How to Save the West An interview with Spencer Klavan. by Jason D. Hill
https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-to-save-the-west/
In his book How to Save the West: Ancient Wisdom for 5 Modern Crises, Spencer Klavan has written a modern tour de force that straddles two realms. The first is that the book is a prescient and chilling analysis of the “five essential crises” facing Western civilization today:
- The Crisis of Reality: Is there such a thing as objective truth—and even if there is, can “virtual reality” replace it?
- The Crisis of the Body: Not just the “transgender” insanity, but the push for a “transhumanist” future;
- The Crisis of Meaning: Evolution—both biological and cultural—is a process of endless replication, of copying. But is there an original model that gives us an aspiration to aim for? Do our lives and actions have meaning?
- The Crisis of Religion: Science has not eliminated man’s religious impulse, but rather misdirected it—and wrongly dismissed the profound philosophical plausibility of Judeo-Christian revelation;
- The Crisis of the Regime: Has America reached a point of inevitable collapse? Republican government was meant to end the destructive cycle of regimes rising and falling—but can it?
Second, Spencer Klavan takes us on a whirlwind and in-depth journey through the ideas of Western philosophy, literature, and classical thought both to bring into sharper relief these crises, and also to demonstrate how an application of ancient wisdom can be a plausible panacea to much of the malarkey, willed ignorance, and malice that constitute the crises facing Western civilization today.
I interviewed Spencer Klavan, a Ph.D. in classics from Oxford University and a senior editor at The American Mind, about his most recent book.
Hill: Congratulations on your profound and brilliant book. What method did you use to boil down the plethora of crises facing our civilization to these five fundamentals that you identify?
Klavan: Well, first of all, thanks sincerely for your words of appreciation and your support of the book. I really wanted this to be a project that would speak both to people who have never encountered some of the great works I discuss, and to people like yourself with academic backgrounds. So it means a lot that you’ve benefited from it.
Really the technique that guides all my work is to try and find the first-principle questions at stake. A crisis in the true Greek sense of the term isn’t just this or that particularly vexing event—the way we talk now about “the COVID crisis” or “a supply chain crisis.” Those are problems, to be sure, but “crisis” literally means a decision point, a time for choosing. A crossroads between two fundamentally unreconcilable options. So that’s what I was looking for: first-order questions that bring clarity where the news brings confusion and concatenation of multiple issues.
News items are important, and there’s nothing shallow in caring about day-to-day politics. But the cascade of stories and fragments that flickers past us every day can make it difficult to understand what’s at stake in each new outrage, or even remember what all of them are. To me that’s a major benefit of reading the classics in the first place: when you have what C.S. Lewis called “the clean sea breeze of the centuries” blowing through your mind now and then, you can catch some of the dominant strains that keep recurring and ask why they’re there, what fundamental questions are being raised.
So for example, I talk in the book not just about “trans” issues, but about the relationship between body and soul which those issues are really about. From that perspective you can see that all sorts of other events are related to the same foundational topic—digital avatars, “body positivity” and negativity, even what they call “transhumanism.” It’s a kind of Aristotelian approach: from particular issues, up to primary ideas, and from there back down to particulars.
Hill: Which among the crises you have identified is the most detrimental one to the West? Or are they all really incommensurable?
Klavan: Actually, from my perspective, there’s a sense in which they’re all one crisis. Near the end of the book I begin driving toward this conclusion: we don’t know how to relate to our bodies because we don’t know what’s truly real. We don’t know what’s truly real because we can’t find a stable point of meaning. We can’t find a stable point of meaning because we have blinded ourselves to the divine. And all of this cashes out in political terms as a crisis for our regime.
That said, I do think the “religion crisis” is maybe the most profound, or the one from which all the others emerge. It’s in some sense the climax of the book, and that’s because examining the others gets us to the point where we’re able to face it head-on: once you see where the logic of these crises tends, you realize there’s no getting out of facing up to God.
Hill: What is it about the wisdom of the ancient thinkers that make their ideas so applicable as solutions to something like radical transgender ideology?
Klavan: Well, I think it has to do with that fixation on ultimate questions, that willingness to get to the heart of things. And of course there’s been a winnowing effect! When time and disaster have destroyed so many books, left so many beautiful things in obscurity, what you’re left with is going to be, in part at least, made up of what Matthew Arnold memorably called “the best which has been thought and said in the world.”
And actually the part before that, which people quote less frequently, might be just as important: “culture,” Arnold writes, is “a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world.” Culture: from cultus, a Latin word meaning that which we tend to or care for day by day, like a garden. “Perfection”: from perficio, not simply to correct but to complete, to reach the fullness of what we are. It’s a matter of knowing ourselves, and then reaching, as the best of the ancients did, toward the fulfilment of our humanity.
If you keep your eyes fixed on that sort of goal, you’ll be drawn to the things that endure—which is why their thought so often still feels fresh even in a more modern context.
Hill: You describe math and science as a new type of religion that is purporting to provide spiritual guidance for human beings today. This phenomenon, I believe, takes a form also known as scientism. You think this state of affairs is untenable. Why? At what point in our history did we turn away from the humanities as moral guides to the good life, and why did this happen in your view?
Klavan: Well, math and science are both noble human pursuits. But you’re right: scientism, as distinct from and often at variance with science, is an effort to crowd out the human field of vision with nothing but material concerns, a doomed attempt to keep from asking or answering questions about our purpose and our souls. Which, since we must ask those questions, ends up not eliminating religion but putting science in the place of religion, which it was never meant to be. Hence “Follow the Science!” with a capital S, as if we had in mind here some imposing deity, proclaiming its pure and objective will. Maybe we do.
Even the word “science” gives a misleading impression that material knowledge just is the only kind of legitimate knowledge, which is what scientia means. It’s a holdover from 19th-century German optimism about Wissenschaft, which etymologically is the same thing. But what we’re really talking about here is natural philosophy, the study of nature or physis (whence our word “physics”). Nature, says Aristotle, is “that which has its principle of change and being at rest within itself.” In more directly modern language it’s the study of what happens spontaneously, according to the set patterns of nature.
And I think very understandably, during the 16th and 17th centuries when the authority of the Catholic Church was falling apart, some people wanted very much to locate a new source of absolute truth, and they thought they could find it in the hard and fast patterns of quantifiable sense data. That’s a major feature of what we now call the “scientific revolution.” But the best practitioners—Newton, for instance, and Kepler—freely acknowledged that material observations and their patterns could get you so far: natural philosophy isn’t the only thing that matters. You need metaphysics too, and theology. That’s what we came to forget as our technology grew so powerful in the wake of the scientific revolution that it overawed us.
Hill: You write a lot about the multiverse and the blending of the digital world with the real world in almost apocalyptic tones. Let’s unpack this a bit. With Artificial Intelligence gaining a stranglehold on almost all facets of human existence, what is the real danger here? What ought we to fear the most about the multiverse as you describe it? You say the collapse between the “real’’ and the “virtual “cannot occur without collapsing distinctions between good and evil. Please elaborate.
Klavan: Well, the wonderful 20th-century Platonist Iris Murdoch wrote that “love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.” Elsewhere she talked about “unselfing,” the act of psychic generosity that lets us abandon our own concerns for a moment and be really, truly absorbed in other people as distinct from us. I think the technology you bring up here, especially AI when it’s presented as some kind of substitute for or equivalent to humanity, poses an all but diabolical temptation to make unselfing impossible. This notion that AI will become “conscious” or “make art” goes back to Alan Turing’s absurd idea that if something can fool you into believing it can think, then it effectively does.
When we say that a machine is thinking we imagine that we’re imbuing it with a kind of life. But what we’re really doing is emptying out ourselves and those around us, suggesting that they too are no more than a confected set of impressions in our minds. It’s just like the old worshippers of idols: first they imagine that the statues of their gods can think and act, then they end up unable to think and act themselves. “Their idols are silver and gold, made by human hands. They have mouths, but cannot speak. Eyes, but cannot see…. They who make them will become like them.” We create a simulacrum of human activity, and then pretend that’s all human activity itself is. But the point of a painting, or a movie, or even a text message, is that there’s another soul on the other end of the line. The art, or the words, or the technology, is just supposed to be a medium for that meeting of soul with soul. That’s what we’ve got to remember, or lose ourselves.
Hill: On one level, your book presupposes that human beings have a desire to apply ancient wisdom to these five crises you have identified. Do you really believe that, say, the majority of Americans are aware of the depth of the crises as you outline them? Do they have the discipline and desire to truly deal with them head on? I have a feeling a great many in the West are living in a state of willed self-deception about the crises you’ve so eloquently diagnosed. Can most human beings step outside their subjective perspectival silos in order to objectively see the nihilism that underlies the crises as you discuss them?
Klavan: Well, recently there was a study that made the rounds which suggested 30-50% of people don’t have an inner monologue. And I don’t really believe you could possibly test that, but I do notice anecdotally that a lot of people I meet seem to be making an active effort to crowd out their inner lives. We stuff our ears with gunk now—meaningless chatter on podcasts, insanely loud music even in otherwise restrained restaurants. Maybe there’s something to that: maybe we’re afraid of the inner attention required for introspection.
And one of the most chilling features of, say, Plato’s Republic is the idea that you really can deform people educationally. Certainly our chattering classes are doing their best, all the time. It’s also true, though, that the worse this sort of thing gets, the more people—even people with little or no reading life—can sense there’s something wrong. At a certain point you hit up against a wall of nature, something absolute within you that cries out at being drugged and distracted all the time. I suspect people are reaching that point, and that the pain of it makes it surprisingly easy to offer them richer food. That’s what I’ve found on my podcast, at least: there actually are a lot of people out there with a lot of spiritual and intellectual hunger. It’s not that hard to feed them when there’s so little good food around, and the canon offers so much. It’s a draw.
Hill: Who is your favorite classical author and why?
Klavan: Without question, Aristotle is the person I come back to most frequently, in some weird way even the guy I relate to most. I wouldn’t want to be deprived of any great work of literature, but the Nicomachean Ethics is a book that not only changed my life: it continues to inform my idea of what it means to seek excellence in the field of being human.
Hill: The West is growing less religious and, especially in Europe among Europeans, more atheistic. Yet there is an Islamic religiosity within those realms that is, at least in my view, inimical to the Western project of liberty, Enlightenment values, and moral individualism. Is it the goal of the state to promote Christian values and principles in the West?
Klavan: Well, Paul said of the Jewish law that it was a schoolmaster. I think one major implication of both Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics is that the whole political environment—not just laws but customs, trends, norms—shapes the souls of those who grow up within it. How could it not? And in that sense, absolutely, I think our laws should foster the ideals on which the country was founded, which absolutely are derived from distinctively Christian and, to a lesser extent, Jewish teaching. There’s been tons written on this—Tom Holland’s Dominion is a great place to start learning about how deeply, and how distinctively, the values we still take for granted are in fact Christian.
But it’s also a delicate business, and by design, because one of the values that has emerged from Christianity is individual liberty, as you say. The American Founders were aware that Christian sectarianism and mandated statements of this or that denominational belief had riven Europe painfully. They didn’t establish a “wall of separation between church and state”—that’s a misapprehension. But they did in the main believe that true belief is sincere belief, and sincere belief is freely chosen. I’d say the law should guide, but not coerce—I’m thinking here about what we teach in our public schools, what kinds of civic holidays we recognize. It’s a travesty that we’ve basically installed an entire separate liturgical calendar to hallow ideas antithetical to those of our founders, as was glaringly in evidence this Easter when Biden’s twitter handlers were gleefully posting about the “Transgender Day of Visibility.” That sort of should ideally be torn out of our body politic root and branch.
Hill: Explain what you mean by biolibertarianism? Why is it so dangerous a phenomenon?
Klavan: It’s the idea that the body is just a piece of private property like any other, to be manipulated and traded on the free market like you would a house or a book that you own. If you want to see this kind of thinking in action, read Andrea Long Chu’s deranged essay in the “Intelligencer,” which argues that human flesh and hormones are a “biological resource” to be parceled out and redistributed to anyone that thinks he wants to change sex. That’s actually the logic behind a lot of what gets called “gender theory”—that your body has no inherent meaning or structure, that you can just mold it to your will. Luckily I think a lot of European countries, and to a lesser extent the U.S., are realizing how sick it is both physically and spiritually.
Hill: Are you optimistic about the future of the West? Are we in a spiraling declinist trajectory?
Klavan: I often say I’m neither an optimist nor a pessimist, because both of those words describe predictions about the future: that things will either go well, or poorly, and you’re the guy that knows. I try to take seriously the thought that I really, genuinely, do not know what’s going to happen in the future. Instead I practice the Christian virtue of hope. And I do have hope—both because of the sound good sense I meet in people every day when I get offline and talk to folks in the world, and because America, though it spirals more readily than other nations into cockamamie moral panics, can also right itself more swiftly than other nations. Everything manmade is doomed to death one day—but my hope is in the name of the Lord, who lives even through and beyond death. Whether we’re the stewards of a sad decline or the architects of a grand revival, our job is the same: seek the good, and work for it as you see it.
Hill: Finally, what gives you your greatest joy in the world?
Klavan: Love is the source of all joy, and love grows greater as its object grows more exalted. I love my work enormously, and my family even more, and my God most of all. In each of these things, I am blessed beyond measure, and surpassing in joy.
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