From Cultural Revolution to Cultural Revival: Spencer Klavan on ‘How to Save the West’

People are starting to realize that you can only scream and yell and tear down statues and set things on fire for so long before things start to get really bad. And now the energy seems to be in the direction of kind of recovering and rebuilding some of our most profound traditions, these wisdom traditions of of Athens and Jerusalem. You're starting to see uh return to if not traditional religion to sort of spiritual ideas of something other than just the raw materialism that has dominated for for so long. >> Spencer Claven is an associate editor of the Claremont Review of Books, host of the Young Heretics podcast, and author of several books including How to Save the West. >> Trump's order to restore classical architecture. I think that speaks to a certain instinct he has for people's hunger for them. These are forms that have endured and survived for a reason and that maintain their beauty because they connect with the eternal. I mean, there's a reason why brutalism goes out of date and those classical buildings still look as beautiful as ever. >> This is American Thought Leaders and I'm Yay Kell. >> Spencer Claven, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. >> Oh, yeah. It's a delight. Thank you for having me. Well, so what really has happened to Western culture? It's a big question. I think broadly speaking, we are living at a turning point right now. And for most of my life, if not all of my life, we have been in a period of really serious crisis and decline. The riots of 2020 and the disasters of the COVID pandemic and its aftermath were just a final kind of explosion that had been building and boiling for decades and decades and decades. And in my particular domain, which is western culture, western arts and literature and philosophy, you really can trace that back at least to the cultural revolution of the 60s and 70s. Hey, hey, ho, ho. Western civ has got to go. This really dedicated rejection of our wisdom traditions, especially in in schools, especially conspiring directly to kind of miseducate and uneducate young kids and college kids. And I think you saw the fruits of that when America went through one of its biggest crisis perhaps crisis in our history um with with this kind of outpouring of partisan rage and iconoclasm and what Roger Scrutin might have called ooophobia the fear of everything local and and native. And what's really remarkable about that to me is not that it it happened. In fact, it seemed pretty predictable that it would go happen at some point given everything gone on. Um, but what's remarkable is that we seem to have now come out of it and passed through into something quite different. Um, it's typically referred to in casual speech as the vibe shift. We've seen this real kind of shifting of of momentum, shifting of weight uh away from this kind of oohobia, this this revolutionary jackabanite spirit. um and into a a kind of brighter and perhaps more optimistic period where people even if they're not aggressively right-wing, even if they're not even Trump voters, people are starting to realize that you can only scream and yell and tear down statues and set things on fire for so long before things start to get really bad. And at a certain point, you have to actually be constructive and you have to build. Um, and now the energy seems to be in the direction of kind of recovering and rebuilding some of our um, most profound traditions, these these wisdom traditions of of Athens and Jerusalem. You're starting to see uh, return to, if not traditional religion, to sort of spiritual ideas, something other than just the raw materialism that has dominated for for so long is coming back, I think, into popularity. starting to see young men in particular returning to church and to traditional religious services. Um, and and you're you're starting to see a a kind of political energy in the direction of pro-Americanism. It's it's no longer cool to be detached and critical of everything that went before. Now there's there's a renewed interest in kind of some degree of cultural stability and and clarity. All of this is very much in its infancy, very early days. Um, but I do think that there's there's we're we're passing now into some kind of new era for rebuilding, which is very exciting for me as somebody who's really never lived through a period like this like this before. >> That's fascinating. Just very briefly for the benefit of those in our audience who might not be familiar what you mean by Athens and Jerusalem as being the foundation. Just very briefly. >> Uh absolutely. Well, this is a concept that we use to understand what we mean when we talk about the west. We throw around this idea of western civilization so much that sometimes you have to stop and think what actually do I mean by that. we have a vague I think kind of sense of classical columns and maybe the founding fathers are involved and people kind of know western civ when they see it. Um but when pressed to define it I like to refer to this idea of Athens and Jerusalem. And these are two great cities of the ancient world. Uh each of them standing in for a major tradition. And when I say Athens I'm talking about pagan philosophy and classical ideals. questions of virtue and logos that is reason what can be best known using merely human reason but one thing I think that is clearly true is that human reason alone can't get us all the way and so that's what Jerusalem stands in for the scriptural traditions first of the Jews in the ancient Israelites and then of the Christians who come emerge out of Judaism uh and that's what Jerusalem stands in for is is that idea of revelation So with that kind of twin pairing of reason and revelation, you get western civilization which then flowers and grows in a million different directions. But those are those are its sources. >> It's interesting that you say that we're shifting away from materialism. And I'd like you to kind of qualify that for me. Explain to me how you really see that because I'm not entirely sure. >> Yeah, >> I see it it in its entirety. There's certainly been, you know, a political shift in America, but there hasn't been as much of a political shift in Canada, for example, >> where which is which is my country, >> right? >> I I'm curious if this shift in materialism that you're seeing is also reflected somehow in this shift in, you know, perception of the value of the human being. >> Absolutely. Well, let me put it this way. For my entire life, religion has been in decline on the Wayne and it's been generally understood that this was bound to continue that this was the way that intelligent people were moving. Especially when I was quite a bit younger in high school or even before, this was the high noon of the new atheism. This is when guys like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins were all over the press and they were lauded as sort of the gold standard of of intellectual excellence. And my friends and I who were all aspiring intellectuals of one stripe or another, we also accepted this. We thought, yeah, well, smart people generally don't believe. And once you learn enough about the world and the way it works, it becomes very very difficult to sustain belief in an immaterial plane in anything other than atoms in motion. And that assumption, that climate of opinion is what I think has completely transformed in the last say 5 to 10 years. I I've been shocked at how quickly it's it's changed. You're right that it doesn't mean people aren't now flocking back to church on mass. There is some evidence in the latest Pew study of America that we're getting at least a leveling off of the decline in in church attendance. But there's still relative to older generations, young generations are still pretty spotty in their church attendance and that sort of thing. But on the other hand, you're starting to see more and more people in more and more domains uh saying, you know what, this sort of secular materialism, it's just not going to hold together. It's just not going to make sense. Um Ion Hersy Ali was a big turning point here when she published this article saying it's just not going to work. If we want the all the lovely things that we've inherited from the western tradition like liberal democracy and freedom of the press and so on and so forth, we're not going to be able to sustain them without some kind of grounding in our our Christian heritage. Um, >> and by the way, I'm a Christian now >> and I personally am a Christian. That's a key step because yeah, many people said all of that and then did not themselves convert or became what was called cultural Christian. I mean, Richard Dawkins himself called himself a cultural Christian recently, by which he basically means, "I don't want my civilization to be overrun by woke maniacs and jihadists and therefore I want sort of the cultural benefits of of Christianity because I can't think of any other way to stop this from from happening." But that's very different from what Ali said, which was, you know, okay, well then I'm going to to become a Christian. Um, my most recent book, Light of the Mind, Light of the World, is about sort of the way that this has happened in the sciences that it for a while it looked very plausible that you could explain everything in the physical world with reference to these little kind of chunks of matter boopping around. And about a 100 years ago, 125 years or so ago, it became apparent that whatever it is that's going on in this physical world around us, it ain't just chunks of matter bouncing and colliding against each other. There's something something much more mysterious to do with the meeting between mind and matter. And as scientists have become aware of that, you'll you're starting to see more and more of them say what uh it's often attributed to Verer Heisenberg that once you take one sip from the cup of science, you become an atheist. But when you drain it to the dregs, God is waiting for you there at the bottom. And so you're seeing a lot of people basically starting to say that. Fred Hy, a great astrophysicist uh and cosmologist said it looks as if a super intellect has monkeyed around with the universe. And that that kind of suspicion has been dawning on people for for some some time. And so I think that these things are all interrelated to one another. I think the renewed interest in traditional faith among young men that we've discussed, I think the the slowing off of the decline in church attendance and the flowering of kind of uh respectable intellectual Christianity. Uh, Matthew Crawford is another name I haven't mentioned yet, but you know, Ross Dowet, these guys that have really sort of put their names on the line for a a high arguing that that intelligent people can and should believe. Um, this is connected in turn to the movement away from materialism in in the sciences. And if you think about how the time scale of these sorts of things, you realize that we should expect them to move very very slowly. Um you know if you think about Isaac Newton at the end of the 17th century he himself was by no means a materialist or an atheist but it was he who created the system that others would then take and use in defense of this kind of general uh materialism that then took hold in in the 19th century and afterward. And so that's, you know, almost 500 years of of cultural life from the from the genesis of an idea. And you can take it back even further and say that that that idea begins really with Capernacus and sort of the earlier scientific revolution 500 years before that just becomes the atmosphere of of acceptable opinion that we grew up in. It produces this kind of world where we all grew up sort of thinking that materialism and atheism were were the smart thing. And so if you then say, well, it was 125 years ago that the quantum revolution kind of upended all of the material assumptions that were underneath that that climate of opinion. You realize that we're only 125 years into what might be our next 500 year long shift and it might be away from that kind of materialist scientistic view and toward something more spiritual. That's my hope anyway. Mhm. I I do think you see that also there's the youngest the sort of the newest generation seems to be more interested in curiously in religiosity which is not something that I that I expected. >> Exactly. Yes. Yes. >> Spencer, one quick sec. We're going to take a break and folks, we're going to be right back. Thank you for tuning in to American Thought Leaders. In a world where spin and agendas dominate the headlines, I'm proud to bring you unfiltered insights from the brightest minds in America from a relative outsider Canadian perspective. To keep this possible and to access even more exclusive content, in-depth documentaries, and our daily digital newspaper, consider subscribing to the Epoch Times today. It's your way to support independent journalism. Just hit the link in the description below to subscribe and unlock the full American Thought Leaders Experience and so much more. You can try it today for just $1 a week. So just hit the link in the description below. And now back to the interview. And we're back with Spencer Claven, author of Light of the Mind, Light of the World. Well, so this fits perfectly into the other thing I wanted to talk to you about, which is just where art has gone over the last however many centuries. Cuz my my sense is that a big part of artistry had to do with I mean, look at >> the these incredible symphonies and various musical compositions that were made. It was a lot of it had to do with, you know, celebrating the divine, >> right? When you're making art that way, you get something very very different than you're making if you're making it to shock or for its own sake or some I I don't know for for some other reason. >> Yeah. >> Right. >> Right. I mean again most of the art which we'll be familiar with from the western classical tradition is going to be specifically Christian and so it will have these particular scriptural themes but that's actually secondary to what you're talking about which is just the idea that the body and matter and the physical world is imbued with more than itself that it has meaning beyond ond itself and that's common also to say the classical Greek artistic tradition which even you know before long before modernity the Greeks were sculpting these phenomenal works of art that that paid tribute to the dignity and the beauty of the human form those famous sculptures and the meticulous attention to to realist detail. What were they doing? What's what's that about? Right? And and what's art about just generally? Well, when we make art, fundamentally what we're doing is we're taking some physical stuff, some medium, and we're investing it with some sort of form or meaning so that it can represent something beyond itself. And you do that by chiseling in stone, or you do it by scratching on the cave wall, or you do it by making vibrations in the air, or you do it, you know, any number of ways. But it's all a translation of this material substrate, this stuff that we have kind of all around us. It's all translating that into some kind of idea or depiction or or picture of something. What are you going to depict? Right? What what kinds of things are there in that higher plane? The only answer that produces beautiful art is that beyond this material world, there is a soul. there is something some set of beautiful and ideal good things that we have access to by virtue of our humanity. If you don't believe in any of that, you're just molding clay. You're just moving gunk around. And I think that the developments in art that followed on from the great secularization of the say 19th century and thereabouts testify to this. You you instantly the minute that happens, you start to get the dissolution of form, the the form of the classical ideal, the the representationalism that had been sort of part of the artistic tradition for the for its entire existence starts to break down. you start to get, you know, woman descending a staircase and the and and you know, some of these artists, by the way, whom I actually quite appreciate like Picasso, but who are nevertheless clearly involved in deconstructing, right? Taking apart um and after that, all that's left to do is to take apart more and you end up with Jackson Pollock, right? And you end up with these sort of um and these sort of very sophisticated scribblings and and and squishings >> and dada >> and and dataism is another great example. Yeah, I think again that is another thing that I think has just played itself out. I just think that that's uh sort of exhausted and people will continue to do it. It's not like there there won't still be these artistic movements and there won't still be people making materialist arguments, but the resources of that are are are completely exhausted. There's nothing left for for that movement to say. >> Just if I may comment, you know, living in Washington DC, you can see it. I mean there's there's these you know beautiful buildings which are you know looking back into the to the classical tradition and then you have these you know literally brutalist buildings right which you and you wonder how did someone thought this was a good idea >> well they're difficult to work in right they're kind of they're oppressive in their own I mean any you'll talk to anybody working in one of them and they'll be like >> I don't know about this right >> and there was a philosophy that went into I mean people brutalism is such an apt name because it sort of sounds the It looks, but it comes from a French term meaning raw concrete. It It's actually not brutal in the in our original sense, although it's related to that. It's it's raw, kind of un unshaped, unmolded. Um, and there were economic reasons for it, but there were also philosophical justifications for it that basically had to do with what we're talking about that that all of our forms are kind of arbitrary. They're not derived from any absolute reality beyond this world. They're kind of imposed by us at random on or at will on on nature. And so we can just decide that this building is going to be a big brick, a brick big square and that won't go against anything inherent in our nature. We'll just adapt. And that turned out to be profoundly wrong. So you know, it's funny. We haven't talked about Donald Trump almost at all in this in this conversation. We've had lots of other interesting things to talk about, but Trump's order or I think it's an executive order to restore classical architecture. You know, I think that speaks to a certain instinct he has for people's hunger for I mean these these are forms that have endured and survived for a reason and that maintain their beauty because they connect with the eternal. I mean there's a reason why brutalism goes out of date instantaneously, right? now looks so shabby and kind of old and those classical buildings still look as beautiful as ever. You know, they hopefully we won't just copy and repeat what went before us. But, you know, if in fact Trump is able to get some of these building commissions uh in place, you you might well see a kind of rebirth of of the new classicism. Um certainly, you're seeing it in in in writing. I think if you go on Substack and you read the most interesting fiction, a lot of it is kind of based on this idea that we we've got to recover form because otherwise what is there to do? >> Wonderful. Uh final thought as we finish up. >> Oh boy. Well, this has been such a wonderful conversation and thank you for for having me. Um, I I would say that one great thing about reading old books, which has been the work of my life and also the thing that I am always trying to convince other people to do. One great thing about reading old books is you very quickly discover you're not alone. And we, another thing that we've lived with is this idea that we have to go with whatever just comes out of the news in the last five minutes. We're in this constant stream of new crisis, new information, new post on social media. Um, and technology has unsettled us in so many ways. It's easy to feel as if we're facing challenges that nobody's ever faced before. In fact, what's happened is that in the wake of our new technologies, we've been confronted with questions that have been confronted by every generation ever. Deep, profound, universal, eternal human level questions. and the western cannon and the uh inheritance of the western civilization exists to maintain and retain the best of what has been thought and said on these very subjects. Um, so if in fact you are feeling disoriented, if you are feeling uncertain, if there's kind of this generalized sense of anxiety, um, that is a great time, a great moment to turn your phone off, turn your TV off, pick up some of the great books of the past and realize you're not alone. >> Well, Spencer Claybin, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you, Yan. It's been a delight. If you enjoyed what you just watched, support our independent journalism by subscribing today to the Epoch Times and get access to all of our exclusive content. Just click the link in the description below and we'll see you next time. [Music]