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“The narrative that old books are worthless is designed to keep you from discovering that they are not.” Spencer Klavan, author of How to Save the West: Ancient Wisdom for Five Modern Crises discusses the West: why it’s so important to preserve it, how its greatest ideas can still help us today, and the limits of science in addressing modern problems.
Spencer Klavan received his PhD in Classics from Oxford and is Associate Editor of the Claremont Review of Books and Features Editor at the American Mind.
His book, How to Save the West: Ancient Wisdom for Five Modern Crises, https://www.regnery.com/9781684513451/how-to-save-the-west/
Dr. Klavan’s podcast, “Young Heretics,” https://youngheretics.com/
“Hey hey ho ho Western Civ has got to go,” https://intellectualtakeout.org/2019/06/hey-hey-ho-ho-western-civ-has-got-to-go/
Spencer on C.S. Lewis’s science fiction novel That Hideous Strength, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdutZEHonLc
More on Plato’s Timaeus, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-timaeus/#:~:text=In%20the%20Timaeus%20Plato%20presents,%2C%20purposive%2C%20and%20beneficent%20agency.
More on Lucretius, a prominent Epicurean philosopher: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lucretius/
More on Stoicism, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/stoicism/
C.S. Lewis’s The Discarded Image, https://portalconservador.com/livros/C-S-Lewis-The-Discarded-Image.pdf
Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45536/ode-intimations-of-immortality-from-recollections-of-early-childhood
Detroit has a sad past with deadly riots, so I was little trepidatious when I headed downtown to the opening night of the Kid Rock concert on Sept. 12. Anti-Trump protestors were expected to swarm the streets surrounding the new Little Caesars Arena, which Kid Rock was inaugurating. I had received a note from his publicist that he would be sharing a special message with his fans regarding his political views and plans for Michigan. Smelling a formal announcement that he would run against Debbie Stabenow for Senate, press swarmed the place, and I was one of them.
Word was that Antifa was planning to create mayhem, and I was nervous enough about it to ask a buff client of mine who had military bodyguard experience to accompany me. My stalwart friend and superior half of @WhiskeyPolitics, @davesussman, worried that I might get my head bashed in whilst chatting up Antifa thugs, so he firmly suggested that I just stay away from them. 
An hour or so ahead of the concert, I immediately noticed the large, no, huge police presence. Officers in uniform, security personnel, mounted police, plainclothes detectives; the street looked more like a police convention than anything else.
My husband, my youngest daughter, and I had lunch with an old friend yesterday. He and I were known to have heated arguments back when we were more politically in-sync, which, I daresay, we both enjoyed immensely. While he still adheres to atheistic liberalism, I’ve converted both religiously and politically. Paradoxically, our conversations seem to be more measured and substantive, although I still win 99 percent of the disputes – just ask me.
Two months have passed since Stanford University’s celebrated student body voted six-to-one against reinstituting a required Western civilization course in its academic curriculum, generating a flurry of commentaries about the majority’s ideological orientation.
On the prospects for Western civilization, Patrick J. Buchanan said in 
When did demographics get so depressing? It really has replaced economics as the “dismal science.” But at least with economics, you get market-based prices and (often) a tax cut. Demographics, as 