How to Start an American Renaissance pits Rod Dreher (How to Save the West) and Joseph Bottum (The Truth and Beauty) against woke culture’s erasure of tradition, tracing the Renaissance’s divine roots in Vasari’s Lives of the Eminent Painters—where art mirrored God’s order—while modernism abandoned metaphysical grounding. They reject relativism’s collapse of good/evil, advocate patronage for conservative art, and warn against sanitized storytelling, urging young creators to forge new forms blending classical wisdom with digital tools. From gender binaries to idolatry in AI worship, they argue art must reclaim its sacred role: depicting life’s ugliness and virtue, like Michelangelo’s Pietà, not woke propaganda or atonal chaos. The mission? A cultural rebirth where faith, not scientism, defines truth—and artists lead the charge. [Automatically generated summary]
We understand there's a pub night going on downstairs and we don't want you to feel bad that you're in here talking about Western civilization.
So whenever we say hylomorphism, just take a shot.
We want to talk today about how to start an American Renaissance.
And the reason we want to talk about that is we both feel that there are two contrary movements rising up in Western civilization in general.
One of them is represented by the kind of amazing fact that the two of us, though we've never met before and have no relation or association, have both recently written books putting forward the idea that we have to recover the great culture of the West from the past in order to move forward.
Spencer's written a wonderful book called How to Save the West, which basically puts forward the idea that the crises that we're facing now are crises that the West has faced from its beginning, and the wisdom of the classical world can be used today just as it could be used then.
And I wrote a book called The Truth and Beauty, which places some of the greatest poetry in English literature in the context of the crisis of faith that was going on then in the Romantic age and is going on again now.
So that's one side of the question.
One side, one of the forces that are rising, we'll call it clavinism or wisdom or civilization.
The other side we will call a troglodytic barbarian idiocy or wokeism, where we've seen recently that books, for instance, Roald Dahl's classic children's books, have been re-edited.
They've been rewritten to make them less offensive to various people who get offended by these things.
They just said that James Bond, some of the James Bond books have been rewritten.
And the idea there is that some new light of purity and virtue has shone upon this generation that makes it so wonderful and so virtuous that they want to erase the past and rewrite it to be what they feel that in their wisdom it should be.
And they are not standing on the shoulders of giants, but in fact they are bringing giants down to their size.
So the question of which of these sides clavinism, wisdom, civilization, or troglodytic barbarian idiocy are going to triumph is, I think, an important one because they both can't win.
And so today we want to talk about what we think needs to be done in order to move forward to recover our civilization.
It seems to me that the barbarians are not at the gates, they're actually in the citadel, so we have to recover our civilization and who we want to be as we move forward.
So having said all that, the author of How to Save the West, I think, should begin with how do you start a Renaissance?
Yeah, no, that's an excellent question.
You wouldn't know anything about this, of course, but I grew up in a house that was filled with old books.
And this is kind of the, you mentioned my book, How to Save the West, and that's kind of the premise of that book, is that to be surrounded by old books is to be surrounded by friends.
I had to learn that that was weird.
I had to learn that that's not like how most people grow up or how most people regard old books.
In fact, if you go out into the world, you will discover that defending Western civilization or even talking about it as a coherent thing is liable to get you called all sorts of names and to get Western civilization called all sorts of names, you know, racist, colonialists, what have you.
And it was my great good fortune to learn early on to know that none of that was true, that the meaning of talking about the Western canon is really simply just knowing that you're not alone.
Because when you come up against crises like we're talking about today, crisis in the arts, it can feel, it's very easy to feel as if everything you're up against is completely unprecedented.
And one dimension that I hope we'll talk about tonight, one feature of our crisis, is digital technology, which is incredibly new and disorienting.
It disorients us in our relationship to one another, in our relationship to ourselves, in our relationship to the cosmos.
And so in that regard, many of the solutions we talk about tonight, many of the things that we will hope for in the future, I think, will look very different from anything that's gone before.
But what I want to propose, and it's been the sort of aim of my life to propose that underneath and driving these kind of very modern crises, what we're really up against is fundamental questions, first order questions, first principle questions, which have been around as long as human beings have been around.
And for that reason, it becomes more urgent and not less to ask, what are some times and periods of history when these same sorts of issues have been at stake?
Questions about whether art and letters will be censored and suppressed, whether they will be subject to the judgment of small-minded ideologues, or on the other hand, whether they will be allowed to do what they do best, which is to expand our humanity and reveal the fullness of all that we are and can be.
And I think that that's why we've chosen to talk about an American Renaissance, a new American Renaissance, because that's a word that means rebirth.
It means not repetition, not going back into the past and redoing the way things used to be, but actually living out again in the here and now things that were once great but have been lost.
And the man who coins this term, who brings it into our consciousness, is a guy called Giorgio Vasari, who in the 16th century, middle of the 16th century, which really is the high Renaissance.
I mean, this guy was like a friend of Michelangelo.
He was in with the Medici.
He was a Macamach.
And he writes really our first great work of art history, the lives of the eminent painters, sculptors, and architects.
And he coins this term renachita, rebirth, which then comes through French as renaissance into our modern English language.
So what I thought we would start by doing, and we're just going to have a conversation here for a bit, and then we're going to invite you into the conversation, talk about whatever you would like to talk about.
But I thought I would start by kind of tossing out some things that in my revisiting of Vasari, as I went back and read the preface to his lives, I thought I could see some trends, some major things that needed to exist in order for this renaissance to occur, first in Florence and Tuscany, and then throughout the rest of Italy and Europe.
And this was a rebirth for him of classical learning, the kind of return of the Greek and Roman greats through the lens of the Christian church.
And so the first thing that you notice right on the opening page of Vasari, kind of introduction, preface to his monumental work on the lives of these great artists, is the premise that God is the first artist.
There are all sorts of ways of talking about God, all sorts of metaphors for God.
But unique, not unique, but specific to Vasari is this idea that God is actually a creative and that his greatest work is man, but that man exists within a vast cosmic architecture of artistic production.
And one of the things I think this does that we don't have or that is under assault or is lacking is that it creates a standard, a final model toward which all art is in some sense yearning.
That what we do when we make art, the Greeks would say, is we create a mimesis.
We reproduce things.
We reflect the world back at itself.
But when you're making a reproduction or a reflection or a creation, you automatically raise the question, what's the object of your representation?
And for Vasari, art can progress, can be reborn, and can move toward perfection only because behind all of our representation, at last, there is a divine model.
It's seen most fully on earth, in humankind.
But humankind itself is just an image of a higher, ineffable, and eternal truth, which is the truth of God.
I would say, surveying the landscape, this is very far from sort of the way we currently think about art.
But I wanted to start us there and ask, what kind of hope you have for a returning to that?
I think that God is the central question.
I mean, it's always been the central question.
I think he's even more the central question now.
And a lot of it has to do with the Renaissance.
You know, Vasari put forward the idea that the church, for certain good reasons, basically to keep away from idolatry, destroyed some of the Greek statues.
And the guy who is sometimes credited with starting the Renaissance, Petrarch, he coined the phrase the dark ages.
And this was, to a certain degree, propaganda.
The church in places did destroy things.
But also there's a great deal of scholarship, a famous medievalist named Southern, who puts forward the idea that the church was actually a vessel which carried classical ideas into an age that was dark, not because of the church, but because the great civilization of the time had fallen.
And so there was this notion that there was something wrong with the church, that the church had cloaked everything in darkness.
You know, they called it the Middle Ages because it was between the classical days and the rebirth.
But the people who were in it didn't think they were in the middle of anything.
They thought they were on the cutting edge of modernity and they were actually very intelligent, deep thinking people, some of whom still, most of whom, of the brilliant ones, still affect us today.
And Thomas Aquinas is the one who always comes to mind.
And I think that in spite of that, the rise of science so undercut faith, not because science disproves God, but because science creates an atmosphere that is different from the atmosphere of the Bible.
When you read the Bible, you know, the sun stands still in the sky, people are healed by a touch, you know, carpenters resurrect after being crucified.
These are things that in science don't actually happen, and it has created an atmosphere where it's difficult to believe.
And that, from the very beginning, as that seeped in, that atmosphere seeped into European society, people started to think in a different way.
And the guy who actually made me a believer because his atheism was so honest was the Marquis de Saad, from whom we get the word sadism.
And he was a guy who said, well, if there is no God, there is no objective morality.
And therefore, if I am turned on by torturing somebody else to death, I should do it.
And that was literally his idea.
And it's amazing how much of sadism has actually permeated our philosophy today.
But ultimately, God is not just the model that we're trying to reach.
He's not just the target that we're trying to hit.
He's the guarantor of meaning.
And to me, I've lived my life as an artist.
I've lived my life in the arts, writing novels.
And I don't know if screenplay writing is an art, but it's a craft in the artistic field.
And one of the things is, you're not just trying to create a mirror of life.
You're trying to create the mirror of life that is coming out of your heart.
It is unique to you.
Each of you is living a creative life, whether you know it or not.
You're living a life in which reality is producing your inner life and your inner life is affecting reality.
That's true for all of us.
If there is a level of goodness that is conscious, that we are in whose image we're made, then art suddenly comes alive as this reaching up from the gutter, as Oscar Wilde said, to the stars.
It suddenly becomes this attempt to say, my life means something in this bigger way, and I can model the things that come out of my inner life echo the things that have come out of God's inner life, which is everything, which is creation.
I don't see, I keep being told, I keep getting emails from listeners and from readers who say, no, no, you don't really need this.
You don't really need to believe in this.
I do not see how you produce art of value for a long period of time without there being some sense of a conscious meaning that you're responding to.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, Flaubert, the French novelist, has this line about when we make art, we're like bears pounding on a cracked cauldron, and what we really want is to produce the music of the stars.
Exploring Inner Life Echoes00:05:47
And that's the position we're all in.
I mean, we all know what shambolic Cretans we are.
I'm certainly sharing a stage with this guy.
But I mean, the question I have for you about this, and then I'll maybe raise some of the other stuff from Vasari, but let me ask you about that extraordinary passage that you mentioned, in which Vasari, quite remarkably, just indicts the Christian church for, you know, it's a Renaissance propaganda, you may say, but like, there's definitely a kernel of truth in it, that in its enthusiasm to get rid of the idols,
that the church was fighting back so hard against polytheism and paganism that it actually had to dig in its heels too deeply into Europe, and it erased a lot of the technical skill that it took to make this kind of art and all this kind of pagan knowledge was lost along with the pagan folly.
And he says, I don't blame the church for this, but this is kind of part of what happened.
I raise that because it seems to me as if in the fight for a new American Renaissance, we are up against not one, but two forces.
I mean, you mentioned the big one, and that is woke, troglodytic wokeism, whatever you want to call it.
And we know, I know for sure that that leads nowhere.
So that raises the question, like, who are the good guys?
Like, where is the cavalry coming from?
And part of what we're saying, like, the implication is that the good guys are going to be in the church, or they're going to be believers, they're going to be faithful.
And there, on that side, I also sense that we have some challenges that face us.
And you know this better than anybody, because when you make art, you depict the world, and the world is ugly.
The world has messy stuff in it.
We are bears beating on cracked cauldrons.
And so to honestly depict the world, you often have to show nasty, dirty things, things that the church, rightly, doesn't want to be, wants to clear out of the world as much as possible.
And so how is it that the church can kind of have space for artists who have to kind of open this messy part of us while at the same time maintaining the moral center that it has to give to the world?
I think the church has virtually collapsed at this moment.
We are in a moment of, this happens to the church from time to time.
And I think it's happened now.
And the reason I think it's happened now is because I do not believe they believe in the supernatural anymore.
And when I say the supernatural, I don't mean magic.
What I mean is this is nature, but if I torment somebody, if I torment a child for my own pleasure, to say that that's evil is to say there is a meaning somewhere that that action attaches to, right?
That's supernatural.
That is above the natural.
It is there whether everybody votes for it to not be there or not.
You know, if we all sit around and say, oh, tornadoes, everybody votes.
When do we get to start throwing rocks?
You know, this thing of like respect all cultures.
There used to be a clothing billboard in LA.
I would drive by, I would say, respect all cultures.
I would say, really?
You know, really, do I respect all cultures?
Do I respect the culture of the South that when they held black men slaves?
Do I respect the culture of the Nazis that put women and children and men into gas chambers because of the last syllable of their last name?
You know, I don't respect that at all.
And guess what?
If everybody on earth says it's moral, it remains evil because it is attached to a supernatural fact, a supernatural reality.
And if it's not attached to that reality, then your Nazi is as good as your saint.
It doesn't really matter.
And I think the church has lost that idea.
So for instance, when they talk about putting up Black Lives Matter and gay pride flags in a church, and I think, well, you know, no, no, it's not that I don't think black lives matter, and it's not that I have any animosity whatsoever against gay people.
It is that what we are inside, this thing that they keep talking, be yourself.
No, don't do that.
Don't be yourself.
Be anything other than that.
Yes, be the person you were made by God to be to hook in to that goodness.
Now, I'm not telling you what that looks like, but to explore what that looks like is the work of art.
It's to explore what it looks like in myself, and by doing that, to explore what it looks like in you.
That's why we read art.
We read art to become more, to become bigger, to have a scope of feeling of that supernatural way.
So this is the thing about the church that really depresses me in the moment, that it's lost that.
Well, that cloud of scientism that you're describing, which makes cows even believing Christians into really claiming the supernatural.
It just makes it sound as if the supernatural is basically synonymous with superstition and primitivism and belief in Skydaddy and whatever.
But I mean, a point that I like to make is, you know, like supernatural is a Latinate word.
It comes to us into English from Latin, super above or beyond natura, nature, right?
But that in turn is a calc.
It's taking something from Greek and putting it into Latin.
And in Greek, super is meta, and natura is fusis.
So if you put those Greek words together, you get meta-phusis, which is metaphysics.
So you're talking, when you talk about the supernatural, you're not just talking about waving a magic wand.
You're talking about an entire branch of philosophy that you need to make sense of, everything else.
I mean, metaphysics is just the description of what happens besides automated mechanical stuff that happens by its own internal logic, right?
Conservative Creatives Connection00:09:51
You know, we should move on a little bit because it's gotten later than I thought.
You're totally right.
Thank you.
I'm sorry.
Once I start talking about etymology, it's really all over.
Yeah.
It goes a blabbing away.
Okay.
So, okay, so let me raise another Vasari tidbit.
The next thing that strikes me about Vasari is the fact that he's even writing a history of artists' lives that goes in sequence at all.
The book is just a big collection of little biographical sketches from like Chimabue in the Diugento in the 1200s all the way up to like Michelangelo and some of Vasari's contemporaries.
And the reason that he can write it that way is because these guys understand themselves as part of a community and a tradition, that they're talking to one another, they're getting ideas from each other.
And not only that, they're also reaching back.
I mean, the point of the Renaissance is that they're also reaching back to this classical precedent, right?
They have this connection to the past.
They have a connection, you know, through the tradition that they're working in.
They have a connection to the present through one another and their relationship.
And they have a connection to the future because they see their tradition, they see their work as kind of getting better and better as time goes on.
Now, this is a place where I'm a little bit more sort of hopeful than I am in the theological sphere, just by looking at what's going on around now, because you and I are both privileged and lucky to be at the Daily Wire, and we do kind of have this community.
I see pockets of this blooming, kind of showing up around the country.
But I'd like us to talk a little bit about what it might take to really get that engine revving.
Do you know what I mean?
I think it's really important.
This is, you know, I don't know how many people remember Andrew Breitbart.
He was one of the very first kind of fighters for the culture, and he brought all the Californians together.
There would be no Daily Wire if it weren't for Breitbart.
I was one of his people, and Ben Shapiro was one of his people, Stephen Crowder.
He discovered all of us in California and brought us all together and built the Breitbart site, which is now very different than what he made.
But one of the last conversations, he died a very young man and lived, you know, some people think he was poisoned.
He wasn't.
He lived at a level where we all knew he was going to die young.
But one of the last conversations I had with him, he asked me, I was very flattered that he asked me to head up a think tank he wanted to start on the arts.
And we stood and talked on the corner of in, oh, it was near UCLA, Westwood.
And we stood and talked on the corner for over an hour, just standing there, kind of talking about what a think tank on the arts would look like.
And all he said, which was his great talent, is I just want people to be able to come together and start to talk and start to say, I have this idea, is this a good idea?
I have this connection.
You know, we tried to do this in Hollywood.
We had a secret organization called Friends of Abe, which was all the conservative Hollywood people.
But because everybody was afraid to come out, we could never actually make the things that we wanted to make.
And ultimately, it just died away.
But this is, I'm convinced, what we need.
I keep, I've been talking for 20 years to billionaires about needing to support the culture, the arts.
And they always ask me the same thing.
Well, what do you want?
And I think, I don't want anything.
I work for a living.
I write my things and people buy them and that's how I make my living.
I don't want you to give me money.
I want to earn my money.
But this is what they should do with their money.
Somebody should build this place where people can come together who want to create and not just screenwriters, not just novels, but all the people who create who also believe in the West.
And I don't actually care.
I would exclude the woke because I don't think they believe in the West.
I think that would be antithetical.
But I don't really care what's part of the spectrum of democratic society they're on as long as they believe that there should be a democratic society and we should be free and free thinking and ready to argue any point and ready to live, let each other live with respect.
I think that we need to build that.
Yeah, you touched on something I think really important that I want to just emphasize, and that is, you know, you mentioned one of the organizations that fell apart because people wouldn't come out.
They wouldn't admit that they were conservatives and that that was sort of part of their project, or at least just part of their lives.
And I just really feel like the time has passed for that.
I mean, I want to have, look, like, I'm lucky, I work for an organization that wants me to speak my mind, and I know a lot of people risk a lot of very real stuff for being honest.
But Alexander Solchernitson, the first, the great dissident of the Soviet Union, in a speech called Live Not by Lies, he said this fantastic thing where he says, you know, sometimes it's too much to say the truth outright in any given context, but at least don't say the lie.
And I just feel as if that first beginning, I mean, you've got to stand up and be counted because otherwise how are you ever going to find people?
And the minute you do, of course, five other people will say, oh yeah, like I kind of, and as you indicated, it's a big tent.
It's not actually like whatever your picture is of a conservative like bowtie wearing, bespectacled, I don't know, but like it's not even really that.
It's like absolutely anybody that wants to live in reality and to figure out how to do that and to do that well in an enriching way.
This actually leads perfectly into the other thing I wanted to talk about from Vasari.
And this is like kind of the most brass tacks practical side of things because these guys also had patrons.
I mean I mentioned Vasari is in with the Medici.
He gets a lot of his commissions that way.
And there are, I think, a fair few conservative gajillionaires with an interest in this problem.
But a family or a community of patrons like the one that was operative in Florence, you know, they need both means and tastes.
Like they need a kind of real love for artists as artists and not as political mouthpieces.
And this is something that I wonder about.
I mean, maybe we're just talking around if anybody's listening about this need for the like for the conservative think tank.
But the practical side of things, you know, how optimistic are you that these sorts of things can actually get made?
Well, this is a really tough thing on the right.
I think we should go back and forth and then open it to questions so we can talk to you.
But this is a really tough thing on the right is getting people to understand, A, that conservative art doesn't look like conservative life.
I live a conservative life.
You know, I'm a happily, faithfully married guy.
That's not a very interesting story.
The stories are about guys who kill each other and this vast evil of the world that we're all sort of looking at and trying to figure out how to live beautifully in.
And it's hard to convince conservatives.
They'll watch King Lear, they'll watch a man put his eye, have his eyes put out on stage, but if you do it on TV, they go, oh, no, I don't want to see that.
I want to look at God Is Not Dead, part eight, you know, and see a happy story.
And I think the thing is, I get a lot of, because I've talked about this for so long, and because conservatives are starting to wake up to the fact that we lost this country at the movies, we didn't lose it at the ballot box, we lost it in the culture.
People now call me up and they'll say, you know what?
I'm thinking of starting a publishing house or a movie production company that's conservative, but I'm going to keep it below the radar.
I keep saying, you know, the radar goes all the way down to the ground.
There is no below the radar.
This is something that we have to do.
You know, we were talking about patrons.
And I think patronage is really important.
In everything in life, wherever the money comes from, that's where the trouble comes from, right?
So if you're trying to appeal to a large audience, then you have to tone down your message because people don't want to hear, not everybody wants to hear everything, right?
Or, if you have a patron, then you've got a guy who's cranky, says, you know, why don't you put in more of this, or why don't you put in more of that?
Wherever the money comes from, that's where the problems come from.
Still, as much as I believe in capitalism, I do believe that there is room for patronage of the arts, of new arts.
Artists live for love.
You do not go into my business thinking you're going to get rich.
There are probably fewer major league baseball players than there are people who have done even as well as I have, let alone some guy who's really a gazillionaire.
It's a very hard thing to do.
I think that there is room for people to start these institutions that give awards, that write reviews with knowledge instead of with just cantankerous partisanship, that give grants.
We have none of these.
We have none of these things.
The left has all of them.
And so when you see the stuff that comes out and when you see them put a crucifix in a jar of urine, that's where that garbage comes from.
And when you wonder why there's no really good art on the right, that's why there's nobody who's saying we will support the good, the true, and the beautiful.
Why don't you finish it off and no more?
Yeah, no, well, just two points based on what you just said.
One is that, you know, the kind of ancient insight is that you get more of what you honor.
If you honor things, people try to do them.
And this is why when you say, well, the left has all the literary magazines, it's like, yeah, well, that enables them to give good reviews to the things that they want to see more of, and then you get more of it.
And then the last thing about virtue in art is, you know, Simone Vey, the philosopher, has this great line that imaginary evil is exciting and thrilling, and imaginary good is boring, but real-life good is an adventure, and real-life evil is actually boring and repetitive.
Honor and Creation00:02:26
And conveying that in art is one of the great conservative tasks.
Let's talk.
Let's have some questions if you've.
Thank you so much.
And now we will begin the QA portion of our event.
So if you have a question, please line up behind my colleague.
And please state your name and keep your questions short so that everyone has the opportunity to ask a question.
So for our first question now.
Hi, thank you both for coming out.
It's very much appreciated given the campus climate and all that.
I am a fan of both of you.
My question is for Andrew.
On the Daily Wire backstage episode for the midterm election, you had said that you married your wife because she was hot, and it took you 10 years to realize that she had the capacity for intellect and rationality.
I was hoping you could explain what you meant by that and what the relevance you think that is for young men today.
Well, obviously, I wouldn't still be standing here alive if I hadn't been joking.
But I was making the point that men are attracted to women physically.
I picked my wife up hitchhiking, and I wasn't driving a car.
I had to run to get my car to pick her up hitchhiking and nearly killed an old lady driving around the one-way grid to get to her before anyone else picked her up because she was so beautiful.
That was my point, essentially.
But there did come a time when many years later, when I was watching her handle a crisis, and she was on the phone talking about really desperate life and death things, when I thought, you know, I really just liked her legs.
I did not know that this was who she was.
I did not know she would become this woman and was bowled over by the gift from God, that's a gift from God.
So my point was simply that the erotic impulse is not necessarily as deep and rich as the life of marriage, which in fact reveals that you are living, can reveal that you are living with someone far, far deeper, richer, and more interesting than you imagined when you just thought, let me just get that babe, you know, before somebody else picks her up.
Fair enough.
Thank you.
Hello, my name is Atman Vakeel.
Camille Paglio's Writing00:03:21
I'm President Emeritus of College Republicans here.
Thank you both so much for coming out.
My question goes back to what you said about this idea of God being right at the beginning, the final aim and end of all art.
And I really agree with that, especially in music, which is one of my areas of study.
Like Bach said that the aim and final end of all music is the glory of God and nourishing of the soul.
Unfortunately, that's something you're seeing less and less of in music being put out today.
And I know both of you have written extensively about that.
My question is, how do we in college, in our generation, fight back against that and try to promote music which does have a true beauty to it?
Thank you.
You were in college more recently than I was.
Sure, and I do recall writing about music at one point, which is probably what got me into this mess.
No, I think this is a tremendous question.
Music is a great way to talk about it because, you know, as you know better than I, one of the big sort of motions in hyper-modernist music is toward what is called atonal music, which is a contradiction in terms.
I mean, it's an actual, you know, the idea that pitches would have no structural relationship to one another is the antithesis of what we mean when we say music.
And you can learn this by reading the Greek philosophers on music.
Aristoxenus of Tarentum is really good on this.
But I digress to a certain extent only to say that form, which is another word for meaning, and which is supernatural in the sense of being non-physical, that is, it's something that exists in the physical world but obviously points beyond it.
Form is essential to doing art, to doing good art.
At the same time, a lot of the forms that we think of as classical in music, in art, in visual art, and even in, I would say, the novel, a lot of those forms have sort of lived out their lifespan.
And this is another reason why we might talk about a rebirth rather than simply a maturation or something.
Because there's a lot of things that have basically played out the full capacity.
This happens to art forms.
And so I would suggest that the challenge for not just a musician in college or an artist of any kind in college, a painter, a writer, a coder, right, a creator of video games is another person I would add in there, would be to find the forms that can embody the old ancient truths that aren't just exploding and deconstructing, because that's very boring now to kind of like undo all the old.
Camille Paglio was writing about how boring that was in the 90s.
So something needs to come into being that is a new kind of formalism, right, that actually lives in the moment, that can be expressed digitally, that can be, you know, that doesn't reject all of our modern technology, but it is not just the rejection of form or the destruction of form.
That's the task.
And I actually think it's people about your age that are probably going to fix this.
Yeah, thank you very much.
New Kind of Formalism00:05:25
Good evening, Andrew and Spencer of No Relation.
My name is Kay G. I'm an artist.
I'm about to turn 24 years old.
I actually share a birthday with your favorite boy, Michael Knowles.
And I have spent the whole last half of my short life being constantly heartbroken over and over by the left corrupting every movie and book and character that I've ever loved.
I would love for that to stop.
So I'm heavily invested in the cause that you've brought to all of us today.
So my question for you is when all of the Disney and the Marvel and all of that burns to the ground as it should, what do you think are going to be the kinds of heroes and stories that rise from those ashes first at the start of the American Renaissance?
That's a wonderful question, isn't it?
Yeah, and I think, you know, you're asking, look, I think one of the reasons that so much of what's going on devolves into this kind of madness about gender is because gender is at the core of who we are.
Sex, you know, there are only two kinds of people.
There are really only two kinds of people.
There are men and women.
There are a million kinds of individuals, but they're only two kinds of people.
And they are, to be a man or to be a woman is a privilege and a responsibility.
It's a gift that you're given that you have to live into and live up to.
And the people who have become heroes, that are enduring heroes, are the people who have lived into it in such a way that they reinvent it, that they make it new.
You know, I have said repeatedly that I'm not a feminist, but what I mean by that is not that I want to go back to a world in which women have fewer choices.
I want to go back to a world, I want to go to a world in which women are celebrated as women instead of as make-believe men, which is what I think feminism now is.
I keep hearing this thing, she's a strong woman, everybody is strong, and I think like, if I wanted to marry someone that strong, I'd have married a guy.
It's not what I'm looking for.
That's not the archetype in our minds.
And so, look, it's a new world.
I get that.
Some of the new things are beautiful.
But you have to go back to that.
That's where you're going to have to start.
And that takes guts because you are going to be slapped from pillar to post every time you do it.
I think many of you may have seen what has happened to Dilbert and Scott Adams for opening his mouth.
He was canceled everywhere.
All his books were canceled.
All his comments were canceled.
They mean it.
They mean it.
And so you're going to have to have guts.
You're going to have to have courage.
But that was always true of the arts.
The arts are always for the brave.
And I think that's the task.
I agree.
Thank you very much.
I drove here from Kansas City to be here tonight.
What a good night.
Thank you very much.
But because it is so important, and I'm trying to do this on kind of my own front.
I'm a journalist and a poet.
I write for the Epic Times and a few other publications.
I'm going to be reviewing your book, Spencer.
I think you look great tonight.
But, you know, the obstacles that I confront, you know, just trying to do this on my front and thinking about the specific mechanics of how to do this.
And what I find is that it is so hard to convince conservatives about realism in art.
And I feel like I'm banging my head against the wall a lot of the time.
And I find that a lot of the kind of strange allies are actually not really die-hard traditional conservatives, but they're like ex-liberals.
And do you find that that's true?
Because it seems like it's kind of an unstable alliance right now.
And that it's, you know, I don't, who knows how long it's even going to last, just a few years or as long as wokeism does.
I guess my thoughts are my question, which is kind of a general question, is really the specific mechanics of this.
Like, I'm trying to write book reviews, but what else do you really do?
Like, think tanks and yeah.
Well, you know, you know, Coleridge, speaking of Wordsworth, said that every artist creates his own audience.
And I think that that's where you start.
You know, the fact is that you have more venues to work in than you would have had 30 years ago.
You know, there are more places to go.
There are fewer people in each of those places because there are so many of them.
But you've got to make a start, and you make a start, and you develop your voice, you develop your vision.
You know, someone who will speak the truth as an individual, you get hammered, you'll get ignored, they will laugh at you, but the great world turns around.
Ultimately, people will come around and find you if you are doing something well.
So I don't think you should be, I mean, to say that you're writing at the epoch times a good paper that has a good circulation, is to say that you've made a beginning.
And I don't see why that shouldn't continue.
And you should have in your mind a plan for how it will continue.
Because the thing about it is, book reviews, I've written book reviews.
They take forever.
They pay you like 50 bucks.
It's like an amazing, you know, amazingly hard thing to do.
Right Relationship to Images00:16:08
They matter so much.
They bring the word of what people are doing to an audience who may buy into it.
It's incredibly important.
I stopped writing book reviews not because it was so hard, because I couldn't bring myself to say a bad word about anybody, and that's not fair.
You have to tell the truth.
But these are all incredibly important things.
And if you do them well enough and you build a structure and you build out of yourself a structure that can spread the word, you're on your way.
I mean, like I said, they're going to come after you, but they can't stop you anymore.
I mean, it's just too many ways to go.
Thank you.
Hi, Andrew.
If you remember me, that's very good memory.
You know, you look familiar, but I don't.
So I'm Rachel Fulton Brown.
I'm a professor of medieval history here.
I'm also a very amateur artist and a Catholic.
And that's to frame the question I'm going to ask you all.
I'm going to suggest that possibly our greatest enemies are not the cultural Marxist, but the Second Commandment.
And when you're talking about Vasari and his contemporaries and desiring to build art, of course there are people in the very same time that fear the images.
And I'd like to hear one or the other of you both talk about how do we answer, one, the commandment not to make images, and two, the problem that, I mean, the United States, whatever it was, was founded by lots of Protestants who did not bring their images with them and therefore do not know the Middle Ages as well as they should.
Despite our surroundings at the University of Chicago.
And I think when we look at the sort of political competition that we've been having, I would suggest that the cultural Marxists actually really get the power of images and that's why they keep destroying them.
And I would really appreciate hearing you all think about that question from the other side.
Thank you for that question.
I'm going to take this one because I've been sort of obsessing over this lately.
So it's an opportune moment for me to air my various obsessions.
I become increasingly convinced with each passing day that in some way, shape, or form, every sin is idolatry, that idolatry and sin are kind of synonyms.
And I have also been obsessing over, I believe it's Psalm 115, which talks about the nature of idols.
And it says, you know, eyes have they, but see not, ears have they, but hear not, mouths have they, but cannot speak.
And those who worship them will become like them.
Jesus cites this when the disciples ask him why he speaks in parables.
Now, a para bole is something that you place alongside something else.
It's like a mirror that reflects.
So why do you tell stories, teacher?
Well, it's not given to everybody to understand this kind of thing.
For some people have eyes but see not, for they are worshipers of idols.
Now, what all of this suggests to me is that there's a right relationship to image and a wrong relationship to images.
And one of the things that Plato gets absolutely right, I think, is that the reason art gets so dangerous is not because it's inherently evil, but because it's so incredibly good that its misuse is explosively bad.
And that's what the Marxists understand, right?
That is why you're right, that they do grasp this very, very profoundly.
We have not yet gotten quite smart enough about this.
And what I would suggest is the right relationship to art that saves it from idolatry is the symbolic, the language of the symbolic, of being able to understand and escape literalism.
And because the human heart is a factory of idols, to throw, to toss a bone to the Calvinists in the room, because the human heart is a factory of idols, we do this all the time.
And every time we do it, we forget anew that we are doing it.
Recently, an engineer at Google, Blake Lemoyne, became convinced that Lambda, which is Google's, basically Google's version of ChatGPT, their chat AI, became convinced that this thing was alive.
And he wrote a long, long exchange between himself and this program, which he had helped to build, and he posted on Medium.
And this was supposed to demonstrate that this thing had a soul.
Now, it's very obvious from the outside that what Lambda is doing is repeating back at this person the Silicon Valley guru's idea of the soul.
My soul looks like a stargate, I sort of meditate a lot, and it floats in this blissful nether region.
Before that happened, I think I thought there's kind of two kinds of idolatry.
There's like the old-timey idolatry where you like hack a wood tree into an object and then you worship it as if it had an inner life.
But then we got too smart for that, so now we just have kind of like abstract idols, like the economy and fame.
These are our idols.
When I saw this man look at the creation of his hands and say, it is alive, I realized there's only one kind of idolatry.
There's only one idolatry always, and it follows us everywhere.
So really, the challenge of the church is to disambiguate these two relationships to the image.
And the medievals are the key to that.
I mean, that's not to throw laurels at your feet, but the medievals understood this in a profound way that we have to get back to.
The language of the symbolic is the language of creation, and if we can't understand it, then we can't make art.
Now we're friends.
Thank you so much for being here.
My name is Jacqueline Lorenzen.
When we think of the Renaissance, we think of Michelangelo's David or beautiful nude paintings.
In society today, I think we've all seen the horrific causes of pornography in our culture today.
How would you address society who has moved so far away from seeing the human body as something that is good and true and beautiful and only sees it as this mode of use or abuse or perversion?
Yeah, it's interesting when you go to a museum, and I never go past a certain point in museums because I think modern art is not very good.
But when you go into the first kind of Renaissance room, you see picture after picture of the virgin and child again and again, but always a different model.
And it sort of is a beautiful statement of the fact that every woman is participating in this icon, that every woman is in some sense the Madonna, you know, because they all have different faces, but they're all the same person.
As that begins to fade, and as they develop the craft and the freedom to make more kinds of pictures, instantly nudity comes in and pagan references return.
And from those, you get what they call the naked and the nude.
You get some bodies that are beautiful in a way that makes you understand creation better and some bodies that you understand were painted for pornographic reasons.
I mean, not many people remember that the first part of the taming of the shrew is a frame story where they show a guy classical art as pornography, just to get him turned on.
And so there was always that aspect to it.
But you're right.
Once you take away that supernatural level of meaning, we are just bodies in space.
That's all we are.
And so it always comes back to sex.
It always comes back to the Freudian idea that every impulse you have is simply a reflection of errors.
That idea is wrong.
It's almost been proved wrong in a lab, but it doesn't matter because it's so much fun for a while until you become a slave.
But it's so much fun that people want to continue doing it.
So I think part of this is how we live.
I think how we, you know, we talk about culture and we talk about movies and books and all these things, but the center of culture is how we live.
And I think when people start to live out the meaning of their bodies as gifts of God, as vehicles for love, then you will start to have art that serves that audience.
Right now, I feel even the people who call themselves conservatives are not living that life and are afraid to live that life.
I know a lot of women, especially, are very afraid to live that life because they're afraid it takes them out of competition.
You know, if everybody is sleeping around and you're sort of saying, well, I'm going to live in a different way, you know, you've lost, maybe you lose the game.
But I think that this is something that's going to have to begin in the way people live, and I think women are going to be in the forefront of it because I think women are being treated abysmally.
I think that when people look back and say the patriarchy, the patriarchy worked better than this.
There may be something else that works better than the patriarchy, but it worked better than what we're having right now when you're basically being told you don't even exist.
You're not even a thing.
It's not even a thing to be a woman.
So I think that people are going to have to rebel with their lives.
And you rebel with your life by living the life that you know is the right one and teaching that to your children.
The art will come after.
Wonderful.
Thank you.
Hey guys, my name's Nick and I'm really sorry.
They just told me to come to the front because I kind of disagree with you guys about something.
Cool.
And I don't know if I'm going to be able to articulate it too well, but I hear you guys talk a lot about they're these conservatives and they just don't understand that there is, I guess, evil in the world and dirtiness and nastiness.
A lot of my friends, a lot of my priest friends, the people that I meet, they don't think that way.
And I don't know how to articulate my disagreement exactly, but I wonder if we're almost kind of looking at the wrong enemy in a sense.
I think we do understand that, or at least people my age, we get that.
I don't meet a lot of my friends who are like, oh no, life is perfect.
I mean, most of us have gone through stuff.
And I don't know if it's somewhat falling on deaf ears because at least for me, I'm like, no, I get that.
And now what?
I don't know if that makes any sense, but I hear you guys say that a lot.
And it doesn't seem to be as true anymore.
Well, first of all, that's great to hear.
I mean, and always, you know, when you're talking about generational differences, you know, you're kind of messing, you have to be messengers to one another because you can only really see at the level of your generation.
That's one reason why I think we like to hang out so much, is like we each give each other kind of different information.
And so that's helpful to know and wonderful.
I definitely think that Christianity is equipped better than any other set of ideas or beliefs to really face up to the evil of the world.
So Christianity at its fullest is not reductive at all, doesn't turn away from darkness and evil.
And in fact, is able, I mean, C.S. Lewis has this beautiful observation that only Jesus knows the true strength of temptation because he resists it unto the end.
And in order to really portray evil, you have to portray it as evil because that's part of the truth of it.
And so any really rich art will come from that perspective.
Let me just say from my own vantage point as somebody creating things and writing about things that I do still meet with a lot of people who say things like, you know, we shouldn't be looking at this ugliness at all.
And there is a difference between life and art, as my dad's been saying.
But the other thing about this that makes it, that puts us at a disadvantage is really shown in Dostoevsky's novel, The Brothers Karamazov, of whom the hero, this guy Elyosha, is, he says, Dostoevsky says at the beginning, I'm worried that you guys are going to think this dude is completely boring because he basically doesn't do anything.
And that's because the great triumph of the novel is the adventure of resisting temptation.
The whole story is framed around Christ's temptation in the wilderness, and by the end, Alyosha has become a man because he has learned to resist temptation.
That Simone Vey thing, that it's harder to do that.
It's harder to convey virtue in an exciting way because it takes real craft.
Anybody can throw feces at a wall.
Anybody can write WAP.
But it's really hard to do what we're doing.
And so our counsel to the church, I hope, is out of love and from within, to dig into its full resources.
No, I think that makes sense.
I guess I just trying to understand where the disconnect almost seems.
I mean, in a Catholic church, every time you walk in, you see a man crucified who's almost naked.
And I just think, are we blind to what we have now with what you're saying?
We have that stuff, that equipment, those skills.
But I don't know.
And I'm just pushing back because I kind of get it.
I hear what you're saying.
I think that the thing that I'm objecting to anyway, just speaking for myself, is the idea of art as voodoo.
The notion that you create something in art and therefore you've created it in life.
And that simply is not the way art works.
You can show evil in such a way that it is evil, that you have done a wrong thing.
I love to tell the story of being, I write ghost stories and I was called into a studio in Hollywood and they said, we want to pitch you an idea.
And I said, great.
And they said, there's a girl and she gets captured and tortured.
And I said, yeah, that's the idea.
And I said, you know, I said, when a guy with a knife is chasing a girl around the room in a movie, I'm rooting for the girl.
I'm going to sit there and titillate people with that.
However, there's also a way of showing terribly grotesque things in a way that uplifts you.
And to me, the Pietas, the statue that always comes out, the worst thing on earth shown is the most beautiful statue in the world.
So that's my objection, is that many conservatives, they know there's evil, but they don't want to see it depicted because they think if they don't think about it, it goes away.
Thanks.
Hey, I heard this guy say that if you disagree, you can jump to the front.
So hello.
I heard you Spencer earlier, we were talking to my friend Atman and then you, Andrew, a second ago, decry more or less unconventional forms of art, first with atonal art and then you with modern art.
And that doesn't make sense to me, even if I operate under your framework, which is that art should help us strive towards God.
So for example, if I were writing a scene to accompany, writing music to accompany a scene in the Garden of Gethsemane, I might write something atonal, something confusing, or something that is jarring because it's supposed to communicate an emotion that helps me relate to the Christ figure.
And you know, since you're both well-read, at least from this talk, I gather, from characters like Augustine, that people come to God in a variety of really unconventional ways.
So why would you decry art that is capable of eliciting emotional responses in people just because it is of an unconventional form that you find personally distasteful?
Well, yeah, I want to make a distinction because I don't think this is actually a matter of taste.
I want to make a distinction between atonality and extra tonality.
The musicians in the room will know that every good piece of music almost has accidentals in it.
And those are notes that don't fit into the key.
And the kinds of things that you're describing, ugliness, like twisting a knife that jars with the kind of overall framework of meaning, that's well attested.
Atonality is a much more radical proposition, which is that there is no framework whatsoever at all.
And I think that destroys the possibility, even of the kind of meaningful ugliness that you're suggesting.
I could write something atonally so as to make it confusing.
Atonal Science Corrupted00:05:39
I mean, again, the only way that it would be confusing is if it took place within a larger framework, where atonality was the exception rather than the atmosphere.
Yeah, that's the framework now.
Most of the music I listen to is tonal, so introducing something atonal would, you talked about deconstructivism earlier.
It deconstructs the norm culturally.
That's actually not as good an argument as you think, because there's always one piece of work.
I mean, I think of Waiting for Godot, there's always one piece of work that you can write that says no.
But if all art is saying no, then art has ceased to have a point at all.
And I think that, you know, no one would disagree that you can do a thing that is meaningful and powerful, but that it's a genre that is worthy of the craft is a question that I seriously ask when I see abstraction in art.
And I really do think that the best art being done now is in video games, when you can enter into this world of your imagination, as opposed to somebody seriously sprinkling paint on a canvas and telling me that I'm supposed to be connected to the world through that.
I do think you're right that you can create a work that is meaningful and abstract, but I don't think abstraction as a genre is worthy of the craft that it takes to create art.
Okay.
Thank you for your answers.
No, no, it's a worthwhile argument.
And nobody, I don't think either of us is being absolute.
No, I think that the whole tenor of this conversation has revealed something important about abstract or atonal art, which is that it's always parasitic on the structures that it proposes to prefer.
So you're right, you can use atonal music in some useful way, but even the examples you've cited make reference to a structure that's being troubled or redone.
I don't think there's any way out of that.
Will your renaissance be parasitic to what you now consider the abstract mainstream or rejection of it?
Hopefully not, actually.
I mean, I think that like, you know, it is possible to engage in discourse and to engage in artistic production that is purely reactive.
And that's maybe one answer to the earlier question about what are we really criticizing in conservatism or in the church is like the part of conservatism that only says no.
But there is a version.
I mean, this is why, you know, famously in the classical formulation, justice isn't just punishment, it's also the attribution of honors.
Because there is a positive version of the thing that you get onto once you've said no.
And there is a version of this that says yes.
I do think it's a danger.
I think.
No question.
There's a lot of people in the line.
I'll leave it in the future.
I'd like to talk about this more later.
So this will be our final question.
Hi, my name is Tyler Shaste.
I'm a first year in the college.
Thank you guys so much for being here.
Something you raised that I thought was really important was the art, not art, but the idea of science being kind of like this corruption to the church, replacing the church almost.
You know, in this country, we've had the rise of science before, and with that came something, a religious movement called the Great Awakening that's happened twice.
However, something I think that's different now than when we had those movements was that science has kind of replaced the church in that science is being worshipped by some of these churches in and of itself.
You talk to many Christians who will say that, you know, the Bible wasn't written as a literal, you know, to be taken literally, but almost that it's a parable so that science can be completely true, so that science can be taught above the church.
And I feel like that's something that's kind of corrupted the church.
How can we have another great awakening in this country when the church has been corrupted by science itself?
Well, I think that the church has been corrupted by scientism.
The word Spencer used is the idea that science can tell you everything that you need to know about everything.
You know, I read at a period, I read a lot of books on evolutionary morality on how we evolved the idea of our moral sense.
And a lot of them sort of say that morality is created by evolution.
And I thought that's absurd.
That's like saying that the eye creates light.
That's not the way it works.
We don't evolve senses to see things that aren't there.
We wouldn't evolve hearing if there weren't something to hear.
We wouldn't evolve an eye if there weren't something to see.
However, what we see, we see as human beings.
We don't see the thing as it is.
We see it as human beings see it.
And that's true of morality too.
We don't know what the moral world looks like to God.
That's why we're told not to judge one another.
But we know pretty well what the moral world looks like to us.
And so the problem with science, there is no problem with science.
Science is a way of testing material facts against one another.
The problem is scientism, which refuses to understand that there is no place where consciousness and reality are separated.
You are not finding something that is completely objectively true.
You're finding something that we see in another way.
And I was just backstage quoting the great, one of my favorite philosophers, Schopenhauer, who said, all science can do is show us how one representation of reality works with another representation of reality.
And talk about idolatry.
There's nothing more idolatrous than thinking that you are, through science, seeing the thing itself.
You're simply not.
And that's what we have to get past.
We have to get past this idea that science has undermined religion.
It hasn't.
It grew out of religion.
And I think it strengthens religion if we see it honestly.