The Auron MacIntyre Show - How the Canon Defines Culture ｜ 5⧸8⧸2024

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00:00:30.000 Hey, everybody. How's it going?

00:00:32.420 Thanks for joining me this afternoon.

00:00:34.780 I am Oren McIntyre.

00:00:37.420 I wanted to talk to you today about the importance of books,

00:00:42.880 the literary Western canon.

00:00:45.820 It's not something that we often discuss.

00:00:48.380 It's not something that people even think about very much anymore.

00:00:52.160 We're fighting for a civilization.

00:00:54.400 We're fighting the current political battle.

00:00:57.660 But we rarely remember the importance of creating the cultural continuity that gives us something worth fighting for.

00:01:06.480 We're always focused on the current issue, the current drama.

00:01:10.760 And I get it, of course.

00:01:12.040 I'm somebody who talks a lot about the importance of political power and taking action and all of these things.

00:01:19.000 But the cultural preservation necessary to give us a connection to the traditions that are worth fighting for is essential.

00:01:28.080 And that's really what the canon is all about.

00:01:31.680 At the end of the day, we are narrative creatures.

00:01:36.040 Humans don't just walk around with a bunch of facts and logic, and that's how they communicate at every moment.

00:01:43.220 Everyone's not this hyper-rational individual that we so often want to pretend that we are.

00:01:49.300 In many ways, we are constantly living out stories, inhabiting the archetypes and the characters that we're familiar with.

00:01:58.280 When we have discussions, when we have exchanges, we're doing that in a very symbolic manner.

00:02:04.680 And 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.

00:02:27.840 We 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.

00:02:38.300 And 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.

00:02:44.700 So I'm going to dive into all of that, guys.

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00:04:17.860 All right, so the first thing we should probably do when we're talking about the literary canon,

00:04:22.520 the Western canon, is explain what that is, because many people might not be familiar with that concept.

00:04:29.840 So every culture is going to have a set of stories, a set of books,

00:04:33.840 that form the foundation of who they are as a people.

00:04:38.800 They're the common literature that everyone is familiar with.

00:04:43.200 Everybody in the nation, everybody who's a part of the culture has some awareness of these works.

00:04:50.960 And these works serve as a language which they use to talk to each other.

00:04:56.980 It's not just the words, obviously.

00:04:58.940 It's not just the sounds or the shapes that you write on a paper that make a language, of course.

00:05:04.680 It's the ideas that are captured in that.

00:05:08.040 And those things have to come from a shared experience.

00:05:11.280 And you can't really have a shared experience outside your immediate community without some kind of shared literature,

00:05:18.560 some stories that everyone understands, everyone can draw archetypes from.

00:05:23.280 Because, again, we are narrative creatures.

00:05:25.560 We are not people who just communicate raw facts on a regular basis.

00:05:29.900 And so who are some of the people or what are some of the books that would make up this Western canon?

00:05:36.040 Well, I think we can go all the way back to the works of maybe the ancient Greeks.

00:05:40.440 We can look at things like the works of Homer, the Iliad, and the Odyssey, Plato and Aristotle.

00:05:47.700 These are going to be things that people make references to.

00:05:51.240 Often, and this is really important when we talk about the canon,

00:05:54.260 and often people are making references to these things even when they don't know this about themselves.

00:06:00.780 They don't understand.

00:06:01.920 They might say something about a cyclops or the sirens.

00:06:05.660 They might say something about the Achilles or these kind of things.

00:06:10.060 They might even not know the stories that they're talking about.

00:06:14.040 But they're still speaking in allusions to these works.

00:06:17.860 They echo through all of your conversations and all of your back and forths,

00:06:22.920 even if you're not particularly aware of them.

00:06:26.020 Of course, I think the core book that's going to be key to the Western canon

00:06:30.580 will be the King James Bible.

00:06:32.940 Now, other translations of the Bible, I'm not saying that they're not valid or they don't have value.

00:06:39.060 I'm not saying that the King James translation is the most faithful in every single situation.

00:06:44.620 But the King James Bible is the one that all of these other classic works pull from.

00:06:51.020 So it's kind of the bedrock of the canon.

00:06:53.840 When we talk about the works of Shakespeare or Milton or Dante,

00:06:58.460 who are all going to be part of the canon as well,

00:07:01.220 they are themselves completely unable to be understood without the context of the Bible.

00:07:09.220 Very specifically, the King James Bible.

00:07:11.700 This is actually a huge problem now when you try to teach these works.

00:07:16.260 As someone who was a teacher, I'm very familiar with this.

00:07:19.380 When you try to teach these common concepts, these cultural concepts to children today,

00:07:25.460 they can't grasp these works because they don't know the foundation of the works.

00:07:31.560 They can't grasp Shakespeare, not just because they have a difficult time reading something of that complexity,

00:07:37.600 but because they don't have the biblical references that are constantly made by Shakespeare throughout his work.

00:07:44.980 They don't even know often the stories of David and Goliath or the birth of Jesus,

00:07:52.640 much less more in-depth references, something to, I don't know, Daniel.

00:08:00.680 They don't know Daniel in the lion's den.

00:08:03.180 They don't know a lot of these basic stories that you think you could easily Jonah.

00:08:07.960 You could just make allusions to Moses.

00:08:10.760 You assume that people just understand these things.

00:08:13.500 But if you're not familiar with the biblical text,

00:08:17.540 then you're not going to be able to draw on it when those things are put into, say, something like Shakespeare.

00:08:22.740 And again, I'm sorry, the language of the King James Bible is echoed through all of those things.

00:08:30.860 So the specific scriptural references that are echoed over and over again in those works

00:08:36.360 are going to be very specifically the King James Bible.

00:08:39.680 Though, again, that doesn't mean it's the one I prefer to read,

00:08:43.200 but that doesn't mean that there aren't other translations that are valuable.

00:08:46.220 It just means that is the one that was the core text for so many other great works that are critical to the canon.

00:08:53.600 Again, like I said, you're also going to want to look at Shakespeare.

00:08:56.720 You're going to want to look at Dante.

00:08:59.200 Obviously, Milton and Paradise Lost are going to be critical.

00:09:03.620 Guys like Dickens, Mark Twain, Alexander DeMoss.

00:09:07.780 All of these are going to be absolutely critical to the canon.

00:09:11.700 And again, this creates this shared language when people make a reference to the white whale and Moby Dick,

00:09:20.340 or they make a reference to something that takes place in a Dickensian novel or the painting of the fence and Tom Sawyer.

00:09:29.900 These are all references that even if as a child, right, I would watch a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

00:09:37.060 I would watch a Looney Tunes cartoon, and he would make the speech from Julius Caesar about, you know,

00:09:43.420 lend me your ears, fellow Romans.

00:09:46.020 And I didn't know that's where that was from.

00:09:48.780 I was completely unfamiliar with the play Julius Caesar.

00:09:52.340 I hadn't read any Shakespeare at age eight.

00:09:55.320 You know, Bugs Bunny is sitting there in a toga holding an ear of corn.

00:09:59.300 Lend me your ears, right?

00:10:00.880 I didn't get that joke other than Bugs Bunny just looked funny.

00:10:04.540 But later on, when I, of course, became aware of these things and eventually read that work,

00:10:10.920 it was a completion of my culture, right?

00:10:13.880 Even though this is just a silly kid's cartoon,

00:10:16.420 the fact that it alluded back to far more serious and important works that had a great cultural impact

00:10:23.620 meant that there's a wholeness that you find when you work your way through your life

00:10:29.480 because the canon has woven its way through everything that you consume,

00:10:34.180 from the smallest, you know, thing given to a child to amuse them,

00:10:38.740 all the way up to rich works that, you know, inform the human condition.

00:10:42.580 All of them are making a constant call back to these things.

00:10:47.320 Now, you notice that some of those works go all the way back to the Greeks.

00:10:51.160 Some of them are part of, you know, a medieval tradition.

00:10:55.020 They could work their way up to Elizabethan England.

00:10:58.380 And, of course, over time, this means that your canon is going to expand.

00:11:03.060 To be clear, the canon isn't just some constant fixed thing.

00:11:07.900 It's not just this set of books that you absolutely have to have read all the time

00:11:13.820 and there's never anything that gets added.

00:11:15.800 Over time, you have to go ahead and start putting things in there.

00:11:19.420 I mean, at some point, you think that somebody like Tolkien will probably become part of the canon

00:11:24.680 due to the massive work impact of his literary work.

00:11:28.800 It probably is a little too early for that yet,

00:11:30.940 but I would say he's a really good candidate down the road to be added.

00:11:35.420 And, you know, at some point, some of this could start falling away.

00:11:39.200 You look at maybe something like Chaucer, Canterbury Tales,

00:11:42.280 probably doesn't have the cultural impact and relevance at this point that it used to have.

00:11:47.380 So it's not like there has to be a static version of the canon.

00:11:51.480 Any good tradition is ultimately a living tradition,

00:11:55.240 and canon must be added to the canon over time once you recognize their impact.

00:12:02.080 Also, it's important to realize the canon is not something to necessarily always be completed.

00:12:07.440 Let's be really honest.

00:12:09.220 The average person is not going to read every work of classic literature.

00:12:14.200 That's just not a reasonable thing to expect the average person to do.

00:12:19.100 The point of the canon isn't to create this definitive body that every single person has to read at any given moment.

00:12:26.560 The point of it is to recognize a central core of text that inform the way that we talk to each other.

00:12:34.440 And this is really important because, again, I worked as a teacher.

00:12:39.360 And unfortunately, I worked in some areas where, you know, the population was very new, heavily immigrant.

00:12:46.860 Many of the children are entirely unconnected to kind of the traditions that are core to the Western idea.

00:12:57.360 And especially a lot of them were unchurched.

00:13:00.240 They were completely unfamiliar with the Bible, completely unfamiliar with all references to Christianity.

00:13:06.400 I know a lot of people think that we need to go to Africa.

00:13:09.240 We got to send that.

00:13:09.880 And look, of course, there's always going to be missionaries.

00:13:12.160 The Bible is clear that there should be.

00:13:13.700 But 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.

00:13:28.300 Why 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.

00:13:41.280 Now, I'm a Christian, and I think that that's a horrific thing just because everyone should come to Christ.

00:13:47.800 Christ is King.

00:13:48.580 Christ is Lord.

00:13:49.200 He's the Savior.

00:13:50.220 It will change your life, and you should do that.

00:13:52.720 But on top of that, it's a travesty because these stories are key to our identity.

00:13:59.520 It'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.

00:14:08.700 It has to be there.

00:14:09.840 By 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.

00:14:22.260 You destroyed their cultural understanding as well.

00:14:25.540 The kids don't know any of these things.

00:14:27.700 They have no shared language, no way to understand the type of passages that they're supposed to read.

00:14:35.200 There'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.

00:14:46.240 You read your Bible.

00:14:47.500 You know, maybe you learned Latin by reading, I don't know, Cicero.

00:14:51.160 There are only a few.

00:14:52.720 There's a handful of books that everyone read, and that's how you learned things.

00:14:56.860 And the fact that everyone had to learn them, you weren't trying to read passages from every culture across the world.

00:15:03.660 You weren't trying to make sure that you had a representation of, I don't know, two-spirit, transsexual Eskimo literature.

00:15:13.220 But there was a core understanding of certain books meant that you could actually build a culture together.

00:15:20.360 There was something for people to assimilate to.

00:15:23.080 And to be really clear, that's why there's been this hostile attack on dead white men and their literature,

00:15:28.520 is that it was actually an attack not just on those people, though it absolutely is,

00:15:33.100 but it was also an attack on the culture that was attached to them. 0.99

00:15:36.220 These activists are not stupid.

00:15:37.760 They understand that if they can strip out those core shared texts, get rid of that canon, 0.93

00:15:43.500 they can destroy the culture that is attached to it.

00:15:46.620 And so while you're reading these little excerpts from, I don't know,

00:15:50.380 every single tiny minority community across the United States that have no connection to each other,

00:15:56.820 no through line, no connection to the history of the actual United States,

00:16:01.460 you end up in this situation where no one can speak a common language.

00:16:05.460 Because again, we are narrative creatures and we embody archetypes.

00:16:10.960 You are not just yourself.

00:16:13.120 You're not just this completely autonomous, rational individual making your personality up as you go.

00:16:21.340 You are actually a nested set of archetypes.

00:16:26.200 Things you have absorbed, ways of being, patterns of behavior, stories that you have learned.

00:16:32.820 And those things are things that you inhabit.

00:16:34.420 When something happens to you and you know you're supposed to be sad or you know you're supposed to be angry

00:16:40.760 or you know you're supposed to be compassionate,

00:16:43.900 the things that you do in response are not just natural patterns of behavior for you,

00:16:49.080 though sometimes they are.

00:16:50.440 They're also patterns that you recognize from the stories that you have absorbed.

00:16:55.160 And so it matters if you share the same stories because then when you're communicating with other people,

00:17:01.760 they recognize your behavior as acting out an archetype.

00:17:06.300 And they don't say that out loud.

00:17:08.040 They're not like, well, right now he's being Moses.

00:17:10.200 And oh, well, right now he's being Ishmael.

00:17:13.220 Well, right now he's being whatever character.

00:17:15.380 They don't always say that specifically, but oftentimes they understand it because they are familiar

00:17:22.140 with the paint that is being placed on the canvas.

00:17:26.240 They are familiar enough.

00:17:27.780 There's enough shared substrate for them to grasp what you are communicating,

00:17:33.300 even if it's not being perfectly communicated through the exact words that you are putting out there.

00:17:38.880 And this is absolutely critical because without this, not only can you not learn other works from the canon,

00:17:45.900 but it becomes very difficult to just communicate as human beings.

00:17:50.040 Again, when I was working as a teacher, I noticed how desperate these students were to try to connect with each other.

00:17:57.760 But none of them had the shared language necessary.

00:18:00.960 And so what happens is they all fall back on incredibly crude versions of this.

00:18:05.660 This is why we have this horrific Marvel Star Warsification of our culture where people can only make references and allusions

00:18:16.660 to movies from the last 15 years, just complete Disney slop that is coming out.

00:18:23.380 Look, there's nothing wrong with watching movies.

00:18:26.120 I liked the original Star Wars movies.

00:18:28.280 I liked some of the original Marvel movies when they came out.

00:18:31.660 But they shouldn't be the core way that you talk to each other in every situation.

00:18:36.460 When you reach for a common understanding, when you're trying to make a reference that will communicate

00:18:41.880 the meaning and purpose and depth of a certain situation to others,

00:18:47.260 you don't want to allude to, I don't know, like whatever garbage Skywalker movie came out three years ago.

00:18:54.460 You 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.

00:19:05.340 That's far more critical than, you know, just referencing whatever slop has come down from on high in the movie production, you know, pipeline.

00:19:15.300 It's really horrific.

00:19:17.120 And 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.

00:19:30.280 And 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.

00:19:34.800 Here's the one in the Constitution.

00:19:36.380 All right, we'll throw in one on we'll throw in a fun one.

00:19:39.040 What do you want to do?

00:19:40.020 And invariably, they all wanted to do advertisements.

00:19:43.020 They all wanted to do logos because that was the one shared thing they all had.

00:19:48.420 Some of them might have been from Haiti.

00:19:50.000 Some of them might have been from Guatemala.

00:19:52.080 Some of them might have been from Alabama.

00:19:54.120 Some of them might have been from Florida.

00:19:55.900 But the one thing they all shared is they could recognize Taco Bell and Starbucks and Pepsi logos.

00:20:03.360 And it's it's incredibly depressing.

00:20:05.920 It really is.

00:20:06.820 But that really was like the most shared culture they had.

00:20:11.120 You couldn't have flashed, you know, pictures of biblical stories up there.

00:20:16.140 You 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.

00:20:24.220 They would have they wouldn't have been able to get any of that.

00:20:26.600 None of that would have made sense to them.

00:20:28.000 In fact, in some cases, I actually did try that.

00:20:30.120 I tried some of those quizzes.

00:20:31.240 And they most of them just had no idea what I was talking about.

00:20:35.040 At one point, I actually had a kid ask me what the word moral meant.

00:20:38.960 I want you to understand I wasn't teaching an eight year old or a five year old.

00:20:43.500 I was teaching someone who was soon going to be an adult.

00:20:46.600 And they didn't know what those words meant because they just were unfamiliar with any of this stuff.

00:20:52.480 They have no culture. 0.98

00:20:53.740 They have no through line.

00:20:55.840 The canon is completely dead to them.

00:20:58.040 It doesn't make any sense.

00:20:59.900 And so they end up with this slop.

00:21:01.620 And the problem when you end up in this scenario is you have a complete just cultural break from the past.

00:21:10.980 And again, this was the purpose.

00:21:13.520 This is not this is not an accident.

00:21:15.920 You know, we're not at the scene of a complete accident.

00:21:20.600 We're at a crime scene.

00:21:21.600 The people who pushed the destruction of the education system had this goal in mind, right?

00:21:28.420 The abolition of the oppressive white patriarchal Western system.

00:21:33.420 That was the goal.

00:21:34.620 That was the explicit goal.

00:21:35.780 And they've done it.

00:21:36.580 They've broken in many cases the shared culture that's necessary to go ahead and communicate your values from one generation to the next.

00:21:47.440 And 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.

00:21:59.580 There's no truth.

00:22:00.520 There's no there's no time tested tradition that's backing up any of their understanding.

00:22:06.440 And again, it's not just about learning the morals or memorizing the Ten Commandments or something.

00:22:13.900 It'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.

00:22:28.200 What does a man look like?

00:22:29.680 What does a woman like look like? 1.00

00:22:31.420 What does a healthy marriage look like?

00:22:33.540 What does having children look like?

00:22:35.480 What does it mean to be a father, a mother?

00:22:37.600 What does it mean to be a good son or daughter?

00:22:40.240 How should I contribute to my community?

00:22:42.300 What does a meaningful life look like?

00:22:44.920 What's an ethical way to earn money?

00:22:47.080 How should I contribute to my society once I have some of that money?

00:22:52.000 These are all things that you completely don't understand because you don't have any moral ground.

00:22:59.500 Oh, I shouldn't act like Ebeneezer Scrooge.

00:23:02.120 Dickens is showing me what a healthy person looks like after Scrooge goes through this shift, right?

00:23:11.260 Those are things that matter.

00:23:13.140 They help people understand the world about them and how they should fit into it.

00:23:17.240 And 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.

00:23:29.840 And it becomes very hard to build again because the canon, again, has to be alive.

00:23:36.500 It has to be something that we're tied together on a regular basis.

00:23:41.300 And if you have that break, then there's no way to create that cultural continuity.

00:23:49.460 Deconstruction has become really our only connection to the canon at this point, right?

00:23:55.020 Nobody can just put on a Shakespeare production.

00:23:57.400 I 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.

00:24:08.940 And it's a huge part of history, but you can't go to the Globe Theater and just watch a Shakespeare production anymore.

00:24:15.940 They're all the radically woke deconstructions and reconstructions of Shakespeare.

00:24:22.860 They won't just Shakespeare is boring, right?

00:24:25.400 Everybody knows it, except actually no one knows it anymore.

00:24:28.760 That's the problem.

00:24:29.960 But everyone assumes that it's boring.

00:24:32.360 Everybody assumes it's passe.

00:24:33.520 It's already been done a thousand times because they've lost the importance of tradition.

00:24:38.560 And iterating on things over and over and over again.

00:24:41.900 Yes, the stories of the Bible have been told a thousand times.

00:24:45.320 Yes, the stories of Shakespeare have been told a thousand times.

00:24:48.740 The plays have been performed.

00:24:49.640 You know what?

00:24:50.240 You need to perform them a thousand more.

00:24:52.260 You need to tell them a thousand more.

00:24:54.380 You do that for a reason.

00:24:56.200 It's not all about novelty.

00:24:57.940 It's not all about being entertained.

00:24:59.720 It's about carrying on something that's true and powerful and meaningful.

00:25:05.600 But you can't do that anymore because no one who actually performs Shakespeare would actually want to be caught dead performing real Shakespeare.

00:25:13.960 They all want to be deconstructed.

00:25:15.700 That's what makes them look clever.

00:25:18.120 That's what makes them look current.

00:25:20.120 That's what makes them look progressive.

00:25:21.600 And so it's impossible anymore to connect to that tradition.

00:25:26.820 The only place you can find a Shakespeare play that's actually being done is like maybe a high school.

00:25:31.720 And 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.

00:25:38.800 And so it's impossible to even capture that anymore.

00:25:41.740 You 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.

00:25:52.360 And so it's a very dangerous, dangerous scenario to be in because you don't have a way to make cultural traction.

00:26:00.320 And that really is where we're at at this point, right?

00:26:02.960 It's not just that we are in danger of losing the canon.

00:26:07.980 When does fast grocery delivery through Instacart matter most?

00:26:11.060 When your famous grainy mustard potato salad isn't so famous without the grainy mustard.

00:26:16.140 When the barbecue's lit, but there's nothing to grill.

00:26:18.820 When the in-laws decide that, actually, they will stay for dinner.

00:26:22.540 Instacart has all your groceries covered this summer.

00:26:25.160 So download the app and get delivery in as fast as 60 minutes.

00:26:28.740 Plus, enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders.

00:26:32.440 Service fees exclusions and terms apply.

00:26:34.760 Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver.

00:26:37.060 It'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.

00:26:44.140 No, we didn't safeguard it for several generations.

00:26:46.960 And now it really is gone.

00:26:48.620 Like, the text is there.

00:26:50.480 You can still go back and read the canon most of the time.

00:26:54.320 But it's not a living connection for most people.

00:26:58.540 If you go to a library in many places, they've cleaned out most of these books.

00:27:04.440 I mean, don't get me wrong.

00:27:05.380 You could still check out the works of Shakespeare and probably, you know, check out some Dickens and something in most of these libraries.

00:27:12.160 But if you go in, 95% of the slop everywhere is just whatever new novel thing is coming out.

00:27:18.780 And I want to be clear here.

00:27:20.380 There's nothing wrong with new books.

00:27:22.080 Like I said, you have to have a living tradition.

00:27:25.080 There are going to be things that are written that are incredibly valuable and will be added to canon.

00:27:30.680 And by the way, there's also just a place for, you know, some level of junk food.

00:27:35.520 Look, I think, like, 40K lore is really fun, right?

00:27:39.000 I think that Warhammer 40K writes a lot of really interesting stuff.

00:27:42.520 Now, they do make allusions to a lot of things that are part of the canon.

00:27:48.220 So there's still some value there.

00:27:49.580 It's not a complete break.

00:27:50.620 But, I mean, it is just junk food at the end of the day.

00:27:53.520 And I'm not saying you can't ever eat McDonald's.

00:27:56.040 But I am saying if 95% of what you eat is McDonald's, you're going to end up with a problem.

00:28:01.340 And that's really what we've done with our libraries and things.

00:28:04.300 It's very difficult for, you know, people to connect with this.

00:28:08.000 And even if they do go out of their way to read old books, it's increasingly hard for them to find people to talk to.

00:28:14.900 People who would be aware of the references that they're making.

00:28:18.840 Increasingly, if you talk about old things, if you talk about things that are connected to the canon,

00:28:23.900 it's not a way for you to bond with people like it used to be.

00:28:26.780 It's not a shared language that you had.

00:28:29.320 Instead, it's something that alienates you.

00:28:31.540 Oh, that guy's read a bunch of old books, I guess.

00:28:34.360 I mean, I don't know anything he's talking about.

00:28:36.200 I mean, you know, have you seen the football game?

00:28:38.660 What about the latest Taylor Swift song?

00:28:40.860 Did you see the last Marvel movie?

00:28:42.960 I mean, you know, here are the three fast food restaurants I went to in the last week.

00:28:46.900 These are the things that people actually use to share experiences at this point.

00:28:51.720 You making references to Dante or the Iliad is going to go over the head of the vast majority of people.

00:28:58.080 And it's a real tragedy.

00:28:59.720 Now, what can we do about this?

00:29:01.300 Right.

00:29:01.460 I don't want to just be doom and gloom about this.

00:29:04.140 Well, one thing we have to recognize is the importance of rescuing the canon.

00:29:08.580 I mean, we have to read it.

00:29:10.460 Now, to be clear, I have not read every book in the Western canon.

00:29:13.420 I'm not even close.

00:29:14.300 In fact, this is something that's a deficit of mine.

00:29:17.220 I'm familiar, of course, with many of these things.

00:29:19.860 I've read the Divine Comedy, I've read the Bible, of course, Chaucer, you know, a lot of this stuff, Dickens.

00:29:26.160 But, yeah, I haven't read all of it.

00:29:28.020 I've never quite made it through Paradise Lost, you know, some of these things.

00:29:31.740 And so I'm not saying everybody has to read every one of these books.

00:29:34.760 I'm not saying it's a personal failing of yours if you don't.

00:29:37.880 But you need to make a concerted effort to go and read old books.

00:29:42.960 Get back into the canon.

00:29:44.520 Take the time.

00:29:45.920 Listen to the Iliad and Odyssey as an audiobook.

00:29:48.340 Man, it was written as a poem.

00:29:49.800 It's meant to be said out loud.

00:29:51.820 So just do it that way.

00:29:53.480 Take the time to go back and mix in a lot of these classics.

00:29:58.180 Importantly, if you're involved in educating people, if you're involved, if you're raising children, make sure that's part of their life.

00:30:06.500 Make sure that you're, you know, you could read Livy's Lives to, you know, to your children.

00:30:13.040 You can read the, you know, the different adventures of classic heroes.

00:30:18.620 You should, of course, be reading the Bible.

00:30:20.140 These are all things that you can put into as, you know, your children's lives as part of their culture.

00:30:26.080 Or maybe it won't be in their wider reference when it comes to, I don't know, something that's on TV.

00:30:32.100 But at least it will be something that was a core foundation of theirs growing up.

00:30:35.600 When I was a kid, my mom got me a lot of those condensed classic novels for kids, right?

00:30:41.000 And I didn't go back and read the adult version of every one of them.

00:30:44.020 But I did read a lot of them when I was a kid.

00:30:46.020 So 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.

00:30:58.180 I knew all of these books well before I read the full book or, you know, had an understanding of their deeper context.

00:31:07.460 But 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.

00:31:20.620 I already knew a lot of the general, you know, where the story was going.

00:31:25.140 These things matter and you can take part in this.

00:31:29.020 Also, start reading clubs.

00:31:31.680 Start getting together with people who care about this.

00:31:34.760 And 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.

00:31:44.960 And I'm not saying go out of your way to be explicitly right wing.

00:31:47.520 You 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.

00:31:56.880 Or at least they're they're probably walking away from progressivism.

00:31:59.720 If they wanted to be progressive, they would never be reading all these dead white men. 0.98

00:32:03.060 So 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.

00:32:12.740 You 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.

00:32:22.900 But that's not the core of what you do.

00:32:24.940 And 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.

00:32:40.680 It's not something that's easily, you know, prosecutable.

00:32:43.720 It's not going to have them searching, you know, through your emails or your DMs on a regular basis.

00:32:48.820 These 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.

00:33:06.860 And that's going to stand out.

00:33:08.420 Yeah, 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.

00:33:28.880 It's already occurring.

00:33:30.000 The left are completely culturally bankrupt.

00:33:31.720 They can't make anything interesting. 0.99

00:33:33.140 Everything the left is making is completely gross and tired.

00:33:37.880 It has all the excitement of an after school special in the 80s.

00:33:41.780 OK, and that doesn't mean that the right is making great art at the moment.

00:33:45.040 They're not.

00:33:46.040 I mean, there are some examples, but it's still very mired in kind of production values and other issues at the moment.

00:33:54.420 However, it's increasingly just better than anything that the left is putting out.

00:33:59.340 I mean, I'll say this, you know, the chosen, you know, not all of its production values are going to blow you away.

00:34:05.700 Sometimes not even all of its writing is going to blow you away.

00:34:08.680 But 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.

00:34:18.260 And that's one of the reasons that it is a success.

00:34:20.880 And I think you're going to see more and more of this and it's going to be more interesting.

00:34:23.840 It's not just going to be, you know, direct iterations on Bible stories, though it will make allusions to those things.

00:34:29.740 Of course, it has to in order to be referencing the Western canon.

00:34:34.000 But 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.

00:34:41.880 You'll be inspired to make these kinds of things.

00:34:44.700 So I think there is important work to be done.

00:34:46.800 We can shelter these works.

00:34:48.840 We can nurture this culture.

00:34:51.820 We can cultivate and bring back and not just, you know, but revivify.

00:34:56.720 We're not just returning to reading Shakespeare or something like that.

00:35:01.280 But 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.

00:35:15.860 One 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.

00:35:25.820 They can't make good culture anymore because there's nothing left for them to draw on.

00:35:31.140 They've deconstructed and destroyed all of it.

00:35:33.620 But you can have that.

00:35:35.380 They don't want it.

00:35:36.260 They've discarded all of it.

00:35:37.280 They've made it forbidden to look at what the white men wrote.

00:35:40.820 Right. 0.81

00:35:41.180 They've made it culturally toxic to be familiar even with the works of these dead white men. 0.57

00:35:48.360 But 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.

00:36:06.640 And they will inform what my children grew up with.

00:36:09.500 And that's how you change things.

00:36:11.860 Now, I'm not saying everything is bottom up.

00:36:13.640 You know that I'm an elite theory guy.

00:36:15.360 So 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.

00:36:21.980 But it's not just about every one of us doing this by ourselves alone or from the bottom up.

00:36:28.560 But 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.

00:36:45.360 Because they'll be superior to the people around them.

00:36:48.360 They just will be. 0.98

00:36:49.140 If 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. 0.97

00:37:01.340 And that's the only culture that they have any attachment to. 0.92

00:37:05.560 And 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.

00:37:15.900 They are spiritually and mentally healthy.

00:37:18.680 They are going to stand out.

00:37:20.260 They are going to overperform.

00:37:21.820 And at some point, the entire point of our society won't be just to mow those people down.

00:37:29.140 We will need these people to rescue us from what society has become.

00:37:34.200 And 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.

00:37:48.580 So 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.

00:37:59.520 They 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.

00:38:15.040 And so that's why it's absolutely critical that we reconnect to the Western canon.

00:38:19.580 Again, everybody doesn't need to start memorizing every line of the Iliad.

00:38:24.460 I get it.

00:38:25.380 We're not all going to get to the same place.

00:38:27.740 We're not all going to spend our time on every one of these things.

00:38:31.560 I understand.

00:38:32.800 But we can all make an effort.

00:38:34.260 And 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.

00:38:43.660 Because that's going to be key.

00:38:45.260 We can't talk about saving the West if we don't even know what the West is.

00:38:50.480 And the foundation of who we are is in our shared stories and understandings.

00:38:55.740 You need the Bible.

00:38:57.900 You need the Inferno.

00:38:59.640 You need Paradiso.

00:39:01.160 You need to have Dickens.

00:39:03.480 You need to have Shakespeare.

00:39:05.140 You need to have Demasi.

00:39:07.140 You need to have these references at hand.

00:39:09.940 You need to have the knowledge that weaves these things together.

00:39:13.080 So, that's why I think it's really critical that we start paying attention to the canon.

00:39:18.000 I think it's really critical that we start focusing on this.

00:39:21.820 Because if we don't do it, then we simply won't have the tools and we won't know what's worth saving at the end of the day.

00:39:30.180 All right, guys.

00:39:31.000 Let's go ahead and take a look over at the questions of the people here real quick.

00:39:35.420 Let me grab a drink of water before we do.

00:39:37.380 All right, Creeper Weirdo says,

00:39:43.760 I too am a son of God or was once.

00:39:48.340 John Milton has written more in one sentence than Stephen King has written in his whole career.

00:39:55.660 You know, one of the things that I definitely learned over time is the importance of rereading and meditating.

00:40:03.260 Obviously, 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.

00:40:13.420 But 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.

00:40:26.440 So that I have a deeper grasp of them.

00:40:28.880 And you're right, Creeper Weirdo.

00:40:30.280 This 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.

00:40:44.380 And that's, again, what makes them so valuable.

00:40:46.820 They're not, you know, I mean, I like some Stephen King novels.

00:40:49.260 You 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.

00:41:06.240 Because, again, when we talk to each other, we talk in this, too, right?

00:41:10.140 We make allusions to stories.

00:41:11.620 And even if we don't understand, we can't explicitly point out, like, the 13 things that are inside the story.

00:41:18.620 We still understand part of that when we talk to someone about them.

00:41:23.060 We're communicating that even when we don't realize it.

00:41:25.660 And that's really important. 0.98

00:41:27.700 Tiny Stupid Demon says, dismiss everything else he says. 0.97

00:41:30.920 But Dugan is right when he says that all government employees should be required to pass a test on Plato, even traffic cops. 0.94

00:41:37.800 Yeah, like a lot of people may know, I do find the works of Alexander Dugan interesting.

00:41:44.640 They do help me think about things, even though I think, overall, he's a guy with a political project that hates me.

00:41:50.640 So don't just read Dugan, you know, with your eyes closed.

00:41:54.780 Make sure you have large grains of salt attached any time you do.

00:41:58.380 But, yeah, he's right that that work is fundamental in many ways.

00:42:03.540 So many of the ideas and notions, you know, I've said this before, but I think it illustrates this perfectly.

00:42:10.320 When I for the first time I read Aristotle, I was not impressed.

00:42:14.040 I was like, oh, Aristotle.

00:42:16.140 OK, what's what's the big deal with this guy?

00:42:18.600 He just says a lot of things that are obvious.

00:42:20.320 And what I didn't realize is that the things he was saying were obvious because they were woven into everything that I understood.

00:42:28.760 They had so thoroughly informed the culture I was a part of that I felt like they were.

00:42:33.900 Oh, OK, well, yeah, of course, everyone knows this.

00:42:36.480 And of course, even I didn't understand enough that I need to go back.

00:42:39.540 And there's many layers of Aristotle beyond what I had culturally absorbed.

00:42:43.820 But most most of it seemed obvious because actually it was what had informed everything that I knew.

00:42:51.040 And that is so often the case.

00:42:52.920 And that's why, you know, having a basic understanding of many of these works is so clear,

00:42:58.760 because then you understand where the beliefs and the attitudes and the archetypes that you're acting out and hold came from.

00:43:06.120 And that really gives you, you know, that just makes you a more well-rounded person in a very critical way.

00:43:12.280 Creeperito says, but Orin, Lovecraft was racist. 0.99

00:43:16.400 In the inferno, a man is in hell for being gay. 0.67

00:43:19.380 His name isn't Slave Jim in the book. 0.82

00:43:22.120 And I can't criticize C.S. Lewis for anything right now, but he's a Christian, so I'll find something. 0.99

00:43:26.740 Yeah, of course, these are all the problems, right?

00:43:28.860 This is all of the things that he's referencing there are reasons we're not allowed to read these things.

00:43:34.300 We're not allowed to appreciate them.

00:43:35.880 They have to be stricken from the record because ultimately it's the same reason we have to disappear.

00:43:40.020 All of the founding fathers because they were all racist slaveholders or whatever at the end of the day.

00:43:46.080 Look, you just have to not care.

00:43:48.420 You have to push back past this.

00:43:51.000 You have to go ahead and say, I am going to learn about this.

00:43:53.680 I am going to inhabit this.

00:43:55.200 I am going to meditate on this.

00:43:57.540 And, 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.

00:44:08.700 Tiny Stupid Demon says, finished your book, was awesome.

00:44:12.800 Room got dusty at tree planting part in the last chapter. 0.99

00:44:17.040 Otherwise, needs more Play-Doh.

00:44:18.840 Sorry on a Play-Doh binge lately.

00:44:21.460 Well, thank you, man.

00:44:22.180 I'm really glad that you enjoyed the book.

00:44:24.000 Thank you for buying it and reading it.

00:44:28.220 Obviously, I'm making references to Play-Doh in there.

00:44:30.940 And, of course, Play-Doh does warn about democracy in his work.

00:44:35.460 So you could definitely use a lot of Play-Doh there.

00:44:37.980 I 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.

00:44:48.160 Because I feel like there are a lot of people who go back to the ancients, and it's fine work.

00:44:53.000 Don't get me wrong.

00:44:54.100 I mean, Patrick Deneen did this, you know, in several of his books, and they're great.

00:44:58.620 I'm not saying you shouldn't do that.

00:45:00.240 But it's just, it was just ground that was well-trod.

00:45:03.680 So I went ahead and tried to keep things a little more contemporary when I was going through there.

00:45:09.520 But thank you very much, man.

00:45:11.760 Let's see.

00:45:12.360 Cooper Weirdo says, well, what if Joan of Arc was trans, though? 0.99

00:45:15.720 Yes, all of your heroes must be destroyed. 0.80

00:45:20.000 Cooper Weirdo also says, are you saying that you don't like Velma, Oren?

00:45:22.980 I heard how terrible that is, but I don't have any other reference point for it.

00:45:27.100 Like, I know they did this horribly woke Scooby-Doo, but I really don't know anything about it.

00:45:31.840 Thankfully, oftentimes today, I'm very glad to just not know about the current controversy.

00:45:37.420 I'm watching the Fallout series right now.

00:45:40.000 I feel like it's not as bad as people made it out to be.

00:45:43.680 It's not great.

00:45:45.040 The plot is just paper thin.

00:45:47.500 It really is something that's just for the fans.

00:45:49.700 It's a lot of fan service.

00:45:50.660 But I'm a huge fan of Fallout is probably my favorite game of all time.

00:45:55.040 And so I recognize everything and I love it.

00:45:58.160 It's not as woke as people make it out to be.

00:46:00.020 Don't get me wrong.

00:46:00.480 It's woke.

00:46:01.540 But the main character being a woman is not as terrible as people make it out to be because she's not perfect. 0.91

00:46:08.980 She's actually like a real person.

00:46:10.860 She's naive.

00:46:11.580 She makes mistakes.

00:46:12.640 She has to learn.

00:46:13.580 She's often hurt or almost killed on a regular basis.

00:46:16.140 She's not better at everything than everyone else.

00:46:18.280 She's just a real person, which, you know, I'm only halfway through.

00:46:22.600 So maybe it gets much worse.

00:46:23.920 But but but in general, I don't know all of the new shows.

00:46:27.800 That's one of the few updated ones I'm familiar with.

00:46:32.240 Glow in the Dark says the antithesis of the deconstructionist is the revivalist.

00:46:37.680 But building is always harder than destroying.

00:46:40.220 So it takes time.

00:46:41.460 That's absolutely true.

00:46:42.360 A lot of people don't want to do it because it's harder.

00:46:44.460 Also, a lot of people can't do it because, again, they've been they've been told that that they must distance themselves.

00:46:50.600 They're not willing to engage with a lot of things that would allow them to revive this stuff because, you know, it's all evil.

00:46:58.040 It's all it's all racist.

00:46:59.540 It's all, you know, from from this terrible past.

00:47:01.900 And so they simply don't have the the material to revive.

00:47:06.740 And that's what I'm saying is I think it's important for us to go back and do this because that will give you a distinct advantage.

00:47:13.340 You will simply have connections and a depth to culture that other people don't have.

00:47:17.760 And it will give you a distinct advantage in pretty much every way.

00:47:20.840 Robert Winesfield here with just a super chat donation.

00:47:23.800 Thank you very much, man.

00:47:24.680 Really appreciate that.

00:47:25.840 And 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.

00:47:36.140 Sophists of Plato's time were the experts of their time or so sources say.

00:47:41.400 Yes.

00:47:41.740 I 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.

00:47:50.080 It 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.

00:48:03.060 The fact that rhetoric, empty rhetoric itself is seems to be losing some of its power is really critical.

00:48:10.360 Something like you said you'd expect.

00:48:11.960 It's a bit of a cyclical thing, but definitely an encouraging development to be sure.

00:48:16.400 All right, guys, well, we're going to go ahead and wrap this up.

00:48:18.680 Thank you so much for coming by.

00:48:21.700 Once again, of course, if you'd like to buy my new book, The Total State just came out this week.

00:48:27.300 You can do that on Amazon.

00:48:29.140 And if you decide to do that, guys, go ahead and leave a rating and a review on that.

00:48:34.280 It really helps with the book and everything.

00:48:36.860 Of course, you could also get the book at local bookstores.

00:48:39.040 You can get it at big box bookstores.

00:48:41.280 It's everywhere.

00:48:41.820 It's got a major distributor, major publisher.

00:48:45.680 So you should be able to get it most places that you want to buy books.

00:48:48.680 And I really appreciate that.

00:48:49.920 Of course, if it's your first time on the channel, make sure you go ahead and subscribe.

00:48:53.680 Turn on the bell, the notification, everything so you can catch these streams when they go live.

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00:49:07.500 And when you do leave those ratings and reviews again, the algorithm, it's always there.

00:49:12.660 All right, guys, thank you once again for coming by.

00:49:15.980 And as always, I will talk to you next.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - May 08, 2024

How the Canon Defines Culture ｜ 5⧸8⧸2024

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