The people up and down the world that talk and laugh and cry, They’re pleasant when you’re young and gay, and life is all to try, But when your heart is tired and dumb, your soul has need of ease, There’s none like the quiet folk who wait in libraries– The counselors who never change, the friends who never go, The old books, the dear books that understand and know!
The thought of reading old books is enticing, but they can also intimidate, particularly those works that have come down to us from ancient Athens and Rome. Feeling intellectually ill-suited to the task, we may hesitate to pick up the plays of Sophocles, the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, or the essays of Cicero.But we can also take edification and entertainment from modern writers who use the ancients as guides to our present age and as pathways to self-improvement.
The Past Lives On
In “Pursuits of Happiness: On Being Interested,” Eva Brann presents visitors to her book with a bouquet of 38 essays. Many of them, in one way or another, have to do with wisdom gleaned from Greco-Roman writers. A teacher for more than 60 years in the St. John’s College Great Books curriculum, Brann reminds us of the importance of the classics, “that living past which reaches right into the present.”
An Example: The Stoics Speak
“What do you want out of life?” is the first sentence in William Irvine’s “A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy.” Irvine begins by defining and describing the vision and practices of such Stoic philosophers as Zeno of Citium, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. From there, he shifts direction and demonstrates how the practical application of their philosophy can help us find our way in the 21st century. Tutorials in self-denial, social relations, putting up with other people, and old age are only a few of the subjects Irvine addresses, lessons he’s learned, and is passing on to us from these long-ago mentors.
Of all these pieces of wisdom Irvine extracts from the Stoics, one in particular, which Irvine calls negative visualization, stands out, chiefly because of its rarity in our age of feel-good pop psychology. Negative visualization means contemplating the possibly that all things have an end, even at times a bad and unexpected end.
Accordingly, Irvine tells us, the Stoics recommend “that we spend time imagining that we have lost the things we value—that our wife has left us, our car was stolen, or we lost our job.” Adding that this practice “is, I think, the single most valuable technique in the Stoics’ psychological tool kit,” Irvine then explains, “by contemplating the impermanence of everything in the world, we are forced to recognize that every time we do something could be the last time we do it, and this recognition can invest the things we do with a significance and intensity that would otherwise be absent. We no longer sleepwalk through our life.”
This advice seems counterintuitive and morbid, yet if we give it a try, in many cases it works as Irvine and the ancients suggest. It intensifies the love we feel for people and things in our lives.
Big Picture Help from the Old Ones
Is the great tree of Western civilization, the grand oak that for so long has sprouted branch after branch of culture, science, art, politics, and philosophy, dying? Some historians and commentators hold this position, and even a casual observer may be forgiven for thinking so. The leaves and boughs of the tree appear blighted, and the gnarled trunk often seems incapable of withstanding one more storm.Klavan divides the present turmoil and the disintegration of tradition in the West into five ongoing crises: the demise of objective truth and the rise of “virtual reality,” the push for a “transhumanist” future, the lack of real meaning for our lives and actions, the replacement of Judeo-Christian revelation by a belief in science, and finally, the waning of democracy and its possible collapse, particularly in the American republic.
Klavan devotes two chapters to each crisis. One discusses the problem, and the other offers restoratives from Greek and Roman philosophers along with biblical teachings. As antidotes to each crisis, he brings us the prescriptions of great thinkers from long ago: Aristotle, Plato, Plotinus, and more. For these men, these same questions—the meaning of reality, the nature of the human body and soul, and the conundrums of government—were also of enormous concern.
Because of its mix of philosophy, science, and the arts, and its frequent quick trips back and forth from classical writers to our present-day culture, “How to Save the West” is both exhilarating and challenging for readers. In the first five or six pages of the chapter “Regime Crisis,” for instance, we go from 6th-century B.C. Israelites to Whittaker Chambers to Vladimir Putin to Herodotus of Halicarnassus.
In the book’s final pages, Klavan reminds readers of the important part each of us can play in resisting a culture antithetical to traditional Western culture. He concludes, “No one knows the role he will play in history’s retrospect. But you and I wake up every day in a world that is real, surrounded by people who are also real, and that is enough. It is everything. And if you and I wake up determined that we will live as if the eternal truths handed down to us by our ancestors are as real as ourselves and the world around us—if we do that in faith, then that’s better than good. That is how to save the West.”
“You can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” runs the old adage. Perhaps not. But those old dogs of the ancient world can teach the rest of us some of their tricks, if we pay attention.
