Spencer Clavin’s How to Save the West traces five crises plaguing Western civilization, culminating in the regime crisis—where democracy risks collapsing into mob rule (oklocracy) due to class conflict and divisive rhetoric like Biden’s "pandemic" framing. Drawing on anacyclosis (the cyclical decay of regimes), he warns that America’s survival hinges on civic friendship (philia), not grand politics, citing Cicero’s resilience during Rome’s fall and Adams’ revival of classical ideals. The antidote? Daily grassroots collaboration—yet Clavin insists despair is premature, urging listeners to embrace the "good, true, and beautiful" while trusting history’s enduring tradition. [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.
Hi, everyone.
It's Andrew Clavin, and we are here with the third and final installment of our conversations about how to save the West, Ancient Wisdom for Five Modern Crises by Spencer Clavin, No Relation.
It gets cut off at the bottom.
It says no relation.
He says it wherever he goes for some reason.
I don't know.
It's on the inside, Jack.
Now, it's a terrific book.
Thank you.
It is a really good book.
You've taken, you know, it's interesting.
I mean, for some reason, your mother insisted we sent you to Yale and to Oxford.
You have a doctorate in the classics.
But it's incredibly readable.
I mean, even someone like me can actually understand some of the words.
I think, by the way, that Yale was just the farthest away, as they called it.
She just wanted to get rid of.
If we had been a college in the ocean, we would have been.
Exactly.
But the book talks about five crises that we continually have in the West, and the fact that the ancients knew this, and they addressed them.
There's the reality crisis, the body crisis.
We've talked about that last time.
The crisis of meaning, the crisis of religion, regime, and the regime crisis.
Regime Crisis00:09:20
And I guess we have only one more of these to do.
And if you want to hear more about the religion crisis and so on, get the book, How to Save the West.
But I want to talk about the regime crisis because it does feel, for a lot of people, it feels like the idea of the American Republic is foundering and it's foundering on things that seem to have destroyed every republic ever made.
The founders sort of said, these are the dangers that come about.
How can we prevent them?
And for 200 years, we seem to avoid them, and now suddenly they seem to be looming at us.
Is this idea something that the ancients actually dealt with?
Oh, sure.
I mean, this is an area in which I'm going to talk about the same problems coming back up again and again.
The ancients actually had a word for this, which was anacyclosis.
And you can hear the word cycle in there.
It means the cycle of regimes, that there's a kind of, it's almost like a wheel that turns, a wheel of history.
And this is a really helpful way, I think, and I argue in this part of the book, this is a really helpful way to understand why the problems that we're dealing with are so severe and so acute.
Because it's easy to say, well, there's so much partisanship.
It seems like we're having these big political fights.
It seems like everything has gotten political.
It's not always so easy to understand why that's going on and what sort of situation we're in.
This is one of the big benefits of studying classical philosophy, is that you can sort of see these schemes that they laid out for how these things tend to go.
And they still help us to understand how things are going now.
So the way this works is there were essentially in classical political philosophy, there were three kinds of regime.
And that's just a sort of fancy way of saying ways of living together, basically, ways of ruling one another and being ruled.
Aristotle says we're political animals, which means that wherever we are, we have rules of living together, rituals, habits.
You might call this the small C constitution of a state.
So there's three kinds, he says.
There's the monarchy, which is ruled by one man.
There's the aristocracy, which is ruled by a few people, the elite.
And then there is what we would call democracy, ruled by the many, right?
And Aristotle points out, drawing even on others who went before him, that there are basically good and bad versions of each of these things.
And this is something, as Americans, we think, ah, monarchy bad, democracy good, right?
We have this kind of—but Aristotle says, and I think he's right about this, that actually there's good and bad versions of each of these things.
And the best ones, when they're good, become worst when they get corrupted.
And so he says, you know, the most sort of obvious thing that people do when they start to get together is they have a monarchy because some strong, maybe, military leader or somebody takes control, and there's a lot of, you know, advantages to that.
Like, you can make definite decisions very quickly.
And if you have a good king, a king who rules for the benefit of his subjects, then everything's hunky-dory.
Life is tickety-boot, you might say.
And then, though, let's imagine the king has a son, right, and he's a little bit spoiled, not so good.
And that king's son is to get worse, and eventually what you end up with is a tyranny.
Tyranny is the worst, right?
You get this in the historical books of the Bible, right?
The 1 and 2 Samuel, the king will drive your sons ahead of him, like the animals pulling his chariot, essentially.
So that's not a state of affairs that people like very much.
And you typically get this revolution of the elites.
People say they toss off kingship, and you have aristocrats ruling, the kind of noblemen take over.
And then they become corrupt and they devolve into what you call an oligarchy, which is just cronyism, basically.
At that point, often the people will seize control and rise up, at which point it's very easy for them to decay into a great word which we have lost, and that's oklocracy, from the Greek word oklos, meaning mob, right?
So the mob rule, basically.
Now, because the ancients knew this, and because our founding fathers studied the ancients so closely, they knew that there was a way of avoiding this cycle, because of course, once you devolve into mob rule, then a king comes in and takes control.
Chaos leads to a strong man, and then you start the cycle all over again.
The republic, which is what we live in, is supposed to be a perpetual motion machine.
We are in a system that is designed to play the different strengths of the different kinds of rule against one another.
That's why we have, for instance, an executive branch and a senate and a congress, right, which is elected by the people, so that you have this kind of balance between the aristocrats, the elite, and the kind of singular executive ruler and the people to whom they are all accountable.
That's the idea.
There's only one thing that can really bring a republic down, say the ancient sources, and Machiavelli is also very good on this too.
The one thing that brings a republic down is class conflict.
If the different social classes within this system start to think of themselves not as collaborators in one big enterprise, but as enemies of one another, as kind of hostile opposing camps, then you are going to destroy the fabric of your nation, of your republic.
Now, once you understand this, you can see why when Joe Biden gets up there and he says we have a pandemic of the unvaccinated, that is a whole segment of the American population is tantamount to a disease.
You can understand why this is so evil and wrong to do.
You can see why when they tell you, oh, white men are inherently racist, right?
It's white against black.
Oh, men are inherently sexist, and there's an inherent homophobia everywhere in the world.
Now you can start to understand why this is death to a republic.
And you can start to ask, well, what's the antidote?
In the ancient world, the antidote is called philia.
That's friendship, civic love.
So I end the book by saying, and this is kind of a hopeful note because it's very doable.
The antidote to all of this, all this tribalism, all this retrograde kind of oligarchy, is to get up every day and form local communities.
The civic friendship that you develop when you go to your neighbor and you say, well, what are they teaching our kids in school?
We ought to see about whether we can get some of this change and we should collaborate on it.
That's how you save the Republic.
That's how you begin to rebuild this stuff.
It's not thrilling.
It's not like a grand election to bring down the world and solve all of our problems.
It's daily work, but it's also doable work, and it's human-sized, and that's really important.
You and I have spent many an hour hiking through the canyons of California and other places and discussing philosophical questions.
And one of the questions that has come up repeatedly between us is if there is such a thing as anacyclosis, if these forms of government seem inevitably to decay, is there some point where you just abandon ship?
So, you know, as Rome, the Roman Republic is falling, you have guys like Cato fighting for the Republic, and when they lose, they kill themselves.
They just say, I'm done, because I don't want to be in an empire.
Although the empire, when it finally comes, is not so bad for a few years, you know.
So here we are in this, what feels like a crisis.
It feels like an essential trust in our form of government has left the hearts of the people.
Is there some point where you think a person just says, it's falling, I'm just going to buy some stock in the empire?
Yeah, I mean, where I've come down on this, and this is what I say in the book, is that when I say that you don't know what's going to happen tomorrow, I literally mean you don't know.
I do not mean things could go great.
I do not mean everything's going to fall apart.
I mean, literally, we do not know the future.
It is not given to us to know the future.
And so we need an answer to these problems that is going to not depend on our being able to predict where everything is going.
And for that, I always turn to another guy from right at the end of the Roman Republic, and that's Cicero.
You mentioned Cato.
Cicero is another one of the last great Republicans in Rome.
And near the end of his life, feeling utterly defeated by the events as they were transpiring, he basically retreated to write political treatises, philosophy, and about the best forms of regime.
And in the short term, of course, Cicero failed utterly.
The empire came.
He was one of its first casualties.
And the new regime was installed, as you said.
Until fast forward to the 1770s, enter John Adams, a man, a founding father, a man who has, since his boyhood, poured over the speeches of none other than Marcus Cicero, right?
Gets up, makes the definitive speech in defense of the Declaration of Independence, sets our republic on the road to its genesis, to its birth.
Cicero's Legacy00:00:49
When you talk about the West, that's the kind of time scale that you're dealing with.
That's the kind of tradition you're carrying forward.
And if you understand yourself, as indeed we all must, as bearers of that torch, carriers of that tradition, then we actually have no right to despair.
There's no room for it.
We don't have the right to despair.
We have a job to do, and that is to wake up every day to seek the good, the true, and the beautiful as it is given to us to know, and to leave the rest to God.
So you can do that or live in ignorance, or you could buy How to Save the West, Ancient Wisdom for Five Modern Crises by Spencer Clavin, No Relation.
I think his last name is actually No Relation.
I don't know how that happened.
But How to Save the West.
It is, I guarantee you, a terrific book, and it will make you feel like you have some concept of what's going on and how to respond.