Spencer Klavan’s “How To Save the West: Ancient Wisdom for 5 Modern Crises” is simply not what I was expecting. It impressed me at every turn. I don’t know why – maybe because of the provocative title, maybe because I associate Klavan with conservative politics – but I was expecting a popularized political diatribe with some obeisance made to classical sources. That is not what I read.
Instead, it is a masterful employment of the best of our Western fathers to address the very real issues that threaten to undermine Western civilization in our day. This is exactly how the classics should be used. If we had the texts employed by Klavan read and studied in our schools today, we would not be facing the destruction of culture in our time.
Klavan addresses real issues, ranging from the “body crisis” exemplified by such pathologies as the trans movement and furries to the “crisis of religion” that recently manifested itself in the pretensions of Anthony Fauci and his acolytes attempting to dictate the religious principles of scientism to the American public. But Klavan never addresses the crises of our era flippantly. He takes these issues seriously, and he gives philosophical and reasoned articulation to our own intuition that there are things going terribly wrong among us.
As someone who has studied the classics all my life, they continue to surprise me in the seemingly endless depth of practical wisdom that applies directly to everyday life. Klavan makes this case for reading
