Feb. 14, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| One of the things we saw in 2020 was that it's actually unsustainable to live that way. | ||
| You actually need like a final truth to add a vertical dimension to your existence. | ||
| And the need for that is why people melt so readily for the BLM people, right? | ||
| Was they needed something to kneel before. | ||
| Or, like, for instance, the Fauci of it all, right? | ||
| I represent the science. | ||
| He's obviously not talking there as a scientist, but he is fulfilling a very deep need, and that is for clerical authority. | ||
| So the proposition in the book is, look, you're gonna worship something, actually. | ||
| There's gonna be a bedrock. | ||
| So why would you get these putzes like Fauci to serve in that role? | ||
| Why wouldn't you seek a deeper and a more ancient and a more tried and trusted version | ||
| of that kind of thing? | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is the host of the Young Heretics podcast and author | ||
| of the new book. | ||
| I've got it right here in my hand, How to Save the West, Ancient Wisdom for Five Modern | ||
| Crises. | ||
| Spencer Clavin, welcome back to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Dave, it's a pleasure to be here. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| Spencer, I believe this is your first solo time on The Rubin Report. | ||
| You've been a panel guest, but as a published author with a hardcover book, and might I say, on the back with the blurbs, you really killed it. | ||
| One of the names on this list is just spectacular. | ||
| Megan Kelly, just wondering. | ||
| Oh, Dave Rubin's on there too. | ||
| That's very nice. | ||
| There he is. | ||
| I didn't think anybody respectable would want to be associated with me and so that's why I reached out to you. | ||
| I do what I can to help the sales. | ||
| I'm glad to have you on Solo. | ||
| Truth be told, we are also friends outside of the These little internet boxes. | ||
| And we often talk about, basically, what your book is about, and it really is about what so many of the things that I do on a daily basis on this show are about. | ||
| So that will set us up for this thing. | ||
| So first off, for the people that just maybe haven't seen you on the show, aren't familiar with you, give me a little of the background that leads you to writing a book like this, because you've got quite a pedigree that this does make sense for you to write. | ||
| Oh, sure. | ||
| Well, I, as you know, you know, I went to all the fancy schools, which is kind of the, like, top-line reason why I know about the, you know, the great texts of the ancients. | ||
| But I think, you know, somebody who comes out of the universities these days, especially in America, has a lot of explaining to do, because the schools are just falling apart. | ||
| And I think that, you know, Basically, what I wanted to suggest to people in this book and throughout my whole career is that you look at the news cycle and every day it seems like there's some new crisis that is flashing across the headlines. | ||
| Something else is going wrong, they're transing the kids all of a sudden, the economy is falling apart, the internet seems to be destroying everything, and America is breaking apart. | ||
| And what I wanted to propose, and this is based on a lifelong love of the classics and of the great texts of the West, is that even though every day seems to bring kind of something new to fret about, a lot of the questions that are underlying our problems are questions that have been asked again and again. | ||
| In fact, they go back to the origins, really, of human thought. | ||
| And some of the answers that come down to us from antiquity are better and saner than the stuff you get out of your modern gurus. | ||
| So even as the Academy is kind of going insane, and even as I was traveling through the Academy and seeing some of that madness, at the same time I was really confirmed in my conviction that these great books, which sort of sit on the shelves, they look kind of dusty and intimidating, they're actually for you. | ||
| They're about how to be good at being human. | ||
| And this is, these are, you know, points of wisdom that we particularly need now as the digital era kind of rockets into its new phase. | ||
| So effectively what I'm doing in this book is I'm just, you know, inviting people to consider the fact that that these aren't actually new problems. | ||
| They're taking new forms, but there are precedents for them. | ||
| There's a way to go back into the past and talk sanely about them, not just for kooky college professors with blue hair, not just for nerds like me who go to fancy schools, but for everybody, and especially for people that care about this country and want to save it. | ||
| Spencer, if I'm understanding you, you're telling me that there is knowledge that people before us knew and that there are things and ways of analyzing reality that luminaries such as, I don't know, CNN's Don Lamond or MSNBC's Joy Reid perhaps don't have a great ability to tell us about? | ||
| I thought they were all so smart. | ||
| I thought the whole point is that people of the modern day are so smart and everyone before us was a bunch of racist, backwards homophobes. | ||
| And misogynist, don't forget about that. | ||
| So yeah, I mean, I'm definitely like, you know, every possible slur you could throw at me. | ||
| I accept them all if what that means is just that I don't think wisdom or information was invented in 1965. | ||
| I mean, in the book I call this chronological chauvinism, right? | ||
| The idea that, like, newer is better, and basically every answer about man's place in the universe was discovered post-scientific revolution. | ||
| Yeah, you call those guys you mentioned the Don Lemans of the world. | ||
| You know, the Nancy Pelosi's of the world, Edward Said's of the world, they'll sneer at you for suggesting that actually it's not inherently evil to talk about things like Western culture and they laugh as if this is like a ludicrous suggestion. | ||
| But why shouldn't it be the case that people who have thought deeply about these things over time and throughout the history of our traditions Right, and it's weird because at least at a mainstream level, that seems to be what people are doing at every given moment. | ||
| or we just cast off everything that went before us as some kind of racist, chauvinist holdover. | ||
| Right, and it's weird because, at least at a mainstream level, | ||
| that seems to be what people are doing at every given moment. | ||
| We just wake up, you see what's going on in the world, and you have some really sort of half-witted dingbats, | ||
| I'm not as learned as you are, so those are my words, who are analyzing this stuff. | ||
| But I thought a nice way of doing this interview would be, you basically are laying out, you've sort of already laid out what the five sort of topics of the book are, the five crises that we're dealing with. | ||
| But we could just kind of go through, spend a few minutes on each one actually. | ||
| So the first one that you talk about is the crisis of reality, and this is sort of connected to our inability to actually say what is true, and that people have their truth, not the truth, and that this has also gotten complicated because of the machines and AI and all that. | ||
| Yeah, well, I mean, it's funny when 2016 happened and bad orange man was elected to the presidency, you suddenly had this new concern about post-truth politics that all of a sudden like, you know, Trump is saying things that aren't strictly true and like he has hype men who spin for him and all of these things. | ||
| And, you know, even I am old enough to remember that, like, the arguments over whether what | ||
| the meaning of is is go back to before Donald Trump, right? | ||
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I mean, you had when Clinton was around 96. | |
| I vaguely recall. | ||
| Yes, I think that was, you know, and then you've got stuff like, you know, the memos | ||
| on Bush, the Killian memos on Bush were fake but accurate. | ||
| That was a New York Times headline about, you know, these sort of falsified charges against Bush that Dan Rather raised. | ||
| And once you start to look at this, you realize this is not, like, a bad orange man problem. | ||
| This is a much, much deeper problem. | ||
| And I think it goes back to a question that was actually raised right at the very beginning of Western And that's like you said, it's what is true? | ||
| Is there such a thing as true and false? | ||
| People think that they can just answer that question in the negative and sound sophisticated, like, oh yeah, there's nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. | ||
| And my argument is that there's no halfway version of that proposition. | ||
| If you take that pill, you've got to go all the way. | ||
| And what that means is the only thing there is is power, which is what you're seeing now, right? | ||
| People will just insist that you call them by the pronouns that they have invented because they're reality. | ||
| Their truth is what they're going to enforce using the state if they can, if they can get their hands on it. | ||
| So that's the first section of the book is about kind of the ancient answer to that important question, which is, yes, some things are true or false, whether you wish them away, whether you digitize them away or not. | ||
| And if you don't want to live in a world of pure power politics, you've got to get on board that train, the reality train. | ||
| So what could we do now? | ||
| Because so much of what, you know, I do a daily show every day and I constantly, I do a daily show every day. | ||
| It's quite remarkable. | ||
| Every day I'm doing a daily show. | ||
| That is true, by the way, Spencer. | ||
| Absolutely true. | ||
| But what can we do? | ||
| I mean, I'm always talking about how we're having this sort of breakdown in reality because if you watch certain things, what is true in your world is very different than perhaps what is true in my world. | ||
| I don't sit here telling you that I own the truth, but how do we sort of arbitrage those two ideas that, you know, this is this and that is that? | ||
| We're going to start living in very different places. | ||
| Sure enough. | ||
| I mean, I would say that the question I continually encourage people to ask themselves and others throughout the book is, how's that working out for you? | ||
| And I think, like, in the abstract, you can sit in a philosophy seminar and say, well, my truth is just as good as your truth, or you need to accept my truth. | ||
| But in point of fact, when you start to do that, you notice all these ways that it breaks down. | ||
| It broke down in Stalinist Russia, you know, when the professors started arguing that there was no real need for evidence to convict somebody because we just know, like, according to—spiritually, according to the party—that he's That he's guilty. | ||
| And you see all the disastrous consequences of this stuff in the here and now. | ||
| And the more we can bring each other back to the here and now, the more we can engage in face-to-face... I mean, I know here we are on a digital communication system, but you mentioned at the outset, we have a real in-person friendship. | ||
| We share ideas with one another. | ||
| And people are really craving that. | ||
| They've been told that they don't need it, or that Zoom is fine, lockdown is good for you actually, you'll own nothing, you'll live in the pod, whatever. | ||
| We know that that doesn't work. | ||
| So the thing I insist on is a constant face-to-face encounter with one another, especially in our communities. | ||
| That's why the stuff that's going on in the school boards is so exciting, because that's where people actually have to face up to the consequences of their beliefs and of their actions. | ||
| And the more we insist on that, I think, the closer we get back to reality. | ||
| All right, so if we slowly but surely get back to reality, that would be a nice concept. | ||
| That would sort of get us to the second part of this, because you talk about the crisis of the body. | ||
| And right now, we seem to be in this situation where many people's reality of their physical reality seemingly is not matching up with their mental model or their mental reality. | ||
| And the rest of us are constantly talking about This trans issue, despite the fact that it's very small percentage wise, it seems to have leaked into like every part of society. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And you make a really... I think that's a great point that we kind of fixate on it even if we aren't feeling it ourselves. | ||
| And that's kind of a key, I think, to a lot of this. | ||
| Because when this kind of stuff comes up, of course, it's really easy just to get into like a kind of conservative fist-pounding mode of like those bad deviants, right? | ||
| They're doing the bad stuff. | ||
| And one of the things I try to point out in the book is, you know, this is definitely a dangerous and destructive kind of ideology. | ||
| The notion that you can, like, pump children full of hormones is obviously, I think, evil and wrong. | ||
| But we have—in order to understand it, if we really want to kind of get over it or move past it, We have to understand that it's a response to a very, very ancient and deep problem, which is the problem of the body, the problem of the flesh. | ||
| You can find people from the early days of Greek philosophy wrestling with this. | ||
| In the book I talk about a neo-Platonist philosopher called Plotinus, whose biographer from antiquity says he seemed ashamed of being in his body. | ||
| And I think that the reason these two things are connected is because when you start talking about reality, about absolute truth, you very quickly start to talk about ideals, right? | ||
| Like beauty, things that are the way they are regardless of, you know, whoever disagrees. | ||
| You know, absolute truth kind of lives in this pure eternal sphere and we don't live in that sphere. | ||
| We live in a really messy kind of world where people break down and die and like, you know, you get man-colds and all sorts of stuff, all sorts of bad stuff happens. | ||
| And when you face up against that, you start to want to kind of crawl out of your flesh. | ||
| And I think that the trans ideology, the transgender stuff, kind of plays on that, sort of offers | ||
| to people this vision of themselves that doesn't depend on, you know, living in the flesh, | ||
| on like seeking health and goodness in the here and now, but promises some kind of otherworldly | ||
| future you can zoom up into. | ||
| And you start to see that this develops very quickly out of transgenderism and into transhumanism, | ||
| into like a whole new kind of, you're going to evaporate into like some digital space, | ||
| you're going to become an android or whatever. | ||
| Once again in the book I just insist on asking like how is that working out for us? | ||
| You know, it's a proposition that's based on something that's currently making us sick | ||
| and miserable. | ||
| And the proposition is, like, just maximize it. | ||
| Just go to infinity. | ||
| So I present in the book a kind of other way, basically, of looking at this. | ||
| That yes, there's more to us than flesh, but the things that we seek are actually found through the flesh. | ||
| That our bodies are kind of a language for our soul. | ||
| And I think, again, this is a much healthier and saner way to engage with yourself and with the rest of the world, but it does require that you actually face up to the consequences of your actions, which again requires coming back to that reality and actually looking at yourself and those around you and making a sober assessment. | ||
| You know, it's interesting because we could spend all day long talking about the trans part of this, but I think actually maybe for a moment we could spend on the transhuman part of this. | ||
| This is the idea that people will replace body parts with robotic body parts and, you know, digital IDs in your hand and if your eye Eyesight's not working. | ||
| You could potentially get, you know, some sort of robotic eye. | ||
| The litany of things. | ||
| Artificial wombs outside of the body. | ||
| There's so many things here. | ||
| And for me, I'm sort of two-minded on this, because on one hand, there's this sci-fi part of me that I grew. | ||
| Every movie, if you went through my favorite hundred movies, or most watched movies, 99 of them are probably sci-fi. | ||
| So I have a great affinity to all of this stuff and the imagination of all of it. | ||
| And then there's this other part where it's like, man, look what in 20 years the internet has done to all of us. | ||
| Did it make us more social, more happy, more connected? | ||
| Or did it actually do the reverse? | ||
| And I would now fear that while it might be cool at some level to have a super strong arm like Will Smith had in iRobot, we might be trading on something that we would regret, which actually isn't that far off from the original trans conversation. | ||
| You know, you replace some parts, but there still might be a problem there. | ||
| It's sort of like you got promised RoboCop, but they actually turned you into the Borg. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| Like there's like, that's what you're describing. | ||
| And I feel it too, because I really don't want to become one of these guys that's just saying like, all this tech is bad. | ||
| We got to reverse it. | ||
| We got to undo it. | ||
| That's always the danger. | ||
| And I talk about this a little bit in the opening of the book, just because it's very easy to slip into and to be accused of like wanting to turn back the tide of history. Some of this stuff is gonna come into existence. | ||
| There's no real version of the future, I don't think, where it doesn't start to... | ||
| we don't start to do things that, you know, for instance, like we're already | ||
| seeing these implants that can fix or help with blindness, with people being hard of | ||
| hearing, and we can recognize that there's something good in that. At the | ||
| same time, as like you say, there's also this philosophy behind it. | ||
| That's kind of what I'm trying to get at here, this driving idea that not only is it good to restore our faculties or enhance our faculties, it's actually good to just transcend what we are altogether. | ||
| And I think that's why the Borg is such a powerful image, and Star Trek actually is, because that's about dissolving the boundaries of yourself. | ||
| And the philosophy that I resort to in the book to deal with this stuff, which is called hylomorphism. | ||
| It's a fancy word for form in matter, that you never really get beyond having a human body. | ||
| You can use that human body in different ways. | ||
| I think that that's the key to deciding between the Robocop and the Borg of it. | ||
| Is this something that takes what we are, which is a soul in a body, and enhances it and brings us closer in some way to the meaning of what we are? | ||
| Or is it something that alienates us from ourselves and ultimately makes us disgusted with our flesh? | ||
| Is the other part of this where it's not even going to necessarily do that much to your physical body, but you will have followed Mark Zuckerberg, who I'm fairly certain is a synthetic android, into the metaverse, meaning that you won't have to actually, you know, the transhuman part of this is that you're literally going to replace body parts, replace eyeballs, things of that nature. | ||
| But the other version of this is the purely digital version of this, which would be more in line with like the Matrix, where we will still exist like this. | ||
| But we will be the battery for the existence in the digital world where you can be an ogre or a furry or whatever else Beto O'Rourke is doing at night. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, Beto, I'm sure, is already, you know, those guys already have the more advanced technology we aren't even privy to. | ||
| So I don't want to think about, like, what's going on in that sphere. | ||
| But, like, no, I mean, this is the flip side of it. | ||
| And rather than, like, fixing your body or changing your body, the kind of offer here is, well, what if you can just engineer your brain so that you feel things that are totally unrelated to what's actually going on? | ||
| Right, so literally in real life you could be a 350 pound, 5 foot 6, you know, guy, and in this digital universe you could be the hottest chick ever, or vice versa, or whatever. | ||
| Exactly, yeah. | ||
| That's, like, there are Black Mirror episodes about this, and you mentioned the Matrix, and actually I think that sci-fi is a really interesting key here to thinking about this stuff, because there's really no sci-fi version of this technology where it's just totally a good thing. | ||
| And these are always kind of presented in dystopian form. | ||
| It's really easy to tell this story about a dystopia. | ||
| It's really hard to tell a story about this that goes well. | ||
| And one of the things I argue throughout the book is that art, you know, is kind of our inlet, our inroad, to the intuitions that we have kind of seeded even deeper than what we can really consciously articulate. | ||
| And so there's something important about the fact that all of these sci-fi stories are dystopian stories. | ||
| And I think it's that, you know, whenever you pull back the camera, whenever you tell that third-person story, there's always somebody manipulating the virtual reality technology. | ||
| That's why those press photos of Zuck walking down the aisle with all those guys with headsets strapped to their faces, that's why those were so damaging to him, because they kind of reveal the third-person objective view of what's really going on. | ||
| And I think we shouldn't let ourselves be talked out of that intuition that we have, that we express in our sci-fi. | ||
| We ought to listen to the Wachowskis, because they were onto something. | ||
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Right. | |
| Well, it's just like, man, we all know this will lead us to something close to dystopia. | ||
| Maybe we're in it already and we don't even know that fully. | ||
| But yet we seem to be following the people who screwed up so much in the first place. | ||
| Zuckerberg, for example. | ||
| But let's move from that to the crisis of meaning, because obviously those things are connected as well. | ||
| There seems to be, at least in a modern sense amongst young people, Yeah, that's right. | ||
| crisis of meaning, really just like a sense of like, what's the point of this whole freaking | ||
| thing? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| I think this kind of boils down to, you know, you can see it in our art and you can see | ||
| it in our science at the same time. | ||
| This kind of idea that like, we're really just throwing stuff at a wall. | ||
| You know, the primordial soup is like generating all these different options and some of them | ||
| kind of endure and survive and some of them don't. | ||
| And I think that this is, you know, where you get to where the rubber kind of meets the road on that. | ||
| Relativism question. | ||
| That this stuff doesn't work when you chase it all the way down. | ||
| And there's a simple reason why. | ||
| It's like, when we make art, when we make memes, when we build civilizations, when we interact with one another, we take it for granted that there is some bedrock to reality. | ||
| Some kind of final good or ultimate existence that You know, everything else is kind of referring back to that. | ||
| And unless you have that, then there's no, like, real meaning to your statements at all. | ||
| You know, we can never really look directly on this, you know, this final truth, but we're always trying to approximate to it. | ||
| We're always trying to represent it, express it in all these different ways. | ||
| And the thesis of the Richard Dawkinses of the world is basically like, that's just an illusion. | ||
| All there is is just this kind of endless repetition and different variations. | ||
| And I think one of the things we saw in 2020 was that it's actually unsustainable to live that way. | ||
| You actually need a final truth to add a vertical dimension to your existence. | ||
| And the need for that is why people melt so readily for the BLM people, right, was they needed something to kneel before. | ||
| Or like, for instance, the Fauci of it all, right, I represent the science. | ||
| He's obviously not talking there as a scientist, but he is fulfilling a very deep need, and that is for clerical authority. | ||
| So the proposition in the book is, look, you're gonna worship something, actually. | ||
| There's gonna be a bedrock. | ||
| So why would you get these putzes like Fauci to serve in that role? | ||
| Why wouldn't you seek, you know, a deeper and a more ancient You know, it's interesting because one of the things that I think helped my own spiritual awakening, obviously not only being on tour with Jordan Peterson and being around that and that sort of thing, but you know, during COVID, one of the things that I noticed really quickly was that people who were believers | ||
| Whether they were Christians or Jews, whatever they might be, even if it was somewhat amorphous, but they considered themselves a believer in something, they seemed to not go as crazy as the pure secularists. | ||
| Because the secularists, I think, were doing the Dawkins move that you're talking about there. | ||
| It was just like, you could wake up on any given day, they gave you a set of information, Here's the data, here's how many people are dying, here's what's going on, here's why you have to stay in your house, and then you just respond to the secular lunacy every single day. | ||
| And I saw that was in stark contrast to people who, because they believed in something else, maybe it was a various set of things, they didn't necessarily have to believe in the immediacy of the day. | ||
| And that kept them sane throughout that. | ||
| That's a great observation. | ||
| This is a point on which the sage Bob Dylan and the novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky are in agreement. | ||
| There's a line in one of Bob Dylan's songs, you've got to serve somebody, might as well be God, right? | ||
| And this is kind of to your point that you're always serving somebody, the only question is whether you know you are or not. | ||
| And those folks that Believed in something that you were observing kind of knew that they were doing that and so they were able to like remain Even if a leap of faith, you know, even if believing in a higher power is I won't say it's irrational But it is it is a rational in the sense that you can't make a logical argument for or against that's conclusive You make the final proof now. | ||
| I know for certain that there's God. | ||
| I can't disbelieve in it but even so putting that Yeah, like you were saying, the day-to-day, everything kind of turns, everything's different, you know, today, whatever the experts say. | ||
| But this is the plot, to bring it back to Dostoevsky, this is the plot of Brothers Karamazov in a certain way. | ||
| saying the day-to-day, everything kind of turns, everything's different, you know, | ||
| today whatever the experts say. | ||
| But this is the plot, to bring it back to Dostoevsky, this is the plot of Brothers Karamazov | ||
| in a certain way. | ||
| He's got this guy Alyosha who is really just an intense kind of spiritual mystic, like | ||
| he, you know, he kneels and prays in these very kind of, you would call them almost primitive | ||
| ways, and yet he's way saner than everybody else around him who's kind of supposedly this | ||
| scientific rationalist. | ||
| Everybody goes insane throughout the novel except for Alyosha, and I think that's kind of what you see, you know, on tour with Peterson or, you know, among the people who believe in something. | ||
| It does actually keep you sane in this really interesting way. | ||
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Right. | |
| And then, bizarrely, we also saw the, I would say, cult-like, not necessarily religious-like, but the cult-like worship of the CDC and the NIH, and quite literally people hanging little fouchies on their Christmas tree and all of these things. | ||
| And in many ways, it was like, yeah, okay, you guys did pick something to believe in, it just ain't the right thing. | ||
| Look, I mean, we're having this conversation how many days after the Grammys where Sam Smith dressed up as Satan? | ||
| And was it CBS from their official Twitter account that was like, Yas, we're ready to worship? | ||
| Like, this stuff gets so explicit, you know? | ||
| And it kind of is presented in this ironic tone, but actually it's saying the quiet part out loud. | ||
| Like, it's more true. | ||
| I don't want to, like, get ahead of ourselves here, but this is kind of the crisis of religion section. | ||
| Yeah, so, alright, so before we jump, that's the next one, that's number four here, but before we get to that, you know, on the Sam Smith point, I think this is sort of also what you're saying, I kept thinking, look, I'm for art, and I don't have to like everyone's art, and I accept it to be, and by the way, you know, I'm a child of the 80s, so, you know, there were major, you know, hard rock bands, Megadeth, and, you know, Marilyn Manson, and all, doing all, eating bat heads and you know all this crazy... You guys have a | ||
| lot to answer for, for sure. | ||
| Yeah, a lot of it was before my, you know, you know me, I'm a, I like Frank Sinatra, | ||
| but the point is, the point is I can accept art that I don't like or whatever, but, but the art | ||
| has to be good and what I thought with the Sam Smith thing was, well this was just shock drivel, | ||
| the, the music is not good. | ||
| It's not saying something. | ||
| It's not giving you something. | ||
| If you had given me good music and then just done all of the most disgusting things around it, you could probably separate some of those pieces. | ||
| But if the art itself is not fundamentally beautiful or good, then I think you have a bigger problem. | ||
| That seems to be where we're at now. | ||
| The shock value was only for shock value, not because it was trying to actually say something. | ||
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Hmm. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Or it's like the transgression is the point or something. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And there's nothing else. | ||
| And it's like, what is that? | ||
| What's the purpose of that? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, I mean, I think this is something we are like recovering as a society again, sort of against our will, like kicking and screaming. | ||
| We're coming to realize that there actually is a moral dimension. | ||
| to art. Like there's no escaping the fact that art depicts the world, but it doesn't | ||
| depict the world just like the way that, say, math tries to, or sometimes like objective | ||
| history will try to just say, these are the facts. That's not the way we experience the | ||
| world. We experience the world as, you know, things people do have moral dimensions to | ||
| them. If you steal bread from a homeless guy, that's an evil act. And if you portray that | ||
| in art, you can't fully portray it unless you portray it as evil, like unless you kind | ||
| of associate it with its consequences and its spiritual dimension. And so, you know, | ||
| we think of the culture wars as this fight between like conservatives who want morals | ||
| They want to, like, tell you not to say certain things or whatever. | ||
| And then the liberals just want everything goes, right? | ||
| You kind of, this libertinism or whatever. | ||
| But that's really not the fight we're in anymore. | ||
| I mean, Sam Smith, by putting those devil horns on, is actually making a moral claim. | ||
| And it's what you're saying. | ||
| It's that the transgression is somehow valuable. | ||
| That, like, this is what you should strive for. | ||
| And the ugliness, therefore, also becomes part of the point. | ||
| Like, it's in service of that performance, that there's really nothing of value or virtue in it. | ||
| Otherwise, it kind of sucks that the song is, like, kind of overplayed. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, it was just like, well, give me something here. | ||
| Give me something here so that it is not just what it obviously is. | ||
| And I don't sense that there was anything else there. | ||
| But all right. | ||
| So we're already sort of into the crisis of religion here. | ||
| So does Sam Smith need God? | ||
| I think Sam Smith has a God. | ||
| I think he's picked one. | ||
| I mean, I genuinely I think like this is kind of we've been we've been talking around this a little bit now that like there really is no such thing as atheism. | ||
| This is something that the Bible has this great line, the fool hath said in his heart there is no God. | ||
| And people kind of read that and think that that means like the fool. | ||
| It's foolish to be an atheist. | ||
| It's stupid to believe in no God. | ||
| But there's a deeper level to it, which is that only a fool can deceive himself into believing that nothing serves the role of God in his life. | ||
| That there's nothing in that place of highest good, highest power. | ||
| And so I think, you know, this is what you see when you see the kneelers at BLM rallies, when you see Sam Smith, you know, like offering a sacrifice on the altar of kind of like ugliness and illogic. | ||
| These are people who just worship just as profoundly or as intensely as you or I. They just don't know that they're doing it. | ||
| And that's kind of where, I mean, the Bible has lots of passages about this that You know, when people start to worship idols, they start to forget that that's what they're doing. | ||
| It's a kind of self-deceit. | ||
| And I think all of this is just like, you know, it's kind of unnecessary because it's based on this false assumption that in order to be smart, in order to be rational, in order to be scientific, we can't possibly say that the thing we're worshiping is actual God, like is actual an object of worship. | ||
| And that's kind of the crisis of religion, which I talk about. | ||
| So if we're going on this theme here that the West is worth saving and we're trying to save the West, I assume you don't want to force all the people to be believers or force all the people to have the same religious beliefs that you might have. | ||
| So how do you blend those two things, a sort of what you describe as a necessary belief for this stuff to be saved, but also the ability to have people and ideas on the margins? | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, I think that forcing somebody into a religion is kind of a contradiction in terms, and that's part of the illogic that makes this—that made this stuff so distasteful. | ||
| When you force somebody to convert at the point of a sword, you basically have created a false belief. | ||
| It's just somebody saying something to get out of getting killed, essentially. | ||
| And so not only is that inherently bad, but it doesn't solve the problem, which is that what you're really dealing with is a void in people's hearts. | ||
| And so what I say in the book is like, look, I would love it if everybody tomorrow became the specific kind of Christian that I am and went to my church and said the Nicene Creed every week and whatever. | ||
| I think that would be good. | ||
| But I'm not here to, like, write a law that says that. | ||
| I'm not here even to, like, bang you over the head with my Bible. | ||
| I'm just here to say that actually you already believe certain things that imply this higher power, and we should fess up to that. | ||
| Like, just by getting out of bed in the morning, you sort of concede that there's some reason to do things. | ||
| And once you say there's a reason to do things, then you have to say there is a highest reason, some good toward which all those goods aim. | ||
| And I say in the book, it's less a conversion than a surrender. | ||
| We ought to You know, not be ashamed of being honest about the fact that mankind has a spiritual dimension and we can look directly at that without feeling like we're, you know, primitive or superstitious or what have you. | ||
| It's actually the other thing that makes us primitive. | ||
| Denying that there's a spiritual realm is what turns us into kind of primitive worshippers of Fauci or BLM or whatever. | ||
| You've given me a fine segue to the fifth here, which is crisis of regime, because we seem to have a bunch of people that worship a regime that has very little to do with their interests in mind. | ||
| That kind of sums up to me where we're at politically at the moment. | ||
| And I don't mean just us from an American perspective. | ||
| I think kind of all over the world at the moment. | ||
| That's right, that's right. | ||
| I mean, I talk in this section of the book about the classical theory of regimes and about what a republic is supposed to be, because that's what we're supposed to be, is a republic. | ||
| And part of the point of a republic is that you rule and are ruled in turn, as Aristotle says. | ||
| Nobody is born with spurs on his boots, and nobody is born to be subjugated. | ||
| We have a kind of shared distribution of power that That it doesn't flatten everybody out into sameness, but does give people, you know, ownership. | ||
| Each person has ownership, sovereignty over his own choices. | ||
| And yeah, you're seeing a lot of people that, like, don't want that or are falling for the kind of removal of that. | ||
| And what I identify in the book is kind of the The problem here is the breakdown of what the ancients would have called philia, that's friendship, just civic friendship, just the love between fellow citizens. | ||
| You know, we haven't heard the State of the Union address yet, but I'll be willing to bet that Biden, when he does get half a sentence out of his mouth, and is able to form a word, he's going to say something | ||
| about those nasty, evil, ultra-MAGA, crazy, bad people. I mean, this is a guy who at one point | ||
| said that, like, we had a pandemic of the unvaccinated. So congratulations, Dave, you're a | ||
| disease. I mean, like, that's really, like, where we're at. Indeed, just like a virus would be. | ||
| No, but I mean, this is the kind of talk that unmakes republics. | ||
| It's like acid that you just pour, and they divide us up. | ||
| They say, like, oh, you're gay, and the straight people are inherently oppressive. | ||
| You're black, and the white people hate you, and you're a woman, and the men are bad. | ||
| And this is really where, as a political matter, civic association, neighborliness, small community, like the kind of stuff actually that you're seeing over in Florida, right? | ||
| This kind of real federalism that then leads to a kind of national movement back against the tribalism and the just bonkers sort of leftism. | ||
| That's where this becomes not just a kind of philosophical imperative, but actually the only political possibility for us to turn this thing around. | ||
| Right, it seems really, really obvious to me at this point. | ||
| I just saw you a couple days ago in Florida, and having lived here now, and everyone knows my feelings on Florida, so I don't want to belabor that, but it's like, I live in a world, both physically and I would say philosophically, that makes sense to me, that I think are good, that are obviously in line with a lot of things you've written here. | ||
| And then if I was to take someone like, someone I talk about on the show often, say Joy Reid on MSNBC, She has the polar opposite ideas. | ||
| She thinks that flora is evil. | ||
| She believes in neo-racism and obsessing over skin color and gender and sexuality and all these things. | ||
| I don't know, other than a disassociation and moving to our own communities and geographically separating, I don't know how you put those two things together. | ||
| So I guess the founders were really onto something with this federalism stuff. | ||
| I know, those nasty, evil, chauvinist, whatever, backwards, white slaveholders. | ||
| I know, right. | ||
| So, I mean, this is Madison's argument in Federalist 10, that the true antidote—because it's not a guarantee, by the way, that you can do republicanism in such a big country. | ||
| I mean, that's kind of the problem that the Founders were up against. | ||
| And this was the solution that they proposed, and I think in our times it has a specific value, which is, I think people like you and me outnumber people like Joy Reid when you get us away from the honking, screaming idiots on MSNBC. | ||
| I actually think that when you do what DeSantis is doing and you state boldly, like, making no bones about it, Americans are Americans, you know, you're not going to teach kids about, like, 57 genders, because that's wrong and that's not what we do in America. | ||
| What did he find in 2022, right? | ||
| That was like the most successful approach to those midterms. | ||
| And it was successful across the races, right? | ||
| It was an interracially successful proposition. | ||
| And you can find that sort of thing when you create these, you might even call them safe spaces, right? | ||
| Like safe havens for sane people who want to live in reality. | ||
| And that can lead to national change, but it has to start locally, like you're saying. | ||
| Spencer Clavin, the book. | ||
| is How to Save the West. | ||
| We will link to it right down below, and we will break bread in the great state of Florida soon enough. | ||
| Or you're in Tennessee, that's pretty good too. | ||
| We're free here as well, yeah. | ||
| Come have some hot chicken. | ||
| We'll see you there. | ||
| See you soon, my friend! | ||
| Likewise. | ||
| Thanks, my friend. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of mindless drivel, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist, all right over here. |
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