Why we need to read

Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. My name is Brian Smith and I am the editor of Law & Liberty. With me today is Spencer Klavan, a prominent podcaster who has a new show with DailyWire+ forthcoming, classicist, magazine editor for the Claremont Review of Books, and the author of the new book, How to Save the West, Ancient Wisdom for Five Modern Crises. And I’m very glad to have Spencer on the show.

Spencer Klavan:

It’s a delight to be here. Thank you so much for having me, Brian.

Brian Smith:

So I have a confession to make, which is that when I first saw the title of the book, I thought to myself, “Not another defense of the canon, this just cannot work.” But read the book, refreshingly, and as I got to know you at a conference recently, I realized that can’t be the book, it won’t be the book. And you say so right away in it. Just so we take anyone who has this apprehension and sort of diffuse this so that they go and buy your book, I wanted you to talk about what led you to write it and what makes you and this book different from the rest of the defending the Western canon genre that we’ve seen so many entries in recently.

Spencer Klavan:

Yeah, I really appreciate your asking that question actually, because it’s sort of like that poem, I too, dislike it. I too, dislike poetry. I too, dislike defenses of the cannon or rather I’m sort of bored with them. And I do say upfront in the book that this is not a defense of the canon, full stop. The other thing I say it’s not is it’s not a survey. It’s not the five books you need to read to get a grasp on the whole of Western literature, it’s not a reading list. There are other good books that deal more comprehensively and at greater length with that sort of issue. I mentioned a couple, Jack Rosen, Harold Bloom. Go read those guys if that’s what you want. But what I would say, this book isn’t a survey, it’s not a defense, it’s an offering. And that comes out of the podcast, Young Heretics, which was sort of my first foray into podcasting.

And I kind of began that podcast because it occurred to me that on the right, in the conservative movement, even among well-intentioned liberals who believe in the value of the Western canon, we do a lot of fighting and speaking in defense of the Western canon. “We ought to be teaching Homer. We shouldn’t be scrubbing them from the curriculum. They’re not all just dead white men. Here’s the relevance,” and so forth. And something that I noticed is we spend so much time defending our right to read Homer that we don’t spend all that much time actually reading Homer. It occurred to me the number of people who pound their fists on the table and say, “Oh, the greats of the West, we’ve got to keep them in schools,” I sometimes wonder whether those people are cracking the spines themselves. I mean the point of preserving this stuff is for it to change you, to shape you…

[Spencer is a joy to listen to. He does some of the most erudite, entertaining videos available. ~ Beege]