Spencer Clavin’s How to Save the West argues modern crises—AI, digital alienation, and existential despair—require ancient wisdom from Athens and Jerusalem over transhumanist fantasies. Criticizing "chronological chauvinism," he frames embodied human nature as the antidote to nihilism, dismissing gender fluidity and brain enhancement as ideologically hollow. Rising youth depression proves disconnection’s toll, while hylomorphism (flesh-spirit unity) offers a path forward. The West’s salvation lies not in politics but personal reclaiming of tradition, not tech-driven detachment. [Automatically generated summary]
When you talk about the West, if you understand yourself as bearers of that tradition, we don't have the right to despair.
We have a job to do, and that is to seek the good, the true, and the beautiful, and to leave the rest to God.
Hey, everyone, it's Andrew Clavin, and as you know, I've tried very hard to disassociate myself entirely from my son, Spencer Clavin, No Relation, to keep him from being swept into the maelstrom, the seamy maelstrom of my reputation.
But I have to talk to him today because he has written what I have to say is an actually sensational book, How to Save the West, Ancient Wisdom for Five to Modern Crisis.
Christ is a very big book.
Oh, but we have this.
You have to lift weights for a month before you can purchase it.
I just wrote this because I was trying to get you to acknowledge me.
I just want you to acknowledge paternity.
I just thought, I wanted you to be proud of me.
I have to confess, I'm relatively proud of you.
There we go.
I can go home now.
It is a terrific book.
Ancient Wisdom for Five Modern Crises.
I mean, the first question that comes into the mind is, why do we need ancient wisdom for modern crises?
Yeah, you and everybody else is asking this, I think, because, you know, we have this thing, in the book, I call it chronological chauvinism, this kind of assumption that newer means better, that basically all the answers to all the questions were like thought up shortly after Darwin discovered evolution and science basically replaced like the Bible and Aristotle and Aqua.
I mean, this is kind of the modern wisdom, like what gets passed for wisdom.
And what I argue in the book is that in fact, with this digital revolution we're going through, with the kind of sea change we've seen in the way that we relate to each other, the way we communicate, with all of our technology, we're actually being forced up against these very fundamental questions.
It's not just that the technology is new, it's that the questions are actually really old.
What is humanity?
What is man?
What's our place in the universe?
Why should I get out of bed in the morning?
Why am I, as a human being, worthwhile when my machines can do things so much faster than me, when AI can outstrip me in all of these ways?
And actually, those fundamental questions, what's the point of man's existence?
Where do we land in the universe?
Those are the questions that have been argued over and debated for millennia, for thousands of years.
And the answers that come down to us through the wisdom traditions of Athens and Jerusalem, these two great pillars of Western civilization, are in many cases saner, more intuitive, and clearer than everything you get from the modern gurus of the age, from your Mark Zuckerbergs of the world.
So that's the point of the book is I think people need to be equipped with this stuff if they're going to make sense of the coming centuries.
Well, the first thing I should ask you, I mean, I have a question to follow that up, but before that, I should ask you, why you?
Why should I?
I mean, I've never listened to a word you said.
Why should anybody start?
Why should you start now?
Right.
Well, I think this is a really important question because when you title a book, How to Save the West, there's a certain imposter syndrome that sets in, right?
And it's such a big ask.
But that's actually the whole point.
You know, when I hear from people about this stuff, I spend my life out here offering people the wisdom of Aristotle and Aquinas and trying to kind of crack open these great texts for folks.
And one of the things that I hear is this real sense of despair and fear about the future of the world.
It's like every day you wake up to a new news story that seems to threaten the end of civilization.
It's like they're transing the kids, they're destroying the economy, they're teaching everybody to hate themselves, essentially, and one another.
And people start to feel like all of this wisdom from the past is really great, but it's all falling apart around our ears.
And what the heck can I do to fix any of it?
It's all so much bigger than me, you know?
And I think that there's a really big mistake we make when we ask that question.
We think of it as if we're like Ron DeSantis.
We sit around and we think, what's the law that I can write tomorrow that would change the world, fix the country?
We imagine ourselves as if we were in the position of the governor of a state or something.
And that's when despair sets in, because we're not in that position.
We don't have that kind of power.
We can't muscle the wheel of history backward.
We're not going to transform the country overnight.
And so what we need to understand is that, yes, we have the vote and we have these ways of participating in the political debate, but there must be something more than that.
The West, as distinct from, you know, America and the 2024 election or the economy, the West, which is a tradition of a great conversation that has been passed down from generation to generation, actually doesn't live in these massive kind of structural concerns that you have.
It lives in every human heart.
The West is saved every time a single human heart is rescued from nihilism and despair.
And so the point of the book is, you know, who am I?
Who are you?
You are actually the, you're an end in yourself.
And the ways that you show up tomorrow, the things that you do when you wake up, how you show up for your kids, the way that you seek the good, the true, and the beautiful is going to matter infinitely more on an infinite scale than anything you could do to quote unquote save the world.
So actually this wisdom for saving the West is more actionable, more practical, and more human-sized than a lot of the things that we tend to worry about in the day-to-day.
When you talk about human size and saving a human, there's a theory going around now that basically we're moving out of the phase of our old humanity.
They're moving into what Yuval Harari called homodeus.
We're going to become so much bigger than this and that the old questions actually don't apply.
Why is that untrue?
Well, this is a big part of the book.
I talk about the body crisis, which is kind of a way of talking about our humanity, right?
Why shouldn't we just transcend our flesh?
Our flesh is fallen, it's broken, we die, we break down.
And this comes to us in a million different ways.
We think these are different, but they're actually all kind of part of one trend.
When people say to you, well, your gender is kind of a shackle and you should be able to change it at will.
You should be able to change from a man to a woman.
Or when they say to you, you're actually not as smart as you could be, let's put a chip in your brain to enhance your capacities.
Or, you know, when they say, actually, it's fine for you to just have all your interactions over Zoom because that's, you know, the essence of you is somehow contained in these digital communications.
All of this is part of the same mistake.
It's part of the same error that sees a human being as kind of like a little spark inside of a machine.
And what we are is like these kind of floating spirits piloting these meat suits.
And wouldn't it be great if we could just get rid of the meat suits altogether?
And that's transhumanism, that's post-humanism, that's all that stuff you're talking about.
One of the points that I make in the book is that this is an ideology which is singularly ill-equipped to deliver on the promises that it makes.
You always get these people saying we're going to move past our human form and then we're going to be happy and free and everything's going to be great.
Well, how is that working out for us, right?
The more we go online, the more we reduce our lives to just digital interactions, the more we perform surgery, these terribly invasive surgeries on children, the worse it gets.
The more sick we get, the more depressed we become, the more disconnected from one another.
And this, I think, is a really important key to one of the things that I really articulate in the book, which is that we're not actually going to float up into some imagined future out of our bodies.
What we are fundamentally, crucially, is embodied souls.
This is kind of an ancient idea called hylomorphism, that you're not just like a ghost in a machine.
You're actually a spiritual being who is expressed in the medium of the here and now, in the medium of flesh.
And I think the more people recover that, the happier they become.
And we really need, I think, to gain ownership over that sense of joy that we're living into in the here and now, which people have been talked out of by all of these kind of fancy theories, but they really don't work.
The ancient stuff works better.
So it's almost as if the ancients set the tone of our problems and the same problems keep coming up again and again.
Of course, of course.
And they come up in new ways in each era.
And the technology that we're currently faced with is more advanced than they had.
And we think that that means that we must therefore have moved beyond somehow what they had to say.
But you're exactly right.
It's not like that at all.
It's like a seed that is growing outward into more and more complex iterations.
It's not like we've moved past the questions that Aristotle raised.
It's that those questions become more and more urgent as we become more and more capable in all of these technological ways.
So the example of transgenderism, I think, is really important here.
It's like you come to somebody, you come to a child, let's say, and people say these terrible things to kids like, you can be a boy or a girl or neither or something in between.
And you see the confusion that sets in that these kids faces because, of course, children have this kind of innate connection to the reality of what we are, which is human souls embodied in flesh.
And as we grow older, we become more complicated.
We get all sorts of, you know, all sorts of other things occur to us.
But fundamentally, it's not like we transform into some other kind of species or other kind of being.
And that's kind of what the position that humanity is in, right?
We began with these foundational questions and we came up with some pretty good answers to them.
And as we grow and we develop, we have to take those answers into the future.
But we can't just leave the questions behind altogether.
It's a recipe for disaster.
You're really not as bad as your mother says.
Is she talking about me behind my back again?
The book is absolutely great.
It's called How to Save the West: Ancient Wisdom for Five Modern Crises.
We're going to do two more of these to talk more about some of these ideas specifically, because each one is interesting in and of itself.