In this episode, Oren McIntyre discusses the importance of the Western Canon, a set of books that form the foundation of our culture. He explains why the canon is so important, and why we should all be reading them.
00:01:12.040I'm somebody who talks a lot about the importance of political power and taking action and all of these things.
00:01:19.000But the cultural preservation necessary to give us a connection to the traditions that are worth fighting for is essential.
00:01:28.080And that's really what the canon is all about.
00:01:31.680At the end of the day, we are narrative creatures.
00:01:36.040Humans don't just walk around with a bunch of facts and logic, and that's how they communicate at every moment.
00:01:43.220Everyone's not this hyper-rational individual that we so often want to pretend that we are.
00:01:49.300In many ways, we are constantly living out stories, inhabiting the archetypes and the characters that we're familiar with.
00:01:58.280When we have discussions, when we have exchanges, we're doing that in a very symbolic manner.
00:02:04.680And so I wanted to focus today on the importance of that tradition, because if we're not understanding that, if we're not reading these classics, if we're not sharing them with those that we care about, if we're not creating a context in which they are part of our language and our culture, then we can have all the political battles we want.
00:02:27.840We can even win all the political battles we want, but we won't have anything meaningful and substantive to go ahead and pour all of those victories into.
00:02:38.300And I think that's a really critical thing that we need to focus on as we try to figure out what we're fighting for.
00:02:44.700So I'm going to dive into all of that, guys.
00:02:46.540But before I do, let me tell you a little bit about today's sponsor, ISI.
00:02:51.500Universities today aren't just neglecting real education.
00:02:54.260They're actively undermining it, and we can't let them get away with it.
00:02:57.280America was made for an educated and engaged citizenry.
00:03:00.980The Intercollegiate Studies Institute is here to help.
00:03:03.780ISI offers programs and opportunities for conservative students across the country.
00:03:08.960ISI understands that conservatives and right-of-center students feel isolated on college campuses and that you're often fighting for your own reputation, dignity, and future.
00:03:18.940Through ISI, you can learn about what Russell Kirk called the permanent things,
00:03:22.740the philosophical and political teachings that shaped and made Western civilization great.
00:03:28.080ISI offers many opportunities to jumpstart your career.
00:03:31.160They have fellowships at some of the nation's top conservative publications like National Review,
00:03:35.520The American Conservative, and The College Thinker.
00:03:38.260If you're a graduate student, ISI offers funding opportunities to sponsor the next great generation of college professors.
00:03:44.240Through ISI, you can work with conservative thinkers who are making a difference.
00:03:47.860Thinkers like Chris Ruffo, who currently has an ISI researcher helping him with his book.
00:03:53.220But perhaps most importantly, ISI offers college students a community of people that can help them grow.
00:03:58.620If you're a college student, ISI can help you start a student organization or student newspaper
00:04:03.420or meet other like-minded students at their various conferences and events.
00:04:08.140ISI is here to educate the next generation of great Americans.
00:13:09.880And look, of course, there's always going to be missionaries.
00:13:12.160The Bible is clear that there should be.
00:13:13.700But a lot of people are really focused on sending their church members half a world away and sending all of their money and attention and prayer to people, you know, many, many, many countries removed from them.
00:13:28.300Why the kid down the street has no clue about Jesus, has no idea who any of the people in the Bible are, could not make and could not understand allusions to any of the events in there.
00:13:41.280Now, I'm a Christian, and I think that that's a horrific thing just because everyone should come to Christ.
00:13:50.220It will change your life, and you should do that.
00:13:52.720But on top of that, it's a travesty because these stories are key to our identity.
00:13:59.520It's just, it's not, and this is what was one of the horrible things about stripping out biblical education from a public school, which absolutely belongs there, by the way.
00:14:09.840By stripping that out, by making it some kind of anathema to have a biblical education in there, you didn't just destroy people's religious understanding, which would in and of itself be a terrible crime.
00:14:22.260You destroyed their cultural understanding as well.
00:14:25.540The kids don't know any of these things.
00:14:27.700They have no shared language, no way to understand the type of passages that they're supposed to read.
00:14:35.200There's a reason that, you know, before we had this kind of current, terrible, modern education system, most people just learned in school by reading a couple texts.
00:17:27.780There's enough shared substrate for them to grasp what you are communicating,
00:17:33.300even if it's not being perfectly communicated through the exact words that you are putting out there.
00:17:38.880And this is absolutely critical because without this, not only can you not learn other works from the canon,
00:17:45.900but it becomes very difficult to just communicate as human beings.
00:17:50.040Again, when I was working as a teacher, I noticed how desperate these students were to try to connect with each other.
00:17:57.760But none of them had the shared language necessary.
00:18:00.960And so what happens is they all fall back on incredibly crude versions of this.
00:18:05.660This is why we have this horrific Marvel Star Warsification of our culture where people can only make references and allusions
00:18:16.660to movies from the last 15 years, just complete Disney slop that is coming out.
00:18:23.380Look, there's nothing wrong with watching movies.
00:18:26.120I liked the original Star Wars movies.
00:18:28.280I liked some of the original Marvel movies when they came out.
00:18:31.660But they shouldn't be the core way that you talk to each other in every situation.
00:18:36.460When you reach for a common understanding, when you're trying to make a reference that will communicate
00:18:41.880the meaning and purpose and depth of a certain situation to others,
00:18:47.260you don't want to allude to, I don't know, like whatever garbage Skywalker movie came out three years ago.
00:18:54.460You want to be able to reach for something rich and impactful, something that shows the depth of the human experience that has stood the test of time and echoes through history.
00:19:05.340That's far more critical than, you know, just referencing whatever slop has come down from on high in the movie production, you know, pipeline.
00:19:17.120And I saw this most when, you know, one of the things that would happen is kids would play these games, these quiz games to make sure that they are going to do well on the test, you know, give them something fun to do.
00:19:30.280And when they would do that, you know, every once in a while, you'd be like, OK, well, here's the one in American history.
00:20:06.820But that really was like the most shared culture they had.
00:20:11.120You couldn't have flashed, you know, pictures of biblical stories up there.
00:20:16.140You couldn't have made allusions to other other things that would have been key to different parts of the Iliad or the Odyssey or anything.
00:20:24.220They would have they wouldn't have been able to get any of that.
00:20:26.600None of that would have made sense to them.
00:20:28.000In fact, in some cases, I actually did try that.
00:21:36.580They've broken in many cases the shared culture that's necessary to go ahead and communicate your values from one generation to the next.
00:21:47.440And this is really important because when you have that complete cultural break, you're in a situation where kids can really be completely programmed into anything because they have no base.
00:22:00.520There's no there's no time tested tradition that's backing up any of their understanding.
00:22:06.440And again, it's not just about learning the morals or memorizing the Ten Commandments or something.
00:22:13.900It's about the fact that when you don't have stories that you share that are time tested and and and feature archetypes that echo through history, you don't have a definition of your role in the world.
00:23:13.140They help people understand the world about them and how they should fit into it.
00:23:17.240And when you don't have that, when your country just becomes this complete, you know, disembodied economic zone with no real way to understand each other, you end up in a very dangerous scenario.
00:23:29.840And it becomes very hard to build again because the canon, again, has to be alive.
00:23:36.500It has to be something that we're tied together on a regular basis.
00:23:41.300And if you have that break, then there's no way to create that cultural continuity.
00:23:49.460Deconstruction has become really our only connection to the canon at this point, right?
00:23:55.020Nobody can just put on a Shakespeare production.
00:23:57.400I went to London with my wife a couple of years ago, and we wanted to go to the Globe Theater to watch Shakespeare because it's the Globe Theater and Shakespeare.
00:24:08.940And it's a huge part of history, but you can't go to the Globe Theater and just watch a Shakespeare production anymore.
00:24:15.940They're all the radically woke deconstructions and reconstructions of Shakespeare.
00:24:22.860They won't just Shakespeare is boring, right?
00:24:25.400Everybody knows it, except actually no one knows it anymore.
00:24:59.720It's about carrying on something that's true and powerful and meaningful.
00:25:05.600But you can't do that anymore because no one who actually performs Shakespeare would actually want to be caught dead performing real Shakespeare.
00:25:20.120That's what makes them look progressive.
00:25:21.600And so it's impossible anymore to connect to that tradition.
00:25:26.820The only place you can find a Shakespeare play that's actually being done is like maybe a high school.
00:25:31.720And even then, it's only maybe most of them feel like Shakespeare is too much of a dead white guy to even put on his plays.
00:25:38.800And so it's impossible to even capture that anymore.
00:25:41.740You got to go watch, I don't know, like a 1950s Marlon Brando rendition of Julius Caesar to actually watch that play be performed at this point.
00:25:52.360And so it's a very dangerous, dangerous scenario to be in because you don't have a way to make cultural traction.
00:26:00.320And that really is where we're at at this point, right?
00:26:02.960It's not just that we are in danger of losing the canon.
00:26:07.980When does fast grocery delivery through Instacart matter most?
00:26:11.060When your famous grainy mustard potato salad isn't so famous without the grainy mustard.
00:26:16.140When the barbecue's lit, but there's nothing to grill.
00:26:18.820When the in-laws decide that, actually, they will stay for dinner.
00:26:22.540Instacart has all your groceries covered this summer.
00:26:25.160So download the app and get delivery in as fast as 60 minutes.
00:26:28.740Plus, enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders.
00:26:32.440Service fees exclusions and terms apply.
00:26:34.760Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver.
00:26:37.060It's not just like, oh, well, you know, if we don't safeguard it for this generation, it might be gone in the next generation.
00:26:44.140No, we didn't safeguard it for several generations.
00:27:05.380You could still check out the works of Shakespeare and probably, you know, check out some Dickens and something in most of these libraries.
00:27:12.160But if you go in, 95% of the slop everywhere is just whatever new novel thing is coming out.
00:29:53.480Take the time to go back and mix in a lot of these classics.
00:29:58.180Importantly, if you're involved in educating people, if you're involved, if you're raising children, make sure that's part of their life.
00:30:06.500Make sure that you're, you know, you could read Livy's Lives to, you know, to your children.
00:30:13.040You can read the, you know, the different adventures of classic heroes.
00:30:18.620You should, of course, be reading the Bible.
00:30:20.140These are all things that you can put into as, you know, your children's lives as part of their culture.
00:30:26.080Or maybe it won't be in their wider reference when it comes to, I don't know, something that's on TV.
00:30:32.100But at least it will be something that was a core foundation of theirs growing up.
00:30:35.600When I was a kid, my mom got me a lot of those condensed classic novels for kids, right?
00:30:41.000And I didn't go back and read the adult version of every one of them.
00:30:44.020But I did read a lot of them when I was a kid.
00:30:46.020So I was already familiar with Moby Dick references and Treasure Island and The Three Musketeers and The Man in the Iron Mask and, you know, just the Tom Sawyer, you know, Connecticut Yankee and King Arthur's Court.
00:30:58.180I knew all of these books well before I read the full book or, you know, had an understanding of their deeper context.
00:31:07.460But because I knew the basic story later on when I read Moby Dick, you know, when I got older, I grasped a lot more of it than my classmates because I already knew the details.
00:31:20.620I already knew a lot of the general, you know, where the story was going.
00:31:25.140These things matter and you can take part in this.
00:31:31.680Start getting together with people who care about this.
00:31:34.760And by the way, this is a great way to, one, basket weave and to take care of, you know, something that's critical and make it right wing.
00:31:44.960And I'm not saying go out of your way to be explicitly right wing.
00:31:47.520You won't need to be because if you're just focusing on the classics, if you're reading the classics, most of the people who are interested in that at this point probably are a little right wing anyway.
00:31:56.880Or at least they're they're probably walking away from progressivism.
00:31:59.720If they wanted to be progressive, they would never be reading all these dead white men.
00:32:03.060So this is this is what I talk about when I talk about creating social institutions that are implicitly right wing, but are not explicitly political.
00:32:12.740You need to make these connections that are not political, but are cultural and will draw you together with people who will share your politics inevitably.
00:32:22.900But that's not the core of what you do.
00:32:24.940And that also protects your organizations from, you know, things like the government that might want to attack right wing organizations because the core of your reading group is Shakespeare or, you know, Tolstoy or, you know, Dickens or something.
00:32:40.680It's not something that's easily, you know, prosecutable.
00:32:43.720It's not going to have them searching, you know, through your emails or your DMs on a regular basis.
00:32:48.820These are things that you can do that build culture, that draw like minded people together, that further your traditions and also set you up to be culturally influential because you're going to have access to a depth of rich culture that other people simply don't have.
00:33:08.420Yeah, it might not help you at your current corporate job, but at some point we're going to see a revival of right wing or conservative or neo-traditional, I guess, whatever, however you want to say this, we're going to see a resurgence of this cultural force.
00:33:46.040I mean, there are some examples, but it's still very mired in kind of production values and other issues at the moment.
00:33:54.420However, it's increasingly just better than anything that the left is putting out.
00:33:59.340I mean, I'll say this, you know, the chosen, you know, not all of its production values are going to blow you away.
00:34:05.700Sometimes not even all of its writing is going to blow you away.
00:34:08.680But just the fact that it's like telling an interest, it's an interesting way to tell biblical stories actually does set it apart and make it better than a lot of what's on streaming services today.
00:34:18.260And that's one of the reasons that it is a success.
00:34:20.880And I think you're going to see more and more of this and it's going to be more interesting.
00:34:23.840It's not just going to be, you know, direct iterations on Bible stories, though it will make allusions to those things.
00:34:29.740Of course, it has to in order to be referencing the Western canon.
00:34:34.000But I think if you are involved in these groups, you will be the kind of people who will be drawn upon to do this kind of stuff.
00:34:41.880You'll be inspired to make these kinds of things.
00:34:44.700So I think there is important work to be done.
00:34:51.820We can cultivate and bring back and not just, you know, but revivify.
00:34:56.720We're not just returning to reading Shakespeare or something like that.
00:35:01.280But we're returning to a place where we have immersed ourselves deeply enough in the canon to once again have a rich ground from which to draw and create things.
00:35:15.860One of the reasons the left is so bankrupt is they're just deconstructing the last little bits that you're picking the last little bits of meat off the bones of Western civilization.
00:35:25.820They can't make good culture anymore because there's nothing left for them to draw on.
00:35:31.140They've deconstructed and destroyed all of it.
00:35:41.180They've made it culturally toxic to be familiar even with the works of these dead white men.
00:35:48.360But you can be countercultural just by investing in that culture, just by looking back into the past and saying, these are the deep, rich, cultural works that inform my ancestors, that were created by my ancestors and informed everything that I grew up with.
00:36:06.640And they will inform what my children grew up with.
00:36:11.860Now, I'm not saying everything is bottom up.
00:36:13.640You know that I'm an elite theory guy.
00:36:15.360So I'm not just saying, oh, well, if every one of us does this, though, to be clear, every one of us should do this.
00:36:21.980But it's not just about every one of us doing this by ourselves alone or from the bottom up.
00:36:28.560But if we create a scenario where we are training the next generation to be familiar with this and have this aspect to themselves, this culture that no one else has, then you will be de facto training elites.
00:36:45.360Because they'll be superior to the people around them.
00:36:49.140If everyone else is going to public school and getting this complete garbage trash culture and the only thing they can reference is like Taco Bell and whatever Marvel movie came out three weeks ago.
00:37:01.340And that's the only culture that they have any attachment to.
00:37:05.560And your kids are people who are well-read and well-versed in the classics and have a deep connection to their tradition and to God.
00:37:15.900They are spiritually and mentally healthy.
00:37:21.820And at some point, the entire point of our society won't be just to mow those people down.
00:37:29.140We will need these people to rescue us from what society has become.
00:37:34.200And so it's critical that you create the culture now, that you inculcate the virtue now, that you create that deep and important well that your next generation can immerse themselves in.
00:37:48.580So that when they rise up and take their place as those who influence the culture and build great things, they will have the necessary connection to the past.
00:37:59.520They will have the connection to that wellspring of deep thought and deep emotion and true culture that will allow them to make a meaningful connections, to have a powerful influence, and to build great things.
00:38:15.040And so that's why it's absolutely critical that we reconnect to the Western canon.
00:38:19.580Again, everybody doesn't need to start memorizing every line of the Iliad.
00:38:34.260And we can all make an effort to grow ourselves in this way, become more connected to this, and most importantly, pass that on to the next generation.
00:39:48.340John Milton has written more in one sentence than Stephen King has written in his whole career.
00:39:55.660You know, one of the things that I definitely learned over time is the importance of rereading and meditating.
00:40:03.260Obviously, you know, in many cases that you read something through the first time and it's just about getting down the idea, the basic outline, the sketch, the stories.
00:40:13.420But more and more, I find myself realizing that rather than reading another 10 books, just to say I read them, I should probably reread slowly and meditate on and take notes on some of the things I've already read.
00:40:26.440So that I have a deeper grasp of them.
00:40:30.280This is one of the things that really makes us stop and understand important things is the depth that is inside many of these stories, the layers of meaning that are wrapped in many of these classic works.
00:40:44.380And that's, again, what makes them so valuable.
00:40:46.820They're not, you know, I mean, I like some Stephen King novels.
00:40:49.260You know, it's not that there's nothing of value there, but the fact that there is layer upon layer upon layer that every time you read Shakespeare, every time you read the Bible, every time you read many of these works, there's something else hiding behind it is what gives it that rich depth.
00:41:06.240Because, again, when we talk to each other, we talk in this, too, right?
00:43:57.540And, you know, and again, you'll be at an advantage because you'll be absorbing critical things that no one else is because they have bought into this propaganda that they need to leave the Western canon by the wayside.
00:44:08.700Tiny Stupid Demon says, finished your book, was awesome.
00:44:12.800Room got dusty at tree planting part in the last chapter.
00:44:22.180I'm really glad that you enjoyed the book.
00:44:24.000Thank you for buying it and reading it.
00:44:28.220Obviously, I'm making references to Play-Doh in there.
00:44:30.940And, of course, Play-Doh does warn about democracy in his work.
00:44:35.460So you could definitely use a lot of Play-Doh there.
00:44:37.980I did use a lot more contemporary, or I shouldn't say contemporary thinkers, but I used thinkers from the last couple of centuries as opposed to going all the way back to the ancients.
00:44:48.160Because I feel like there are a lot of people who go back to the ancients, and it's fine work.
00:47:25.840And let's see glow in the dark says, have you ever read anything about the sophists kind of encouraging because it seems history does rhyme.
00:47:36.140Sophists of Plato's time were the experts of their time or so sources say.
00:47:41.740I mean, obviously, you know, the idea that they would just speak to speak to sound important as a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.
00:47:50.080It is very clear that there's a lot of connection to how to what's happening today and the fact that the experts of our time are losing their sway in a very similar manner is certainly a good thing.
00:48:03.060The fact that rhetoric, empty rhetoric itself is seems to be losing some of its power is really critical.