Those who don’t value tradition usually speak of “ancient wisdom” with squinty eyes and a wrinkled nose, as if they are being force-fed something that tastes bad. The implicit judgment of these people is that such scornful attitudes are indicative of “modern foolishness.” But the distinction is something of a false dichotomy.
When looking to ideas of the past for guidance, one seldom thinks of the sophist Gorgias’s position that “nothing exists”—but if it does, it cannot be known, and even if it can be known, this knowledge can’t be communicated. That students were once hypnotized by such a view, as today’s students are of postmodernism, reminds us that the proper distinction to be made doesn’t involve a war between old and new ideas, but between ancient wisdom and equally ancient foolishness—between old ideas that work and old ideas that don’t.
As Spencer Klavan shows in his new book, “How to Save the West: Ancient Wisdom for 5 Modern Crises,” wisdom is rightly recognized by its adherents as occurring within a continuum of civilization. But he also demonstrates that what makes foolishness in all times and places so peculiarly foolish is how it falsely repackages itself as new.
The irony is that the lifestyle of “do what feels good” barely acknowledges its roots. The Greek philosopher Epicurus also taught that people should spend their lives devoted to pleasure.
Scope of the Book
Klavan is, in some ways, a latter-day Russell Kirk, providing intellectual coherence to the embattled conservative movement. Like Kirk, he has arisen at a time when liberalism has been culturally dominant, and many feel that it’s time for a change.Unlike Kirk’s classic book “The Conservative Mind,” which has a timeless quality in its lack of references to day-to-day events, “How to Save the West” frequently ties in ancient wisdom with modern relevance to popular culture. While this will date the book more quickly, it is a necessary and effective method for addressing the “5 Modern Crises” referred to in the book’s subtitle.
These crises—of reality, of the body, of meaning, of religion, and of the regime—comprise the book’s five sections. Each section contains two chapters: one that draws on an ancient thinker to describe the contemporary version of the problem and one that offers a solution through another ancient idea.
Klavan defines the reality crisis as “a moment at which it seems unappealing, inconvenient, or even naïve to believe that some things are more real than others.” He compares living in Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse to being shackled in Plato’s Cave, mistaking shadows for reality.
Spokespeople for Big Tech usually deny any meaningful distinction between the “real” physical world and the “fake” digital one. But, Klavan reminds us, Plato taught that there is a world outside the cave, an unchanging and eternal reality. From this perspective, someone living their life on a virtual reality headset looks pretty pathetic.
In “The Body Crisis,” Klavan draws on the Roman philosopher Plotinus, who despised his own body in favor of the soul, to draw a connection to the modern gender dysphoria problem where people feel “trapped” in the wrong bodies. He then uses Aristotle to explain how soul and body, form and matter, exist as an intertwined and inseparable union.
Klavan defines the crisis of meaning as a world where “there is no inherent system of values or intentions in nature itself.” He returns to Plato to show how his dialogue, the “Timaeus,” contains an ancient version of biologist Richard Dawkins’s “meme” theory, which explains how cultural phenomena spread through imitation and transformation. In Plato’s view, time and space are a copy of the infinite timelessness in which the one creator dwells. But where Plato glimpses an objective reality behind the copying, Dawkins sees only “copies of copies, all the way down”—and hence no ground for moral standards.
In “The Crisis of Religion,” Klavan addresses the claim that science has killed God. Far from being disproved by any scientific experiment, philosophers of science simply “wrote God out of the picture.” In the process, the system promulgated by Francis Bacon and Auguste Comte has become the new priesthood, evolution the new creation myth, and multiverse theory a mystical, unprovable theology.
“Kick faith out the front door,” Klavan writes, “and it will come in the back.”
The book’s climax comes near the end of chapter eight, where Klavan brings together various strands of his earlier arguments to describe a theory of language that accounts for the word of God. He maintains that the thing we are really trying to express, at bottom, is love. Love informs our morality by giving us a sense of what is good and evil. The yearning after truth is, too, “in itself a kind of love” in trying to discover what is good in the world. Klavan’s argument, only a few pages long, is a tour de force that should become paradigmatic for many conservative thinkers today.
In “The Regime Crisis,” Klavan draws on the Greek historian Polybius’s theory of cyclical regimes to explain how our republic has become vulnerable to “the oligarchy of Big Tech, Big Media, and Big Government that wield extraordinary power over the nation.” He cites Aristotle’s view that political communities are bound together by “philia”—friendship or love—and that this is the key to rediscover our strength.
Hold On to What’s Real
So just how do we save the West? In his proposed solutions, Klavan is less concerned with putting forth specific programs than suggesting a correct orientation to approaching life and society. Solving the reality crisis involves, in part, a refusal to submit to Big Tech companies that push their technology on us. To solve the body crisis, we must learn to value motherhood again.The crisis of meaning needs to be overcome by conservatives who create and promote art that finds beauty, truth, and goodness in the world while representing it in a realistic way. The crisis of religion can (obviously) only be solved by finding God again as a culture.
Some might complain that the “how” part of “How to Save the West” is vague, if not wishy-washy. But Klavan’s point is that public policies such as Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” are just the opposite of what we need. What is required, rather, is to change our habits of mind, work on building families and civic engagement, and recapture the West within our hearts.
“The way out of this mess, paradoxically, is to think smaller and not bigger,” he writes. The solution, in other words, is love.
