Hi, and welcome back to the Carol Markowitz Show on iHeartRadio.
There was a.
Piece on the Spectator website that came across my feet a few days ago. It was called modern Life Doesn't make Us Happy? By Tenneth Carrey. The subhead was when everything is designed to be pleasurable, nothing feels good. Carrie's thesis is that dopamine isn't a happiness chemical. It's a go out and survive chemical. But now we don't fight for our survival every day, so dopamine becomes this drug
we chase. I looked her up and she's written some cool stuff on friendship and what kids are actually thinking, really up my alley, But I have to disagree with her a little bit about modern life not making us happy. She writes, quote, when your ancestors woke each morning feeling hungry, dopamine levels would have risen to motivate them to seek out a bird's nest from which to rade eggs, or bee high from which to gather honey in addition to
the berries and nuts they foraged. But dopamine's effect is designed to be short lived once they've eaten and gotten the reward of the extra spurt of dopamine along with the release of feel good opioids, those levels quickly dropped and even dipped below baseline. After all, unless dopamine fell back down again, where would they have found the necessary motivation to seek out the next meal? And then she adds,
and I find this part so interesting quote. Apart from some slight changes due to genetic selection over the years, you basically have the same brain as your ancient family members, powered by the same reward system. Do we chase that dopamine hit more than our ancestors did? Sure, but I'd argue that because our brains are largely the same, they would have chased the next dopamine hit the exact same way as us, except those far harder and didn't come
in the form of Instagram likes. I also don't think that, Yes, it might have been the dopamine that would spur them to maybe go further and finding food, But you know what motivation would they have found to seek out the next meal? Hunger? Hunger would have been that motivation. She writes that people now expect to be happy all the time. I'm not so sure that's true. I think we probably have a lot more wallowing than our ancestors who lived
constantly under threat. But the things that ultimately made us happy, having a good meal, warm bed, all of that really has stayed the same. Like have you ever worked a long day or been out all day and then you get home and you take a shower and you get into your nice, clean, warm bed and that feeling is so amazing. I mean, that's our ancestors having that same
feeling getting into whatever comfortable position they had. I think about stuff like this, where, you know, we kind of look at modern life as like, oh this is you know, we chase this dopamine hit and it's so bad. But I really don't think it's that different than what our ancestors did. I once read a story about a therapist
who work in a refugee camp. These people in the camp, she wrote, had lost everything and she was there to counsel them, but the eighteen year old girls still wanted to discuss how the boy she liked didn't like her back and instead preferred her cousin and that made her feel bad, and that's what she wanted to talk to this therapist about. People aren't that different than they were, And I hate the idea of treating our phones because we're so addicted to them, as if there's something other
than a tool that we can use and put away. Look, I know people are addicted to their phones. I'm sometimes addicted to my phone. But we can acknowledge it and curtail our use. It's not heroin. I think about that all the time, that people compare it to like serious drugs that have like physical withdrawals, and people die sometimes from withdrawal. That's not what your phone is. Your phone can be put away. You can we don't have to keep scrolling for the dopamine hit. We can be like
our ancestors and take that dopamine break. Coming up next and interview with Spencer. Join us after the break. Welcome back to the Carol Markowitz Show on iHeartRadio. My guest today is Spencer Claven, author of the book How to Save the West, Ancient Wisdom for five Modern Crisises, and the host of the Young Heretics podcast. Hi Spencer, how are you, Carol?
I'm doing great. It's so nice to see you, and thanks for having me on.
Thank you so much for being on. You have a lot of big words in there. Heretics, Crisises I you know, I did the best I could.
Just beautiful. It rolls off the tongue.
Thank you. So with your appearance on my show today, I'm actually concluding the Claven Moore trifecta. I've interviewed your dad, Andrew Claven, and your sister Faith more about their books. Although maybe I shouldn't say this is the end. What's your mom up to? Maybe we can schedule a chat.
Well, we're like Pokemon, you know, got to catch them all. Thanks for thanks for collecting the full set. Unfortunately, however, I have disappoint you because my mother, who is by far the best person in my family, I mean, not even a competition miles and miles beyond us all, is also the only one that never does any media. She's extremely private.
Boo. Yeah, sorry, all right, you know I might try anyway like she does it as a favor to us, part of the chase.
Oh really good. Yeah, yeah, that's the appeal. No, she does as a favorite to us so that we won't look bad by comparison, because if she did have podcast or a book, then nobody would pay any attention to the rest of us.
That's great. So you're also doing a new sub Stack with your dad. What is it called? Tell my listeners about it? How can they sign up? And they should sign up?
Yeah, oh, thank you. I'm really excited about this. It's called the New Jerusalem, which is a reference to the Book of Revelation when the New Jerusalem comes out of heaven and down to Earth, which should give you a sense of the project. It's about what it means to live in faith here and now, not in some imaginary before time, but in the world of the Internet and technology and all the many crises that we are currently basing down. We're doing it in the format of a
father son conversation. So Andrew Claven, my dad, no relation, and I have been really just lucky and blessed in our relationship that we get to discuss these big ideas. And we used to go over long hikes together in Los Angeles when he lived there and just kind of ruminate on this stuff forever, and we wanted to invite people into that. So the Subtec is the way of doing that. It's the New Jerusalem dot substack dot com.
And what it'll be. The way it'll work is we'll post an opening essay written by both of us and then every day. From then on, we'll just be writing back and forth to each other, kind of like letting you in on a series of emails between us. There will also be a list of our most cherished works of art and books that we kind of build gradually on Fridays, which is for paid subscribers. If you want to support us, you can send up for that, but
the rest of it's free. And yeah, you can sign up at the New Jerusalem dot substack dot com and yeah, become moret of the journey with us.
I'm going to sign up. I just I'm not sure I'm smart enough for all this, but I'll do my very best.
Wait, no, okay, first of all, that's I don't know if I think this is in the book. I can't remember if I put this in the book or not. But I often have conversations that begin with somebody saying I'm not that smart or I'm not smart enough for X or y, And those are always the best conversations because it turns out people are actually much smarter and they are more philosophical they than they think. And I know that's actually true of you. So yes, come along, come join.
But you guys, you know you just your whole family just comes off as you know, just a little smarter than the average people. So again, I'm going to sign up and I'm going to follow it, and you know, I'll do my best to keep up with the Clevens. I feel like keeping up with the Kardashians is maybe a little easier.
I mean, you will not find, unfortunately, any of our like botox tips or.
So. I have your book. I love your book, And one question that I ask all of my guests is what do you think is our largest cultural or societal problem in America? And is it solvable? In this case? I think that question takes us, you know, into the direction of your book. You write about five essential crisis and the crisis of reality, the body, the crisis of meaning, of religion, of the regime. Which do you think is the most pressing for us as a country right now?
Well, I'm going to say the crisis of religion, which is really the heart of the book, and actually in particular right now, I think the most pressing social problem we're facing is anti Semitism. I was thinking about this this morning. We have seen, ever since October seventh, a profoundly dark resurgence of some of the leiest stereotypes, but
also trends about in relationship to Jewish people. And the reason that I bring this up is not only because of my love for the Jews and my Jewish heritage, but because I think that anti Semitism represents now as it always has, a profound sickness in the spiritual heart of man. It is the oldest hatred, and the Jews are the most hated people throughout history, the reason for which is at least in part that as part of
their role as the Chosen people, they really do. Jewish people really do stand in for us in relationship to God. And I believe, and I argue in the book, that the human heart can hardly bear to see itself in a true light in relation to God and to contemplate the nature of its inadequacies, and we do everything we can to look away and ignore our calling as divinely
created beings. And I suspect that hatred of Jewish people, anti Semitism, these things that come up again and again, no matter how hard we try to erase them or resist them, this is an indicator that we are once again facing up to our own brokenness. And since we can't look at that we offload it all onto Jewish people and to the Jewish religion. And so you ask me if this is solvable In the deepest and most profound sense, I don't think it's ever possible to eradicate
this problem. I think it's baked into the tragic nature of the world. But I believe, even still, even now, passionately that Americans perhaps uniquely are equipped to reckon with and to expunge this sickness from our hearts because of the nature of our creed and our founding documents that we actually do believe in this country. And there's still a deep into at war now with the worst elements of us and the worst angels of our nature, demons,
I guess of our nature. There is still a deep instinct that we are in doubt by our creator, with inalienable rights, that we're created equal. And yeah, I think that. You know, I'm not a big predictor. I hate making predictions, which means that I'm neither a pessimist nor an optimist because I don't know what's going to happen. But I am a big advocate of hope. That's one of the three Christian virtues. Faith hope and love, and hope means
where are you placing your efforts? Where you pouring your heart. I'm pouring it into that crisis of religion, hoping against hope and trying desperately to kind of call people back to these core truths of our creativeness in the image of God and the results, the political result, which is fundamental human equality and the truest and best sense.
Well, yeah, I mean I think that I also have basically the biggest hope for America and Americans, especially where the issue of anti Semitism is concerned. I have more faith than the American people and in our system than I do in you know, any other country basically. But have you been surprised about the kind of spike and
anti semitism since October seventh? I feel like even so, I am an optimist, I think, and I haven't been shocked because I think it's been heading in this direction for a number of years, and people have sort of looked away, including you know, my fellow Jews. I think they just didn't want to see it. But have you been like shocked at the kind of events that have happened since then?
I've said for a while that we need a word. Maybe there's some great German word that means something that is shocking but not surprising. So whenever, right, I'm sure there is, you know, right, like whenever the sort of woke crowd comes up with something absurd, Like I don't know if you saw that video that's floating around the internet. It was like a Stacy Abrams choral performance about our rights depend on it, Like it was like this incredibly.
No, I'm going to have to go find.
That, Harold. Okay, wait, maybe I'll send it to you afterwards and you can link to it or something. But it's so cringe and over the top that you're like, I can't believe they're doing this, But also I actually totally can. And that's that feeling that I feel like we have all the time now, And that's how I feel about this hideous resurgence of just the most kind of atavistic and obvious and crude forms of anti Semitism.
I am shocked and appalled by it, but I'm not actually all that surprised, in part for the reasons that you suggested. I think we've been toying with this stuff for a long time. We've been playing with fire poisoning our race relations, which always ultimately comes back to these sort of religious wars, and especially animists towards Jewish people. So I think this was kind of in the works.
I also think that because our ruling classes think that they're immune from this sort of thing, they imagined themselves to be virtuous and pure, and never they thought that they were the grand white knights that were warring against the evil, racist, bad orange man people or the nasty deplorables.
And that is the surest fire recipe for a return to the worst and most obvious forms of hatred that humanity is capable of, because if you think that you're kind of immune from that, then you're ultimately really vulnerable and just ignorant I think about the nature of human hatred. So no, I'm not surprised, but I am appalled.
You say you're not an optimist, but your book is How to Save the West. I mean, isn't that sort of an optimistic vision for how we make things better, how we make the country and society.
Better in a certain sense. And everyone thinks that I'm an optimist for sure. That's the word that GE's applied to me most often, and It's why I started thinking about well am I actually And the reason that I'm not an optimist is because I don't think anything is written in the stars. And I understand optimism and pessimism both to be convictions about what you're certain is going to happen in the future, and for that reason, they
both lead to certain errors. So optimism tends toward complacency, I think, in its most extreme forms, if you think everything's going to go okay, you're not going to.
Do anything about it.
It's hard exactly. Pessimism also tends toward in action, but in the form of despair, which is an actual sin. Conservatives are so guilty of this, I think so much of the time we love to know that everything is going to go wrong. It makes us feel very special and makes.
Us feel you can't do anything about it. So what are you going to do? Right?
Yeah, complain complain online, I think, is the answer to that question. And so that's why I say that I'm neither of those things. Is because when I say that I don't know what's going to happen, I genuinely mean I don't know, and I have faith I trust in God that ultimately the final answer to the whole of this history is going to be good. But in the meantime, my question is where are we in what is possible?
And in what is possible? I'm looking for the best that can be thought and said, which is why my book is titled How to Save the West, and why it's written the way that it is, because it's not actually about how the West is absolutely going to be fine and everything's gonna be hunky dory. It's about how, even in bad times, the West has always endured, and people who carry it forward are people like you and meet people who start conversations by saying I'm not that smart.
People that feel doubt and fear and all the normal things that we feel. Nevertheless wake up in the morning and put our socks on and feed our kids. I just attributed children to you that I don't know.
I do have told you. Yeah, you're old, you're good.
For kids, right, I'm sorry of them.
Yeah, my my youngest son went to school with your oldest nephew.
That's right. Yeah, okay, so that's and that's how faith. Yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah, I just was like, no.
I need to be sorry. I feel like I was going to say that I'm going to pressure you later on in this conversation that you clearly need to have children because we need little Spencer Cleveman's running around.
Well, we certainly can get to that, but okay, so anyway, but my point was just that you know, the stuff that we do kind of in the morning and throughout our day in our neighborhoods like that is the stuff of saving the West. And it doesn't depend on making a grand pronouncement about everything that's going to go right or wrong like that. These things, this stuff has happened, that this tradition has been maintained through the sacking of Rome and the rise of the Soviet regime, and you know,
in in gulags as well as in ivory towers. And I think that's something we have to remember so that we don't get disappointed in the reality of the world, which is often very messy and very difficult.
We're going to take a quick break and be right back on the Carol Marcowitch Show. So when you say how we can save the West, what are some other than you know, the getting up every day and taking care of your kids and all of that. What are some of the ideas that you think that people should embrace in order to save our civilization.
Yeah, well, the book big question. I'm sorry, no, no, I mean looking, I put myself on the hook for this when I wrote a book called How You Really Did Rest? Right? Yeah, there's there's no escaping it. And one of the things that do say at the outside of the book is that you're not going to open these covers and find a political program, which is by design because if our hope for salvation rests in a politician or law, we are in trouble. I mean, there's
just no certainty to be had there. The kind of TLDR version of my book is log off and go to church. And that's not because I think that it's not because I think the technology is evil. I actually think that it's it. It doesn't matter whether it's evil or not. It is now kind of embedded in our lives, and you and I are currently having a conversation and an interaction that we would never have if the Internet
didn't exist. So these are tools. You know, it doesn't pay to talk about them as if they we have no control over them or no choice in how we use them. But a major theme of my book is
rooting ourselves back in the here and now. I think this kind of starts to emerge, well, it starts in the first chapter, which is the reality crisis is about kind of our disconnection from the obvious truths around us that we're able to experience and perceive, and our alienation from just the felt sense of life that actually our connections, our desires, our aspirations, our memories, our loves. These things aren't just brain farts or accidents of our biochemistry. They
are the stuff of what we are. And so rerooting ourselves in that first and foremost and then the body crisis really does I think kind of drive this home when I start talking about the trans extremism that we've seen, but also kind of it's more advanced, like cutting edged stages, which are not just about sex and gender, but they're about transhumanism and people that hope to escape from humanity altogether. This is going to be a major theme by the
way of the New Jerusalem. You could replace well not you couldn't replace go to church with go to the gym, but you could add to go to church to go to the gym, or join a softball team or you know, become part of some sort of physical activity that gets you in contact with other human beings. There are a lot of people that ask me when they listen to my podcast, like how do I cultivate relationships? How do I make friends? That sort of thing, And one.
Of my favorite questions, you're going to answer, yeah.
Yeah, okay, I actually have an answer, and it comes from the Western canon, so it's even better. It's not my answer, it's Cistero's answer and an Aristotle's answer, and that is become the kind of person you would want to be friends with, especially become that person by seeking virtue.
There are four they're called cardinal or you know, we might think of them as kind of the core virtues, the excellences of the soul, the way to be really good at being human, And they don't depend on being smart or even particularly you know, good in your raw form, and they depend on daily habits. So they are temperance, taking care of the way that you relate to your desires,
not rejecting your desires, but managing them with your reason. Courage, which I think is one of the ones that's most lacking at the moment and one of the hardest really saying to just plunge in and undertake. But it's the excellence of the heart. Right courage is what enables you to follow through on your big grand ideas. Wisdom which is perhaps the most abstract, but is what enables you to make these choices about well, what am I gonna
you know, what am I gonna do today? Of all the different possibilities, of all my different desires and impulses, which ones are I going to indulge? Wich On's I'm going to arrest? And we seek that through the tradition, right through the canon and through the kinds of works that I'm talking about in the book. And then finally justice dkay, which we think of as this sometimes we
like outsource justice. We put it on the government. We're talking about social justice, which is another way of saying justice by people other than me, right justice by like a group of people that haven't do with me. But actually, the classical sense of justice is an individual virtue, and it's about right organization of all the parts, the right integration of the different parts of your soul and your person.
And it starts there. It starts with the man in the mirror, as MJ would say, right, and then rose outward into the right relationship between cousin and wife, father and child, mother and child, so on and so forth. So I would say, like, if you want to know how to make friends, if you want to know how to get back into the game, how to get some agency in your life, start with those those cardinal virtues and start with becoming the kind of person that you
want to meet. And you will be shocked at how quickly in that process run into exactly the people that you're looking for. But you won't find them by going out and trying to put it on them to be good. To be the people you want, you got to put on yourself first thing.
So interesting, So now that you've solved Western civilization, what would you say? What would do? A question that I ask all of my guests, is your best tip for my listeners on how they can improve their individual lives. You've touched on making friends and you know, kind of improving yourself in that way. What's your best tip overall for how people can improve their daily lives.
Okay, I wouldn't be me if I didn't answer this question with a quote from somebody who spoke Greek, and so I'm going to do that.
I thought you're going to say. It wouldn't be me if I didn't say go to the gym, because I follow you on Twitter, and.
Yeah, I mean I am a gun. There's a lot of content, no question, but you know, I'm actually not going to say that, although you should go to the gym.
No.
So, Marcus Aurelius isn't one of the most famous names from the ancient worlds so many and people have heard of it's actually Julius Czily. People have heard of him, but they don't necessarily read his book Meditations, which is really still one of the best self help books in the world because it's not a list of prescriptions. It's a record of inner dialogue. It's about the thoughts of a man who's trying really hard to cultivate those virtues.
And so the piece of advice that I'm going to give is lifted right out of the Meditations, and it's the obstacle is the way. This is one of his most famous statements. It essentially means the thing that you think is keeping you from your goals or interrupting your smooth path of life is actually what you're supposed to be dealing with right now. It's there for you to
learn from. And I think that so much of the time, ninety percent of the misery that we inflict upon ourselves has to do with this picture in our heads of like, here's the path and the goal, the end of the path is in the future, and now this annoying thing, whatever it.
Is, like twitter you okay.
Okay, right, yes, love it or politics or whatever work you know, is getting in the way. And so now the path is here, and we're here, we're somewhere else. But Aurelius's brilliant insight, which I think will make you have and also more effective, which are two important things. Both matter. Is to give up on that line, that straight line you have in mind toward the goal, because it doesn't exist, that's in your that's a figment of
your imagination. And what's happening to you right now, whether you like it or not, is the thing that merits your attention. And the minute you get like let go of the imaginary line, straight line toward the goal and turn yourself toward the actual situation, the minute solutions start to present themselves to you and you actually find that there might actually be enormous wisdom for you in the situation here.
And now I really like that my husband recently reread Meditations. I haven't. I mean, I read it in high school, but I haven't. I haven't read it in a long time. I think it's I'm also due for reread you now, really.
Can I plug something else in that? Gay?
Yeah? Please? Yeah?
Okay. So I last year wrote the forward to a collection of Stoic writings, including the complete Meditations. It's called the Gateway to this and I also have some translations in there of some letters by Seneca that are also bangers.
So, my gosh, I'm going to order that right now. Tell me again what it's.
Called Gateway to the Stoics.
Gateway to the Stoics. I'm going to check it out. I'd advise all of my listeners to do the same, so we could be maybe as smart as Spenser someday. So you got married in the last year year plus.
Yeah, just a little over a year ago.
A little over a year ago. You're insanely successful in all of these different ways. Do you feel like you've made it?
You are so sweet, and this question is so hard. You're also very mean. I I ask everybody this, and I get such a range of answers.
I love it, you know.
Yeah, No, I like the question because of how hard it is, because of the three that you posed, is the only one that I thought, like, I genuinely don't know how I would answer this. I can certainly say that every minute of every day, I'm doing exactly what I want to be doing. And maybe that's in part because of the whole obstacle is the way mindset, But I don't think so. I think I'm very very lucky.
I work hard, but I also have just been blessed beyond measure, and so you know, it's part of my joy in life that I don't see myself ever like retiring. I would like to work as long as I have breath, Like my work is my life. And you know I love my husband profoundly more and more each day. Yeah, I think, I think like I'm very satisfied, but I also am like part of my satisfaction is a deep,
deep dissatisfaction, like a huge ambition. And I guess here's one last thing that I that I'll say about this. Not having answered your question, I feel like you.
Did answer it, but yeah, okay, I think you've made it. I think maybe you've made it.
Maybe, I guess yeah, I feel very very lucky and joyful. And I will say that the other day actually I was really grinding my gears as as I basically I'm always doing over like the project that I wanted to complete next and it's actually a new book. You know, I'm working on this thing and I going to be going to finish this thing. And there's this sense when you do that that like I just want to be finished with it, you know, like I want to get
it out, I want to achieve the thing. And then and then I stopped and I had this thought like, don't kid yourself. You like this, like you're happy, right, you know, you're happy with the gears grinding. And I think if you can be happy with the gears grinding, then maybe in some sense you have made it.
That is perfect. I really I've enjoyed talking to you so much. His book is How to Save the West Spencer Craven. You are fantastic. We will follow all of your different projects. And thank you so much for coming on, Carol.
What a joy. Thank you very much for having me.
Thanks so much for joining us on the Carol Markoli Show. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts,