Spencer Klavan joins Brian A. Smith to discuss his new book, How to Save the West.
Brian Smith:
Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. My name is Brian Smith and I am the editor of Law & Liberty. With me today is Spencer Klavan, a prominent podcaster who has a new show with DailyWire+ forthcoming, classicist, magazine editor for the Claremont Review of Books, and the author of the new book, How to Save the West, Ancient Wisdom for Five Modern Crises. And I’m very glad to have Spencer on the show.
Spencer Klavan:
It’s a delight to be here. Thank you so much for having me, Brian.
Brian Smith:
So I have a confession to make, which is that when I first saw the title of the book, I thought to myself, “Not another defense of the canon, this just cannot work.” But read the book, refreshingly, and as I got to know you at a conference recently, I realized that can’t be the book, it won’t be the book. And you say so right away in it. Just so we take anyone who has this apprehension and sort of diffuse this so that they go and buy your book, I wanted you to talk about what led you to write it and what makes you and this book different from the rest of the defending the Western canon genre that we’ve seen so many entries in recently.
Spencer Klavan:
Yeah, I really appreciate your asking that question actually, because it’s sort of like that poem, I too, dislike it. I too, dislike poetry. I too, dislike defenses of the cannon or rather I’m sort of bored with them. And I do say upfront in the book that this is not a defense of the canon, full stop. The other thing I say it’s not is it’s not a survey. It’s not the five books you need to read to get a grasp on the whole of Western literature, it’s not a reading list. There are other good books that deal more comprehensively and at greater length with that sort of issue. I mentioned a couple, Jack Rosen, Harold Bloom. Go read those guys if that’s what you want. But what I would say, this book isn’t a survey, it’s not a defense, it’s an offering. And that comes out of the podcast, Young Heretics, which was sort of my first foray into podcasting.
And I kind of began that podcast because it occurred to me that on the right, in the conservative movement, even among well-intentioned liberals who believe in the value of the Western canon, we do a lot of fighting and speaking in defense of the Western canon. “We ought to be teaching Homer. We shouldn’t be scrubbing them from the curriculum. They’re not all just dead white men. Here’s the relevance,” and so forth. And something that I noticed is we spend so much time defending our right to read Homer that we don’t spend all that much time actually reading Homer. It occurred to me the number of people who pound their fists on the table and say, “Oh, the greats of the West, we’ve got to keep them in schools,” I sometimes wonder whether those people are cracking the spines themselves. I mean the point of preserving this stuff is for it to change you, to shape you.
Even if it isn’t erased from the internet, even if it isn’t taken out of the school curriculums, none of that will matter if you personally, wherever you’re with your family, in your home, and your community and you aren’t exposing your soul to the forming influence of these great works. I think that’s what they’re for, I think that’s why they endure. They don’t endure because they’re complicated or fancy or elevated. They don’t endure because they furnish material for PhD thesis. They endure because somewhere in them is wisdom about how to be good at being human. And the reason the subtitle of the book is Ancient Wisdom for Five Modern Crises is I think that the moment we’re in, especially the moment that has been kind of accelerated by digital technology as I discuss a lot in the book, is dredging up and presenting us with a lot of fundamental questions about what it is to be a human being and just what is this universe in which we live?
And there’s an irony, as I say in the introduction, that the great works of the canon, the intellectual inheritance of Athens and Jerusalem is being most maligned precisely when it’s most needed. This is what these resources exist for.
Brian Smith:
And by people who should know better. By people who should know the best.
Spencer Klavan:
In fact, I think in some cases by people who know exactly what they’re doing because of course depriving people of the resources to take a certain degree of ownership over their own spiritual, psychological, political formation is a really good way to present yourself as the savior of the world, right?
Brian Smith:
Absolutely.
Spencer Klavan:
And so the reason it’s a how-to, despite the kind of ostensible grandeur of that title, the ambitions of the book are actually much smaller than you might expect upon cracking the spine. People who open this book expecting some political program to “Fix all Problems,” capital F, capital P, right, those people are going to be disappointed because what you’re going to be finding instead is a selection and offering, as I said, of ways of thinking about these fundamental questions, “Who are we? What are we made out of? Where are we going?” That are time tested, rich and for you. And that’s what I’m offering here.
Brian Smith:
So one thing that really strikes me in what you just said is, maybe giving it to you as an anecdote, so in graduate school, I feel like anytime you’re in graduate school for great books like both of us were, I did political theory, you did classics-
Spencer Klavan:
Right.
Brian Smith:
There’s a sense in which you’re surrounded by technicians often. Now I was very fortunate in that I had professors that were not technicians, Patrick Deneen, Josh Mitchell, others, but there’s very much a sense of as you professionalize, you’re going to read these books to understand the discourse around these books and what falls out of that kind of training and education I think quite often is the very thing you’re pointing us toward, which is: How do these books form our souls? How do these books offer that guide to life? How might they simply show us, “Don’t go down that door, that’s the Nietzschean door, [that’s a] bad door,” or things like that. So is there a sense in which any of your graduate school experience or your exposure to the academy before you ran screaming informs this book? I mean you don’t explicitly say this, but I had the suspicion that some of this has to do with the reaction to how academia does things.
Spencer Klavan:
Yeah. That’s well put. I’m like you in that I had a lucky grad school experience. And I always feel really responsible to say this when I launched my critique of the academy, which is severe and structural because I do believe that in America especially, but in Europe as well, the academy is suffering a real kind of identity crisis and in some ways a kind of an implosion self-destruction. And so I always feel like I need to put the caveat on there that I too had wonderful instructors who didn’t view these texts as kind of objects of power to wield or certain brand mystique that they could attach to their own person, all these ways that you see people misusing, I think, the great works, but that matter of technicity that you identified is so important. And one reason why I did not end up pursuing a career in academia is I feared that the technicity would become the point.
For people like you and me who devote lives to the life of the mind, the pleasure of that technical expertise is very great. And indeed the temptation to pride in it is also very great. It becomes very easy to forget, especially if you seal yourself off hermetically in a world of technicians, that all techne, all kind of practices of doing something well and with craft are in service of something. They are handmaidens. They’re not goals.
And one thing that immediately became clear to me as I started the podcast and also as I wrote this book, is I got a lot of people who come up to me and say, “Oh, you’re really smart. I’m not that smart.” And by that they didn’t actually mean what they were saying. What they meant is, “You’ve got all these tools in your tool belt.” And that’s actually true. I don’t want to deny that it takes some doing to kind of unpack a paragraph of Aristotle. But if you’re doing that and if you’re devoting your life and investing the kind of human capital that you’ve been given by God as a person, then you ought to be doing it for someone and for something.
Brian Smith:
Exactly.
Spencer Klavan:
And that’s what I think is lost in our approach to these books a lot of the time. And in some ways, it’s a way of neutralizing them and diffusing them because what they have to say is so explosive and in some ways so contradictory to the going conventional wisdom of just our modern gurus that if we look at Aristotle as simply a kind of animal in a jar or a bacteria in a Petri dish that we can isolate and study, then we never have to risk exposure to his claim, for instance, that man is a political animal. Imagine if you actually had to consider that as a truth claim that could or could not be true of you, what would that do?
Brian Smith:
Yes. Well, it becomes news in that regard of sense.
Spencer Klavan:
Totally.
Brian Smith:
These are not just sort of scientific claims. The news has arrived and you’ve got to decide how to live with it.
Spencer Klavan:
Right.
Brian Smith:
So sometime in graduate school, I remember stumbling on the statistic, it was reported in the Chronicle of Higher Ed that something north of 60 or 70%, depending on the field, of graduate students in the humanities and social sciences would suffer severe depression during the course of their studies.
Spencer Klavan:
Geez. Yeah.
Brian Smith:
And at a certain point, just in a PhD program in politics, I started to notice that my colleagues were sort of divided selves fairly often. They wanted to apply these theories in a very tactical way to other people and yet it couldn’t help but infiltrate their life.
Spencer Klavan:
Yes.
Brian Smith:
So I’m reminded of this passage in one of J. Budziszewski’s books where he says, “I set out to prove all morality was essentially arbitrary and that our choices were equally arbitrary and that all of our emotional states were equally meaningless. And yet I loved my wife and I loved my children, but this theory couldn’t help but bleed back in to the way in which I treated my wife and my children.” He said that the despair from that was actually the moment that he turned and went in search of something that was better, that he could actually wager his life on.
Spencer Klavan:
Two passages come to mind, one that you and I just recently shared when we were at that conference on Brothers K. Dostoevsky in that novel has a wonderful moment between Alyosha, the kind of hero, and not his beloved mentor, Father Zosima, but actually a more severe kind of almost administrator in the monastery, Father Paisi, who he thinks doesn’t really like him very much, but he pulls him aside and he says, “Men think that by isolating the technicity of the world, the science of the world, they’ve reduced an objective truth about morality, they’ve reduced virtue to mere fantasy. But the people bear witness to the impossibility of that view and their own hearts bear witness also.” I mean I think this is something very much in evidence and really important, especially in an era where one’s convictions, one’s gut reactions to things, one’s subjective “experiences” of things are written off as totally without worth or merit.
You take the true claim, which is that your first impressions of something might need revision, they might need you to step back and consider them and understand them and we’ve advanced that to the claim that actually your loves, your aspirations, your virtue, your attachments, these are illusions. They’re after effects, they’re byproducts of what’s “really going on,” which is matter bouncing off of matter essentially. And since it’s impossible to live that way, you do end up in a situation where your own life kind of bears witness against your philosophy, which is a profoundly neurotic place to be.
Brian Smith:
Exactly. And you said two passages.
Spencer Klavan:
Oh you are right. I’m sorry, I got so wrapped up in the Dostoevsky. The other one in C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, which is the conclusion of his Space Trilogy, by far my favorite fiction that Lewis ever wrote. I know people know Narnia and love Narnia, but that third installment of the Space Trilogy for me is his master work. It’s basically an artistic enactment of the abolition of man. It’s deals with a lot of these questions of scientism and materialism. But there’s a moment at the end, very small spoiler alert, that one of the guys whose whole project has been to reduce human life to determinism, it’s all kind of neurons firing in the brain and fate just kind of carries us where it will because we’re a machine, he finds himself overtaken at the last moment like one of the denizens of a fairytale city who’s turned to stone by a curse that actually was all real all along. The things he was playing with in his kind of neat syllogisms were deadly serious. I think that’s a situation we find ourselves in a lot as well.
Brian Smith:
Yes. No, I think those are very apt quotes for this problem and your book is filled with many others, but I want to drag us back to that because we could talk about other stuff like this all day long.
Spencer Klavan:
Yes. Let’s talk about the book.
Brian Smith:
So you list five crises and given that you sort of start and end the book by circling around this, I wanted to focus on what I take to be the most foundational one, which is over our sense of reality. What is this crisis? Why do you think it matters?
Spencer Klavan:
Yeah, one thing I do in the book throughout is you sort of start with a news cycle moment that everybody’s familiar with or remembers from the last couple years. And then I unravel that into, “Well, here’s 10 other news cycle moments you probably forgot about from the last 20 years that all kind of point in this direction. And here in fact is this long history of dealing with this very problem.” And the one that the book starts off with is the Metaverse, virtual reality essentially, immersion into virtual reality, and this way that a lot of our elites have of talking as if the distinction between my actual daily experience of life, which I would think of as reality, and a computer generated simulation that stimulates the brain in such and such a way, that distinction is really quaint and kind of outmoded and superstitious.
And so it’s really not to get down on Mark Zuckerberg or on Meta or whatever, Facebook and so forth. It’s rather to use these statements and these product launches as ways of uncovering a real philosophical conviction. Once you see it, it’s like putting on the green glasses, you see the Emerald City, you can see this everywhere. And I think that this speaks to a conviction that some things are very, very true. We have still in our society, because it’s impossible to live any other way, a desire to claim to reality and to truth and also a total lack of grounding of where do we root that. Is reality the images that my neurons cough up on the screen of my eyes? In which case the metaverse is just fine as a substitute for reality. It’s not even a substitute, it’s just an equivalent alternative that I happen to find more pleasurable. Or is reality some other thing?
And if it’s some other thing, is it the idea of the good? Is it my physical experience of the world, right? Before even asking the questions, I mean the first section of the book, I don’t even begin to ask the question, “Well, is reality abstract truth or is it emotional truth?” Or whatever, get into that much later. As you say, this question is threaded throughout the whole book, but really the first question and the fundamental question with which western philosophy proper begins is, “Do you believe that somewhere in some realm of experience there are things that are true no matter who says so or who says otherwise, things that you can’t by feeling differently about them, things that you can’t wish or imagine into existence and that you will never be free of even if you blind themselves to them?” You take Plato’s Cave. I say in the book, “It’s the original metaverse,” the idea that you are already in some sense being blinded by the sophists that run your culture and by your own presuppositions.
The point of that story is our third person view. The reason it’s a revealing story is because it draws back the camera so we are looking from the outside right into the cave and we’re able to see that even though for the people shackled to the walls of Plato’s Cave there is no reality other than this, there is in fact an external, truer reality outside of that kind of fantasy. And that matters even for the people who believe in the fantasy. Just as we were talking about earlier, if you invent a world where your emotions are part fictive and where your moral convictions are arbitrary, you can construct that world in speech all you want, but the reality of actual moral truths is going to come crashing down on you one way or another.
And that’s where we start to see the very tight and intimate connection between these kind of dismissals of absolute truth, of final reality and violence. Because if there is no absolute truth, you think you’re kind of being let free into some glorious future where everything is whatever you want it to be and nothing is either good or bad, thinking makes it so. But of course the only way then to determine what’s going to happen is through an exertion of power, through the Thrasymachus’s claim, that the power is basically the determiner of justice.
Brian Smith:
But to be even more dark within that, I think there’s an element of, “I can prove I’m really real by killing.”
Spencer Klavan:
Right.
Brian Smith:
Which becomes a theme in Russian literature like we’ve just read. It becomes a reality in ideology in the 20th century. But there’s also this other element which you draw on throughout the book, which I think is very interesting, this idea that there’s an explanation for why the dramas that we watch even have gotten so vacuous. In our denial that there is a reality and consequence, this multiverse theory where we can reinvent characters’ histories in a completely arbitrary way and we can take what’s seemingly were meaningful moments, Thanos snapping his fingers, half of everybody dying, and just undo it in a heartbeat and then nothing has any weight. How does this relate to Plato’s Cave? Say more about that because I want to hear that connection drawn a little bit more tightly.
Spencer Klavan:
So this is where you do have to start to ask the question, “Well, okay, if you intuitively feel that in fact there is such a thing as the real and it’s not purely arbitrary or purely capable of being constructed at will, then where does it live?” And I think the most readily available answer for most people to what is real is stuff, physical objects. They are real. And there’s an appeal to that answer of course, because as Aristotle observes our sensory experience of physical things is the most vivid and immediate experience that we have. And it takes some doing… What is purest and realest in actual fact is in some sense the last thing that we make our way toward if we ever get to contemplating, “Okay, I see a brown table and a brown cow. What is brown?” And as you reach those levels of abstraction, Aristotle thinks, you also begin to hone in on things that have more integrity as entities than just the physical objects you see in front of you.
And yet crucially, reality only ever comes to us mediated through our senses. So it’s very easy to make this mistake that, “Well, there’s only matter, right? Matter is what is real.” And basically my argument about the multiverse is that as an artistic failure, it is kind of the final breakdown of materialism as a philosophy. And I think everybody’s looking for the grand victory that’s going to stop people from thinking that the world is just atoms, you’re going to be able to prove such and such a thing. And one thing I argue a lot in the book is that these aren’t the kinds of questions that subject themselves to scientific proof. If you believe that matter and scientific questions are the only things that exist, you’re going to trap yourself in a little tightly sealed box with no opening because there then will be no mode of accepting any kind of truth that is other than the one that you’ve already determined for yourself.
And I think the emptiness of our art as it becomes more and more inspired by a kind of neo-epicurean philosophy of pure matter, of atoms bouncing off one another, is itself not a proof, but evidence, an indication that science is basically trying to lift itself up by its own bootstraps. Plato’s claim is that the effort to extract truth from your day-to-day experiences is already a difficult enough task, is already something that requires long years of study and effort and perhaps even divine intervention. And the multiverse claim is essentially that, “No, in fact the things that you can see and touch are basically the realest possible thing, the only thing really that we can count as real at all. And other than that, it’s basically just shadows on the wall. It’s just fantasies that’s just throwing these up.” Those fantasies are empty. If, in fact, you believe that that’s what you’re doing when you’re telling stories, you’re just pressing certain buttons in the brain, you’re just confecting certain shadows on the wall, then you are going to end up with stories that don’t mean anything because they don’t refer to anything outside of themselves.
Brian Smith:
Right. And I do also wonder whether there isn’t an implicit link here between the people who find these stories compelling and the people who, having embraced the idea that matter is everything, begin to doubt their own loves, their own affections toward people, places, things, institutions. And so this is a society for whom all the solid things melt into air. And yet I also think that there’s some hope in the sense that the shows and the forms of art that rebel against this, that say, “Reality is not just the evidence of your senses,” the ones that don’t try to beat you over the head with this fact seem to be the most successful ones. I think of a show like Yellowstone for instance. This is a show about very intense affections and deep historical sort of ties that people are not willing to break and to assert something real beyond the senses.
Spencer Klavan:
Another show that comes to my mind is White Lotus and-
Brian Smith:
Oh yeah.
Spencer Klavan:
There’s this dark comedy. It’s really about sexual relations and power relations in an era of woke morays. And what I love about this show, although it’s kind of viewer discretion advised in a big way, what I love about it is that rather than perform a little morality play where all the people with the wrong ideas get theirs, the show creators have simply depicted the problems and consequences of woke sexual ethics as in fact they are. And there’s no grand scene of repentance where somebody makes a big speech about, “This is my philosophy,” but there is a sense that ideas have consequences, philosophies have consequences. And if we’re going to show these things on screen, to be fully honest about them, we can’t just depict the fact of their existence. I mean this is something that I think both conservatives and liberals get wrong about the culture wars, which I talk about also in the book.
We think of this as some sort of debate about, “Is art going to just show anything goes? Are we just going to be totally free to put anything on screen or are we going to side with those nasty conservatives who don’t want you to be able to show certain things, want the Hays Code back and so forth?” And what we don’t realize I think is there’s no such thing as art that is anything goes. Art inherently contains a moral outlook on the world because the reality of moral truth is actually inescapable. It’s impossible for us to think without it, the very forms, the shape of our mind.
Brian Smith:
We need rules.
Spencer Klavan:
We need rules. Yes.
Brian Smith:
It reminds me of an essay you once wrote for us on video games.
Spencer Klavan:
That’s right. Yeah, rules and the good. We need ideals, we need objectives, we need the telos. And so really what we’re in is a fight over whose rules, whose vision of reality is going to be publicly honored and awarded and more regularly produced in these big movie houses. And the ones that are most on offer are kind of epicurean nihilism. There’s million universes, nothing you do matters except that we be kind of peaceful and pleasurable amongst ourselves. And then there is this new strain, you’re right, of art that is not preachy, it’s not a conservative tractate and in fact many of the people that are making it are not traditionally speaking conservatives, but that simply recognizes the total inadequacy. I mean look, I just went to see Avatar, Way of Water, Part Two, This Time It’s Wet. And here’s James Cameron, a guy who’s made movies that I really like.
I think Terminator 1 is one of the great movies, a great pop art of the last few decades. But this guy spent 10 years on basically a roller coaster ride. And what has he got to say? I mean this is just this kind of wonder of science, earth mother Gaia, “It’s all energy bouncing off of atoms, man,” is so played out that even when it makes money at the box office, people kind of know they’re being served thin gruel. And that’s kind of the hope I think you’re talking about. We are still in a situation economically where people feel incentivized to slap another cut of raw meat on the table for the Lumpenproletariat to consume. And yet everybody knows this stuff is inadequate, that in fact shows White Lotus, shows like Yellowstone, shows that kind of put the moral universe out in front of your eyes as if it had urgent reality are becoming more popular for exactly this reason. They feed the soul better.
Brian Smith:
So I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about one of your best phrases. I mean the book has a lot of great phrases and sort of pithy encapsulations of really complex thoughts. My favorite, the aptest, I think is something you call Soul Dysphoria and in that section you explain a bunch of things, but you link body positivity, this whole movement and the phenomena of Insta photoshopping perfection. And you say that they have a common outlook and I guess my question is, so what’s common to them? Why are they popular? What do they tell us about who we are right now?
Spencer Klavan:
So near the beginning of that chapter… First of all, I’m really glad you noticed soul dysphoria because I thought, “Oh, that’s just a subhead.”
Brian Smith:
I circled it.
Spencer Klavan:
Nice. Well, okay, so let me try to work into this. Near the beginning of that chapter, I say the kind of pop wisdom, pop psychology is that the soul is kind of extraneous, that it’s kind of an appendage, that it’s a holdover from certain kind of unclear evolutionary accidents that cause us to feel things like love and emotion, but really all we’re really doing is just surviving physically. So given the fact that we have these bodies, why do we need to have thoughts and souls and consciousness at all?
But in fact, since as we’ve been discussing now at some length, in fact since love and desire and the soul truths are realer in some sense and more urgently real than the kind of physical facts that follow upon them, the real question that everybody has always struggled with and that secretly we’re still struggling with now is not, “Why do I need a soul?” It’s, “Why do I need a body? If I am this being that is capable of making contact with abstracts truths and with love and with all the high, noble things that you and I have just been talking about and have talked a lot about off mic as well, then what’s the point of this meat sack that’s hanging off of my divine spark?”
One of the things that pulling back the camera on that does is it helps to have a little bit of charity and empathy for this problem. This is an old problem. It goes back not necessarily, I don’t think actually to Plato himself, but to some of Plato’s interpreters inside and outside the early Christian Church. Plotinus is somebody that I mention a lot in the book in this context. And if that’s true, if the body is kind of an imposition or a fall or a descent, then it follows that the best thing we can do with it is just mold it to our desires and to conform with our souls, our divine spark, our essence, our identity, whatever word you want to call that, to mold it as directly to conform with our desires as possible.
And that is the connection which is a very central and old human impulse between the internet avatar, the airbrushed, photoshopped picture, and the body positivity movement. They’re all efforts to reconfigure the world of the body so that it matches people’s aspirations, the way they think they ought to be, the thing that they think they somehow are secretly. And the great Christian and pagan truth, the height of Athenian and Jerusalemite wisdom on this topic is that you are not actually going to float away from your body into the true, the good, and the beautiful. You have a body because it is the medium in which the true, the good, and the beautiful is best expressed. And that’s the mind flip I think that the great texts can give us on this one.
Brian Smith:
Well, and without this insight, I think it is relatively easy to yearn for a technological solution to the frailties or the dysmorphias that we have with our own form. I mean this yearning, which I think is expressed in science fiction, for uploading into a place where we can just define our own avatar, on the one hand, anyone who’s played a role playing game or played a computer game where you create an avatar of some kind I think can sympathize with this. “Wouldn’t I wish to be a thing I am not?”
Spencer Klavan:
I want to look like my LensAI profile picture. It looks better than I do in real life. It doesn’t have the aches and pains that I have. Yeah, totally.
Brian Smith:
Right. And people who hit the gym, who lift weights, we’re struggling against the limitations of our bodies with the weight we can’t get rid of. But in a way there’s something I think which you get at, that it’s more human to embrace the intersection of body and spirit and live with those struggles and find things that give us traction for understanding that, as in great books, as in deep conversation with friends who share similar struggles. Without those touchpoints, it makes sense that some of the weirdness we’re inhabiting right now… I do kind of wonder, in the world of no Covid ever happened, shutdowns never happened, would the extreme anti-body sort of movements that we have right now have quite as much traction, if people had not been cut off from one another, had been left in the face-to-face encounters that you cannot avoid as a teenage person? And you think of the biggest number of these people are, it’s teenagers who have been most isolated and found these online communities.
Spencer Klavan:
Well, there is a moment in the history of this problem, this question in modernity that I found really striking and that was a piece by Andrea Long Chu in the New York Times. This is a male to female transgender person, making the argument that the point of bottom surgery wasn’t happiness and that it wouldn’t actually necessarily cure the depression or the discomfort, “Because desire and happiness are unrelated agents.” This is the line from the piece. And to me, that is really the heart of where this is actually going. That’s at least a level of honesty about what actually happens if you disembody yourself or if you make your body into a plaything to kind of respond to your whims. The terrible bind that we’re in… I mean it’s a fallen world, no question about it. But the problem is if the material world including your own self is just kind of raw material to be dominated, then you’re not actually in a relationship with anything, including yourself and you’ve in fact destroyed the possibility of aa relationship.
So you will just be a bunch of diodes just kind of beeping at will haphazardly in the end, right? That’s basically what we are without bodies and our pushing up against something physical as you describe in the gym, which is a great example. There’s a reason that people go to the gym now as a kind of reaction against this trend. It’s precisely because making contact or having driven home to you that there is kind of a hard surface against which you’re pushing up against. Lets you know you’re not alone. Otherwise, it’s lonely being a divine spark. There’s really no to go with it.
Brian Smith:
What you just said makes me think this entire movement that we’re talking about, it’s the rejection of that Augustinian understanding that we are intentional desiring creatures and by severing that understanding, we’re casting ourselves off, we’re adrift. Because if you understand yourself as, “I am a sinful creature,” or maybe you don’t even understand yourself as that to get this point? If you understand yourself as defined by the things you are attracted to and love, that at least opens the door to certain kinds of understanding through the body that the denial of that, that chosen severing of desiring from happiness. Once you make that leap, it becomes very hard to reach this sort of person even through art, I fear. Historically, I feel like novels and poems and film and music can hit us where we don’t expect it, not because they’re attempting to crush our intellect, our intellectual defenses, but because they open us to a kind of experience in our hearts and in our longings that maybe we didn’t see that way before.
Spencer Klavan:
Wow. Yeah, that’s very beautifully put.
Brian Smith:
Thank you.
Spencer Klavan:
Something I read after finishing the book that has been a little mantra with me lately is this Simone Weil observation, and I’ll probably butcher it because it’s one of those things I’ve repeated in my head so many times that I feel like I probably have my own personal version of it that I don’t want to lay that on Weil, but she says something to the effect of, “Love is a form of attention and attention is a form of prayer.” And somebody that really affected me deeply this year is Thomas Traherne, this English mystic, undiscovered for hundreds of years, and then resurrected in the early 20th century, I think, whose whole thing is about the beatific vision and the question for Weil and Traherne both I think is your actions imply a highest good.
They imply a love even if you don’t… And we have this kind of ridiculous, cheapened idea about the word love that it means butterflies in your stomach. Those are beautiful things. It’s beautiful to have a crush on somebody, but if what you think is that you are not loving if you’re not experiencing those things, then you don’t understand yourself. Beatrice says to Dante, “Never creator, nor creation was ever without love.” And everything that we do, every action that we perform by its inherent logic implies some goal, some good. And pursuing that goal, paying attention to that goal, devoting yourself, giving of yourself to it is love.
And when you are mindlessly scrolling, I’ll pick my drug of choice, Twitter, it could be Instagram, whatever, when you are lying in bed for the third straight hour, that you hit snooze on your alarm, whatever, you’re not not loving, you’re not in a neutral space of, “I don’t worship…” And people think they don’t worship anything, they think whatever. No, you’re just giving yourself over to another kind of worship, another kind of love that you have less control over and self-awareness about and really the reason that this body problem is so pernicious is because it holds out this fantasy that you can choose the structure of your loves or have no loves at all. You can just be kind of a free floating entity that’s not tied to or pulled toward anything and that ain’t going to happen. We exist in states of love at all times.
Brian Smith:
We may not like those loves.
Spencer Klavan:
No.
Brian Smith:
We may not be quite aware of them as you say, but they’re really there. So I want to shift gears again. We’ve talked a bit about scientism already. I mean I don’t even remember you using the word scientism anywhere in the book, but there is this pervasive notion you talk about, of science outstripping its proper boundaries in our imaginations. Quick quote from you, “We call upon science now to explain not just how the physical world works, but how everything, everything works and why.” So I’d just like you to riff a bit on how you think this vision of science as a sort of ideology has added to the distortions we’re experiencing and this phenomena we’ve been talking about.
Spencer Klavan:
Yeah, it’s interesting. I’m recording the audiobook now and I’m trying to remember if I’ve said the word scientism at all because it’s a word that I use all the time. I’m a podcaster and so forth, and in so far as it goes, I think it’s a very good descriptor of what we’re dealing with when we talk about this sort of thing. But no, I didn’t use it in this book because I wanted people step by step to really see what we’re dealing with. It’s like one of those things where the two young fish are swimming by and the old fish says, “How’s the water, boys?” And the young fish turns to his friend and says, “What’s water?” I mean this is what we’re up against when we talk about something like scientism. It’s so pervasive and really what it is is the swelling up of what the ancients would’ve called natural philosophy to swallow every other discipline, branch of knowledge, way of doing things.
And of course natural philosophy is an ancient good and noble way of studying the world. It has to do with the things that behave according to phusis, which is the Greek word for the things that happen spontaneously or according to fixed rules that are inherent in the things themselves. So it is in the nature of a stone. It is in the phusis of a stone to fall to the ground when dropped because objects with mass attract one another, right? These are things that even in describing them, you can freely and happily blend language from Aristotelian metaphysics with kind of Newtonian mechanics and even on into quantum physics. This is a seamless tradition in that respect.
Of course, there are many profound revolutions in science, but as a practice, as a human practice, it retains, I think, its noble character. What happens really to cause the neurosis that we’re struggling with is the development of the idea that that form of knowledge, knowledge about spontaneous, rule-based behaviors in the natural world is the only form of knowledge and this is where the reality thing becomes important again. This is the only kind of truth. This is the only way that we can know things is through experiment and verification and therefore the things that exist are physical things and that’s that. There’s nothing else to them. And I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that even if this is not what people believe in their conscious minds, we all breathe this in like oxygen.
Brian Smith:
Oh absolutely.
Spencer Klavan:
Yeah. We all know that. We all feel in our bones that that must be true. And one of the things I try to show in the book is that was never proven. That was not a thing that happened because somebody advanced some brilliant argument, that science is the only kind of truth. It’s actually something that happened as a matter of circumstances. The church lost its claim on authority and as truths began to come to light that science could reveal that theological speculation, suddenly we became very addicted to this kind of knowledge because it’s powerful and it’s reliable. You can always get it if you do it right and you can do things with it that make you very strong. And this has now become our idolatry, our way of thinking about everything, the whole world, and it is not strong enough to sustain that weight.
This thing where we now say, “Trust the science,” where Dr. Fauci becomes the defacto governor of every state in America for two plus years, this is obviously a disordered way of living and of governing ourselves and it arises directly out of this unsustainable effort to reduce all forms of truth to scientific truth because some things don’t have a scientific answer, some very important things like moral questions, right? “Okay, the virus is this contagious. Should we therefore shut the country down?” And what we’re doing now is we’re trying to find some way of rooting our answers to that question in science, as if we could empirically prove what the right answer is because that’s the only way that we think we can know anything. And really in this respect, demoting science will be the best thing that ever happened to it out of Covid.
Brian Smith:
Right. Well, because the only logic that science can lend itself to in terms of an ethical theory strikes me as something like a kind of crass utilitarianism, that you’re struck with okay, so if our postulates are health and bodily integrity are the goods we’re aiming, at least a sort of way understanding of that, then you can kind of understand how you get to these judgments like we’re seeing again now of, “Oh yes, we need masks again because of the triple threat of viruses and the flu and Covid version X,” I don’t even know what we’re at right now there. And so there is this oddity going on. You knew it was going to happen, there’s a line from Walker Percy about this.
Spencer Klavan:
Oh, here we go. Good.
Brian Smith:
Yes, here we here, right? You had to expect it.
Spencer Klavan:
Somebody should play a drinking game at home with this podcast, how many times-
Brian Smith:
Exactly. But he had this notion that what is happening with scientism is this seeding of our sovereignty to they, the experts and that something is lost in that. When we allow this notion that scientific expertise can claim sovereignty over the moral choices that define who we are and that our insanity around this shows up in various ways, that people in their yearning to have that certainty, which we might find in the gospel, we might find it in the way we let our faith shape our lives, if you don’t have that, it’s really easy to sort of say, “Well, trust the science. The experts are telling us this is the right way to live. And so we just have to do is we’re told.”
Spencer Klavan:
Yes, it’s very easy to find this argument made explicitly in the works of Wilsonian progressives.
Brian Smith:
Yes.
Spencer Klavan:
Since the era of the progressive, this has not stopped being an express argument, that democracy basically is inefficient, that it doesn’t work, and that the best thing to do is to do that outsourcing that Percy’s talking about. Let me give an example that may seem a little bit out of left field, but that I think is really telling and that is this respect for Marriage Act that just passed. Irrespective of the side that one may be on about gay marriage itself, it suddenly occurred to me that this whole thing now where everybody wants to codify certain Supreme Court decisions, and it all happened after Dobbs because it turned out that you could actually overturn a Supreme Court decision, right?
Brian Smith:
Shocking, right?
Spencer Klavan:
I mean it’s funny, but my colleague and boss, Charles Kesler, who edits the Claremont Review of Books, made this point that the problem with Dobbs was not just how sacrosanct abortion was in the leftist project, it was also that court constructed, substantive due process rights are the whole architecture of the progressive universe. And if one of those planks can be just taken out, then any one of them is vulnerable. That’s why Clarence Thomas’s concurrence was so scary, even though he was the only person to say, “Now we need to revisit all these other decisions.”
Brian Smith:
He said the quiet part out loud.
Spencer Klavan:
Exactly. But it’s true. If substantive due process is a fiction, which I think it is, then all of these things are vulnerable and they’re vulnerable even more fundamentally because the courts aren’t supposed to be making these sorts of decisions, which is maybe another way to say the same thing. Anyway, this funny thing then happened where Democrats were like, “Well, what we really need to do now is write laws in Congress that codify these decisions and these principles and then they’ll be safe,” to which I thought, “I have news for you about Congress. We vote in new people and they also can write new laws and can overturn these.” And it’s like everybody wants a final answer to these culture war issues. That is one side definitely won, and that’s that. But a lot of these issues, that’s not our form of government. We debate these things together, face-to-face, and we come up with compromises that we enact locally and people, they would rather have, in many cases, I think the definitive pronunciation of the experts.
Brian Smith:
And I think there’s something tempting but ultimately flawed about this. And not just about politics, but even more broadly speaking. I stop myself all the time… This is another way that scientism creeps into your head. I try not to talk about human things as problems that can be availed by solutions.
Spencer Klavan:
Right.
Brian Smith:
Because almost nothing in human life that isn’t a medical condition is actually a problem in that way of, “I can find a technical answer that will fix this.” I mean, yes, you can set an alarm to get yourself out of bed, to use your example earlier. You can set five alarms, you could do the Jocko thing and just stagger them on top of one another, but you still have to make the conscious choice of will to get up and go lift heavy things if that’s how you’re ordering your day and how you have aspired to order your day.
Spencer Klavan:
You can wake up and turn off the five alarms just as easily you turn them on.
Brian Smith:
Right. And yet all the time we use this problem-solution pairing, and to get back to the political thing, as if we are not tomorrow going to find another challenge that our hypothetical final solution to this great problem has caused. So the things we do to ameliorate the challenges that are in front of us tend to create a new set of challenges. And this is human life. It is an unending series of this sort of thesis-antithesis cycle. Then you talk about the Polybius regime cycle in the book for a little bit, and there’s a very similar version of this sort of dynamic.
Spencer Klavan:
Yeah. And I’m so glad you mentioned medical problems because the danger, the thing that I am trying to train myself out of now is medicalizing regular phenomena, and that’s in terms of language of psychiatry or the language of actual physical ailment. You do this all the time, right? “Oh, I had trauma.” “I struggle with or suffer from depression, suicidality.” I mean these are not diseases. They are spiritual struggles and we should talk about them that way.
Brian Smith:
Yes, absolutely.
Spencer Klavan:
Yeah.
Brian Smith:
So maybe this is a good way to draw us toward the ending I had in mind, which is I wanted to end by talking about love, which is to the degree there’s a “solution,” I put it in air quotes, present in your book, you talk about love, you talk about the ordering principle, and I just want you to talk a little bit now about how love points us back to the real. How does it help us out of the fixes that we perpetually find ourselves?
Spencer Klavan:
Yeah. It’s interesting that just kind of naturally, we’ve been edging up upon this very thing as we start to talk about it’s going to be a daily grind. You’re going to wake up and you’re going to have to make the decision to get up in time to make breakfast for your kids, to go to church, to read for 30 minutes a day, whatever. You’re going to have to make these decisions afresh each time. And that’s because love is love of the particular, and by the end of the book, I even say even something as noble as Save the West is a kind of unhelpful aspiration if it’s not embodied in the here and now, in the fullness of the here and now, not just this kind of reductive what’s the physical reality around you, but the whole experience that you wake up every day and are immersed in. Yeah, this is my answer, this is my solution.
How do you save the west? Love. But you have to write a whole book about it because you have to earn your way to it. You have to earn your way to an understanding of love that isn’t just going to boil down into nice, fuzzy feelings. And what begins somewhat slightly perhaps at the very beginning of the book, I drop in this Iris Murdoch quote, she’s one of the great disciples of Plato in the 20th century, and she says, “Love, and so art and morality, is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.”
Brian Smith:
It’s a great quote.
Spencer Klavan:
It’s a beautiful line. When you come down to politics, people feel immobilized by the fact that there are all these sort of structural crises going on at the level of our national government and indeed the world. And those narratives, those crises are in some sense designed to immobilize you. You are not going to muscle the cycle of regimes back into place, right?
Brian Smith:
Absolutely not.
Spencer Klavan:
No. And it may be that you have some role to play in ameliorating those big problems, but you’ll find them in the particulars of your human sized life because that is where you are capable of doing love as a verb. This is where if a man says he loves God but love’s not his brother, he is a liar. Why is that? Well, because we’re very easily swayed into making God into the kind of amorphous jelly of our particular preferred abstractions. God is love, God is goodness. All these things that God actually is, but there’s a reason he took on flesh, right? There’s a reason that Christmas happened. There’s a reason the cross happens, and that’s because we are actually more complete, more noble, more elevated at the size that we are at. Man is made in the image of God and this is where goodness and joy take place, on our earth, in our creation. They take place in the daily political and personal struggles that people wake up and choose to do out of love of the good and embodiment of the good, and the realization that someone other than oneself is real.
Brian Smith:
And that I think particularly, as we are recording right before Christmas-
Spencer Klavan:
Yes.
Brian Smith:
But our audience won’t hear this till after, but I think it’s a good place to stop. Thank you so much for joining me for this hour and talking about all these great things. Spencer’s book will be out at the time we put this podcast up and it can be bought anywhere you buy books, so please go out, get yourself a copy of How to Save the West by Spencer Klavan. I’m Brian Smith, and this has been another episode of Liberty Law Talk.
Thank you for listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts, and please visit our journal at lawliberty.org.