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Feb. 15, 2023 - The Charlie Kirk Show
34:24
How to Save the West with Spencer Klavan
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Truth Beyond Simple Equations 00:14:30
Hey everybody, today I'm Charlie Kirk show a full hour on how to save the west with Spencer Clavin.
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How do we save the West?
I love listening to our next guest on the American Mind Podcast.
He's super smart and has an amazing ability to capture the essence of things in a very educated way.
How to Save the West, Ancient Wisdom for Five Modern Crises by Spencer Clavin.
Spencer, welcome to the program.
Oh, thanks so much, Charlie, for having me.
It's great to be here.
All right, Spencer, lay out the main case that you make in the book and we'll go from there.
Sure.
So this is a book based on the radical idea that the past has something to say to the present.
A lot of times we hear that, you know, everything thought up before Darwin and the scientific revolution, all those old dead white guys, they were superstitious, they were prejudiced, they were wrong about most things, and science has replaced them all.
And what's funny about that is it sounds like a sophisticated thing to say, but it actually leaves us totally disoriented and lonely, really, in the world.
Because if everybody that went before us is dumb and dead and they had nothing useful to say to the present moment, then what are we supposed to make of everything that's going on right now?
I mean, even just the stuff that you've been talking about in the daily news cycle, let alone some of the bigger questions that it raises.
It feels like every day we wake up to a new disaster.
Something else is going wrong.
And these things feel huge.
They feel radically new.
And it's really hard to know what to do about them.
But the really interesting thing that I lay out in the book is that actually a lot of the stuff that we're facing, especially as our new technology rockets forward, as the digital revolution changes the way we relate to each other and to the world, it's actually dredging up all of these really profound, fundamental questions, questions that are eternal, that have been around since humanity has been walking on this planet.
And so it's not the case that the past has nothing to say to us.
In fact, there have been great minds and great thinkers throughout the history of the West, throughout the great traditions of our literature and our thought.
There have been great minds that have thought about these very questions.
What is a human being?
What's our place in the universe?
How can we understand ourselves in relationship to the world and to one another?
These are the sorts of questions that have been asked again and again in the great texts of our tradition, in the works of Athens and Jerusalem and their inheritors that come down to us.
And what that means is we're not alone.
There's actually a huge treasure house, a storehouse of wisdom and of insight that we can bring into the modern world and apply to the problems that we're facing today.
So that's why I wrote the book: I wanted people to know they weren't alone, and I wanted people to have some ownership over these great texts because it's very easy to feel like these are just dusty books on a shelf, or they're only for academics and nerds like me, or even worse, maybe they're racist or they're sexist or what have you.
None of that stuff is true.
These are guys who thought and read deeply, not so that people would have material for PhD theses, but so that normal folks would have wisdom and guidance for how to be excellent at being human.
And as the digital revolution rockets on, as we face all of the challenges that we're up against today, those sorts of questions, that sort of wisdom becomes more urgent and not less.
So you lay this out in five different categories.
The first is, you say, the crisis of reality, which I just love.
And he who argues with reality lives in hell.
And we're seeing a lot of hellish living right now.
So, Spencer, I'm going to ask an infinitely deep question that shouldn't be deep.
What is reality?
Yeah.
You know, on one level, of course, we all know that there's such a thing as true and false and real and unreal.
We see that and we experience that every day in our lives.
But on the other level, actually, it turns out that for a long time, there has been this idea that maybe there is no such thing as true and false, no such thing as good and bad.
There's just your truth and my truth.
And we should fight it out, basically, in kind of a war of power politics.
Now, that's something we're hearing a lot these days, right?
You know, that if I can shut you up, if I can censor you on social media, if I can scream my truth louder than your truth, then I've won.
I've won the debate.
And that's one of those things that we think is totally new.
Nobody's ever faced this before.
But actually, in the book, I argue that this kind of situation goes right back to the origins of Greek philosophy, that Athens part of Western civilization that I was talking about.
Socrates, the great philosopher, and followed on by his students, Plato, and Plato's student, Aristotle, Socrates was in a debate over exactly this question: Is anything real?
Can we know anything?
Or is it all just change and flux, as Heraclitus says?
And this is the crisis of reality when people feel like they don't know what's true or false.
Maybe virtual reality is better than real reality.
And actually, it's kind of inconvenient to believe in moral absolutes like good and evil, because if we just toss them out or we relativize them, well, then we could get everything that we wanted, right?
We could just take it because justice is the will of the stronger, as Thrasymachus says in Plato's Republic.
Now, this is ancient.
It's also persistent.
There's a passage in the book where I talk about the gulag of the Soviet Union under Stalin.
And Alexander Solchernitsyn, the great dissident who lived through the Gulag, says, you know, in the Gulag, they had a theory, and that theory was that true and false, guilty and innocent, these are relative terms.
And that means you don't have to have a trial.
You can just decide.
The party can decide that you're guilty from afar.
And all of this starts to sound more and more familiar as we understand that this is a perennial question that we're up against.
And what I argue in the book is there's no such thing as halfway relativism.
There's no such thing as just getting a little bit of this pill, and then you're going to be in the metaverse and you're going to upload your consciousness into virtual reality.
It's all going to be great.
Either something is true absolutely, no matter who wishes it away or not.
And if it's not, then all we have left is power politics.
That's not the world I want to live in.
I don't actually think that's the world most people want to live in.
But in order to avoid that world, we've got to recover this wisdom that there is such a thing as truth and we can know it.
That is a very simple statement, but unbelievably controversial when you say it on a campus.
I talk to a lot of college kids.
I'll set up a table and talk to them for a while.
And if you, over a period of time, I did it at Berkeley, I did it at Austin in the last year, I've done it at dozens of schools.
I've spoken at over 120 universities.
And at some point, eventually, you're going to get back, you're going to get down to some truth claim.
And they are insistent that there is no such thing as absolute truth.
Of course, they believe that statement absolutely.
And that is self-contradictory.
However, they will say, and basically they're threatened by the idea that somebody might be able to tell them that there's a truth because they have been really been told so narcissistically that I'm so important, my own feelings, my own emotions are more important than whatever metaphysical reality might exist outside of me.
So, Spencer, in a minute and a half, you're going to need longer than this.
How do we go about fixing that?
Because I think a vast majority of people in the West are living under this mirage of, y'all, just live and let live, and you can kind of dictate your own truth.
Minute and a half.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, I would say, you know, in addition to my feelings, my emotions, like you said, I mean, you know this better than anybody, right?
It's also my identity, right?
That's the thing that people really grab on to is, yeah, who I inherently am in some absolute sense.
And I guess the question that I keep coming back to when I have encounters like this, that I keep asking people is: how's that working out for you?
You know, you said that these things are simple, and that's absolutely true.
It's also the case, as I say in the book, that the simplest things are often the most profound and they're the hardest to put into practice, right?
And this question: how is it working out for you to believe that nothing's either good or bad makes it so?
Are you happy?
Are you feeling good?
Do you wake up in the morning excited to get out of bed?
A lot of times, if you start asking questions that way, you'll discover that this stuff doesn't, it's not good for people.
It doesn't work out well.
And maybe, you know, they may not back down from screaming at you in the moment on the college campus.
But a lot of people I've heard from doing my podcast, you know, will go away and they'll come back and they'll think, you know, actually, in a moment of quiet and silence, as I kind of sat with myself, I realized that, look, it's no way to live.
It's no way to live if you are the only defining feature of the world, your identity.
That's a terrifying and lonely place to be.
And a lot of what we're seeing looks like anger, looks like rage, but is actually loneliness, despair, and sadness.
The book exists to offer an alternative to that.
It's the most depressed, suicidal, alcohol, and drug-addicted generation in history for many reasons.
One of them is because we have decided to burn with enthusiastic zeal everything that works and is true that came before them.
So let me ask you: you know, I was recently with a group of college students that did not agree with me, but they were rather thoughtful.
And I said, Can you prove something to me to be true without using the phrase studies show?
And they melted down in the sense they've never thought that there could be truth outside of scientism.
So one of the contentions you're making in the book is the pursuit of truth.
And you do it through Aristotelian or Platonic or Socratic means.
But it also, in some ways, runs contradictory to the prevailing, let's just say, methodology that the Academy uses, which is, well, studies show, studies show.
And if you tell a young person, okay, prove to me that you believe something without saying a study shows, they look at you and they're not able to do that.
Your thoughts.
Wow.
That's really interesting.
It's a great question that you asked them.
And I think it shows a real fear, a fear that if you step outside the bound of accepted ideas, accepted kind of dogma, then you'll be attacked because we don't so much have a culture of open discourse and sort of public discussion anymore.
We have adherence to the scientism, as you said.
And in the book, I quote this paleontologist, G.G. Simpson, who says something to the effect of, you know, all good answers to the questions of life were thought up after Charles Darwin.
After that, that was when everybody else became obsolete, right?
And this is a perfect, oh, it's perfect.
It's a perfect encapsulation of what we mean when we say scientism, because, of course, the left will say, oh, these conservatives, they're anti-science.
They hate the science, right?
It's not science at all that I am against.
It's the contention, the claim that science is an exhaustive description of reality, that mathematical studies, yes, yes, figures, right?
That these kind of can totally describe everything about the world, everything about us can be boiled down into an equation.
And once it spits out the right answer, that's what you do, that's what you say, that's what you think.
Of course, we know if we think about our own lives for just a split second, that this doesn't work, that this isn't true.
Everything about us that matters, everything that sets us apart from animals and sets us apart from machines, lives in a space that can't be reduced or boiled down to physical science.
Things like love, desire, memory, aspiration, virtue, these things, of course, they have a physical component, but they don't show up on a brain scan.
You can't point at a brain scan and know what these things are.
You have to live them and experience them.
And this is what I talk about in the book when I bring up the concept in Greek, it's called phronesis, practical wisdom.
How do you take abstract truths and live them out in your everyday life, play them out in scenarios that you might be faced with?
And I really think that in addition to the kind of scientific, scientistic turn, it was the capital P progressives who kind of installed in us this fear, this doubt about our own intuitions and our own experience of the world, because they were the ones who came along and said, yeah, you can actually reduce politics to an equation, to a system, to a machine.
And then you can outsource everything to the bureaucracy, right?
Then the administrative state will take care of it.
And there's no need for these messy people anymore, these kind of dirty, deplorables that like have all their backwards ideas.
Whatever else that is, that's not America.
And it's not the best of what our traditions have to offer us.
There are things in this life that simply don't boil down to an equation.
And when we talk as if equations describe the whole world, what we end up doing is becoming pagan worshipers.
We end up praying at a cult where we believe that Dr. Fauci is going to give us the right solution, whatever he says goes.
When we know that's not true, so it's just an article of faith.
It never works out.
The models never deliver.
It's always the world's going to end in 12 years and then it doesn't, but we just adopt a new one.
The Body As Divine Medium 00:10:19
That's the behavior of somebody who believes in a religion.
And I argue in the book that everybody's got a religion.
So you might as well pick one that's actually true rather than just listening to the WEF or the CDC or whatever.
Yeah, I mean, there has been, you want to talk about the false religions of the last couple of years.
I'm so glad you mentioned paganism.
One of the marks of beauty of the Old Testament and the Torah, it was a nonstop refutation of river civilization paganism, which is that there is a singular God and he is not in nature and he made nature and there's a distinction between God and man and there's a distinction between good and evil and that not everything that you do is a God.
There's not a God of the sun and the God of the moon and the God of the river and God of the cow and the God of the and the Torah was very clear about that.
Now, why does that matter?
Well, polytheism means you have polymorality.
That's why it matters.
Ethical monotheism means that you have a singular morality for humanity.
And that's what the Noahic covenant was all about, which is that you do not get multiple gods and therefore you get multiple realities.
A man does whatever is right in his own eyes.
There is a singular morality.
Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.
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Spencer Clavin continues with us.
You should check out his new book, How to Save the West.
So, Spencer, you have an entire section dedicated to the body.
That's interesting to me.
Explain.
Yeah, this is maybe one of the ones that people would pick up the book and think, okay, absolute truth.
I get it.
America's regime, I get it.
But the body, what's going on with our bodies?
What's the problem there?
But when you think about it, actually, one of the central issues in our public debate right now has to do with the role of the human body, and that is transgenderism, this sort of extreme uptick that we're seeing in gender dysphoria, this feeling like there's some kind of war within you between your true self, which is somehow disembodied or hovers above your body, and the way that your body actually works and how you were born.
Sex and gender is kind of the distinction that they typically draw.
And it's easy to feel, I think, like this thing just came out of nowhere.
I hear from a lot of people like, how did this all happen?
Where did this start?
Because suddenly it was so in the public eye.
And not only that, but it's actually trending in a yet further direction, not just about, you know, male and female, but pushing beyond the boundaries of humanity altogether.
People that identify as demons, as dogs, as machines, robots, this idea of transhumanism.
This is all kind of going way beyond what anybody expected, except that what I point out in the book is it's actually a very ancient problem.
It feels like it came out of nowhere, but it's not the sort of thing that we've never dealt with before.
In fact, from the very beginnings of Greek philosophy, you have people beginning to feel like actually the body is kind of a burden.
The Neoplatonists are people that I bring up in the book, Plotinus, one of the followers of Plato, who read his work a lot.
Platinus' biographer says that he seemed ashamed of being in his body.
And you say, well, what's that about?
Why is that?
Well, you know, all the stuff we've been talking about in this conversation, absolute truth, beauty, goodness, these ideals, they're wonderful and I believe they're real.
And yet, we live in this world of change and decay.
And ultimately, the thing that the Judeo-Christian tradition drives home to us is one day we will die.
It's a terrible tragedy, and it makes us feel alienated from our flesh.
And so when you look at it that way, you realize when Judith Butler comes along and she writes gender trouble and she says sex and gender are two totally different things.
These are all just kind of power impositions upon the body and we can do whatever we want.
It's all a performance.
She's really drawing a platonic dividing line.
She's drawing this line between the spirit and the flesh and tearing the two apart.
And this is another one of those areas where again and again throughout history, we've had to ask, how is that working out for you?
This theory that we'll be better off if we just float up into some disembodied realm, whether it's digital space or, you know, our kind of gender identity and making our body conform to it.
It always makes us less happy, more depressed, more deeply self-loathing and not happier.
It doesn't actually deliver on its promises.
There is another way here.
And this is something that has been passed down not only from Aristotle and the Greek philosophical tradition, but also through the church and Thomas Aquinas, this idea which is called hylomorphism, a kind of Greek inflected word that means soul in flesh, form in matter.
The fusion of the two is what we actually are.
Our bodies aren't a mistake.
Our human being, our humanity is not some kind of accident that we need to wish away or surmount.
This is actually the language in which our souls are expressed.
It's the way we live out everything that's good about us that doesn't fit into a mathematical equation.
And so the way forward is not into some imagined utopian future where we just use drugs and hormones and surgery to correct and remake ourselves.
The way forward is actually deeper into our physical presence, into real life and living face to face in the here and now.
It's one of the reasons why COVID, people think the conservatives just got all mad about COVID for no reason, but we had this deep felt sense that we were being alienated from one another and from the time that we might spend together in physical space.
This is why.
It's because our bodies aren't just kind of an accident or an afterthought.
They are the medium in which our souls are expressed.
That's why the Christian church preaches the doctrine of the incarnation, that the human body is actually the medium for God himself to walk the earth.
And that's the antidote to all that paganism you were talking about before.
That's exactly right.
And a lot of Eastern religions, the idea that the divine would take the broken shell or form of a human, the dirty, the untouchable, it's such an incomprehensible idea.
It's one of the many ways that Christianity is differentiated from so many Eastern mystical traditions, where, in fact, it's the opposite.
In Buddhism, it's you leave your body, is that you must ascend with the spirit, where this idea that the divine, the pure, the beautiful would then take the form, it is true.
And it's the reason why I think so many people are moved by it.
The incarnation, we could talk about at great length.
Okay, but I want to keep our momentum here.
The crisis of meaning.
What is it?
Well, this is one where, you know, online, we encounter every day this idea that all we're doing is just reproducing and replicating and reproducing one another.
This is where we get our word meme.
You talk about memes online.
You share these images.
You pass them back and forth.
We don't always remember that this comes out of an evolutionary theory of all human life.
Earlier, we were talking about spreading out science to cover the whole of reality.
This is spreading out the theory of evolution to cover all of human existence.
And that's in Richard Dawkins' book, The Selfish Gene, that's the theory he proposes, that all we're doing is kind of imitating one another and replicating and just reproducing stuff.
And the stuff that works kind of survives, basically.
You have genes at the biological level, you have memes at the cultural level.
Now, this is actually an idea that goes way back to, for instance, Plato's Timaeus, the idea that the whole world is sort of a copy or a reproduction.
The Greek word is mimemo, which is where we get our word meme.
And mimesis is this act of imitation.
We can see we all do.
We do it in our art.
We do it in our culture.
And we do it even at the biological level of our genes.
But of course, the trick is, if we're imitating, if we're reproducing, if all this stuff is copying, copies are copies of something.
Reproductions reproduce some original model.
And in Plato, right, the original model is the divine.
It's the God who, the one God, you know, you were indicating, and I think this is really right.
All thinking people who have grown up in pagan polytheistic societies have this interesting tendency to kind of trend toward monotheism because of the logical problems that are inherent that you were saying about ethics and polytheism.
You start to get these one gods, first prime movers, or in Plato, it's the demiurge, the one God that kind of creates all of the universe and then delegates to other gods.
That's what we're all copies of.
And that gives you a stable reference point for what we call meaning.
Now, in Dawkins' world, everything about that description is true, except the God part, except the meaning.
And so what you actually have is just this war of all against all.
And Dawkins kind of tries to fight against this, but actually his revolution has so outstripped him now that it's impossible to deny.
If there's no final truth, no final being, you can tell that we're pushing up against the idea of God here.
Reclaiming Civic Meaning 00:09:34
If that doesn't exist, then there really is no meaning to anything that we do at all.
Dawkins and Sam Harris are in the same boat where they actually know the consequences of their ideas, which is why they tap dance around it.
It's why Sam Harris had to write an entire barely coherent book, The Moral Landscape, because he knew what he was flirting with.
He knows it.
He knows that if he is not able to articulate to the best of his ability using purely materialistic means, almost basically copy-pasting the Epicureans saying, okay, well, there is a way that even if we deduce things back down to the atom, that there's a way to reduce meaning.
I think they fail miserably at that.
And we're all kind of living in the consequences of that.
So, Spencer, more broadly here, I think that there is an opportunity to save the West.
And we can keep going through your list here, but I'd love your thoughts because we are in some ways suffering under the excesses of modernity and postmodernity.
It's not working.
I'm going to just use a very utilitarian argument.
Let's get out of the clouds.
Our existence right now, it seems to be harder to do the basic things and easier to do the awful things.
People are more alone.
We live in bigger homes with more stuff and less kids.
I think we can save the West because people are yearning for a revival of what is true and joyful.
Your thoughts?
Wow, I'm so glad to hear you say that because, of course, when you say, as I've been doing, you go around and say we need to save the West, people will instantly say, oh, the West is past saving.
Everything's gotten too terrible, too bad.
And my feeling is, really?
Have you cracked a history book lately?
Do you know how bad things can get?
And actually, this moment that is a moment of real trial, real trouble, I won't dispute that.
But that does create this exact opportunity that you're describing, the opportunity of longing, of hunger, right?
That when you present to people a better way out, they're more inclined to take it.
And you know where I think we've seen that lately is in the state of Florida.
And, you know, again, to bring it down to earth, right?
The midterms happened.
It was kind of disappointing for the Republicans, except in Ron DeSantis, Florida, where he came forward with a confident cultural proposition.
Our roots aren't rotten.
They're good.
And we don't accept this kind of nonsense about whatever woke theory and so forth.
Everybody got on board with that.
It didn't matter your race, your sexuality, your religion, your whatever.
People responded to that.
And that's that opportunity that you're talking about because people are hungry.
I think that's exactly right.
And I mean, Aristotle said, what, in the metaphysics, all men desire to know.
I mean, I think we could do the modern day example.
I think all people want to get closer to joy and happiness.
They reach out.
They ore guontae.
They reach out for knowledge.
And also, yeah, for that flourishing, for happiness.
I love that.
I am going to steal it and use it a lot.
Our roots are not rotten.
They are good.
Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.
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I want to talk about the action part of this, though.
What do people have to do to save the West, to retake this beautiful thing that we have inherited?
You're absolutely right that it's not just going to be about writing books or reading books as much as I love books.
And that's an important guide.
You know, you have to think of people like me, people like you and I who write books and talk for a living.
We are standard bearers, but the real people in the fight are everyday folks who go out and actually put this stuff into practice.
There is a really simple insight from the tradition.
And we were saying earlier that, you know, simplicity is sometimes the most profound thing.
When it comes to the American Republic, actually, when it comes to any regime, according to classical political philosophy, there is an ingredient, a dimension that is almost always missing from our discussion.
And that's what the Greeks called philia, friendship or even love.
Politike philia is civic love.
It's the kind of thing that can only exist between and among neighbors.
So I would say that this is, first of all, exactly why identity politics is poison to a republic, because what does Machiavelli say can unmake a republic?
It's class warfare.
When you understand that, you understand why it's so poisonous when Joe Biden gets up and says something like, you know, we have a pandemic of the unvaccinated.
Okay, so a significant portion of the population is tantamount to a disease, right?
Or they say men are inherently sexist, women, you know, are oppressed, all of this stuff, of course, that they just insist on every day.
The reason it was important to bring up that Florida example earlier is because there you see an example of what it looks like when people act like Americans, when citizens of this country invest in their neighborhoods, in their communities, in their school boards, where we're seeing so much of the best action going on in this country.
And so if I had like two pieces of advice to just leave people with for now from this book, it's this, log off and go to church.
These two things put together will solve so many of our problems if we reinvest in those communities and if we decide together that we're not going to be, you know, divided into black and white and brown and whatever other color.
We're not going to be divided into sexuality or sex or what have you.
We are Americans, first and foremost.
Our flag is the American flag.
Though this country may be benchy, it's not broken.
And we still have hope for the West if we invest in those local communities and most of all, in that commitment to philia, to civic friendship or civic love.
I tell people all the time that if every American honored the Sabbath the way a religious Jew would from Friday night to Saturday night, crime would go down.
Suicide would go down, depression would go down, anxiety would go down.
It's as if people that came before us knew exactly what they were talking about.
Closing thoughts on the book because the premise, the title, is not fatalistic.
It's not cynical.
In fact, it implies that reclamation is possible.
Closing thoughts, Spencer.
Absolutely.
Well, of course, when you start to look out in the world, it's easy to feel despair.
It's easy to feel like the forces we're up against are bigger than any of us and it's already too late.
You know, all the kinds of things you hear every day in the news.
It's very easy to get modeling into despair.
One of the most important things about the Western canon, the Western tradition, is that it belongs to God.
It is a tradition of truth-seeking and seeking truths that are eternal.
I'm not here to say that everything's going to go wrong tomorrow.
I'm not here to tell you that everything is going to go right.
I do not know what's going to happen in the future.
What I know is this.
When the Roman Republic was on the verge of collapsing, there was a guy called Marcus Tullius Cicero who thought that he had to retreat from public life and just write a republic of letters, just write political philosophy, because nothing else could be done.
Everything else was falling apart.
In the short term, Cicero was an abject failure.
The new regime was coming.
The republic was ending.
And Cicero was one of the first victims of that process.
Fast forward hundreds and hundreds of years and enter one John Adams onto the scene, who since his boyhood has been poring over the speeches of none other than Marcus Cicero.
This is a guy who has been riveted by Cicero's work his whole life, stands up and gives the speech in defense of our Declaration of Independence that sets this country on the road to its birth.
It's not that it doesn't matter what happens in the next election.
It does.
It's not that we shouldn't care about the day-to-day of politics.
We should.
It's just that our hope is in a further and deeper and higher thing than even the kinds of fights that we have on the day-to-day.
We are looking to a tradition that is much longer than that.
And in that tradition, there is no room for despair.
We have no right to despair.
We have a job to do, and that's to carry the light.
Just hope our head doesn't get cut off like Cicero's.
Spencer, I mean, we certainly can't.
How to save the West.
Love it.
Thank you so much.
Email us freedom at charliekirk.com and subscribe to our podcast.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
God bless you.
Email me, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Have a great day.
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