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June 23, 2022 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
01:26:34
Exploring the Western Canon
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Hello everyone, it's this week's Left, Right and White.
I am Chris Roberts, joined of course by Gregory Hood, and this week we are going to take an email from a listener head-on.
He wrote in to me a few days ago asking if the two of us could talk about the Western canon.
Specifically, he's curious as to which ones we actually enjoy, not just the ones which are important.
Basically, this guy is asking, I mean, what a lot of people fairly ask about the Western canon, which is like, well, this list is enormous and sprawling, which ones should I really focus on?
Because the prospect of just taking, like, Harold Bloom's famous list.
And just reading all of it is really, really quite daunting and not necessarily the best way of approaching the thing.
So, Greg, initial thoughts?
Yeah, Bloom's the name we go to with this because he famously tried to defend the Western canon against the first attacks of what we would consider Hegemonic liberalism in the universities today.
I mean, it wasn't that long ago.
It was only the 1980s when Jesse Jackson was leading protests at, I believe, Stanford, and they were famously chanting, hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civs got to go.
And now, of course, you're seeing this decolonialized so-called movement where they say, well, we need to take care.
We need to remove these required readings from college classes.
We need to insert these multicultural things.
The irony, of course, is that this so-called decolonial movement is actually colonialism, because it's actually these foreigners coming into our country and colonizing us.
And what's happening is really part of our oppression.
So I'm going to come at this a little bit differently, because one of the things that Harold Bloom and really a lot of conservatives in the Intercollegiate Studies Institute type mold We'll say because this is not some radical thing.
If you're involved in any level of the conservative movement, they're going to say we need to defend the Western canon.
We need to read these great books.
But the reason they say it is because.
They say the Western tradition has a universal appeal.
And therefore it can be justified.
Because it's not just limited to our civilization, but it contains these universal truths that are applicable to everyone.
And therefore, there's an implied claim to superiority over other traditions, where basically they're just supposed to be relevant to their own people.
Now, I can see why a lot of people in our sphere might think that.
It might even be objectively true.
If you're my age or certainly below, when you went to college, when you went to grad school, obviously you got shoved into these forcible take your multicultural classes.
And usually they're just kind of a bad joke.
And a lot of the people in the class know it's a bad joke.
And there's not really a lot of relevance to you We're really anybody outside a campus activist.
Uh, this is what Bloom talked about in some detail that it was basically, I'm not going to use the French term, but Nietzsche's concept of resentment, the way, the more specific way he worded it, where it's basically a sense of implied inferiority.
So therefore you try to tear down everything great.
And that's where a lot of this stuff is coming from.
So the counter is to say, oh, well, we're going to go back to the Western canon, which is the Greeks and the Romans and the Bible and the church fathers and everything else.
And this will allow us to know what it is to be an educated man in today's society.
But I'm going to actually reject that and say that while that's a good idea in theory, in practical terms, it doesn't really lead us anywhere.
I find that a lot of the people who focus most on this think that the solution is basically to lock yourself in a room, read a lot of old books, which is good.
I mean, you should do that.
But then somehow that leads to something.
And I also can't help but notice, because my focus is always on power, I can't help but notice that a lot of the people who encourage this kind of thing also tell you not To do anything that revolves around power, where you simply say, Oh, well, we're just going to have the best argument in the marketplace of ideas and everything else.
And if you've been listening to this podcast, you know, I don't believe in the marketplace of ideas.
It's a great idea in theory, but it's a rigged game and it always has been.
And if you think that there's a discussion to be had about some of these great ideas with the other side, uh, you're kidding yourself.
So I'm going to come at it and say that, This is not about expressing universal truths, except in the same way that any culture has its own grasp on universal truth.
Instead, I'm going to say that the Western canon should be important to you as a white person, because this is your blood.
This is your ancestry.
This is part of who you are.
And as I wrote in a direct conflict to what Ben Shapiro was claiming a couple of years ago, Western civilization really is white civilization.
Full stop.
We're not going to play this game where it's some books and if you read them and agree with them you're part of the civilization or that it's just some pure abstraction.
That's complete nonsense and we don't have time for this anymore.
And certainly most non-whites don't believe this either.
In fact, I'm not sure if any non-whites believe it outside those who get lucrative salaries at conservative non-profits to spout such nonsense.
We'll get into why I think you should read these things for your purposes as a white person.
What's the best way to come at some of these things without, as you say, just plowing through a lot of this stuff that might not be the best use of your time.
And then some more controversial choices that I've found to be important to me.
Now, I should point out, I believe it's St.
John's College in Maryland, where they actually have a great books curriculum.
Where you actually will go through and read the foundational texts of Western civilization, but you do have to ask yourself, is it really that important that you're reading the basic texts of, say, geometry from the 14th century when we no longer have these things?
We've outpaced these things.
And so.
I think it's a good thing if people go to these places, and if that's the kind of education you want, That's great.
But for people who are trying to look at it for more of a practical thing, and for people who are looking at it to find out who they really are, because as Jonathan Bowden said, you know, reading about your own history is a revolutionary act.
And that's why the people who run the system now don't want us doing it.
So with that said, let's get into it.
And I think the best way to approach it right off the bat, Is as a premise and hopefully this will start outreaching people right off the bat.
I'm going to say that.
Western civilization right now is in a state of essentially occupation.
And so anything that is going to be put forward by those in power now.
Is it subversive of the deeper Western tradition, but.
in terms of where we are now, we're actually the subversives.
We're actually the ones trying to destroy the current political and cultural power structure.
And so you have to say, okay, well, when did this great subversion take place? And we all have
our own thoughts about that, but I think we could probably get a consensus that the fix was in by
the late 60s. Would you agree?
Yeah, at the very least. Right. So one of the memes out there, and it is a meme, but
like most memes, it contains some truth.
Let's read old books.
There's a good series called Classics of Western Thought, which was put out by Michigan State University back in the 60s.
The Ancient World, edited by a Dr. Noll.
Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation, edited by Carl Thompson.
And then The Modern World, edited by Charles Hirschfeld.
If you go through those, these are selections from Church Fathers, from the great philosophers, from all the people that you've heard of, but they're just selections.
And this will give you the kind of broad base that you need to know what you're actually interested in.
There's another one called Sources of Western Civilization.
Volume one is from the ancient world to the Reformation era, and then volume two gets to the modern era.
And I think there comes a point once you get to the modern era, especially once you start getting into post-structuralism and everything like that, you are seeing something different from the Western tradition or perhaps you're seeing the Western tradition turning on itself and consuming itself.
So at that point you're engaged in just purely deconstruction and the only reason to read it Is to know how to use those weapons, how to use things like critical theory against critical theory.
But if your purpose is to try to learn what it is to be part of the West, what it is to be part of the civilization, I don't think these things are of much value because they're just weapons and they were intended as such.
I would just conclude by saying.
Western civilization did not begin with Christianity.
At the very least, it began with Greece and Rome.
I would argue that, in some sense, it's all about an attempt to get back to Rome.
And that, in my view at least, it goes well before Greece and Rome, which is why I suppose I have a more... How do I put this?
Charitable take on some of the more mythical things about Hyperborea and about legends and...
Mythologies of all these different people's had in common because I think that when we are looking at recorded history, the history of our people actually goes back much farther than that.
And you want to read this stuff, not as an exercise of the brain, but of the blood.
I mean, this has to be something that really speaks to you because this is you, not because you're approaching this like it's a school assignment.
So with that, what's your take on where people should begin on this stuff?
Boy, well, I thought that monologue of yours was going to end with at least a few recommendations.
I can get into some of the specifics, but I honestly think people should turn to some of the older compilations that people were putting out in the 60s, the early 60s at least.
Even just old textbooks, which, you know, an old textbook written at a high school level is superior to a college textbook put out today, and today's college students probably Literally can't read it, so.
If you get in like all that stuff is still there and these specific things, I'll put a link to them into the description.
You can buy them used for like $3.
These selections are just to to get you started.
But I think before you should actually look through some of these things, so you get a sense of the arguments that people have been having for thousands of years before you pick one 500 page book, plonk down and read it completely out of context and have no idea what specifically he's talking about.
Because a lot of times, even when somebody is talking about Plato or Aristotle, these were met at their time.
And so some of the things that are supposed to express universal truths Yes, they may be universal truths, or they may be universal arguments, but they're also trying to rebut people who they were arguing with at that time.
I mean, it would be like reading a newspaper now, taking an editorial column and trying to turn it into a universal truth.
It doesn't really work unless you have some idea of who they were fighting with at that time.
Well, I mean, this might be a personal thing, but I really can't stand reading just sort of selections or summaries of stuff.
It just, I don't know, it feels wrong to me.
It's the same way I almost never stop watching a movie.
It's like once I've started, I want to get to the end.
But your word of caution before sitting down and just cracking open a 500 page book is definitely However, I actually find it sort of unfortunate the Western canon is often associated only with these enormous tomes, and that's really not the case.
It's certainly true, specifically with generally most of the Russians associated with the Western canon.
You know, these enormous books by Dostoevsky or Tolstoy.
But one of the pleasures of delving into the Greco-Roman side...
of the Western canon is actually how how blessedly short a lot of it is, especially the plays, which are some of the most famous works by the Greco-Romans.
And one that I really love is Lysistrata by Aristophanes.
And you can read that in an afternoon.
There's no real need or there wouldn't even really be a way necessarily of just reading a little chunk of it.
I mean, it's a very short play.
Same with Oedipus Rex, which is probably the most famous play by Sophocles, who wrote a number of important plays that are included in every list of the Western canon.
And then remember that back then, novels weren't really a thing.
So aside from plays, you have these epic poems that are sort of like novels, but they read much easier.
I mean, you don't actually have to be Terribly well-educated to enjoy, say, Ovid's Metamorphosis.
I mean, it goes over a lot of the theological myths of the day, but you can just learn those myths by reading Ovid.
You don't actually have to already be familiar with them in any way.
Same with the classic Homer's The Odyssey or Virgil's Aeneid.
I mean, You can, I mean if you really want to, you can delve into the context of some of these things, but these are extremely enjoyable works of literature, and I don't think there's actually a very high cost of entry with reading those the way there definitely is for Herman Melville's Moby Dick, which for the record is a novel I do enjoy, but it's not something I'd just recommend
Just kind of loosey-goosey.
It's extremely long.
Parts of it are undeniably boring.
That's actually kind of the point of certain chunks of the book, is that they're boring.
It's meant to reflect the kind of chunks of your life where there's just a lot of downtime and not really anything happening, because the entire novel, Moby Dick, is just a metaphor for life itself.
So parts of it have to be uninteresting.
But all the Greco-Romans wrote about such exciting things.
It's really, I mean, you know, basically all of our, basically our concepts of tragedy and heroism come from the epic poems and the plays of the Greco-Romans.
So that would generally be my first recommendation for anybody who's interested in jumping into the Western canon, because it's easy to read, it's epic, and they're relatively short.
Yeah, Dominic Venner, Said that the Iliad was essentially the founding text of our civilization.
I think if we're going to begin anywhere, I would begin with that, with the Iliad and the Odyssey, as you point out.
And I also have a soft spot for the Indian.
I would actually go so far, especially for those of you out there, including myself, who are thinking about homeschools and co-ops and things like that.
There is a really big movement now, and there's countless organizations out there that will help you with this, to go back to the way school used to be, where you actually would learn Greek and or Latin.
I would prefer Latin.
And you actually read these things in the original.
And I think it is really important that we begin with Greece and Rome, so you get a sense of what But the primal spirit of the West was when it first began.
And as you say, these are fun to read.
These are not boring discourses on a scientific question that was settled 600 years ago, where you're reading it just to kind of learn how people think.
You're reading stories that were not just entertaining, but actually moved great men to action.
You know, Alexander the Great did what he did because he was consciously basing himself on his heroes and because he literally thought he was a
descendant of Zeus on one side and Achilles on the other.
And that sense of being a part of something, it's not something that you can get through
pure reason.
It has to be something that you get through experience.
And this is also true of the histories.
And all said and done, at the end of the day, if we were still a country, I think we would
I'd be working, you know, probably in the State Department or something like that, because international relations was always my first love.
And Thucydides, I think, reads like an action novel.
It reads, it gets into you, the speeches, the blood, the consequences of everything that is at stake.
But it is teaching universal lessons about power and politics that our leaders today, or I should say our rulers, have forgotten.
And so I think Thucydides, along with Homer, is a constant in somebody.
Just everything that he wrote is worth reading.
One of the great tragedies, of course, is that with Homer, what we've got is not even a tenth of what he wrote.
Even if we assume that there was a single man named Homer, it wasn't just part of a larger tradition.
One of the things that kind of makes me Get irrationally angry at random points of the day.
It's knowing that they used to actually have in the Olympics reciting Homer as an event.
And then after Christianization, they banned it.
And so that was just kind of lost.
But one of the things that always kind of bothered me when you were in these multicultural studies things is they would say, oh, well, these peoples, unlike you, had this rich world tradition and everything else.
And it's like, well, we did have that.
It was just crushed.
And maybe the first step to recovery is bringing that back and rediscovering it.
For that reason, I would also encourage not just Iliad, the Odyssey, and Thucydides, but I would actually read both the Poetic and the Prose Eddas, so you get a better grasp on some of the Nordic mythology, which should really be called the Germanic mythology, because so much of our picture of Western civilization Is especially in the early period or recorded history is focused on the Mediterranean world, but it wasn't just the Mediterranean world and the more we learn without getting too deep into the weeds of practical history and what people are discovering now the relationship between the Roman Empire and the peoples of the north was a lot closer than people think it's not that there were
Guys in Sweden who had no idea what was going on down in Rome.
I mean, there were trade relationships, there were political relationships, there were things happening that shaped this entire world.
And while the gods and the pantheons were a little bit different, the Romans themselves clearly saw some correspondences.
Which is also why Tacitus and Germania is an essential reading, not just because what it tells you about Northern Europeans at that time, but also because it's one of the best social critiques ever written in a way.
Maybe the bad part is that this is sort of the origin of the noble barbarian or the noble savage Where he's portraying these Northern Europeans as morally superior and clean to decadent Romans.
But that may not actually be true.
This may actually be just be a way of critiquing the decadence he saw on the ruling class in his own time.
But that at least gives you a pretty solid indication of what people saw as positive virtues and negative virtues.
And again, I know as we get into the more modern times, you're going to have to talk about beyond good and evil and everything else.
I think the moral framework of looking at things should not be necessarily good and evil, because these things change over time and in different societies, but instead it should be what is noble and what is base, and that is the way to look at things.
OK, OK, so what about?
About moving beyond pre-Christian times, what part of the Christian canon do you enjoy or advise avoiding entirely?
No, I don't advise avoiding it, but the ecclesiastical history, there's actually a good selection of it in the Sources of Western Civilization Volume 1 by McCurry and Hull, which then inspired me to read the whole thing.
And that talks a lot about the theological battles in the early church.
Now, one of the reasons you might find this boring is because it does sometimes come down to how many angels on the head of a pin type thing.
But really, it's about practical politics.
And you start to see how the church and the collapsing empire sort of merged together and created this new entity because
If we take as a premise that Western civilization is one thing
That the civilization that came from you know, take your pick either hyperborea or Greece and Rome
Through Christendom and to today is still a singular thing You still have to admit that there have been some pretty
major course adjustments along the way with Christianization obviously being one of them and
one Of the things that is now coming out
and a lot of people are making comparisons to the iconoclasm we saw in 2020 is that the
Last pagan generation, which was a recent history book, which is worth reading
the collapse of The pagan Mediterranean world
Came a lot more quickly than people once thought it It wasn't a slow conversion.
And then one day everybody woke up and nobody was worshiping Jupiter anymore.
It came suddenly and it came because political circumstances favored it.
And because, frankly, the Christians believed and were willing to act on those beliefs to destroy a world that they saw as corrupt.
Whereas the pagans had become lax.
They didn't really believe in it anymore.
It had just become sort of this aesthetic thing.
where and you even see that in the renaissance where people are using classical motifs but nobody really believes in this stuff and so it might look beautiful but it lacks a certain power whereas when you're reading the ecclesiastical history you get the sense that these bishops are feuding and there may be a lot of petty personal disputes but there's also real belief and passion underneath the surface and that's why i like history that reads like Epic poetry, where you get the sense that these were people who were acting in their emotions and the way they viewed the world is not that different from yours.
Even if the specifics of what they believe are different, you can still imagine yourself acting that way.
And you know, history is written in blood.
It's not written in ink.
And these people, these intellectual disputes, We're just limited to the page.
I mean, there were deadly consequences with the kinds of things that they were talking about.
So the ecclesiastical history is definitely up there, but I don't think you necessarily need to read the whole thing.
It's just something that you should look into, because especially if you're a Christian and you want to make a claim either in support of the Roman Catholic Church or the Orthodox Church or one of the various Protestant denominations, it's good to know how this all began.
And it's good to know that a lot of the things that we take for granted, like the formation of the Bible and what books are included and what are not, where did this idea that the Pope has supreme authority come from?
What exactly was the relationship between the early church and the emperors?
Where did this idea of the Roman Empire itself becoming a quasi-sacral institution, which then of course had a big impact going into the Holy Roman Empire later on in Christendom, all of these things And who wrote this history book?
I always butcher the name, but use a bias.
very small battles between different factions within the early church, but they actually
had massive consequences.
And I don't think you can really understand Western civilization without fully understanding
the way the church came together.
And who wrote this history book?
I always butcher the name, but use a bias.
E-U-S-E-B-I-U-S.
This is why one of the reasons I'm trying to work on my Latin is because my pronunciation
for Latin names is just unbelievably bad.
I don't think I've actually ever heard of this book.
Is it generally included on lists of the Western canon?
No, and this is why I think it's worth mentioning.
But again, this is why I actually recommend these specific things that you can find For dirt cheap.
I mean, look, if you want to read the classics, the Harvard classics, you can get basically for free or for like 99 cents on Kindle and whatever book you're thinking of, whatever novel, whatever history, whatever poem.
Everyone's list, I promise you, whatever list you have in your head, it's on.
It's in there.
So if it's just a question of.
Oh, which book should I get?
Like, you don't even need to worry about that.
You can get all that for free.
But the question is, what are you going to focus on?
And that's why I actually, I think it's a big mistake to go in and say, well, I'm just going to start at, I don't know, Greece and just plow my way forward reading everything.
I think it actually is better to go with certain selections and then say, okay, I'm seeing how these things are making connections, and now I'm going to focus on this thing or that thing.
The only exceptions, of course, would be what I would consider to be the foundational poems of the civilization—Iliad, Odyssey, and, in my opinion, the Aeneid.
I really, really recommend Metamorphosis by Ovid.
It's O-V-I-D.
But, okay, so in terms of what you think people should focus on, or what you think people
should be reading, what would be some of your recommendations beyond the Greco-Roman and
the sort of Nordic and Germanic pagan era?
I mean, I know I'm going to get a lot of sneering at this, but I actually think that
Evelle's revolt against the modern world actually should be considered a core book of the canon.
And the reason why is not because I'm trying to be edgy and be a meme here about radical
traditionalism or something like that.
I think it's because Even if you think he was just completely insane People You see certain symbols And the narratives that surround certain symbols coming up over and over again throughout our history.
And it's remarkable how often, you know, they rhyme, let's say, from the ancient world to the Christian world to even modernity.
For example, just the way Christ was portrayed as a sun king for in a lot of the early icons and everything else.
It's important to see, to have a mythic context where you say, okay, this is where this stuff is coming from.
Now, maybe he is wrong about the specifics.
I don't think he is, but maybe he's wrong about the specifics.
Maybe he's just making leaps.
Maybe he is, his, his radical take on how everything has gone wrong and has been going wrong for tens of thousands of years is just completely insane.
And the supernatural claims he's making is completely insane.
All that taken is red.
You can still believe all of that, but you have to understand that a lot of the people in history really believe this stuff.
And when you see certain patterns re-emerging over and over again, it's good to have a context for, well, why is it emerging this way?
Because otherwise I think you get, You get into a trap, which I think even a lot of ISI types fall into, and certainly a lot of the early Christians fell into, although fortunately not the majority, which is why we have most of these ancient works.
I mean, let's not forget that if it were not for the Roman Catholic Church, yes, there were Christian mobs that destroyed a lot of stuff, but at the end of the day, it was the Roman Catholic Church and the monasteries that saved a lot of these things.
The reason these things express themselves in similar ways over and over again is because There is a united tradition.
And to me, this is essentially the whole ballgame, because you have to be willing to say there is a universal spirit that defines Western man that stretches not just through modernity, not just through Christendom, but to the ancient world and possibly even before that into prehistory.
Because if we don't have that, then essentially you just have a bunch of different Separate civilizations which are nothing more than intellectual constructs where people have an argument for a few centuries and then it's over and they move on to something else.
And if that's the case, then there's not much reason to be interested in it other than as an intellectual enterprise.
It certainly doesn't have anything to tell us as 21st century postmodern Westerners.
So to me, it actually is very important to have this Mythic grounding.
I mean, if you want to look at Hamilton and the Greek way and the Roman way, any kind of book that kind of summarizes the way people in this world viewed themselves, viewed the gods and viewed what they considered to be base and noble, that is going to be extremely valuable.
I think one of the best books that is worth reading, I mean, it's really several books, Worth reading.
All of them, of course, is Plutarch's Lives, where you see that he pairs off a hero from ancient history, or what he would consider ancient history, to someone that he would consider more modern, and essentially says, now here's what this guy did, now here's what this guy did.
And so, you can kind of start thinking in your mind, okay, he's writing this, then who would be the contemporaries that would follow up?
Who would be a third person?
In these kinds of comparisons, and when you start thinking in that way, I think you start getting closer to understanding the truth, which is that we're part of something that goes back a very, very long time and that our ancestors really weren't that different from us.
And the way they viewed the world isn't that different from us.
I think one of the other big mistakes of our movement is sort of this.
This idea that our ancestors were these towering gods that we can't possibly compare to because everybody now is so weak or cucky or whatever, brainwashed, whatever.
But when you get into real history, you begin to understand like, no, like the same motivations were always there.
The same kinds of behaviors and temptations were always there.
It's just the way power is being wielded has changed and Biography, I think, is probably the best way to understand this, which is why I think Plutarch is one of the people that I would put on the list of, you absolutely have to read cover to cover.
So, Evola and Plutarch, I know that might be a bit of a strange inclusion, but I'm going to stand by it.
Well, Plutarch is certainly not a controversial I mean, Plutarch is on all kinds of lists of what, you know, of the greats of the Western canon.
I mean, there's nothing controversial about suggesting Plutarch.
I'm just, I'm desperately trying to find a way to get you to name a text generally affiliated with the Western canon that was written after the death of Christ.
I'm going to try again here.
So are there any American authors included in the Western canon that you think are exceptionally good or exceptionally worth skipping, right?
Like your Alan Poe, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Herman Melville, Flannery O'Connor.
Yeah, I don't think the Transcendentalists or Emerson are that great.
I would generally skip all that.
Although, frankly, and this is a whole new argument in and of itself.
I mean, you could do a whole segment on this.
I mean, I think the great American novel has already been written, and that's The Great Gatsby.
I mean, if you were talking about a book that if you had to present one book, even more than Tom Sawyer.
If, or Huckleberry Finn, if you were to say what is one book that encapsulates what the country is, I would say that's it.
And I think that America's place in the Western canon is problematic, as the kids would say, because so much of it was framed at the time of we have it in our power to begin the world anew.
I think it's Thomas Paine said, and so, so much of it was framed in terms of rejecting everything that came before it.
And certainly a lot of America's critics, including Abel himself, have pointed this out.
At the same time, if you look at the founding fathers and you look at how they conducted themselves and you look at how they modeled the behavior, I mean, let's face it, they basically were LARPing as Roman aristocrats.
That's how they saw themselves.
They wrote in pen names.
They did a lot of the things that, you know, people today would call LARPing, but that's how they framed it.
I mean, George Washington, when his troops were starving at Valley Forge, was having Joseph Addison's play Cato staged in front of these starving guys.
And you have to think to yourself, all right, well, if you're a person who, if you're this farmer who probably doesn't know much more than the Bible, what does a play about senatorial resistance to Julius Caesar have to tell you?
Well, the father of our country evidently thought it told you quite a bit.
And so that again, sort of brings home the lesson that The link between the ancient world, the Christian world, and what we would consider the beginnings of modernity, really everything up until post-modernity and post-structuralism, it is a clean line.
I mean, you can see how one thing flows to another, and it really only stops once scholars started seeing their job not as continuing a certain tradition or adding to it, but deliberately deconstructing it.
and trying to tear it down because they wanted to create something entirely new and entirely built
on repudiating what came before. I mean, this is, I guess, the defense of why I think America
does count as a Western country and that the break between the new world and the old world
isn't as absolute as some reactionaries or conservatives might put it.
But I'd agree with you about the great Gatsby.
I think it's probably the best candidate for the Great American Novel.
I know a lot of people think it comes second to Moby Dick, which I think you can make a strong case for.
As you would put it, at the end of the day, The Great Gatsby is a really easy and really enjoyable read, while Moby Dick is something of an undertaking.
Having said that, If you're not up for cracking open Moby Dick, which I really don't fault you for, Herman Lovell's short story Bartleby the Scrivener is a really, really interesting read, and it's much shorter and considerably less dense.
I don't think I've ever met anybody who regretted spending time reading Edgar Allan Poe's poems and short stories, although I do fully agree with you that The Transcendentalists are really overrated.
Well, and you don't really need us to recommend Walden or Civil Disobedience to you.
At some point, you're going to read that in high school or college.
I mean, it comes up.
I mean, it's sort of like why I wouldn't ever really recommend to anybody that they read John Locke, because if you spend any time in the humanities department, it's going to show up.
You're going to read a chunk or two of it.
You know, it's fine.
It's there.
It is undeniably Western canon political thought.
Well, I suppose we're also not mentioning the obvious, which is that the one book that everybody, until quite recently, knew cover to cover and could draw upon for allusions and everything else is the Bible.
Regardless of your faith or not, I mean, you're not You're not even capable of beginning to understand the way people view the world without reading the Bible.
And I would actually recommend, even if you're not a Protestant, looking into one of the Bible study courses out there.
Or if you want to take a more secular viewpoint, the Bible as literature.
Because if you don't do that, anything we're going to say in terms of Shakespeare or any The Brothers Kosmarov or Dostoyevsky or anything like that.
You're just not going to get it unless you actually have enough knowledge of scripture, not just to know the broad strokes, but to know the specific references that are being made.
And so it does ultimately begin with claim.
Culture comes from the cult.
And so every great culture is going to begin with claims to the supernatural and to the divine.
So if you say, okay, the Western canon, It's not so much about abstract debates.
You actually should begin with claims that are completely unreasonable and have nothing to do with the scientific viewpoint.
The Iliad, the Odyssey, the Bible, the Aeneid.
Again, I would throw a vole in there just so you have some idea of better understanding of mythology and why certain symbols recur over and over again, and maybe give you a glimpse of the idea that our civilization may go back farther in Greece and Rome, that there is a mythology that is even grander than what you've been told.
There was an interesting series of works, and again, this is why it's kind of tough to include it, As a specific thing, but there was a a series of stories about the Saints and various heroes and adventurers that were broadly lumped together under something called the Golden Legend, which was probably the second most popular book on the Bible in Christendom.
And if you can, there are different versions of it out there, but if you can find that you start to see some of the elements of Mythology and folktales that have survived obviously The Arthurian cycle speaks to something great, you know, it's part of a specific theological tradition, but somehow transcends it basically anything that is within the religious framework, it should be something that
A believer can read and believe in literally, but it also simultaneously has a greater lesson to teach even if you don't literally believe what it's saying.
That's why I think it's so important to have a focus on mythology even before you start getting into Descartes or Hegel or Nietzsche or any of these things where we start getting lost in the weeds about Well, what is reason?
Who am I?
How does psychology work?
I mean, some, most Western canons at this point would consider Freud, for example, to be fundamental because of the way he changed the way people view themselves.
But again, and this is just my reading on it, I would say far more important is Jung, because what does he draw on?
He draws on archetypes, he draws on mythology, and I think he was fundamentally more correct about the way, what drives human behavior, what drives societies, whereas a lot of Freudian psychology, although it had a big impact, it's kind of been discredited at this point, at least as a therapeutic tool.
Yeah, well, like with everything with the canon, I mean, at a certain point you You hit this kind of fork in the road of influence versus goodness.
I mean, you can't take Freud out of the canon because he was simply too influential.
I mean, you wouldn't have Jung without Freud.
But yeah, Freud was certainly second to his understudy in terms of just intellectual capacity.
And the same would be true of Marx.
I mean, As far as worthy inclusion in the Western canon, you have to include Marx.
You just have to.
And I don't think that Capital was necessarily worth reading, because... I mean, I've read it, but to be blunt, I mean, there was a lot of it where I was just kind of skimming, because if you've ever read the thing, you know it's a lot of, like, industrial statistics from, like, Nineteenth century England and a lot of it, frankly, I mean, right off the bat, like, the labor theory of value is just completely wrong.
And so, like, the whole premise is gone.
But you do need to understand Marxism just to understand the way things are.
And even if you think somebody is completely wrong, or even if you think that it influences evil, that doesn't mean that there aren't things to teach you.
And so, obviously, A lot of these people who I think have been tremendously destructive, Rousseau, Voltaire, Marx obviously, and as we get later into it, but I think we've covered this subject on other episodes, the post-structuralists, they're worth reading and maybe even deserve inclusion in the canon.
But it's not, there is a difference between something that is meant to be part of a tradition and expanding on it, And something that is meant to just deconstruct it now.
I think Marx is in an interesting place because his brand of old school leftism was something aspirational, at least in cultural terms.
I mean, he really thought that come the revolution.
You would do whatever three or four hours of work you had to do every day because we'd have organized production so well and then you could criticize in the evenings.
So, you know, we would be discussing literature and everything like that.
To me, there's a very big jump from.
Mark's talking about that and his utopia to.
People who call themselves Marxist today, or people who at least are post-Marxist, saying that Shakespeare should be driven out of the universities because it's too colored by racism and sexism and everything else.
What about the big British figures in the canon?
Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte, Henry James, William Shakespeare.
I'd include all those.
I would add, uh, Burke actually not to include them.
But what do you, what do you recommend?
What do you, like, what do you specifically?
All right, well, let's, let's, I said that for the reviewing the North, when I was reviewing Northman, I said that the story of Amleth, uh, which is not exactly reproduced in the current film, but if you look at the source material for Hamlet, I would say if you had to pick one Shakespeare play that Summarizes the human condition in the Western condition.
It would probably be Hamlet.
I realize that's a cliched choice, but And it's not even my favorite play.
My favorite play is Coriolanus but I think Hamlet is is Got to be at the top in terms of universal importance and what it has to teach us.
I think that as far as Political writings and writings on society.
I think Burke especially his Writings on not just on the French Revolution, but when he talks about his idea of the sublime I think that Should be included.
I would include I Really I'm not that impressed frankly with a lot of 19th century American literature with the obvious exception of Mark Twain and Like I said, I really have no time for Emerson or Thoreau.
I don't think there's much there.
I think that in terms of where you would have to begin as far as if you were structuring a curriculum, for example, I think the founders' political writings are actually tremendously neglected.
I disagree wildly with a lot of what he had to say, but if you read Thomas Jefferson's political writings, and even if you read Madison's, and even to some extent Washington, who is not seen as a particularly literary figure, a lot of the assumptions they make about what is correct behavior and good government and really the purpose of the state It's not quite as simple as just sort of the Lockean social contract thing that we're sold when you're in elementary school or high school.
I would actually go so far as to say that reading the founders, uh, reading the federalist papers and reading the anti-federalist, I would actually say that's more important than reading Locke himself because what Locke had to say about the social contract and What he actually did because he actually had a hand in designing.
Pack me up here.
I think it was a state constant or the colonial constitution of one of the southern states.
He actually had a role for slavery and.
People who own property had a larger share in the vote.
If you get into the practical aspects of how these theories were applied, I think that's actually of more value than the theories.
So I think that if America has a place in the Western canon, it comes in kind of that golden age where it was right before modernity, right before people were grappling with questions raised by the Industrial Revolution, but where you had men like Madison and Jefferson and even Washington and certainly Adams looking back to the Roman Republic and saying, this is how we're going to consciously model our new society.
And that itself, especially when a lot of these guys were not particularly Christian believers, Jefferson certainly, but all of them acknowledged to some extent the central role of the Christian religion in governing our society.
And they saw no contradiction between the Enlightenment and its arguably anti-Christian underpinnings, Christendom, which they still identified themselves with in some way, And antiquity.
I mean, that's sort of my closing argument for why this can be considered as one continual cultural discussion and as something that you are a part of.
Like when you read these people and you understand that these were people who live where you live and we're making decisions that aren't too dissimilar from the kind of decisions that you make, you understand that this is, this is in your blood.
It's not just an abstract thing.
It's sort of like when people go to a museum, I mean, I suppose we are dancing around the real subject here, which is we should probably... certain things taken as read, I think we can agree.
actually are part of this thing that extends back centuries.
I mean, I suppose we are dancing around the real subject here,
which is we should probably, certain things taken as read, I think we can agree.
Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, Plutarch's Lives, the Bible.
If you wanted to get into the more modern things, I would say elements, certain books at least of Dostoyevsky.
If you're not going to read the whole thing, but I think you got the human condition better than just about anybody.
Uh, Shakespeare.
Give us some specifics here on that.
So that's what I mean.
I'm just trying to, I'm just trying to brush through all the stuff that I think just about everybody would include, but what would be some more controversial choices that maybe people might not think of?
My, my, At a left field pick would be revolt against the modern world as far as something that I would had I the power to do what I would literally teach it in schools because I think this is like you need to know this to understand what the heck is going on when you start reading about the way all these crazy cults and weird beliefs that people had throughout history.
So that's my pick.
That's kind of out of nowhere and I will.
back up a few choices that are included in just about everybody's definition of the canon that I think are most important.
But what's one that you would pick that most people would not even consider part of the canon?
Well, let me preface this by saying I am not qualified to make arguments as to what should or should not be in the canon.
I think that is way beyond my pay grade.
With that caveat in mind, I think you could make a strong case that Raymond Chandler should be included in the canon, at least, you know, especially if you're focusing on kind of an American canon.
I mean, he's basically the godfather of detective novels, which are, you know, the sort of grandparents of spy thrillers and techno thrillers and all of that stuff.
We know, which is extremely popular and I mean, kind of predominates sort of dominates contemporary literature, at least in its popular form.
And yeah, so I always recommend that people read Raymond Chandler's detective novels.
The Big Sleep is generally where people start, and that's a fine place to start.
But I don't include it.
Oh, I think if I if we're going to include Poe, I think Lovecraft has a real claim then too.
I mean, if you're talking about somebody who shaped Right, but that's not controversial, including Edgar Allan Poe and H.P.
Lovecraft.
I think Lovecraft might be considered controversial to some because, I mean, let's face it, he was writing for magazines called Weird Tales.
I mean, it was essentially pulp.
And, you know, he was corresponding with Howard, the creator of Conan the Barbarian.
I mean, that was like the level they were operating on.
I mean, I think it's just sort of People like us will sneer at, and I agree with Martin Scorsese that, like, superhero films, like, aren't cinema.
And so we'll say, like, okay, this isn't literature.
But at the same time, I'll say, well, Lovecraft's different.
The only defense I can really mount is that the pulp culture of, the best of it anyway, from 100 years ago, is objectively superior to what we have now.
Uh, and it was more authentic and less obviously just a product as opposed to a work of art.
I do think that we should maybe bring it that that's a interesting pick that you highlighted.
Uh, as far as like creating a new genre, we are moving a little bit away from, I think some of the philosophy that people would begin, obviously the great battle that never really ended.
Between Plato and Aristotle, I guess the real question is, is there value in reading classical philosophers now that we know, I mean, if you take modern philosophy class or get into it, I mean, you just want to rip your own brain out because it becomes just these endless battles over semantics.
And arguably, you could say that they've, they've reduced the great books of the past to just meaninglessness through just the endless logic chopping and everything else.
Given that that's the context that we're in, is there still value in reading somebody like Plato or Aristotle?
Yeah, I mean, absolutely.
Just because if you go to college and some professor tries to ruin it or misunderstands it, there's no reason to not read it like ever at all.
But I mean, like, really, you're not suggesting that?
No, but there's a broader question, which is that there are certain works and there are certain, particularly of philosophy, that we would consider core.
So, for example, anything coming out of the Enlightenment that was built around this idea that Newtonian physics and the idea of a predictable, predictable universe with universal laws that we could apply this to the human realm.
And we know that that's not true.
I mean, insofar as we know anything, as we can know anything, we know that the simple orderly universe of Newton does not really exist once you start breaking it down to, say, the molecular level.
And so therefore, a lot of these theories that were drawn from this also don't work.
I don't think it's an accident.
And I'm not alone in this.
When Einstein started talking about relativity, that was also around the time you had theories of cultural deconstruction, Dadaism, all these things started popping up around the same time.
The question is, is there value in reading works that are, and I'm kind of playing devil's advocate from a leftist perspective here, but I think there is a question to be considered.
Things that are objectively not true, things that have been disproven by history, but they're still valuable because they sort of led us to where we are today.
Well, I wouldn't advocate reading ancient scientific texts about stuff that's been disproven, like the old concept of phlogiston, which I'll let listeners look into themselves.
Or some of Aristotle's views on science?
I mean, because obviously philosophy and science were considered the same thing back then.
Yes and no.
I mean, I would recommend, I mean, for people interested in politics and philosophy, reading Aristotle's book, Politics, I don't believe any of it has been disproven by contemporary science?
No, I think Aristotle's view of human flourishing, broadly translated as the idea of the goal of life, I think stands up pretty well even now.
It's certainly better than What people coming along later thought were if you just say something like happiness, because you can actually deconstruct that pretty easily.
But if you say something like human flourishing or excellence, however you want to phrase it, I think that that really has stood the test of time.
I would also add Machiavelli.
Not just the prince, but also when he talks about his concept of virtue and What a statesman really should be aiming to do.
He does what we had.
I mean, I think our first episode was on Burnham and Machiavelli did what I think no one else really was able to do, which is that he had a moral framework.
He had a concept of what was good and what was noble, but also made the first hesitant steps toward what Burnham called the science of power.
And I think that viewpoint is very refreshing when it comes to reading the Western canon and cutting through a lot of the rhetoric that really is not all that important.
Evola, for example, has a very soft spot for Dante's De Monarchia, which is this grand theory about, you know, how the emperor should govern all of Europe and eventually the world on Earth.
But really doesn't have much to tell you in terms of practical political behavior.
But at the same time, I think few would deny that Dante's poetry should ever be cast out.
I mean, you can't really grasp even how people think of the divine without reading Dante, because even the way we think of hell is probably been more influenced by Dante than the Bible itself.
I mean, this kind of goes back to what I say, where I think there should be more of a focus on poetry and epics rather than abstract philosophy.
Sure, well, and again, the question that prompted this podcast was specifically which parts of the Western canon we enjoy, and as far as conceptions of hell and poetry go, you've also got to check out John Milton's Paradise Lost, which is an epic poem in the tradition of the Greco-Romans, but it's extremely Christian, but it's just an incredible It's just an amazing, amazing read, and I would say that Paradise Lost really influenced what we think hell is like in a really big way.
I mean, recall that the Bible doesn't really get into super specific stuff about hell.
There's a lot of ambiguity as to what hell would be like.
Well, it changes in the Old Testament from the New, depending on how you look at it.
I mean, the literal translation, I believe, In the Old Testament, Gehenna, right, is, I mean, it was just like a part of Jerusalem where they would throw corpses and garbage.
And then it kind of gradually turned into this place of unquenchable fire.
I mean, the person who talks more about hell than anybody else in the Bible is Jesus, which is funny because, you know, they frame it like, oh, he's coming to save us from hell, but actually he goes farther than anyone else in describing what hell actually is.
But in terms of the popular imagination, it's drawn much more from Dante and then also from, this is why I bring up the Golden Legend, from folk memory and certain European traditions that I think predate and then were incorporated into what became European Christianity.
In terms of a modern epic poet, I think obviously, even though epic might be the wrong word, but I mean, one of the things that we kind of take for granted now is we sort of say, Oh, well, artists, they're always on the left, right?
Because we're so used to celebrities and used to musicians and these people constantly making stupid political takes.
And we just say, well, you have to divorce the person from the work and everything else.
I mean, I think the, the broader point is that, well, It's just artists now are objectively worse.
They don't have anything to tell us.
In many ways, they aren't even artists.
They're just kind of products.
And if you look at the people specifically in the early part of the 20th century, who we would consider the great poets, the great artists, not only were they on the right, a lot of times they were on the extreme right.
I mean, if you said who was the greatest American poet of all time, Ezra Pound has got to be up there.
And We all know what he did during World War Two and what happened to him afterward.
Um, I mean, I think it was what convicted of treason and then ruled insane or something, uh, doing propaganda broadcast from Mussolini.
But then afterward he was still seen as so important that artists were writing in basically calling for the government to show mercy because they thought he was such an important intellectual figure.
And so, I think that, I think Napoleon had a similar comment with, uh, there was, there was somebody who was criticizing his rule and he was basically told to, to kill this guy.
And he said something like one doesn't execute Voltaire.
And a lot of the people who have been sort of included in the Western Canada are now being pushed out.
If you get into early modernity, A lot of artists and a lot of poets were coming at it from an essentially aristocratic viewpoint.
They did not see this world of technology and the masses, masses that are easily manipulated from above, as something to be welcomed.
And there's something in the artistic spirit, if you really boil it down, which is really anti-egalitarian.
I mean, one poet we haven't talked about is Lord Byron.
And if we think of the Romantic Era and the idea of the Byronic Hero, I mean, what is he other than somebody who rejects social conventions, considers himself above everything else, goes on crazy adventures?
I mean, he died when he was on his way to Greece to go fight for Greek independence.
And a lot of the people who are being pushed out now, I think, are not just being pushed out because They don't like the idea of white people having anything other than a negative identity, although I think that's the bulk of it.
But it's also because if you get into the specifics of what people believed, it's subversive to the current power structure.
And this even goes back to somebody like Shakespeare.
If you were saying, what is one of the most devastating critiques of democracy and media manipulation ever written?
Antony's speech after the death of Caesar where within a couple pages he takes a crowd screaming that Caesar had it coming to let's murder everyone in the city who had anything to do with the death of Caesar.
Coriolanus has sort of the same lessons and I think that explains why the idea of the Western canon and this idea of an education where you're basically being taught not just how to think but How to conduct yourself almost like an aristocrat.
They really want to stamp that out at the university, because ultimately they're trying to turn you into a product and not into a person.
Because a person has roots, and a person has a mind of his own, and a person also knows that popular opinion isn't really a thing.
It's sort of the outcome of power.
It's not something that actually just manifests, and it's certainly not the voice of God.
We should probably just pick what you think the five most essential texts are, other than the obvious epic poems that we've already mentioned.
Essential?
Boy, I don't know about essential.
As far as just recommendations go for people who are just looking to have a more robust literary life or are looking for stuff that's higher caliber than just kind of binge watching TV. But
what would really be at the top of the list for me would be The Great Gatsby, Flannery O'Connor's
short stories. For the Russians, I would really recommend Nikolai Gogol's The Nodes. I think
it's really, it's probably, probably never laughed out loud more while reading
something than reading Nikolai Gogol's The Nodes.
It's an enormous amount of fun.
And then Albert Camus' fiction, which we've talked about before and I do think is generally considered to be basically kind of like the most recent addition to the canon, would be Albert Camus and some of his contemporaries in France in the 1950s and 60s.
in 50s and 60s.
How about you?
I would say Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Pfeiffer, Heidegger, Pfeiffer, Heidegger,
Bye.
Probably, I don't like him.
In fact, I pretty much despise him and all he represented.
But I think you have to grapple with Voltaire.
Candide would be, I mean you have, that's like the kind of thing you read in school, but it's something to dip into as far as understanding the beginnings of the intellectual climate that we have today, which I think is tremendously negative, but it's certainly, we have to deal with it.
It's the same reason you have to read Marx.
Augustine?
I mean, I honestly think that a lot of, I think if you read Plato, you're going to get to a lot of some of the more contemporary applications of early Christian thought.
I mean, I think you can get into that, but I think you, if you're talking about St.
Augustine or St.
Thomas Aquinas, that's not the kind of thing You want to just read on your own unless you're just doing it for pleasure and you've done the homework beforehand.
I think if you just kind of dive into that unprepared, you're not going to get as much out of it, which is not necessarily the same thing with Plato or Aristotle.
Like, I would read those first before you go to that.
Well, I think for St.
Augustine's Confessions, which is worth reading.
Yeah.
I think so long as you're familiar with the Old Testament, you're pretty much good to go there.
I suppose Aquinas would be more the, I mean, there he's building a whole worldview.
And so, I mean, it's, and he's, it's also important, you know, to note that he's dealing with a very, a very relevant political question, which is if you have a worldly order, That is meant to be sacral, or to put it into modern terms, if you have a political order that's supposed to be rooted in some sort of eternal value of or set of values that is supposed to represent the good, how do you react when that thing fails so spectacularly, when it objectively fails, as in cities are being conquered and you're losing wars.
That's something that I think is worth always confronting.
Machiavelli, I think, is tremendously underrated.
I would read him.
And... I think... probably Hume.
I think that Locke is not... Which book, specifically, of Hume's?
I would say... probably The Treatise of Human Nature.
I mean, I think that, again, what he led to was not necessarily the best thing.
I mean, there's still a lot of skepticism that, like, even though I'm not particularly fond of neoreaction as such, I think that the claim that everything can be grounded in reason and everything can be grounded in skepticism Uh, is not true.
I mean, that's why somebody who I would actually include in here, who I think it's, is not included in most definitions of the Western canon was, uh, Joseph Dimitri and his analysis of the French revolution and his analysis of the way people actually behave when it comes to political power.
Uh, particularly when he contends that anything which is created by human beings is also something that human beings don't respect.
I think that's actually a pretty good, a pretty cutting and accurate way of the way people view political power.
I mean, so much, especially as Americans, so much of what we have comes out of the enlightenment and We're lucky in a way that the founders died before the Industrial Revolution really hit and people started deconstructing this idea of fundamental rights because, you know, had our revolution been in the 1840s, say, a lot of the things that we consider to be our fundamental rights would not have been taken for granted.
You know, like during the American Revolution, the idea that free speech is a good thing.
Because the premise is, if everybody is operating based on reason, and everybody is free from arbitrary power, eventually, in theory, we can come up with the correct answer.
And I don't think anybody believed that, even 50 years later.
But we're lucky that the founders had that delusion when they did, and they put it into the Constitution, because that's why we still have what liberties we still have.
But I mean, I think reading the founders again, I think they're underrated.
I think they actually have more to tell us than Locke himself does, but I think it's also important to, to crack open, um, the ministry because his view of power and his view of the way human psychology works and also his view of the way a nation works and a civilization works is far more accurate than Thinkers of the Enlightenment.
I mean, I think that what we're seeing now and really the the note I kind of want to close on is that over the last few centuries you can sort of see the West at war with itself in terms of its high culture.
For example, we talk about the Arab world and the Islamic world more or less interchangeably.
Am I wrong about that?
I mean, I know the Islamic world is bigger than the Arab world, but if we say Arab countries.
It's understood that we mean Muslim countries.
Do you agree with me on that?
Yeah, yeah.
Colloquially, that's certainly right.
And obviously, Indonesia is the world's biggest Muslim country.
I don't mean to equate the two, but the Arabs don't have a situation where they have a religion that is seen as opposed to their identity.
In fact, it defines them in many ways.
Whereas with the West, and this is not the first time it happened, You could argue that Christianity essentially overturned and remade Western identity, and it could have led to basically the destruction of a civilization and the birth of a new one, but it didn't, because instead a lot of the things from pre-Christian Europe, both in Northern Europe and in the Mediterranean world, were incorporated into how we understand European Christianity.
And then with the enlightenment and then moving forward with liberalism and then socialism, this idea of Christianity as being the rot that needs to be removed.
And then we're going to create an entirely new world that the tragedy of that has been sort of playing out over the last few centuries.
So now we're in the situation we are today, which I suppose is why we're doing this podcast and why we do what we do, where, You exist in this civilization and the leading institutions of that civilization, the things you should be looking to for guidance, your religious leaders, your academic leaders, your political leaders, the only thing they all can seem to agree on is everything that came before this was a horrific mistake.
And we have to rip it out and change it and turn it into something new.
And The reason why I think it's important to be connected to the cannon as a as a poetic and as a mythic.
Enterprise not just as an intellectual enterprise is because.
This is really the story of you as a person and it's not your life didn't just begin when you were born you're part of something that's thousands and thousands of years old and even the things that you may disagree with.
Still impact you and still impact your thinking in ways that you don't fully understand until you start seeing how other people who are just like you behaved in similar historic situations.
Right now, I'd say the West's crisis is greater than it's ever been because we're being told that we have to unmake ourselves, not just philosophically, not just in terms of culture and in terms of identity, but even physically in terms of the physical extirpation of whites.
And you know, this would be seen as a good thing, or at least something that people shouldn't care about one way or the other.
And unless you have an argument beyond reason, unless you have an argument beyond, oh, we're going to debate costs and benefits with this kind of contention, unless you have something that says, no, like this, this is how it is.
And we don't need to debate this.
This is something that is the continuation of our people as a self evident good.
You're not going to get anywhere.
So that's why I look at the Western canon the way I do.
And that's also why I think the counter enlightenment theorists were often neglected actually have a lot to tell us.
Because if there's one thing we've learned over the last few years, it's that the.
Far-right conspiracy theorists and the tend to be right about the way things are gonna go and the slippery slope remains the undefeated champion in terms of defining what's gonna happen.
There were guys calling this in the 1790s about stuff that we would be facing today.
And that's something you're not gonna get in school.
And this is also why I think that the Western canon should be taught Not in the ISI way.
I don't mean to smear ISI, but not in the, you know, the Conservatism Inc.
way of, oh, you're reading this because then you'll be an educated person and you can comfort yourself that you're smart, even as civilization crumbles around you.
It should be taught in the way of, this is a living tradition that is part of you.
This is teaching you what it is to be a part of this civilization.
And there are people who are trying to take it away from you.
For purely negative reasons, and you can actually pinpoint in our history and in our philosophy, the points where what we could call the forces of the left, the forces of chaos, the forces of entropy went from having an aspirational viewpoint.
You know, I would say Marx, at least for all his faults, still had to today's left, which is just purely negative.
I mean, they don't even pretend that they have anything positive to offer us.
It's just tear it all down.
To make it fair.
And then we'll all be equal in the rubble.
So.
And I think there's a bigger story here, too, which defines the whole Western canon, which is and is in all our mythologies and in all our religious traditions, which is the battle of order versus chaos.
And.
You know, maybe defeat is inevitable in some way, but history is cyclical and we always come back, which is why I guess Probably my last controversial addition would be Spengler.
Well, I guess if there was any doubt before, all of you listeners know to go to Greg for philosophical and political recommendations and to go to me for fiction, literature, etc.
Well, I want to give you the last word.
I mean, you've brought up, I think, some excellent selections in terms of fiction, in terms of literature.
I have to admit, I like kind of epic poetry more than I like novels.
I don't think that's unreasonable at all.
I don't think that's anything to be embarrassed about.
A lot of the kind of classic, really big English novels I really find quite boring, but I wonder if that's largely because my ancestry is overwhelmingly Irish and Iberian and not British.
Jared Taylor, for example, loves all that stuffy old British stuff, like Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope.
I just can't do it, so if any of y'all have had a bad experience with that kind of thing, I would really advise you not to give up on the canon as a whole, but to look back to the Greco-Romans, because their fiction is so awesome, whereas the Victorian fiction is just so gossipy, and at times it just feels so petty, and just be really inaccessible.
So yeah, maybe that's kind of the last.
The last thing I would really want to leave people with is, you know, if you read one of these really big classic novels in high school and hated it, don't give up on the canon.
The best thing you might do is delve into some short stories, since obviously that's a smaller commitment and you can experiment more that way, or just to go all the way back to the Greco-Romans, because even their long stuff is so much more fast-paced and cool, frankly.
So yeah, that would be kind of my final thought.
I want to keep it at least relatively simple and mildly practical.
Don't forget about Joyce, too.
Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist.
I would just say, don't even try Ulysses without a guide.
That is definitely not something.
Some people say it's the best book of the last century, but it is definitely not something you're going to try to take on.
Without having to check a million different references every single time, which I guess is true of T.S.
Eliot, too.
I mean, if you just kind of sit down and start reading it and you're missing a lot of the stuff.
Actually, one thing that maybe we can unite about pop culture and the canon, and maybe people can sneer at this, but I'm just going to go for it and I'm going to say Tolkien.
I mean, he said himself he was giving the English people their mythology.
Yeah.
I mean, I think that's perfectly credible.
And in terms of the fascination that it has held, even as they try to, you know, deconstruct it now, I mean, if you, it really, and it's not something, I mean, he wrote about explicitly about what he was doing.
If you're talking about something where the mythology of the North, the specific experiences of the Anglo-Saxons, And then, of course, core to his identity and everything he did is very strong Catholic beliefs and Christian beliefs.
That's all there.
And you can't say that he was some stuffy guy who was a romantic.
I mean, this is a guy who saw the horrors of the Great War, which was something that was so terrible that it turned so many of the brightest people of that generation away from Western civilization entirely.
So I'd include that, too.
All right, let's close with that, huh?
I think we've doled out enough recommendations.
Yeah, I think so.
That'll keep you busy for a while, guys.
Yeah, that's right.
So thanks for tuning in, everybody, and we'll see you next week.
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