There’s a treasure trove of Western literature and philosophy that Oxford-educated Spencer Klavan aims to reveal in a new podcast.
Klavan, who holds a doctorate in classical Greek and Latin literature, launched the Young Heretics podcast in May to walk through works of Western literature, such as Homer’s Iliad and the biblical book of Isaiah, with inquisitive listeners. Speaking to the Washington Examiner, Klavan spoke on why and how people ought to read Western literature to form their worldviews.
“A man can’t always be defending the truth. There must be a time to feed on it,” Klavan said, invoking writings from British author C.S. Lewis. “It’s not that I don’t think it’s important to fight back against what really is, at this point, a collective mania that’s taken over, especially our academies of higher education, but also our major media institutions. Basically, every major thought-producing outlet in the country is progressively going down this crazy path where you can’t read Homer because he’s too racist or you can’t read Shakespeare because he’s too white.”
Klavan wants his podcast to return to a more classical mode of education in the liberal arts that fights back against a “smorgasbord” of arguments that some academics use to either avoid teaching Western literature or structure curricula around devaluing the subject. He says the colleagues he’s spoken to are enthused about his method of teaching through the podcast, but they are afraid to endorse it in fear of losing their jobs.
“It’s a poisonous kind of bullying that goes on in these places. And there’s no substitute, unfortunately, for courage. There’s no substitute for just actually speaking out no matter the consequences,” Klavan said.
Massive civil unrest has occurred across the country since the death of George Floyd on May 25. Some activists have toppled, attempted to tear down, or petition their local governments to decommission statues of historical figures such as former Presidents George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Ulysses S. Grant. Klavan says the U.S. social environment reflects a practice in Roman history known as “damnatio memoriae,” translating to the damnation of memory, whereby one would “exact justice from the past” by “erasing the history of the past.”
Klavan said Pliny the Younger, who served under the Roman emperor Trajan, wrote documents to his leader expressing glee that previous statues of the former emperor Domitian, known for being a more violent autocrat, were removed. He describes Pliny the Younger’s justification to remove the statues as bringing “blood and pain” to Domitian’s legacy.
“When you see an injustice in the past, when you see something like chattel slavery in America, which is an inexcusable injustice, you want to exact justice from the perpetrators. You want to go and get the person that did that and make them pay. That is, unfortunately, not how our fallen world works,” Klavan said.
“We have many of our great figures who are also bound up in their historical context with things we now deplore. The notion that by tearing down somebody’s statue, renaming a university, erasing somebody’s memory, you’re somehow going to get justice is a false and deceptive notion. And it never ends. Because you always want that blood. Really, what you’re looking for is what Rene Girard calls the ‘scapegoat,’ the person you can make to pay for the sins,” he continues.
Klavan says learning from Western literature can be “noble for its own sake” and that, at this moment in history, it can provide wise “counterexamples” and “parallels” to make better decisions going forward. Reason paired with ethical teachings of Christianity, he says, enhances one’s experience in studying philosophy and helps one properly appreciate the history of the Western world.
