This is what I call what many people call scientism, that science is not just a good way of discovering information.
It's the complete description of reality.
And this simply doesn't work.
I mean, this is like kind of the great discovery of Einstein in some ways was that it wouldn't work, that like Newtonian mechanics wasn't a complete and exhaustive description of all things because there is no complete and exhaustive mathematical description of all things.
And we see this as a direct analog in politics with the capital P progressive movement, born out of that same idea of kind of this sort of materialist, but really just like equationist.
It's the scientist idea of like all things, every kind of human activity boils down to calculations, chemicals, atoms.
And if you can calculate it, then you can get the right answer always.
They will always spit out the right answer.
And so there's really no need for like all this like voting and the constitution is kind of outdated.
I mean, you read the early progressives, they're saying all this stuff.
They're saying like history has moved beyond this sort of like antiquarian document.
And really what we need is bureaucracies.
And this is the birth of the administrative state.
We need like systems experts in place who are going to turn the numbers and spit out the right answer.
And the classical understanding, which is really important, is no, actually, that's not the kind of thing material you're working with.
You're not working with material that's going to spit out an answer to an equation.
You're dealing with human souls.
And human souls have a kind of infinite capacity to surprise.
And that means that like politics has to happen.
That means the little guy gets to be free.
That means we do representative government.
This stuff is becoming more and more apparent in the sciences, except that we have a really loud microphone class screaming to us that no, the equations still work.
They will deliver the right answer for COVID.
They tell you you need to lock down.
Science says you have to stay in your room, whatever.
It's like that stuff fails and fails and fails, but because it has taken on the character of a faith rather than dogmatic.
But I also think that one of the things that bothers me about the trust science language is it's a misunderstanding of science itself.
Because when they say trust the science, what they're really saying is trust what the experts say.
And the experts are designated by bureaucrats or whatever.
They're not saying trust the process of science because remember, science, the scientific method is a process.
It's hypothesis, test, you know, and then the more the hypothesis is reaffirmed, the more you can sort of believe it to be true without adopting it as scripture, right?
But that's not what they were saying.
They were not saying trust science.
They were saying trust the scientists, right?
Or the experts, which is like a completely different thing.
Because if we were actually serious about trusting the science, then we would be looking at the genetic structure of COVID and saying, huh, it's interesting that strands of this DNA were actually patented by certain drug companies.
It's it's interesting that we haven't identified specifically which animal that it supposedly came from, but we do know that whatever animal it was was absolutely adjacent to a biolab that was researching COVID viruses or coronaviruses, rather.
unidentified
And so, like, they're not really saying trust because if you trust the science, you realize that masks don't work.
Um, there is a version, you can imagine a version of trust the science, uh, which is kind of like saying trust the invisible hand.
Like, it's like saying there's a process at work here, the process eventually delivers the right answers, and so sometimes we're going to get it wrong.
We're going to develop hypotheses, we're going to test it out.
Um, that is, you are absolutely right, that is absolutely not what trust the science capital T capital S means.
unidentified
That trust is very manipulative, yeah, and totally.
And it wears like all good, kind of like lefty borg slogans.
Um, it wears a good idea like a skin suit, it kind of hollows out everything that's good about science and then pretends that that's what they're saying.
And this is like you get this with feminism too.
It's like feminism is just the idea that men and women should have equal rights in the workplace, but that's not what it means anymore.
No, no, and so they'll say that, and then they'll then they'll get people to be like, Okay, well, then I'm a feminist, and they'll be like, Oh, good.
So, you must believe that there are 37 genders, and like you know, we need to because then they've got you in this like linguistic game, basically.
Um, and yeah, this is what trust the science is also.
It's like trust, there's they act like they're saying trust the process of knowledge formation that's kind of open to all.
That we, but in fact, what they're saying is bow down before my false god, like believe in this claracy, this priesthood of people who access the pronouncements of some absolute truth, and then they hammer it down upon you, and whatever they say goes.
Um, I wrote a book called Music in Ancient Greece, um, which is about music in ancient Greece.
And as you may imagine, it's it was kind of more.
I mean, I won't say it was more academic because this book does contain sort of big ideas, but this book is really aimed as an invitation to people into the great tradition.
Music in ancient Greece is specifically for people who are interested in that.
Well, now you're talking about the subject of my PhD thesis, so you've really stepped in it because this is going to be it's like you're going to have to tell each other.
Oh boy, um, so not many people know that we actually have sheet music from the ancient world, on staff, it's not on staff, no.
Um, uh, what they did is they wrote letters, they had letters assigned to notes, but speaking very, very broadly, they took letters of the Greek alphabet and assigned them to notes of the scale, and then they put them over the syllables of the words that uh were being sung.
And so, we have, for instance, a papyrus that uh at least claims to show original music, or seems rather, I should say, to show original music from uh Euripides or play Orestes.
It's a fifth century BC tragedy with like whoa, I didn't know that, bro.
Uh, no, no, the poker face of antiquity, uh, an ode.
Um, yeah, so like basically, um, the reason it doesn't sound like Lady Gaga, besides the fact that like the Greeks had better taste, sorry, um, is that their scales are slightly different than ours, they're formed in the same way that the kind of like bones of the Greek scale are formed in the same way.
So, I don't know, do you play an instrument or anything?
I mean, like, uh, you know, the scale is built on two fourths, the tetra, two tetrachords, do re mi faso la tido.
And if you go, here comes the bride, and then you go, um, like happy birthday, and then you go, here comes the bright, and then you get an octave, right?
If you do a fourth and a whole step, and then sing it, baby, yeah.
So that's how our, that's the sort of skeleton of our scale.
And then you fill in the fourths with either a major or a minor, or sometimes if you're in like Dorian or whatever.
But the Greeks had kind of like an almost infinite number of notes that they could fill in the tetrachords with.
There's like, I mean, there are all sorts of traditions that use these tones.
And like we are super locked into those of us that think about music in the Western world are often kind of locked into the piano keyboard as if that is like a, you know, iron music.
That's right.
That's like where all that's where the existing notes live and there are no others.
But in fact, there's like an infinite number of notes in between every note on the piano keyboard, as you know, because you can slide continuously up.
And so yeah, lots of traditions, the Indian ragas and all sorts of Chinese music, whatever, use different tones than the ones we use and the Greeks did too.
This all makes it a very, very tricky business to actually reconstruct, but people are out there doing this.
My supervisor, Armand Dangor, does a lot of this stuff.
I mean, tempo and time signatures are different, but here's an interesting feature of the Greek language, which is not true of English necessarily, is that Greek syllables, in addition to having vowels in them, have like a duration and a pitch, relative duration and pitch.
And so our poetry is mostly structured around emphasis, right?
The stress of a syllable.
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
You're kind of arranging the line around the stress of the word.
Greek poetry is arranged around duration of syllables.
This is the first line of Homer's Iliad, and it's like in a kind of, you can hear already it's in a kind of bump.
It's like it got a little jam going to it.
It's called dactylic pentameter.
And so all Greek poetry has something like this.
It has a kind of a rhythm baked in.
And similarly, it has a contour, a tonal contour baked in because there are accents that tell you to go up and down.
And so we can like, again, these are all tools that we can use.
It's kind of like sometimes you see like people have painted over Greek statues because many of them were painted.
And so we're kind of trying to get a sense based on some of the traces that are left behind and all of this technology.
It's probably not going to get you exactly how it looked like, but it's like a very useful exercise for thinking your way back into what it might have felt like to be around this stuff.
So that's kind of the comparison I would use.
We don't know anything exactly, but there's a lot of really interesting stuff out there.
So in some ways, this book has been in my heart since like I was like 12.
And that's because I, as I mentioned earlier, I grew up in a house surrounded by books.
And the thing that that revealed to me very clearly is that to be surrounded by books, especially old books, is to be surrounded by friends.
This stuff is just so rich, but it's also so companionable.
Works like Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics or the Bible even, Thomas Aquinas, these guys, they sound so forbidding.
They're used kind of a lot of times to like keep people out of whatever power structure or what have you, but they're actually incredibly rich and meaningful discussions about how to be excellent at being human.
And it's like everybody needs to think about that.
Everybody cares about that.
And so that's been the driving force of my life.
And, you know, even as I went into like academia and did that part of my life, there was always for me an urgency about it for just real life, for real people.
And so I started this podcast, Young Heretics, Cole, which was basically designed to deliver some of this, to offer people an inroad, to let them know that you're actually not alone.
You know, that the news cycle is so crazy and everybody, all the stuff that we've been talking about, it's like you feel like you wake up every day and something else is going wrong and it's going wrong in some way that seems totally unprecedented.
It's like nobody has ever faced this problem before.
Digital technology especially does this, like just disorients us, alienates us from ourselves and one another.
And so, I, as I did this podcast, I mean, you know, that when you do a podcast, you start to make contact with listeners, you connect with people, and I just heard so much despair.
Like, I just heard a lot of anxiety, fear, despair.
And a lot of it was based on the sense that everything was falling apart.
And gradually, it occurred to me that the reason why people were responding to these great texts that I was offering them was because in these texts, you discover that even if the news is new, even if the technology is new, the questions that we're up against are very fundamental and ancient.
They're especially fundamental in these moments of change and crisis.
And so that means that the old books become more urgent and not less, because those problems have been around forever.
What's a human being?
What's our relationship to God and the universe?
What's our place in the world?
And these people that have been my friends since I was a kid, you know, these guys were wrestling with exactly those questions and they were incredibly wise and they offered us sane, good, helpful answers for facing some of that stuff.
And, you know, now we're being basically told that all that is outdated and probably racist and also bad and we should throw it away, which is just like such a disservice to people.
It cheats them out of their inheritance.
Athens and Jerusalem and this great wisdom literature, this is like a treasure house.
And these ideas don't just come out of the sky.
Like we don't, we're not just born so nice and so commonsensical that we kind of know like, oh, all men are created equal.
Yeah, everyone believes that.
People act now as if everyone believes that.
And so they can just stand in judgment of the past.
But the opposite is true.
It's like the past is what got us here.
The great works, the great texts give us our best answers to the questions that we are facing.
And so I wrote the book because I wanted people to know that.
And I wanted people to have a little bit of ownership over this stuff that really does belong to them.
That's what the whole point of it is.
So then, like, how do you put it together?
The way I worked on it, I'm an outliner.
So I outlined, you know, a kind of just thinking about like, what are these fundamental questions that we're up against?
And one of the things that keep coming back up, even as the news cycle goes and changes and we forget about things, it's like, I thought, here are some fundamental questions that we're facing.
And these are the five crises in the book.
The first one is, is there such a thing as objective truth?
I remember walking out of that movie, dude, with my dad.
And we were both like, that didn't, that was like the dumbest line for this reason.
Because, right, like, yes, if you say absolutely that nobody deals in absolutely, and in fact, in Athens, in Greek philosophy, there is record of a guy, a follower of Heraclitus, who was one of these relativists.
He sort of said everything is in flux.
It's all just kind of what you perceive or what I perceive is.
Hey, I basically took like one class on ancient philosophy, one class on medieval philosophy, one class on modern philosophy, and I think maybe one other, I think it was a logic class that contributed.
So I think I had like 12 hours of philosophy total.
So yeah, just a hand, like one or one class every semester or something.
It was small.
But I read a lot of the books.
I mean, you know about the pre-Socratics, which is, yeah, I read the Presocratics Reader, you know, the little white book that's got all the pre-Socratics in it.
No, like this is a lot of people think like Socrates just had all the great ideas, but actually he was dealing with a very specific problem, which is very much like our problem, which is a culture where it was super fashionable to sort of mouth relativism as like a piety, you know, or just like, oh, yeah, there's nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
That's the Hamlet version of it later on.
And so one of the things that Socrates shows us, and this is what I say in the book, is like, there's no such thing as halfway relativism.
So the reason I embarked on this whole Heraclitus thing is Heraclitus had a student who concluded that the only thing he should do is just sit around and move his finger because everything else would be anything you say is false.
Anything you do is sort of inherently false.
And so you should just sit and like stare at your finger.
It's actually not because he's a spousal abuse victim who's being paraded by a conniving like Democrat elite to it's actually because he's a disciple of Heraclitus and he's realized that who's just racist.
I mean, anti-Heracletianism is just rampant in our society and we structural and we need to get woke about it and it's no less and Heraclitian violence.
This country was founded, founded on systemic anti-Heraclitianism.
That's, yeah, there's a lot of in-jokes here going on for the crowd.
But like, this is the thing is this stuff is so, you know, it feels so kind of nerdy and is funny, but also it is weirdly urgent.
It's like, this is exactly the problem we're dealing with is like a culture that believes and teaches that you can be a relativist in your philosophy class and then go out and fight for justice, right?
Social justice.
That's what we fight for.
It's like, what's justice?
Justice is an absolute.
Like this is only, I thought only a Sith deals in absolutes, you know?
And like, this is, yeah.
So that's the first one.
And then the next one, which is similarly kind of like everywhere is a body crisis.
It's just like, what's the point of the human body?
Because so many people are so desperately and painfully confused about this or even not confused so much as like furious about it that this transgender craze in which children are mutilated.
Again, it's so horrifying that it's easy to just look at it in sort of despair and be like, well, it's end times.
But actually, it's the consequence of a very bad and very old idea, which is that the body and soul are not united, that they're not one.
This is like, that goes back to Neoplatonism and some of the early followers of Plato who kind of wanted to like transcend the body, get out of the human body.
And this is like the part of the book that just says like, no, man, your body is the language of your soul.
Like it is the vessel that God chose to walk the earth in.
And this stuff is, to me, this is the part that's just most, I don't know, I care maybe most of all about this because I see how much pain people are in over this.
And I really think that like ancient, an ancient insight here, that the body and the soul, that the form and matter are fused together, that you're a thing beautifully and wonderfully made.
It's kind of our only hope.
I mean, this tech is only going to get more crazy and the offers are only going to get more and more insane.
Like, you know, upload your consciousness to the cloud, be in the metaverse, whatever, restructure your whole body or leave it all behind.
It's like you're going to need a foothold against that stuff in days to come.
And the soul, the human soul is the only foothold.
It's like that's kind of the whole game.
You either think that your form is something real about you, or you just believe that you're kind of a disembodied brain and you can tear up your flesh however you want.
So yeah, that's a good example of like, you know, the stuff gets so nerdy, but it also gets so real real quick.
One, the trouble that I have, particularly in the trans conversation, is if the body and the soul are so distinguished from one another, so separated from one another, then why is it so important to change the body?
Um, the answer is that was one of the things that fascinated me about Matt Walsh's documentary, What is a Woman?
I didn't realize that the average trans suicide was like seven and a half years after a transition surgery.
Yeah, you know, the narrative is you got to do transition to prevent your kid from killing themselves because they'll be so miserable in their body, which they don't identify with.
But then you look at the data, and most trans suicides, which are tragic, occur seven and a half years or seven years after they've actually transitioned physically absolutely, and so many people grow out of this-like, just blunt, just blunt about it.
I was just going to say the show is going to be about the stuff we're going to talk about, the great works of West.
And it's going to be in a real sort of deep dive documentary format.
So we're going to talk about like Paul's sermon on the Areopagus, the moment that Athens meets Jerusalem, but just like every, you know, get into sort of like who those Greek philosophers were and, you know, who Paul was and why this meeting mattered so much and what happened.
So I'm really stoked about it.
I think if people, you know, if people liked young heretics, they'll love it, but I also think it's kind of a cool opportunity to bring this stuff to a wider audience as well.
And I will excitedly follow that show when it comes out.
Are you going to dive in at all to the sort of first three centuries of Christianity, the difference between the Trinitarians and the Aryans or anything like that?
Because I'm really interested in Elaine Pagel's work on the Gnostic Gospels and things like that.
Because I think a lot of it is probably stemmed from Plato's metaphysics, some of those ideas that were debated so hotly for those first three centuries.
So it's not like it's not a book you're supposed to have read.
It's a guy who he's pals with Jordan Peterson and just has a lot of really interesting stuff about early Christianity, but also, you know, sort of patristic literature.
It's a really good idea.
It's not one of the ones that we currently have in the works.
We have about four of these like slated.
But I definitely think something about, yeah, the just the early church, which is such a, I mean, the, I always think of it as like a kind of a kind of trauma.
And I use that term in the sort of more general sense of just like a really disjointed and jarring experience for Christianity to go from being a persecuted faith to being the kind of operating system of the Roman Empire.
Yeah, well, and the problem is it pisses off a lot of people because when you really dive in, there is a substantial debate about the nature of the Trinity.
And when you start talking about the Trinity, it can really piss off a lot of Christians and non-Christians alike.
And so I can see how maybe the Daily Wire audience would either really embrace it and be interested in it or be sort of antagonistic toward it because I'm someone who's actually read the Bible and studied some of the early Christianity stuff.
And I went through a long period of time where I felt that the Trinity was actually against the teachings of Jesus.
And it was something that I was unable to talk about with people who were sort of devout in whatever denomination that they were a part of, because they're all virtually Trinitarian today.
There should not be because it suggests a lack of conviction, actually.
Like the reason why you would never offend me by discussing like the Nicene Council or whatever else, the homoousios and homoousias stuff is like I believe in the truth of the Trinity.
And so I have a confidence that the thing that we will discover is that truth.
And I also feel as if like a lot of Christians act as if they don't really believe what they're saying.
And so they don't want to talk, they don't want to talk about like some of these like more difficult things to discuss.
And of course, like a lot of these places where this stuff is discussed are hostile to doctrinal Christians.
And so there's reason to be wary.
But I also think that what that does is it seeds the ground to people who are hostile to Christianity.
If Christians say, that's all secular nonsense and I'm not going to engage because I don't want to be tainted by it, then you develop an entire expert class that is interested in these questions and studies them minutely from a hostile perspective.
You've basically just left that territory open in whatever you want to call it, the culture war, the academic.
So I feel very strongly that it's like you should never be afraid.
Even if what you end up saying is sometimes I think it's very legitimate.
More people should learn to do this.
It's very legitimate to say, you know, this is a challenging new piece of information for me.
I still believe in the doctrine because that's my faith and I'm going to believe that, but I'm going to continue examining and thinking through this.
Like you don't have to, at the end of every conversation, tie neatly up with a bow the conclusion that everything is fine, that like you were right all along.
Do you know what I mean?
Like you can have faith in something that you will say, you know, you say, to my dying day, I'm going to believe that God is three in one.
At the same time, I'm going to examine portions of questions that make it difficult for me to believe that or that raise issues that I haven't thought about before.
