00:00:31.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:00:40.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:38.000So this is a book based on the radical idea that the past has something to say to the present.
00:01:44.000A lot of times we hear that, you know, everything thought up before Darwin and the scientific revolution, all those old dead white guys, they were superstitious, they were prejudiced, they were wrong about most things, and science has replaced them all.
00:01:59.000And what's funny about that is it sounds like a sophisticated thing to say, but it actually leaves us totally disoriented and lonely, really, in the world.
00:02:10.000Because if everybody that went before us is dumb and dead and they had nothing useful to say to the present moment, then what are we supposed to make of everything that's going on right now?
00:02:20.000I mean, even just the stuff that you've been talking about in the daily news cycle, let alone some of the bigger questions that it raises.
00:02:28.000It feels like every day we wake up to a new disaster.
00:02:36.000And it's really hard to know what to do about them.
00:02:39.000But the really interesting thing that I lay out in the book is that actually a lot of the stuff that we're facing, especially as our new technology rockets forward, as the digital revolution changes the way we relate to each other and to the world, it's actually dredging up all of these really profound, fundamental questions, questions that are eternal, that have been around since humanity has been walking on this planet.
00:03:03.000And so it's not the case that the past has nothing to say to us.
00:03:07.000In fact, there have been great minds and great thinkers throughout the history of the West, throughout the great traditions of our literature and our thought.
00:03:14.000There have been great minds that have thought about these very questions.
00:03:21.000How can we understand ourselves in relationship to the world and to one another?
00:03:25.000These are the sorts of questions that have been asked again and again in the great texts of our tradition, in the works of Athens and Jerusalem and their inheritors that come down to us.
00:03:35.000And what that means is we're not alone.
00:03:38.000There's actually a huge treasure house, a storehouse of wisdom and of insight that we can bring into the modern world and apply to the problems that we're facing today.
00:03:49.000So that's why I wrote the book: I wanted people to know they weren't alone, and I wanted people to have some ownership over these great texts because it's very easy to feel like these are just dusty books on a shelf, or they're only for academics and nerds like me, or even worse, maybe they're racist or they're sexist or what have you.
00:04:08.000These are guys who thought and read deeply, not so that people would have material for PhD theses, but so that normal folks would have wisdom and guidance for how to be excellent at being human.
00:04:20.000And as the digital revolution rockets on, as we face all of the challenges that we're up against today, those sorts of questions, that sort of wisdom becomes more urgent and not less.
00:04:30.000So you lay this out in five different categories.
00:04:34.000The first is, you say, the crisis of reality, which I just love.
00:04:39.000And he who argues with reality lives in hell.
00:04:43.000And we're seeing a lot of hellish living right now.
00:04:46.000So, Spencer, I'm going to ask an infinitely deep question that shouldn't be deep.
00:04:56.000You know, on one level, of course, we all know that there's such a thing as true and false and real and unreal.
00:05:03.000We see that and we experience that every day in our lives.
00:05:07.000But on the other level, actually, it turns out that for a long time, there has been this idea that maybe there is no such thing as true and false, no such thing as good and bad.
00:05:39.000But actually, in the book, I argue that this kind of situation goes right back to the origins of Greek philosophy, that Athens part of Western civilization that I was talking about.
00:05:51.000Socrates, the great philosopher, and followed on by his students, Plato, and Plato's student, Aristotle, Socrates was in a debate over exactly this question: Is anything real?
00:06:02.000Or is it all just change and flux, as Heraclitus says?
00:06:06.000And this is the crisis of reality when people feel like they don't know what's true or false.
00:06:12.000Maybe virtual reality is better than real reality.
00:06:15.000And actually, it's kind of inconvenient to believe in moral absolutes like good and evil, because if we just toss them out or we relativize them, well, then we could get everything that we wanted, right?
00:06:26.000We could just take it because justice is the will of the stronger, as Thrasymachus says in Plato's Republic.
00:06:34.000There's a passage in the book where I talk about the gulag of the Soviet Union under Stalin.
00:06:40.000And Alexander Solchernitsyn, the great dissident who lived through the Gulag, says, you know, in the Gulag, they had a theory, and that theory was that true and false, guilty and innocent, these are relative terms.
00:06:53.000And that means you don't have to have a trial.
00:06:56.000The party can decide that you're guilty from afar.
00:07:00.000And all of this starts to sound more and more familiar as we understand that this is a perennial question that we're up against.
00:07:06.000And what I argue in the book is there's no such thing as halfway relativism.
00:07:10.000There's no such thing as just getting a little bit of this pill, and then you're going to be in the metaverse and you're going to upload your consciousness into virtual reality.
00:08:10.000However, they will say, and basically they're threatened by the idea that somebody might be able to tell them that there's a truth because they have been really been told so narcissistically that I'm so important, my own feelings, my own emotions are more important than whatever metaphysical reality might exist outside of me.
00:08:31.000So, Spencer, in a minute and a half, you're going to need longer than this.
00:08:35.000Because I think a vast majority of people in the West are living under this mirage of, y'all, just live and let live, and you can kind of dictate your own truth.
00:08:57.000That's the thing that people really grab on to is, yeah, who I inherently am in some absolute sense.
00:09:03.000And I guess the question that I keep coming back to when I have encounters like this, that I keep asking people is: how's that working out for you?
00:09:10.000You know, you said that these things are simple, and that's absolutely true.
00:09:14.000It's also the case, as I say in the book, that the simplest things are often the most profound and they're the hardest to put into practice, right?
00:09:21.000And this question: how is it working out for you to believe that nothing's either good or bad makes it so?
00:09:38.000And maybe, you know, they may not back down from screaming at you in the moment on the college campus.
00:09:44.000But a lot of people I've heard from doing my podcast, you know, will go away and they'll come back and they'll think, you know, actually, in a moment of quiet and silence, as I kind of sat with myself, I realized that, look, it's no way to live.
00:09:57.000It's no way to live if you are the only defining feature of the world, your identity.
00:10:02.000That's a terrifying and lonely place to be.
00:10:05.000And a lot of what we're seeing looks like anger, looks like rage, but is actually loneliness, despair, and sadness.
00:10:12.000The book exists to offer an alternative to that.
00:10:15.000It's the most depressed, suicidal, alcohol, and drug-addicted generation in history for many reasons.
00:10:21.000One of them is because we have decided to burn with enthusiastic zeal everything that works and is true that came before them.
00:10:30.000So let me ask you: you know, I was recently with a group of college students that did not agree with me, but they were rather thoughtful.
00:10:38.000And I said, Can you prove something to me to be true without using the phrase studies show?
00:10:45.000And they melted down in the sense they've never thought that there could be truth outside of scientism.
00:10:51.000So one of the contentions you're making in the book is the pursuit of truth.
00:10:55.000And you do it through Aristotelian or Platonic or Socratic means.
00:11:00.000But it also, in some ways, runs contradictory to the prevailing, let's just say, methodology that the Academy uses, which is, well, studies show, studies show.
00:11:11.000And if you tell a young person, okay, prove to me that you believe something without saying a study shows, they look at you and they're not able to do that.
00:11:22.000It's a great question that you asked them.
00:11:24.000And I think it shows a real fear, a fear that if you step outside the bound of accepted ideas, accepted kind of dogma, then you'll be attacked because we don't so much have a culture of open discourse and sort of public discussion anymore.
00:11:40.000We have adherence to the scientism, as you said.
00:11:45.000And in the book, I quote this paleontologist, G.G. Simpson, who says something to the effect of, you know, all good answers to the questions of life were thought up after Charles Darwin.
00:11:58.000After that, that was when everybody else became obsolete, right?
00:12:02.000And this is a perfect, oh, it's perfect.
00:12:04.000It's a perfect encapsulation of what we mean when we say scientism, because, of course, the left will say, oh, these conservatives, they're anti-science.
00:12:15.000It's not science at all that I am against.
00:12:18.000It's the contention, the claim that science is an exhaustive description of reality, that mathematical studies, yes, yes, figures, right?
00:12:27.000That these kind of can totally describe everything about the world, everything about us can be boiled down into an equation.
00:12:34.000And once it spits out the right answer, that's what you do, that's what you say, that's what you think.
00:12:39.000Of course, we know if we think about our own lives for just a split second, that this doesn't work, that this isn't true.
00:12:45.000Everything about us that matters, everything that sets us apart from animals and sets us apart from machines, lives in a space that can't be reduced or boiled down to physical science.
00:12:56.000Things like love, desire, memory, aspiration, virtue, these things, of course, they have a physical component, but they don't show up on a brain scan.
00:13:05.000You can't point at a brain scan and know what these things are.
00:13:08.000You have to live them and experience them.
00:13:11.000And this is what I talk about in the book when I bring up the concept in Greek, it's called phronesis, practical wisdom.
00:13:17.000How do you take abstract truths and live them out in your everyday life, play them out in scenarios that you might be faced with?
00:13:23.000And I really think that in addition to the kind of scientific, scientistic turn, it was the capital P progressives who kind of installed in us this fear, this doubt about our own intuitions and our own experience of the world, because they were the ones who came along and said, yeah, you can actually reduce politics to an equation, to a system, to a machine.
00:13:44.000And then you can outsource everything to the bureaucracy, right?
00:13:47.000Then the administrative state will take care of it.
00:13:49.000And there's no need for these messy people anymore, these kind of dirty, deplorables that like have all their backwards ideas.
00:13:56.000Whatever else that is, that's not America.
00:13:58.000And it's not the best of what our traditions have to offer us.
00:14:02.000There are things in this life that simply don't boil down to an equation.
00:14:07.000And when we talk as if equations describe the whole world, what we end up doing is becoming pagan worshipers.
00:14:13.000We end up praying at a cult where we believe that Dr. Fauci is going to give us the right solution, whatever he says goes.
00:14:20.000When we know that's not true, so it's just an article of faith.
00:14:50.000One of the marks of beauty of the Old Testament and the Torah, it was a nonstop refutation of river civilization paganism, which is that there is a singular God and he is not in nature and he made nature and there's a distinction between God and man and there's a distinction between good and evil and that not everything that you do is a God.
00:15:11.000There's not a God of the sun and the God of the moon and the God of the river and God of the cow and the God of the and the Torah was very clear about that.
00:15:55.00031 whole fruits and veggies in a capsule.
00:15:58.000I know a lot of people who take supplements and formulated nutrition packs, but balance in nature goes right to the source.
00:16:03.000Real fruits and veggies, all that nutrition captured with their advanced vacuum-cold process, packed in a capsule and sent to your doorstep.
00:16:10.000I give my body what it needs because feeling great is important to me.
00:16:13.000Getting good daily nutrition is the foundation of all aspects of good health.
00:16:17.000And that is why you hear me talking about balance of nature on my show.
00:16:21.000Shipping is always free, but don't forget to get a 35% off your first order as a preferred customer by using discount code Charlie when you go to balanceofnature.com.
00:16:30.000You can order by phone by calling 800-2468-751 or go to balanceinature.com.
00:17:12.000But when you think about it, actually, one of the central issues in our public debate right now has to do with the role of the human body, and that is transgenderism, this sort of extreme uptick that we're seeing in gender dysphoria, this feeling like there's some kind of war within you between your true self, which is somehow disembodied or hovers above your body, and the way that your body actually works and how you were born.
00:17:39.000Sex and gender is kind of the distinction that they typically draw.
00:17:42.000And it's easy to feel, I think, like this thing just came out of nowhere.
00:17:47.000I hear from a lot of people like, how did this all happen?
00:17:51.000Because suddenly it was so in the public eye.
00:17:54.000And not only that, but it's actually trending in a yet further direction, not just about, you know, male and female, but pushing beyond the boundaries of humanity altogether.
00:18:04.000People that identify as demons, as dogs, as machines, robots, this idea of transhumanism.
00:18:11.000This is all kind of going way beyond what anybody expected, except that what I point out in the book is it's actually a very ancient problem.
00:18:21.000It feels like it came out of nowhere, but it's not the sort of thing that we've never dealt with before.
00:18:26.000In fact, from the very beginnings of Greek philosophy, you have people beginning to feel like actually the body is kind of a burden.
00:18:35.000The Neoplatonists are people that I bring up in the book, Plotinus, one of the followers of Plato, who read his work a lot.
00:18:42.000Platinus' biographer says that he seemed ashamed of being in his body.
00:18:49.000Well, you know, all the stuff we've been talking about in this conversation, absolute truth, beauty, goodness, these ideals, they're wonderful and I believe they're real.
00:18:59.000And yet, we live in this world of change and decay.
00:19:02.000And ultimately, the thing that the Judeo-Christian tradition drives home to us is one day we will die.
00:19:09.000It's a terrible tragedy, and it makes us feel alienated from our flesh.
00:19:14.000And so when you look at it that way, you realize when Judith Butler comes along and she writes gender trouble and she says sex and gender are two totally different things.
00:19:21.000These are all just kind of power impositions upon the body and we can do whatever we want.
00:19:28.000She's really drawing a platonic dividing line.
00:19:31.000She's drawing this line between the spirit and the flesh and tearing the two apart.
00:19:37.000And this is another one of those areas where again and again throughout history, we've had to ask, how is that working out for you?
00:19:43.000This theory that we'll be better off if we just float up into some disembodied realm, whether it's digital space or, you know, our kind of gender identity and making our body conform to it.
00:19:53.000It always makes us less happy, more depressed, more deeply self-loathing and not happier.
00:20:00.000It doesn't actually deliver on its promises.
00:20:04.000And this is something that has been passed down not only from Aristotle and the Greek philosophical tradition, but also through the church and Thomas Aquinas, this idea which is called hylomorphism, a kind of Greek inflected word that means soul in flesh, form in matter.
00:20:22.000The fusion of the two is what we actually are.
00:20:26.000Our human being, our humanity is not some kind of accident that we need to wish away or surmount.
00:20:32.000This is actually the language in which our souls are expressed.
00:20:36.000It's the way we live out everything that's good about us that doesn't fit into a mathematical equation.
00:20:41.000And so the way forward is not into some imagined utopian future where we just use drugs and hormones and surgery to correct and remake ourselves.
00:20:50.000The way forward is actually deeper into our physical presence, into real life and living face to face in the here and now.
00:20:57.000It's one of the reasons why COVID, people think the conservatives just got all mad about COVID for no reason, but we had this deep felt sense that we were being alienated from one another and from the time that we might spend together in physical space.
00:21:11.000It's because our bodies aren't just kind of an accident or an afterthought.
00:21:16.000They are the medium in which our souls are expressed.
00:21:19.000That's why the Christian church preaches the doctrine of the incarnation, that the human body is actually the medium for God himself to walk the earth.
00:21:28.000And that's the antidote to all that paganism you were talking about before.
00:21:32.000And a lot of Eastern religions, the idea that the divine would take the broken shell or form of a human, the dirty, the untouchable, it's such an incomprehensible idea.
00:21:45.000It's one of the many ways that Christianity is differentiated from so many Eastern mystical traditions, where, in fact, it's the opposite.
00:21:54.000In Buddhism, it's you leave your body, is that you must ascend with the spirit, where this idea that the divine, the pure, the beautiful would then take the form, it is true.
00:22:07.000And it's the reason why I think so many people are moved by it.
00:22:11.000The incarnation, we could talk about at great length.
00:22:13.000Okay, but I want to keep our momentum here.
00:22:20.000Well, this is one where, you know, online, we encounter every day this idea that all we're doing is just reproducing and replicating and reproducing one another.
00:22:40.000We don't always remember that this comes out of an evolutionary theory of all human life.
00:22:45.000Earlier, we were talking about spreading out science to cover the whole of reality.
00:22:49.000This is spreading out the theory of evolution to cover all of human existence.
00:22:54.000And that's in Richard Dawkins' book, The Selfish Gene, that's the theory he proposes, that all we're doing is kind of imitating one another and replicating and just reproducing stuff.
00:23:03.000And the stuff that works kind of survives, basically.
00:23:06.000You have genes at the biological level, you have memes at the cultural level.
00:23:09.000Now, this is actually an idea that goes way back to, for instance, Plato's Timaeus, the idea that the whole world is sort of a copy or a reproduction.
00:23:20.000The Greek word is mimemo, which is where we get our word meme.
00:23:30.000And we do it even at the biological level of our genes.
00:23:34.000But of course, the trick is, if we're imitating, if we're reproducing, if all this stuff is copying, copies are copies of something.
00:23:42.000Reproductions reproduce some original model.
00:23:46.000And in Plato, right, the original model is the divine.
00:23:50.000It's the God who, the one God, you know, you were indicating, and I think this is really right.
00:23:55.000All thinking people who have grown up in pagan polytheistic societies have this interesting tendency to kind of trend toward monotheism because of the logical problems that are inherent that you were saying about ethics and polytheism.
00:24:10.000You start to get these one gods, first prime movers, or in Plato, it's the demiurge, the one God that kind of creates all of the universe and then delegates to other gods.
00:24:22.000And that gives you a stable reference point for what we call meaning.
00:24:26.000Now, in Dawkins' world, everything about that description is true, except the God part, except the meaning.
00:24:33.000And so what you actually have is just this war of all against all.
00:24:37.000And Dawkins kind of tries to fight against this, but actually his revolution has so outstripped him now that it's impossible to deny.
00:24:43.000If there's no final truth, no final being, you can tell that we're pushing up against the idea of God here.
00:24:50.000If that doesn't exist, then there really is no meaning to anything that we do at all.
00:24:55.000Dawkins and Sam Harris are in the same boat where they actually know the consequences of their ideas, which is why they tap dance around it.
00:25:05.000It's why Sam Harris had to write an entire barely coherent book, The Moral Landscape, because he knew what he was flirting with.
00:25:13.000He knows that if he is not able to articulate to the best of his ability using purely materialistic means, almost basically copy-pasting the Epicureans saying, okay, well, there is a way that even if we deduce things back down to the atom, that there's a way to reduce meaning.
00:25:32.000And we're all kind of living in the consequences of that.
00:25:35.000So, Spencer, more broadly here, I think that there is an opportunity to save the West.
00:25:42.000And we can keep going through your list here, but I'd love your thoughts because we are in some ways suffering under the excesses of modernity and postmodernity.
00:26:20.000Wow, I'm so glad to hear you say that because, of course, when you say, as I've been doing, you go around and say we need to save the West, people will instantly say, oh, the West is past saving.
00:26:29.000Everything's gotten too terrible, too bad.
00:27:03.000It was kind of disappointing for the Republicans, except in Ron DeSantis, Florida, where he came forward with a confident cultural proposition.
00:27:57.000When Roe versus Wade fell as the law of the land last year, all it did was increase what pro-abortion states are doing to entice and mislead women to abort their children.
00:28:07.000States are now advertising to travel just to get an abortion.
00:28:12.000So the need to provide the truth as girls and women are contemplating what to do about their pregnancy is greater now than ever before.
00:28:19.000Ultrasounds save babies because ultrasounds give the truth at a time everyone else is saying it's not just a baby, it's just a clump of cells.
00:28:27.000When you introduce a girl to her baby by providing an ultrasound, you are giving her the truth at the most important time of her life.
00:28:34.000And more than 85% of the time, she will choose life.
00:28:38.000You don't have to make a lot of noise to make a big difference for life.
00:28:40.000Just give an ultrasound at preborn.org to be a hero for life.
00:29:16.000You know, you have to think of people like me, people like you and I who write books and talk for a living.
00:29:23.000We are standard bearers, but the real people in the fight are everyday folks who go out and actually put this stuff into practice.
00:29:32.000There is a really simple insight from the tradition.
00:29:36.000And we were saying earlier that, you know, simplicity is sometimes the most profound thing.
00:29:42.000When it comes to the American Republic, actually, when it comes to any regime, according to classical political philosophy, there is an ingredient, a dimension that is almost always missing from our discussion.
00:29:56.000And that's what the Greeks called philia, friendship or even love.
00:30:03.000It's the kind of thing that can only exist between and among neighbors.
00:30:08.000So I would say that this is, first of all, exactly why identity politics is poison to a republic, because what does Machiavelli say can unmake a republic?
00:30:19.000When you understand that, you understand why it's so poisonous when Joe Biden gets up and says something like, you know, we have a pandemic of the unvaccinated.
00:30:27.000Okay, so a significant portion of the population is tantamount to a disease, right?
00:30:31.000Or they say men are inherently sexist, women, you know, are oppressed, all of this stuff, of course, that they just insist on every day.
00:30:38.000The reason it was important to bring up that Florida example earlier is because there you see an example of what it looks like when people act like Americans, when citizens of this country invest in their neighborhoods, in their communities, in their school boards, where we're seeing so much of the best action going on in this country.
00:30:56.000And so if I had like two pieces of advice to just leave people with for now from this book, it's this, log off and go to church.
00:31:04.000These two things put together will solve so many of our problems if we reinvest in those communities and if we decide together that we're not going to be, you know, divided into black and white and brown and whatever other color.
00:31:17.000We're not going to be divided into sexuality or sex or what have you.
00:31:25.000Though this country may be benchy, it's not broken.
00:31:28.000And we still have hope for the West if we invest in those local communities and most of all, in that commitment to philia, to civic friendship or civic love.
00:31:39.000I tell people all the time that if every American honored the Sabbath the way a religious Jew would from Friday night to Saturday night, crime would go down.
00:31:47.000Suicide would go down, depression would go down, anxiety would go down.
00:31:50.000It's as if people that came before us knew exactly what they were talking about.
00:31:55.000Closing thoughts on the book because the premise, the title, is not fatalistic.
00:32:49.000When the Roman Republic was on the verge of collapsing, there was a guy called Marcus Tullius Cicero who thought that he had to retreat from public life and just write a republic of letters, just write political philosophy, because nothing else could be done.
00:33:10.000And Cicero was one of the first victims of that process.
00:33:14.000Fast forward hundreds and hundreds of years and enter one John Adams onto the scene, who since his boyhood has been poring over the speeches of none other than Marcus Cicero.
00:33:26.000This is a guy who has been riveted by Cicero's work his whole life, stands up and gives the speech in defense of our Declaration of Independence that sets this country on the road to its birth.
00:33:36.000It's not that it doesn't matter what happens in the next election.