Review: Spencer Klavan’s “How To Save The West”

If one were to place Pat Buchanan, Andrew Sullivan, former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a room together, they would fight—a lot. It is unlikely that the aggressively partisan, outspoken, and incompatible ideas in that room would be conducive to accomplishing anything or emerging with any new agreements. However, the one thing on which they would all likely agree is that something is wrong.

For moderates and populists alike, this seems to be one area of consensus. The actual problem is less clear. Is there too much populism or not enough? Too much capitalism or not enough? Too much technocracy or not enough? The chasm between views renders any meaningful discussion of solutions nearly dead and empowers radicals to turn up the heat further.

This question of what is wrong is a primary concern for Claremont Review of Books Associate Editor Spencer Klavan, who tries to offer a complex prognosis for the unstated question of modernity’s failure in his new book How To Save The West: Ancient Wisdom For Five Modern Crises, which was published last month.

Much in the spirit of Allan Bloom’s enduring 1987 work The Closing of the American Mind and Ross Douthat’s insightful 2020 book The Decadent Society, Klavan approaches the subject of modern society’s dissolution as an academic exercise, drawing on the works of Plato, Aristotle, St. Jerome, and Thomas Aquinas to diagnose what he believes are the central problems plaguing our world and, thus, threatening civilization itself.

Klavan outlines five current philosophical crises, which he describes as outward signs of deeper problems churning under the surface of society. These are “the Reality Crisis,” “the Body Crisis,” “the Meaning Crisis,” “the Religion Crisis,” and “the Regime crisis.” The book is structured with calls and responses, with chapters laying out the nature of each problem followed by a prescription from the classical understanding of these concepts.