Klavan, Spencer. How to Save the West: Ancient Wisdom for 5 Modern Crises. Regnery Publishing, 2023.
Spencer Klavan’s How to Save the West: Ancient Wisdom for 5 Modern Crises is the latest “collapse of modernity” volume, and it distinguishes itself in the genre by offering solutions on both the societal and the individual levels. How to Save the West is an effective diagnosis of late modernity, updating the critiques offered by T. S. Eliot, Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, and William F. Buckley for the twenty-first century. Beyond diagnosis, Klavan shows the resources the western tradition holds for solving the woes of modern life. Through his popularity with the Young Heretics podcast and move to the DailyWire, Klavan has proven himself a significant voice within the rising generation of intellectual conservatives.
In addition to speaking to a broad audience, Klavan fills a need within the niche of classical education. The classical renewal movement is growing each year, and the need to help new teachers, parents, and administrators understand the western tradition is paramount for the movement’s success. Klavan provides a single-volume introduction to western thinking. Heads of Schools should require it for summer professional development; no other volume provides such a clear introduction to the values and methodologies of classical education. In an ideal world, all teachers beginning a career in classical education would read How to Save the West. The same could be said for parents who look at their children's classical education and conclude that their own schooling failed them; Klavan’s work shows the width and breadth of the tradition, and just how few schools provide excellent training in it.
In Klavan’s view, society is currently undergoing five crises. In describing these crises, he illustrates the timeless value of Classical Greek philosophy. The present is difficult to discuss or diagnose without succumbing to partisan rancor. By identifying our current struggles with universal human concerns, Klavan transcends political polarization by wrestling with prior questions. His argument models the value of acquiring deep knowledge of a universally comprehensible culture; classical Greece becomes a mirror through which the reader comprehends the questions which humans have asked for centuries, and the resources that exist to provide answers.
Klavan opens with “The Reality Crisis,” arguing that the metaverse and transhumanist futurism offer an alluring promise: substitute the real with virtual reality. While presented as an extension of creativity and technology, the metaverse masks a power grab: “Making a bid to create the metaverse means making a bid to construct the contours of the world. It is an attempt to gain control, not just over what can be said, but over what reality looks like.” Klavan connects the reality crisis to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, showing that Western philosophy began with the goal of distinguishing reality from initial perception. Philosophy began with rejecting shadows on the wall as the totality of the real and choosing instead to emerge into the sunlight. Today, the triumph of relativism threatens our ability to perceive reality, and in so doing Thrasymachus’ understanding of justice as power is all that remains: “Let truth go and you will not be set free: you will be cast into a brutal war of all against all. If truth is relative, then all that matters is power.” This was the original reality crisis. And Socrates stood accused of causing it. The reality crisis threatens our ability to understand the real and live within it; substituting a false reality gives control of that reality to someone else. To live well, human beings must know what is real.
The “Crisis of the Body” begins with the soul: “Our moral evaluation of ourselves—our feeling of guilt over lashing out at a friend, say, or telling a lie—suggests that we are something more than just a disconnected succession of impulses and appetites. It suggests that we have a soul.” Greek philosophy focuses on how that soul relates to the body—is the self separate from the body? Should not the soul long to ascend from its prison of flesh? Klavan argues that all we know comes through the body. “Dissolve the boundaries of your body and you dissolve the boundaries of yourself.” Klavan addresses both transgenderism and transhumanism: “Our present efforts to transcend gender or even species, to become transhuman or to live as an avatar in virtual reality, have left us looking ridiculous and feeling sick.” The rejection of the body as essential to the self, paired with the ability to form niche online communities, reaches the ridiculous:
The movement that began with ‘gender neutral’ pronouns has now produced an enormous constellation of totally invented identities, going far beyond ze and zer to include neologisms like ‘pupself’ and ‘demonself,’ for those who identify as animals or demons. What’s going on here is bigger than gender: we are dreaming not simply of making men into women, and vice versa, but making ourselves into anything, at a whim.
To solve this crisis, Klavan turns to the Greek term “hylomorphism,” referring to the union of body and soul. He argues that “The human soul’s goodness, honor, courage, and excellence must live in a human body—or not at all.” Such a view equips Klavan to write:
Your flesh, for all its flaws and failings, has something to say about who you are. Your masculinity or your femininity is not something you perform; it is something you aspire to fulfill. Most men long to be manly because they carry in their bodies the potential to be fathers, protectors, and warriors. Women are, by and large, endowed with the grace to create, to make homes, to give life. These are things to be relished, not despised or discounted.
Both body and soul matter, and find their union in the human person. The body, Klavan argues, is also part of the real.
In “The Crisis of Meaning,” Klavan argues that every human knows the need for meaning, and that such meaning implies an ultimate reality. “When a poem or a human face reflects some emotion or truth, we say there is a meaning in it; some reality lies behind the symbols and reproductions that we create every day. If that is not true—if it is just memes all the way down—then what we have is a crisis of meaning.” He then discusses “The Crisis of Religion,” arguing that scientism has presented a myth of disproving the existence of God, but such proof is by definition beyond the possibility of actual science. Building on Aristotle’s concept of mimesis, Klavan argues that all life seeks to replicate itself; humans, as rational animals, seek to replicate not just themselves, but the highest levels of reality. He then suggests that while God cannot be proven, such a concept is philosophically necessary: without God life must be meaningless.
In these sorts of questions religion confirms basic truths; it does not invent them. It is Plato and Aristotle, and even Dawkins, who raise the necessary question: If the world is one giant factory of replication, then what, ultimately, is being replicated? All the Bible does on this score is pose an answer: God.
Klavan is careful to not go more specific than an ultimate being, but he makes a clear argument that God is necessary to solve the reality, body, and meaning crises.
Klavan closes with the “Regime Crisis,” arguing that our political structure in the modern west is untenable without solving the prior crises. His discussion of regimes ranges from Aristotle through Machiavelli and Washington, with a specific focus on the American founding. He closes his argument with these lines: “And if you and I wake up determined that we will live as if the eternal truths handed down to us by our ancestors are as real as ourselves and the world around us—if we do that in faith, then that’s better than good. That is how to save the West.” Klavan does not claim to prove his arguments with certainty; instead, he invites the reader to agree with his insights, and if so, live according to those truths.
How to Save the West stands alongside the previous “crisis of the West” volumes such as Ideas Have Consequences, God and Man at Yale, and The Abolition of Man; it indicts modernity and identifies sources of redemption. Through this book, Klavan demonstrates that rejecting the sources of hope and life in the West fails to bring joy. Rather, reaching deep into the Western Tradition provides the resources to withstand modern efforts to abandon human nature. Klavan affirms reality in all of its complexity and argues that when we do the same we will save what is worth saving in the West.
Josh Herring serves as Dean of Classical Education for Thales Academy. He writes regularly for the Acton Institute and Liberty Fund. He runs The Optimistic Curmudgeon, an interview podcast dedicated to furthering the conversation of intellectual conservatism. He tweets @optimisticC3.