The Charlie Kirk Show - How to Save the West with Spencer Klavan

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, today I'm Charlie Kirk show a full hour on how to save the west with Spencer Clavin.

00:00:05.000 Phenomenal book.

00:00:06.000 Check it out.

00:00:06.000 We talk about all of the crises ahead of us and what we could do about it.

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00:00:17.000 Buckle up everybody here.

00:00:18.000 We go.

00:00:19.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:00:21.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.

00:00:23.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:00:26.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:00:29.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:00:30.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:00:31.000 His 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.

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00:01:04.000 How do we save the West?

00:01:07.000 I love listening to our next guest on the American Mind Podcast.

00:01:11.000 He's super smart and has an amazing ability to capture the essence of things in a very educated way.

00:01:21.000 How to Save the West, Ancient Wisdom for Five Modern Crises by Spencer Clavin.

00:01:27.000 Spencer, welcome to the program.

00:01:29.000 Oh, thanks so much, Charlie, for having me.

00:01:31.000 It's great to be here.

00:01:32.000 All right, Spencer, lay out the main case that you make in the book and we'll go from there.

00:01:37.000 Sure.

00:01:38.000 So this is a book based on the radical idea that the past has something to say to the present.

00:01:44.000 A 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. 0.82

00:01:59.000 And 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. 0.89

00:02:10.000 Because 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? 0.80

00:02:20.000 I 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. 0.97

00:02:28.000 It feels like every day we wake up to a new disaster.

00:02:30.000 Something else is going wrong.

00:02:32.000 And these things feel huge.

00:02:34.000 They feel radically new.

00:02:36.000 And it's really hard to know what to do about them.

00:02:39.000 But 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.

00:03:03.000 And so it's not the case that the past has nothing to say to us.

00:03:07.000 In 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.

00:03:14.000 There have been great minds that have thought about these very questions.

00:03:17.000 What is a human being?

00:03:18.000 What's our place in the universe?

00:03:21.000 How can we understand ourselves in relationship to the world and to one another?

00:03:25.000 These 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.

00:03:35.000 And what that means is we're not alone.

00:03:38.000 There'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.

00:03:49.000 So 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.

00:04:07.000 None of that stuff is true.

00:04:08.000 These 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.

00:04:20.000 And 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.

00:04:30.000 So you lay this out in five different categories.

00:04:34.000 The first is, you say, the crisis of reality, which I just love.

00:04:39.000 And he who argues with reality lives in hell.

00:04:43.000 And we're seeing a lot of hellish living right now. 0.98

00:04:46.000 So, Spencer, I'm going to ask an infinitely deep question that shouldn't be deep.

00:04:52.000 What is reality?

00:04:55.000 Yeah.

00:04:56.000 You know, on one level, of course, we all know that there's such a thing as true and false and real and unreal.

00:05:03.000 We see that and we experience that every day in our lives.

00:05:07.000 But 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.

00:05:16.000 There's just your truth and my truth.

00:05:18.000 And we should fight it out, basically, in kind of a war of power politics.

00:05:23.000 Now, that's something we're hearing a lot these days, right?

00:05:26.000 You know, that if I can shut you up, if I can censor you on social media, if I can scream my truth louder than your truth, then I've won.

00:05:34.000 I've won the debate.

00:05:35.000 And that's one of those things that we think is totally new.

00:05:38.000 Nobody's ever faced this before.

00:05:39.000 But 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.

00:05:51.000 Socrates, 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?

00:06:01.000 Can we know anything?

00:06:02.000 Or is it all just change and flux, as Heraclitus says?

00:06:06.000 And this is the crisis of reality when people feel like they don't know what's true or false.

00:06:12.000 Maybe virtual reality is better than real reality.

00:06:15.000 And 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?

00:06:26.000 We could just take it because justice is the will of the stronger, as Thrasymachus says in Plato's Republic.

00:06:32.000 Now, this is ancient.

00:06:33.000 It's also persistent.

00:06:34.000 There's a passage in the book where I talk about the gulag of the Soviet Union under Stalin.

00:06:40.000 And 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.

00:06:53.000 And that means you don't have to have a trial.

00:06:55.000 You can just decide.

00:06:56.000 The party can decide that you're guilty from afar.

00:07:00.000 And all of this starts to sound more and more familiar as we understand that this is a perennial question that we're up against.

00:07:06.000 And what I argue in the book is there's no such thing as halfway relativism.

00:07:10.000 There'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.

00:07:18.000 It's all going to be great.

00:07:19.000 Either something is true absolutely, no matter who wishes it away or not.

00:07:23.000 And if it's not, then all we have left is power politics.

00:07:26.000 That's not the world I want to live in.

00:07:28.000 I don't actually think that's the world most people want to live in.

00:07:31.000 But in order to avoid that world, we've got to recover this wisdom that there is such a thing as truth and we can know it.

00:07:39.000 That is a very simple statement, but unbelievably controversial when you say it on a campus.

00:07:46.000 I talk to a lot of college kids.

00:07:47.000 I'll set up a table and talk to them for a while.

00:07:49.000 And if you, over a period of time, I did it at Berkeley, I did it at Austin in the last year, I've done it at dozens of schools.

00:07:54.000 I've spoken at over 120 universities.

00:07:56.000 And at some point, eventually, you're going to get back, you're going to get down to some truth claim.

00:08:01.000 And they are insistent that there is no such thing as absolute truth.

00:08:05.000 Of course, they believe that statement absolutely.

00:08:08.000 And that is self-contradictory.

00:08:10.000 However, 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.

00:08:31.000 So, Spencer, in a minute and a half, you're going to need longer than this.

00:08:33.000 How do we go about fixing that?

00:08:35.000 Because 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.

00:08:46.000 Minute and a half.

00:08:47.000 Yeah.

00:08:48.000 Okay.

00:08:48.000 Well, I would say, you know, in addition to my feelings, my emotions, like you said, I mean, you know this better than anybody, right?

00:08:55.000 It's also my identity, right?

00:08:57.000 That's the thing that people really grab on to is, yeah, who I inherently am in some absolute sense.

00:09:03.000 And 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?

00:09:10.000 You know, you said that these things are simple, and that's absolutely true.

00:09:14.000 It'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?

00:09:21.000 And this question: how is it working out for you to believe that nothing's either good or bad makes it so?

00:09:28.000 Are you happy?

00:09:28.000 Are you feeling good?

00:09:29.000 Do you wake up in the morning excited to get out of bed?

00:09:32.000 A lot of times, if you start asking questions that way, you'll discover that this stuff doesn't, it's not good for people.

00:09:37.000 It doesn't work out well.

00:09:38.000 And maybe, you know, they may not back down from screaming at you in the moment on the college campus.

00:09:44.000 But 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.

00:09:57.000 It's no way to live if you are the only defining feature of the world, your identity.

00:10:02.000 That's a terrifying and lonely place to be.

00:10:05.000 And a lot of what we're seeing looks like anger, looks like rage, but is actually loneliness, despair, and sadness.

00:10:12.000 The book exists to offer an alternative to that.

00:10:15.000 It's the most depressed, suicidal, alcohol, and drug-addicted generation in history for many reasons.

00:10:21.000 One of them is because we have decided to burn with enthusiastic zeal everything that works and is true that came before them.

00:10:30.000 So 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.

00:10:38.000 And I said, Can you prove something to me to be true without using the phrase studies show?

00:10:45.000 And they melted down in the sense they've never thought that there could be truth outside of scientism.

00:10:51.000 So one of the contentions you're making in the book is the pursuit of truth.

00:10:55.000 And you do it through Aristotelian or Platonic or Socratic means.

00:11:00.000 But 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.

00:11:11.000 And 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.

00:11:19.000 Your thoughts.

00:11:20.000 Wow.

00:11:20.000 That's really interesting.

00:11:22.000 It's a great question that you asked them.

00:11:24.000 And 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.

00:11:40.000 We have adherence to the scientism, as you said.

00:11:45.000 And 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.

00:11:58.000 After that, that was when everybody else became obsolete, right?

00:12:02.000 And this is a perfect, oh, it's perfect.

00:12:04.000 It'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.

00:12:13.000 They hate the science, right?

00:12:15.000 It's not science at all that I am against.

00:12:18.000 It's the contention, the claim that science is an exhaustive description of reality, that mathematical studies, yes, yes, figures, right?

00:12:27.000 That these kind of can totally describe everything about the world, everything about us can be boiled down into an equation.

00:12:34.000 And once it spits out the right answer, that's what you do, that's what you say, that's what you think.

00:12:39.000 Of 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.

00:12:45.000 Everything 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.

00:12:56.000 Things 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.

00:13:05.000 You can't point at a brain scan and know what these things are.

00:13:08.000 You have to live them and experience them.

00:13:11.000 And this is what I talk about in the book when I bring up the concept in Greek, it's called phronesis, practical wisdom.

00:13:17.000 How do you take abstract truths and live them out in your everyday life, play them out in scenarios that you might be faced with?

00:13:23.000 And 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.

00:13:44.000 And then you can outsource everything to the bureaucracy, right?

00:13:47.000 Then the administrative state will take care of it.

00:13:49.000 And there's no need for these messy people anymore, these kind of dirty, deplorables that like have all their backwards ideas.

00:13:56.000 Whatever else that is, that's not America.

00:13:58.000 And it's not the best of what our traditions have to offer us.

00:14:02.000 There are things in this life that simply don't boil down to an equation.

00:14:07.000 And when we talk as if equations describe the whole world, what we end up doing is becoming pagan worshipers. 0.89

00:14:13.000 We end up praying at a cult where we believe that Dr. Fauci is going to give us the right solution, whatever he says goes.

00:14:20.000 When we know that's not true, so it's just an article of faith.

00:14:23.000 It never works out.

00:14:24.000 The models never deliver.

00:14:26.000 It's always the world's going to end in 12 years and then it doesn't, but we just adopt a new one.

00:14:30.000 That's the behavior of somebody who believes in a religion.

00:14:33.000 And I argue in the book that everybody's got a religion.

00:14:36.000 So you might as well pick one that's actually true rather than just listening to the WEF or the CDC or whatever.

00:14:43.000 Yeah, I mean, there has been, you want to talk about the false religions of the last couple of years. 1.00

00:14:48.000 I'm so glad you mentioned paganism.

00:14:50.000 One 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.

00:15:11.000 There'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.

00:15:17.000 Now, why does that matter?

00:15:19.000 Well, polytheism means you have polymorality.

00:15:25.000 That's why it matters.

00:15:26.000 Ethical monotheism means that you have a singular morality for humanity.

00:15:33.000 And that's what the Noahic covenant was all about, which is that you do not get multiple gods and therefore you get multiple realities.

00:15:39.000 A man does whatever is right in his own eyes. 0.93

00:15:41.000 There is a singular morality.

00:15:45.000 Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.

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00:16:47.000 Spencer Clavin continues with us.

00:16:50.000 You should check out his new book, How to Save the West.

00:16:52.000 So, Spencer, you have an entire section dedicated to the body.

00:16:56.000 That's interesting to me.

00:16:58.000 Explain.

00:16:59.000 Yeah, this is maybe one of the ones that people would pick up the book and think, okay, absolute truth.

00:17:04.000 I get it.

00:17:06.000 America's regime, I get it. 0.71

00:17:07.000 But the body, what's going on with our bodies?

00:17:10.000 What's the problem there?

00:17:12.000 But 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.

00:17:39.000 Sex and gender is kind of the distinction that they typically draw.

00:17:42.000 And it's easy to feel, I think, like this thing just came out of nowhere.

00:17:47.000 I hear from a lot of people like, how did this all happen?

00:17:50.000 Where did this start?

00:17:51.000 Because suddenly it was so in the public eye.

00:17:54.000 And 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.

00:18:04.000 People that identify as demons, as dogs, as machines, robots, this idea of transhumanism.

00:18:11.000 This 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.

00:18:21.000 It feels like it came out of nowhere, but it's not the sort of thing that we've never dealt with before.

00:18:26.000 In fact, from the very beginnings of Greek philosophy, you have people beginning to feel like actually the body is kind of a burden.

00:18:35.000 The Neoplatonists are people that I bring up in the book, Plotinus, one of the followers of Plato, who read his work a lot.

00:18:42.000 Platinus' biographer says that he seemed ashamed of being in his body.

00:18:47.000 And you say, well, what's that about?

00:18:48.000 Why is that?

00:18:49.000 Well, 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.

00:18:59.000 And yet, we live in this world of change and decay.

00:19:02.000 And ultimately, the thing that the Judeo-Christian tradition drives home to us is one day we will die. 0.78

00:19:09.000 It's a terrible tragedy, and it makes us feel alienated from our flesh.

00:19:14.000 And 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.

00:19:21.000 These are all just kind of power impositions upon the body and we can do whatever we want.

00:19:26.000 It's all a performance.

00:19:28.000 She's really drawing a platonic dividing line.

00:19:31.000 She's drawing this line between the spirit and the flesh and tearing the two apart.

00:19:37.000 And 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?

00:19:43.000 This 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.

00:19:53.000 It always makes us less happy, more depressed, more deeply self-loathing and not happier.

00:20:00.000 It doesn't actually deliver on its promises.

00:20:02.000 There is another way here.

00:20:04.000 And 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.

00:20:22.000 The fusion of the two is what we actually are.

00:20:24.000 Our bodies aren't a mistake.

00:20:26.000 Our human being, our humanity is not some kind of accident that we need to wish away or surmount.

00:20:32.000 This is actually the language in which our souls are expressed.

00:20:36.000 It's the way we live out everything that's good about us that doesn't fit into a mathematical equation.

00:20:41.000 And 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.

00:20:50.000 The way forward is actually deeper into our physical presence, into real life and living face to face in the here and now.

00:20:57.000 It'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.

00:21:11.000 This is why.

00:21:11.000 It's because our bodies aren't just kind of an accident or an afterthought.

00:21:16.000 They are the medium in which our souls are expressed.

00:21:19.000 That'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.

00:21:28.000 And that's the antidote to all that paganism you were talking about before.

00:21:31.000 That's exactly right.

00:21:32.000 And 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. 0.76

00:21:45.000 It's one of the many ways that Christianity is differentiated from so many Eastern mystical traditions, where, in fact, it's the opposite.

00:21:54.000 In 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.

00:22:07.000 And it's the reason why I think so many people are moved by it.

00:22:11.000 The incarnation, we could talk about at great length.

00:22:13.000 Okay, but I want to keep our momentum here.

00:22:15.000 The crisis of meaning.

00:22:19.000 What is it?

00:22:20.000 Well, 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.

00:22:33.000 This is where we get our word meme.

00:22:36.000 You talk about memes online.

00:22:37.000 You share these images.

00:22:38.000 You pass them back and forth.

00:22:40.000 We don't always remember that this comes out of an evolutionary theory of all human life.

00:22:45.000 Earlier, we were talking about spreading out science to cover the whole of reality.

00:22:49.000 This is spreading out the theory of evolution to cover all of human existence.

00:22:54.000 And 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.

00:23:03.000 And the stuff that works kind of survives, basically.

00:23:06.000 You have genes at the biological level, you have memes at the cultural level.

00:23:09.000 Now, 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.

00:23:20.000 The Greek word is mimemo, which is where we get our word meme.

00:23:23.000 And mimesis is this act of imitation.

00:23:26.000 We can see we all do.

00:23:27.000 We do it in our art.

00:23:28.000 We do it in our culture.

00:23:30.000 And we do it even at the biological level of our genes.

00:23:34.000 But of course, the trick is, if we're imitating, if we're reproducing, if all this stuff is copying, copies are copies of something.

00:23:42.000 Reproductions reproduce some original model.

00:23:46.000 And in Plato, right, the original model is the divine.

00:23:50.000 It's the God who, the one God, you know, you were indicating, and I think this is really right.

00:23:55.000 All 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.

00:24:10.000 You 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.

00:24:20.000 That's what we're all copies of.

00:24:22.000 And that gives you a stable reference point for what we call meaning.

00:24:26.000 Now, in Dawkins' world, everything about that description is true, except the God part, except the meaning.

00:24:33.000 And so what you actually have is just this war of all against all.

00:24:37.000 And Dawkins kind of tries to fight against this, but actually his revolution has so outstripped him now that it's impossible to deny.

00:24:43.000 If there's no final truth, no final being, you can tell that we're pushing up against the idea of God here.

00:24:50.000 If that doesn't exist, then there really is no meaning to anything that we do at all.

00:24:55.000 Dawkins 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.

00:25:05.000 It's why Sam Harris had to write an entire barely coherent book, The Moral Landscape, because he knew what he was flirting with.

00:25:12.000 He knows it.

00:25:13.000 He 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.

00:25:30.000 I think they fail miserably at that.

00:25:32.000 And we're all kind of living in the consequences of that.

00:25:35.000 So, Spencer, more broadly here, I think that there is an opportunity to save the West.

00:25:42.000 And 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.

00:25:51.000 It's not working.

00:25:53.000 I'm going to just use a very utilitarian argument.

00:25:55.000 Let's get out of the clouds.

00:25:57.000 Our existence right now, it seems to be harder to do the basic things and easier to do the awful things.

00:26:06.000 People are more alone.

00:26:08.000 We live in bigger homes with more stuff and less kids.

00:26:13.000 I think we can save the West because people are yearning for a revival of what is true and joyful.

00:26:19.000 Your thoughts?

00:26:20.000 Wow, 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.

00:26:29.000 Everything's gotten too terrible, too bad.

00:26:32.000 And my feeling is, really?

00:26:33.000 Have you cracked a history book lately?

00:26:35.000 Do you know how bad things can get?

00:26:37.000 And actually, this moment that is a moment of real trial, real trouble, I won't dispute that.

00:26:44.000 But that does create this exact opportunity that you're describing, the opportunity of longing, of hunger, right?

00:26:52.000 That when you present to people a better way out, they're more inclined to take it.

00:26:56.000 And you know where I think we've seen that lately is in the state of Florida.

00:27:00.000 And, you know, again, to bring it down to earth, right?

00:27:02.000 The midterms happened.

00:27:03.000 It was kind of disappointing for the Republicans, except in Ron DeSantis, Florida, where he came forward with a confident cultural proposition.

00:27:11.000 Our roots aren't rotten.

00:27:12.000 They're good.

00:27:13.000 And we don't accept this kind of nonsense about whatever woke theory and so forth.

00:27:19.000 Everybody got on board with that.

00:27:20.000 It didn't matter your race, your sexuality, your religion, your whatever.

00:27:24.000 People responded to that.

00:27:25.000 And that's that opportunity that you're talking about because people are hungry.

00:27:28.000 I think that's exactly right.

00:27:29.000 And I mean, Aristotle said, what, in the metaphysics, all men desire to know.

00:27:34.000 I mean, I think we could do the modern day example.

00:27:36.000 I think all people want to get closer to joy and happiness.

00:27:41.000 They reach out.

00:27:42.000 They ore guontae. 0.57

00:27:44.000 They reach out for knowledge.

00:27:45.000 And also, yeah, for that flourishing, for happiness.

00:27:48.000 I love that.

00:27:49.000 I am going to steal it and use it a lot.

00:27:51.000 Our roots are not rotten.

00:27:53.000 They are good.

00:27:56.000 Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.

00:27:57.000 When 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.

00:28:07.000 States are now advertising to travel just to get an abortion.

00:28:10.000 It's become abortion trafficking.

00:28:12.000 So the need to provide the truth as girls and women are contemplating what to do about their pregnancy is greater now than ever before.

00:28:19.000 Ultrasounds 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.

00:28:27.000 When 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.

00:28:34.000 And more than 85% of the time, she will choose life.

00:28:38.000 You don't have to make a lot of noise to make a big difference for life.

00:28:40.000 Just give an ultrasound at preborn.org to be a hero for life.

00:28:44.000 That is preborn.org.

00:28:45.000 $140 gives five mothers a free ultrasound and saves babies.

00:28:49.000 $200 can save 10 babies.

00:28:50.000 Go to preborn.org.

00:28:52.000 I love this organization.

00:28:52.000 I'm a donor to it.

00:28:53.000 Check it out, preborn.org.

00:28:58.000 I want to talk about the action part of this, though.

00:29:01.000 What do people have to do to save the West, to retake this beautiful thing that we have inherited?

00:29:08.000 You're absolutely right that it's not just going to be about writing books or reading books as much as I love books.

00:29:14.000 And that's an important guide.

00:29:16.000 You know, you have to think of people like me, people like you and I who write books and talk for a living.

00:29:23.000 We are standard bearers, but the real people in the fight are everyday folks who go out and actually put this stuff into practice.

00:29:32.000 There is a really simple insight from the tradition.

00:29:36.000 And we were saying earlier that, you know, simplicity is sometimes the most profound thing.

00:29:42.000 When 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.

00:29:56.000 And that's what the Greeks called philia, friendship or even love.

00:30:00.000 Politike philia is civic love.

00:30:03.000 It's the kind of thing that can only exist between and among neighbors.

00:30:08.000 So 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?

00:30:18.000 It's class warfare.

00:30:19.000 When 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.

00:30:27.000 Okay, so a significant portion of the population is tantamount to a disease, right?

00:30:31.000 Or they say men are inherently sexist, women, you know, are oppressed, all of this stuff, of course, that they just insist on every day.

00:30:38.000 The 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.

00:30:56.000 And 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.

00:31:04.000 These 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.

00:31:17.000 We're not going to be divided into sexuality or sex or what have you.

00:31:21.000 We are Americans, first and foremost.

00:31:23.000 Our flag is the American flag.

00:31:25.000 Though this country may be benchy, it's not broken.

00:31:28.000 And 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.

00:31:39.000 I 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. 1.00

00:31:47.000 Suicide would go down, depression would go down, anxiety would go down.

00:31:50.000 It's as if people that came before us knew exactly what they were talking about.

00:31:55.000 Closing thoughts on the book because the premise, the title, is not fatalistic.

00:32:00.000 It's not cynical.

00:32:02.000 In fact, it implies that reclamation is possible.

00:32:06.000 Closing thoughts, Spencer.

00:32:08.000 Absolutely.

00:32:09.000 Well, of course, when you start to look out in the world, it's easy to feel despair.

00:32:14.000 It's easy to feel like the forces we're up against are bigger than any of us and it's already too late.

00:32:20.000 You know, all the kinds of things you hear every day in the news.

00:32:23.000 It's very easy to get modeling into despair.

00:32:27.000 One of the most important things about the Western canon, the Western tradition, is that it belongs to God.

00:32:34.000 It is a tradition of truth-seeking and seeking truths that are eternal.

00:32:39.000 I'm not here to say that everything's going to go wrong tomorrow.

00:32:41.000 I'm not here to tell you that everything is going to go right.

00:32:44.000 I do not know what's going to happen in the future.

00:32:47.000 What I know is this.

00:32:49.000 When 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.

00:33:02.000 Everything else was falling apart.

00:33:04.000 In the short term, Cicero was an abject failure.

00:33:07.000 The new regime was coming.

00:33:09.000 The republic was ending.

00:33:10.000 And Cicero was one of the first victims of that process.

00:33:14.000 Fast 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.

00:33:26.000 This 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.

00:33:36.000 It's not that it doesn't matter what happens in the next election.

00:33:39.000 It does.

00:33:39.000 It's not that we shouldn't care about the day-to-day of politics.

00:33:42.000 We should.

00:33:43.000 It's just that our hope is in a further and deeper and higher thing than even the kinds of fights that we have on the day-to-day.

00:33:51.000 We are looking to a tradition that is much longer than that.

00:33:54.000 And in that tradition, there is no room for despair.

00:33:57.000 We have no right to despair.

00:33:58.000 We have a job to do, and that's to carry the light.

00:34:00.000 Just hope our head doesn't get cut off like Cicero's.

00:34:03.000 Spencer, I mean, we certainly can't.

00:34:05.000 How to save the West.

00:34:06.000 Love it.

00:34:07.000 Thank you so much.

00:34:08.000 Email us freedom at charliekirk.com and subscribe to our podcast.

00:34:12.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:34:14.000 God bless you.

00:34:14.000 Email me, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:34:16.000 Have a great day.

00:34:20.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - February 15, 2023

How to Save the West with Spencer Klavan

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