Spencer Clavin’s How to Save the West frames today’s transgender surge as a modern "body crisis," echoing ancient struggles over embodiment, decay, and soul. He rejects reducing identity to biology or brain scans, tracing discontent from Plotinus’ transcendentalism to modern tech enabling bodily rejection—from gender transitions to "identifying as demons." Clavin argues hylomorphic unity (soul-body) is sacred, warning that severing it risks moral chaos, while ancient philosophers like Aristotle offered answers modern society ignores. The book urges reclaiming timeless wisdom to confront this existential fracture. [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, it's Andrew Clavin.
Many people ask me, are you related to Spencer Clavin?
And no, I'm not.
But he has written a terrific book.
He spells his name the same way, oddly enough, called How to Save the West, Ancient Wisdom for Five Modern Crises.
This is the second of our three conversations about this book, so you might want to check out the first as well.
Sort of ended in the last one, talking a little bit about the body and the body crisis and transgenderism and people changing gender.
And it seems like it came out of nowhere.
It spread like wildfire.
And it has this feeling like nobody's ever thought of this before.
Is there ancient wisdom to speak into this weird gender dysmorphia that seems to have infected the entire country?
Yeah, I think you put that really well.
I hear this all the time.
It's like this just came out of nowhere.
Suddenly, you know, it's like in 2020 or 2016 or whatever date you want to pick that's like exploded.
And if you look at the statistics on this stuff, it actually has gone up.
There has been an uptick in gender dysphoria.
In part, I argue in the book because we're teaching kids that their bodies are kind of malleable, that their gender is a construct.
But one of the things that I argue is that fundamentally, as a crisis, the problem of the body, of the human body, it's actually very old.
And it's really hard.
It's hard to live in a body.
And this is something I think we can understand and have a little bit of compassion for, you know, since forever, basically.
We've known that there is something more to us than our flesh.
We're not just chemistry sets in meat sacks.
We're not just bone mechs piloting meat armor or however you want to put it, right?
There is something more to us than that.
And in fact, all of the things that matter most about us live in that something more kind of space.
Beauty, truth, love, memory, virtue, right?
These are things that don't actually exist anywhere on a brain scan.
And now there's this kind of cheap modern wisdom, this idea that, you know, actually you do boil down to what you can find on a brain scan and everything else is just kind of accidental.
It's just a kind of, you know, a byproduct of your evolution or your biology, that you have these feelings inside.
What you really are is a machine.
And of course we know that's not true.
In fact, we know urgently that the things you can't map on a machine are the realest things about us.
And so the problem is not, well, why do we have these kind of accidental feelings of love and desire and joy?
The problem is, why do we have to have this flesh?
Why do we have to have a body sitting around?
Because the body causes all sorts of problems.
It decays, it breaks down, it eventually dies.
This is a terrible tragedy.
And ever since people have thought about this stuff, there has been the temptation to transcend or get rid of the body.
I talk in the book about Plotinus, who is a philosopher, followed the Greek philosopher Plato.
And really his biographer, his ancient biographer, says that he seemed ashamed of being in his body.
He wouldn't go to the public baths.
When he got sick as an old man, he wouldn't take the required medicine because it was too physical, essentially.
And he just thought that he was going to kind of transcend out of his flesh and become a divine spark.
And so what this shows us is that there's something very kind of deep in this longing that has now been reanimated, I think, by digital technology.
Now that we have this tech, we can put ourselves on screens, we sort of see one another through screens, we start to think again, well, maybe we can get past this flesh that we are.
And this is, I think, where this crisis comes from.
If you can say, why have we suddenly started feeling all of this transgenderism, dysphoria, stuff?
It's because we are now being forced back again into this body crisis, into this kind of hatred of the flesh, this desire to reform it and change it according to some sort of spirit, our gender identity, whatever.
And basically what I'm proposing here is that this is never a successful proposition.
That even though the tech is new, the offer is old and it's always a bad deal.
And I think that ultimately people are starting to kind of have an intuition of this and it can be reinforced by these ancient texts, uncovering the reality that what you actually are is an embodied soul.
You're actually what Aristotle or Aristotelians might call a hylomorphic entity.
You are form morphé in matter, hule.
And there is no such thing as being born in the wrong body.
You are effectively a union of body and soul.
And understanding yourself that way is a path to much deeper happiness than all the other stuff they're offering you.
Like so many other things now, everything seems to get back to sex.
Everything seems to center around sex.
And you think of the Bible saying, well, man was made in God's image, male and female.
And then you think of Jesus saying there's no marriage in heaven, which raises the question of like, are we still male and female?
Was this a question that the ancients actually worried about?
Or is this something that we just made up all the law?
No, no.
You can find in patristic literature and the early church fathers, you can find speculation about whether we'll all be male at the resurrection, whether there's some kind of, whether we're leaving sex behind.
Because we have souls, because we are more than our bodies, there's always been this kind of curiosity about what the resurrected state will be like.
And that has something to do with moving beyond the present state, which is fallen.
But one of the things I point out in the book is that that passage from Genesis and that creation story, when God breathes life into the dust, when he creates man, Adam, it's not actually that he takes some essential mankind, which is this pure breath and spirit, and he fuses it with this kind of useless clay.
Instead, what the text says is, God breathed the breath of life into the dust, and then it became a living soul.
It's the fusion of the spirit and the flesh that actually makes us what we are.
And I think that you really can't talk or think about this stuff without observing the hatred of womanhood, of femaleness that comes along with a lot of the desire to transcend our bodies.
And so I think that actually, sex in the sense of what people now call gender, that is womanhood, is really urgently important here.
And that's because women in their role as the bearers of children are like a little portrait, a picture of this truth.
They bear witness to the fact that our flesh is actually the medium of life.
It is the thing in which even God himself consents to come into being.
It's incredibly profound, and it's why whenever they start to try to break this down, they reduce women to their body parts and act as if men can just basically put on womanhood like a sort of skin suit, the menstruators, chest feeders, all this language that we use.
You will start to understand that what that is, is an attempt to deny the fact that women make so apparent with their essential natures, which is that our flesh is something much more than just a kind of accident that we can rearrange.
Is there some reason, I mean, obviously our technology has blown up in just in the last 50 years has blown up.
And it is more possible to carve somebody into the physical representation of the sex he wants to be than it was.
Are the ancients, talking about the ancients of Greece, maybe the ancients of Israel, Are they still relevant to this question?
I mean, do they have, is there a reason why we should turn to them instead of the guy next to us?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I think that what you're observing is what the ancients would have called a development, an advanced development of techne.
And this is where we get our word technological from.
It's like a kind of a power that you have over the material of nature.
It's not the same thing as absolute scientific knowledge, episteme, which is kind of like the knowledge of the real verities, the truths of virtue and goodness.
This is like a kind of technical knowledge.
We know how to do more stuff.
You and I will both live to see, I assume you're about to keel over about five minutes, but you and I will both live to see this technology get more and more advanced.
Brilliant.
Yeah, we better kind of see.
No, I mean, this stuff is going to get more and more advanced, and you're going to see people argue, you know, it's not just about sex and gender.
You're going to see people argue that we should turn ourselves into robots.
You're already seeing people say, well, I identify as a dog.
I identify as a demon, whatever.
And this tech, as it gets more advanced, it gets easier and easier to confuse it for the real thing.
But that's precisely why we need these first principle questions that guys like Aristotle and the ancients raised.
Because if tech enables us to do anything, to make ourselves even into anything, suddenly it becomes a really urgent question, what should we do?
What should we make ourselves into, right?
And that ought question, the question of morality and goodness, those are the questions that don't go away, that have been there since antiquity, and are going to become really crucial to ask and answer as this tech gets more advanced.
That's a great answer.
Oh, thank you.
Wherever Books00:00:19
Oh, Spencer Clavens, I says right there.
I considered spelling it with an E.
I wouldn't have blamed you.
The book is How to Save the West, Ancient Wisdom for Five Modern Crises.
It is not actually that big.
It's more like this size, but you can get it now on wherever you get your books, Amazon, wherever you get your books.