Name: From Cultural Revolution to Cultural Revival: Spencer Klavan on ‘How to Save the West’
Uploaded: 2025-11-25T07:44:28.000Z
Description: For decades, there has been an assault on the Western classical tradition and the core values, arts, and philosophy at the bedrock of Western civilization, says classicist Spencer Klavan.

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[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] For decades, there has been an assault on the Western classical tradition and the core values, arts, and philosophy at the bedrock of Western civilization, says classicist Spencer Klavan.

Are we now witnessing a shift in this tide?

Klavan is the author of multiple books, including “How to Save the West: Ancient Wisdom for Five Modern Crises.”

He is also an associate editor at The Claremont Review of Books and host of the “Young Heretics” podcast.

“People are starting to realize that you can only scream and yell and tear down statues and set things on fire for so long,” Klavan says. “Now the energy seems to be in the direction of … recovering and rebuilding some of our most profound traditions, these wisdom traditions of Athens and Jerusalem.”

In this episode, we dive deep into questions of form and matter, beauty and truth, and the importance of finding spiritual meaning in our modern era.

“It’s often attributed to Werner Heisenberg that once you take one sip from the cup of science, you become an atheist. But when you drain it to the dregs, God is waiting for you there at the bottom,” he says.

What do the classics have to offer us? Why is classical art and literature important? And why does Klavan believe President Donald Trump’s executive order on restoring classical architecture is a major step forward?

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of NTD.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:

Spencer Klavan, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Yes, it’s a delight. Thank you for having me.

Well, so what really has happened to Western culture?

Big question. I think, broadly speaking, we are living at a turning point right now. And for most of my life, if not all of my life, we have been in a period of really serious crisis and decline. I think 2020 and the ensuing events were kind of the most dramatic form of this, but in many ways, as other people have pointed out, the riots of 2020 and the disasters of the COVID pandemic and its aftermath were just a final kind of explosion that had been building and boiling for decades and decades and decades.

And in my particular domain, which is Western culture, Western arts, literature, and philosophy, you really can trace that back at least to the cultural revolution of the 60s and 70s. Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western civ has got to go. This really dedicated rejection of our wisdom traditions, especially in schools, especially conspiring directly to kind of miseducate and uneducate young kids and college kids.

And I think you saw the fruits of that when America went through one of its biggest crises, perhaps crises in our history, with this kind of outpouring of partisan rage and iconoclasm and what Roger Scruton might have called oikophobia, the fear of everything local and native. And what’s really remarkable about that to me is not that it happened. In fact, it seemed pretty predictable that it would happen at some point, given everything that had gone on.

But what’s remarkable is that we seem to have now come out of it and passed through into something quite different. It’s typically referred to in casual speech as the vibe shift. We’ve seen this real kind of shifting of momentum, shifting of weight away from this kind of oikophobia, this revolutionary Jacobin spirit, and into a kind of brighter and perhaps more optimistic period where people, even if they’re not aggressively Right-wing, even if they’re not even Trump voters, are starting to realize that you can only scream and yell and tear down statues and set things on fire for so long before things start to get really bad. And at a certain point, you have to actually be constructive, and you have to build.

And now the energy seems to be in the direction of recovering and rebuilding some of our most profound traditions, these wisdom traditions of Athens and Jerusalem. You’re starting to see a return to, if not traditional religion, to sort of spiritual ideas. Something other than just the raw materialism that has dominated for so long is coming back, I think, into popularity. You’re starting to see young men in particular returning to church and to traditional religious services.

And you’re starting to see a kind of political energy in the direction of pro-Americanism. It’s no longer cool to be detached and critical of everything that went before. Now there’s a renewed interest in some degree of cultural stability and clarity. All of this is very much in its infancy, very early days. But I do think that we’re passing now into some kind of new era for rebuilding, which is very exciting for me as somebody who’s really never lived through a period like this before.

That’s fascinating. Just very briefly, for the benefit of those in our audience who might not be familiar, what do you mean by Athens and Jerusalem as being the foundation, just very briefly?

Absolutely. Well, this is a concept that we use to understand what we mean when we talk about the West. We throw around this idea of Western civilization so much that sometimes you have to stop and think, well, what actually do I mean by that? We have a vague, I think, kind of sense of classical columns and maybe the founding fathers are involved, and people kind of know Western Civ when they see it. But when pressed to define it, I like to refer to this idea of Athens and Jerusalem. And these are two great cities of the ancient world, each of them standing in for a major tradition.

And when I say Athens, I’m talking about pagan philosophy and classical ideals, questions of virtue and logos, that is reason, what can be best known using merely human reason. But one thing I think that is clearly true is that human reason alone can’t get us all the way. And so that’s what Jerusalem stands for in the scriptural traditions, first of the Jews and the ancient Israelites, and then of the Christians who emerge out of Judaism. And that’s what Jerusalem stands in for, is that idea of revelation. So with that kind of twin pairing of reason and revelation, you get Western civilization, which then flowers and grows in a million different directions. But those are its sources.

So you referenced Roger Scruton earlier, and it made me think, I believe he said something like, as for the definition of Western civilization, we make symphonies. Does that ring a bell?

I love that, yes.

Yes, and that’s very interesting. It fits very well into your area of interest, which is beauty. I mean, there’s something unbelievable. I’m thinking right now of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, which is my favorite, which is just this unbelievable thing, right? And how did someone even conceive of that?

We’re sitting in Nashville, and we have this great orchestra here. They just had their concert, an annual concert that is a sort of suggested donation, but it’s mainly for the community. And they did Gustav Mahler’s second symphony, which is called his Resurrection Symphony, which I had never heard before. Mahler was in many ways a tortured and difficult artist. He was a transitional figure between these big Germanic composers like Wagner and some of the modernism that would come later.

The Resurrection Symphony grew out of a reaction to his friend’s death. He first composed this smaller piece, which was the first movement of the symphony, although he didn’t know it at the time. And it is this funeral march that kind of alternates between triumph and lament. And the kind of soaring movements of it start to break down and be troubled by chaos. And he builds this ultimately into this musical interrogation of chaos and order. And is there life after death? That is, is there some meaning beyond everything that we now see and experience? Or do we just have to ultimately go down to the dust and be abandoned in chaos?

And in the hinge of this symphony, in the fourth movement, there is a solo, an alto solo, which is unusual for the time. And it’s a poem, a traditional folk song from the German repertoire of folk music. And effectively the message of the piece is, you know, we are in such, here in our deepest pain, God will give us a light that will lead us out to a new dawn and then the last and final movement of this grand choral resurrection and I was sitting there thinking exactly as you say, you know, not just this piece of music which is so beautiful but the centuries and centuries of thought and emotion and feeling and struggle that had to go into creating the culture in which Mahler could produce this work of art and in which it could have meaning.

I think that culture is so rich and so ubiquitous. We’ve all kind of moved through it our whole lives that we think it just fell out of the sky. We think that everyone has always had these ideas, believed in absolute truth, believed in the good and the beautiful, or that all men are created equal. All these things that we cite now as if they were kind of common sense. One thing that studying history really shows you is most people in most times and places haven’t believed in these things. In fact, the history of the world generally is quite bleak and full of savagery and barbarism and pain. And it’s in the midst of that that we have this thing that we call Western civilization, which consists of these two great sources of reason and revelation.

We started out by talking about the summer of 2020 and the disaster that afflicted our culture. People destroyed so much and we saw so much destruction that we actually came up against what the world looks like without Western Civ. If Western Civ has got to go, what are you going to replace it with? And it turned out the answer was basically revolution, infinite revolution, and savagery.

If I may, you know, on the one hand, there was this movement of destroying history and so forth. But at the same time, there was this movement to destroy the global economy. I mean, it’s interesting. These things were happening simultaneously, and I hadn’t really thought about that until this moment. There’s a whole lot of destruction going on in the name of some kind of progress in all cases, I think.

Well, the economy is a good example of another thing we think just kind of exists. It’s just there in the universe. Most people, and I certainly speak for myself when I say I’m by no means an economist. And so it would be easy for me to go about my day to walk into the supermarket and choose among riches that would have made King Ashurbanipal of Assyria blush. I mean, his jaw would have dropped. The great kings of old would have been astonished to see a modern supermarket.

And it would be easy for me to just walk in and take that for granted and think, great, this is just how the world works. Things come from who knows where. And as you say, that’s actually a wonder of the world. very carefully built up over many, many decades and even centuries. And there was this heedless, just, you know, well, we can afford to kind of throw money at people. We can afford to shut this all down for a bit so that COVID doesn’t spread.

And we’ll just give people stimulus checks and we’ll just, you know, incur yet more debt to add to our already towering number. And I think that people, again, if you do that long enough, you actually start to hit rock bottom and you realize, oh, these things aren’t just kind of guaranteed. We actually have to work to maintain them. And that’s another thing people are rediscovering, I think.

There’s a central theme of human dignity. Thinking about this has been kind of plaguing me for years now, and how easy it is with some sort of possibly lofty ideal to almost forget about the dignity of every individual human life, which is kind of the centerpiece of this tradition that you’ve been describing. And if I may deviate slightly, I don’t think it’s just the Western tradition. We were chatting a bit earlier about The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis, and the concept of the Tao and this kind of universal morality that he discussed. That always resonated with me because I saw that not just in the Western tradition.

Yes, that is interesting. I mean, one accusation that is typically made against people like me when we start talking about Western Civ and Athens and Jerusalem is, well, do you just think that everyone else in the world is backwards? Are you a Western chauvinist or supremacist in the sense that you think only of these nations — and usually the insinuation is that there’s a racial component to this as well, that basically it’s code for you just only like white people or white nations or anything like that.

And my answer to this includes exactly what you just said. To affirm the beauty, the uniqueness, the preciousness of Western civilization does not imply that nobody anywhere else ever has had a good civilization. In fact, I’m fascinated by Japanese culture. So that’s a civilization that just happens to have a great deal of respect and interest for me.

But as you say, human dignity or the worth of human life is, I think, very central to any rightly understood Tao, that is, any reasoned tradition that is worth the name. And I think you do find this also in Confucianism, for instance. I’m not all that familiar with the intricacies of that particular philosophy, but I gather that this is a central aspect of Confucian thought as well. It’s interesting, as they get to thinking, once people think deeply, they begin to see that this is a necessity of any moral system. It’s certainly crucial in Christian ethics because of what we call the imago dei, which is the image of God.You get this in Genesis 1.

Crucially, when St. Paul goes to the Areopagus, which is the hill where he preaches to the Greek philosophers, when he goes to Greece to evangelize in pagan Europe, he quotes the Stoic poet Aratus. And this is in Acts 17 when he’s giving this sermon. He says, we are his offspring, that is God’s offspring, as some of your own poets have said. And he’s referring there to the fact that completely separate from the Christian tradition, outside of this religious, very culturally specific religious tradition, Greek philosophers had also worked their way to something like this idea of human dignity, of mankind, the image of God.

You find this, for instance, in Seneca’s letters when he’s saying you should treat your slaves well. Well, why should you treat your slaves well? Because they’re humans just like you, even though they’re so much lower in the social hierarchy. And so, yes, some of these principles are not universal in the sense that everyone has always known or believed them because there are many, many societies where human dignity is not respected even today. And in fact, that’s a major danger.

But it’s also the case that around the world, there are a variety of different traditions where people have thought carefully, struggled, and worked hard to figure out what are the core principles of good ethics. And they all end up with this core idea of human dignity, which is one reason why when somebody tells you, as the French, as the Jacobins in the French Revolution did, as Lenin before Stalin and then Stalin did in the Soviet Union, when somebody says to you, I’ve got the perfect system for humanity, everything is going to work great, the economy is going to be great, we’re going to have money, we’re going to have, well, one thing we have to do is we have to just get rid of this idea of human dignity, right?

You see this a lot. Trotsky wrote that we need to dispense with the Quaker-Papist notion of the dignity of human life. When that happens, that’s a little red warning sign that goes on to tell you that you’ve deviated from the Tao. That is the moment when you know no matter how good this system seems, it’s going to end in disaster when you get rid of it.

Well, I think Stalin famously verbalized that in order to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs, right?

And the eggs are people.

Right, right, ultimately. And this is, again, exactly what you’re talking about. The moment that you benevolently, however benevolently, decide it’s okay to sacrifice the few for the benefit of the many. That’s really what we’re talking about, right? It doesn’t, you know, you’re not, you don’t have to be thinking about it in the sense that, oh yeah, it’s okay to actively kill people. It might be, you know, just to know, yes, there might be a few that, you know, kind of fall out in the margins.

There’s a wonderful story by Ursula Le Guin called The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. And the notion is very simple. Omelas is paradise. It’s perfect. Their scientists have the most advanced technology in the world. The philosophers reason exquisitely. Their artists are unfathomably talented. And in Omelas, every citizen’s development comes to realize that this is the case. And everyone in Omelas of a certain age knows that all that these people enjoy, all the prosperity of this city is dependent upon the suffering of this one child. Nobody can quite say how, but we all realize that this is the case.

And so, of course, it’s called The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas because it’s about the few. Most people are happy to go on sort of ignoring this child, but some people walk away. And I think that’s kind of the, in some ways, correct me if I’m wrong, that is kind of the distinction that you’re drawing on here, is the ones who walk away.

Well, I’m thinking about the Hippocratic Oath and how in pursuit of a better approach to medicine, our medical system seems to have not forgotten about it, but certainly has been moving away from medicine based on the Hippocratic Oath, to do no harm.

I think there’s a huge dimension of this that is about the replacement of virtue ethics with utilitarian ethics. I mean, once you take a metaphysical perspective out of the equation, that is, once you stop including abstract ideals and divine truth in your calculations, you can only reason on the basis of numbers, basically. I can save 10 people by killing one person. It’s the classic trolley problem that we’re always confronted with. And the classical answer to these sorts of questions is to refer to non-negotiable absolutes, which include things like the dignity of humanity, that this is just not something, even if you can get all sorts of riches out of killing one innocent person, it’s still wrong and you must not do it.

The modern way of reasoning is to kind of reject all that because it depends on this source of absolute non-negotiable truth. And usually, however you reason it out, that source has to be higher than this material plane. You’re going to end up with something like the good or the ideal or God or all these scary words that we don’t like to refer to anymore.

And so instead, people try to construct systems of ethics out of this merely material plane. Those are always numerically weighted systems of ethics because that’s what this world presents us with, is all these sort of quantities and tallies and then very, very quickly you do start to say things like we can get five more utils of happiness, and we can get five more ounces of the good if we sacrifice one guy over here.

It’s interesting that you say that we’re shifting away from materialism and I’d like you to kind of qualify that for me. Explain to me how you really see that because I’m not entirely sure I see it in its entirety. I’m curious if this shift in materialism that you’re seeing is also reflected somehow in this shift in perception of the value of the human being.

Absolutely. Well, let me put it this way. For my entire life, religion has been in decline, on the wane. And it’s been generally understood that this was bound to continue, that this was the way that intelligent people were moving, especially when I was quite a bit younger, in high school or even before. This was the high noon of the new atheism. This is when guys like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins were all over the press. and they were lauded as sort of the gold standard of intellectual excellence.

My friends and I, who were all aspiring intellectuals of one stripe or another, also accepted this. We thought, yes, well, smart people generally don’t believe. Once you learn enough about the world and the way it works, it becomes very, very difficult to sustain belief in an immaterial plane in anything other than atoms in motion. That assumption, that climate of opinion, is what I think has completely transformed in the last, say, five to ten years. I’ve been shocked at how quickly it’s changed.

You’re right that it doesn’t mean people are now flocking back to church en masse. There is some evidence in the latest Pew study of America that we’re getting at least a leveling off of the decline in church attendance. But still, relative to older generations, young generations are pretty spotty in their church attendance and that sort of thing. On the other hand, you’re starting to see more and more people in more and more domains saying that this sort of secular materialism is just not going to hold together. It’s just not going to make sense.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali was a big turning point here when she published this article saying it’s just not going to work. If we want all the lovely things that we’ve inherited from the Western tradition, like liberal democracy and freedom of the press and so on and so forth, we’re not going to be able to sustain them without some kind of grounding in our Christian heritage and personally saying, I am a Christian.

That’s a key step because many people said all of that and then did not themselves convert, or became what’s called cultural Christians. Richard Dawkins himself called himself a cultural Christian recently, by which he basically means, I want my civilization to be overrun by woke maniacs and jihadists. Therefore, I want the cultural benefits of Christianity because I can’t think of any other way to stop this from happening. But that’s very different from what Ali said, which was, you know, okay, well then, I’m going to become a Christian.

My most recent book, Light of the Mind, Light of the World, is about the way that this has happened in the sciences. For a while, it looked very plausible that you could explain everything in the physical world with reference to these little chunks of matter bopping around. About 100 years ago, 125 years or so ago, it became apparent that whatever it is that’s going on in this physical world around us, it ain’t just chunks of matter bouncing and colliding against each other.There’s something much more mysterious to do with the meeting between mind and matter.

As scientists have become aware of that, you’re starting to see more and more of them say what is often attributed to Werner Heisenberg, that once you take one sip from the cup of science, you become an atheist. But when you drain it to the dregs, God is waiting for you there at the bottom. So you’re seeing a lot of people basically starting to say that.

Fred Hoyle, a great astrophysicist and cosmologist, said it looks as if a super intellect has monkeyed around with the universe. That kind of suspicion has been dawning on people for some time. I think that these things are all interrelated to one another. I think the renewed interest in traditional faith among young men that we’ve discussed, the slowing of the decline in church attendance, and the flowering of respectable intellectual Christianity are connected.

Matthew Crawford is another name I haven’t mentioned yet. But he, along with Ross Douthat, these are guys that have really put their names on the line for a high, arguing that intelligent people can and should believe. This is connected in turn to the movement away from materialism in the sciences. If you think about the timescale of these sorts of things, you realize that we should expect them to move very, very slowly.

If you think about Isaac Newton at the end of the 17th century, he himself was by no means a materialist or an atheist, but it was he who created the system that others would then take and use in defense of this kind of general materialism that took hold in the 19th century and afterward. That’s almost 500 years of cultural life from the genesis of an idea, and you can take it back even further and say that that idea begins really with

Copernicus and the earlier scientific revolution. 500 years before that just becomes the atmosphere of acceptable opinion that we grew up in. It produces this kind of world where we all grew up thinking that materialism and atheism were the smart thing. If you then say, well, it was 125 years ago that the quantum revolution upended all of the material assumptions that were underneath that climate of opinion, you realize that we’re only 125 years into what might be our next 500-year-long shift. It might be away from that materialist, scientific view and toward something more spiritual. That’s my hope anyway.

I do think you see that also there’s the youngest, the sort of the newest generation seems to be more interested and curiously in religiosity, which is not something that I expected.

Exactly. Yes. Yes. It has all those dimensions. I think young people are, unlike the young people of the sixties and seventies who were just getting the first flush of excitement of casting off sexual morality and letting a thousand flowers bloom, the young people of today have only gotten the hangover. They’ve grown up in a culture that was already hollowed out. That’s actually not so much fun. That’s very disorienting, painful, and confusing. There’s a desire for cultural cohesion among young people. Then there’s also these more intellectual or spiritual questions of, what should I believe?

You know, you have this recent essay I’m thinking about, you know, people trying to kind of shortcut into the spiritual experience, so to speak. So tell me about your musings on this. I thought I found it quite fun.

Well, this is the other side of what we’re talking about, I think, is that when the spiritual world comes back into people’s consciousness, there’s no guarantee that it’s going to be a good or smooth transition. In fact, you could get all sorts of things that might come out of that, including a revival of paganism, things like astrology, crystal therapy, and all of these slightly more New Age spiritualities as well. That’s one reason not to, even if there is more interest in the spiritual now, there’s no reason to be complacent. I mean, that actually means we have to exert more effort into thinking about what a healthy spirituality looks like.

One place where this seems clearly true to me is in this renewed interest in psychotropic drugs as a way of accessing spiritual healing or spiritual nirvana or even just as a spiritual practice unto itself. I got interested in this for a really pedestrian reason, which is that all the guys at my gym started talking to me about it. Well, not all of them, but there was a significant contingent of guys at my gym that would say, you’ve got to look into this.

They know what I do for a living and they know I’m interested in this sort of thing. Some of them will say, yeah, we’re seeing these amazing results. There are some remarkable cases where you get a guy who’s come back from a war and he’s trapped in a kind of PTSD spiral. He’ll have one trip with MDMA or LSD or whatever, and then suddenly his neural pathways are unlocked, and he can go and be free of this trauma or what have you.

Joe Rogan talks about this all the time. I mean, he’s practically an evangelist for this stuff. On top of that, there is some evidence to suggest that, in fact, psilocybin, LSD, and MDMA, these sort of psychotropic drugs do create a condition of what’s called neuroplasticity, which is where your brain is much more flexible and can create new pathways much more easily. They create that condition so that you basically go back to your childlike state when you were a kid.

We all know it’s easier to learn things as kids. Kids learn a lot more, a lot faster. Hypothetically, at least, you can jog the brain out of its normal pathways or unhealthy pathways, and that might give you access, some people will say, to a sort of spiritual plane or to this new healthier healing. This idea has been around for a very long time. This was part of hippie culture. Ram Dass, who was a big guru in the 60s and 70s and even thereafter, would deal with some of this. He got his start really experimenting on people. People would take drugs and go to church and report on whether or not they’d had a religious experience.

There’s a wonderful story that Ram Dass told that I think really answers a huge amount of this quite devastatingly. Because all of this, right, seems very promising. But Ram Dass told a story that he went to his guru, whom he called Maharaji. Neem Karoli Baba was his actual name. Maharaji asked Ram Dass for some LSD because he knew that Ram Dass at the time was using LSD as a spiritual practice.

Maharaji takes this big dose of LSD that, Dass said, would have knocked out anybody else. He’s completely unfazed. But he’s having this trip. Maharaj says, Oh, I see. He says, this, this is only a kind of temporary stimulation of the true path. But the true path is loving kindness. Love is a much stronger medicine.

And this is almost identical to a story that Plato tells about Socrates in the Symposium. They weren’t taking LSD; they were drinking wine. But in ancient Greece, it was very typical to kind of have these parties and drink wine and just let the wine carry you into a sort of fugue state. And everyone in the Symposium says about Socrates, you can drink, he can drink, he cannot drink, he can seem to get hammered, he can just chug big vats of wine, he’ll never get drunk.

And in fact, at one point in the Symposium, Socrates does drink this big pitcher of wine and carries on in the same way, talking about love and beauty and the divine. And the reason for this, for both Socrates and Maharaji, is that they are already in the state that the drugs are supposed to induce, but they’re in that state sustainably.

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