Teach your children well. You just might save the West.

Also, Happy Father's Day

One of my favorite podcasters, Steven Bartlett, recently asked Konstantin Kisin, “What could I do as an individual listening to this to save the West?” Kisin replied:

Teach your children how lucky they are. Take them abroad. Show them the rest of the world. Show them what people live like in poor countries around the world and remind them how fortunate they are. And then explain to them where it all comes from. And it comes from the fact that we have developed, designed, invented, found the magic formula for human society. At least, the best one that humans have invented so far. Freedom of expression, freedom of research, freedom of speech, capitalism, private property, the rule of law, and the idea — we talked about religion and I think it comes largely from Christianity — that we all have dignity by virtue of being human. Those are the things that have driven our society to the tremendous success we have and to the technological progress. People don’t realize that but without freedom — freedom of research, freedom of expression — you don’t have the technological progress that we have. And then you don’t have the dominance that we enjoy. Because our dominance is almost entirely based on technological progress. We’re not the most populous civilization in the world. We don’t have the largest number of people.

We are prosperous because of our technological advantages and they come from the incredible opportunities that people have to research things, to make things, and then to profit from them in a way that they don’t have in other societies. Teach your children that their society is great. Teach them that they live in one of the best places in the history of the world and that all the bullshit that they’ve been taught at school is not true. My parents had to do this for me. When I was growing up in Soviet Union, before my first day at school, they said two things. First, do not ever discuss anything we talk about in the home at school because we’ll all be in trouble. And two, they’re gonna teach you this, this, this, and this. This is not true. That’s fine. You don’t have to argue with the teacher. Just know that it’s not true. Here’s why it’s not true. If you have any questions, talk to us. You have to inoculate your children against this stuff and then they will be good citizens. Then they will create things of value to the society and they will spread that message to others.

The transmission problem is the oldest existential threat any civilization faces and it’s more acute now than at any point in Western history. This is because the institutions historically responsible for that transmission — church, family, local community, civic ritual, newspapers, universities, and left-wing political parties — have been replaced by a monoculture of credentialed expertise and woke conformity that’s actively hostile to the very thing it’s supposed to transmit.

Often when I speak to friends on the left, they are entirely convinced that the problems they see on the right are worse than the ones on the other side. But what I see is a political problem on the right and a narrative problem on the left, and I tend to worry much more about the latter for the following reason. Every civilization runs on a story it tells itself about why it’s worth preserving. But what happens when the storytellers are replaced by those who regard the civilization’s foundational values and achievements as primarily a ledger of colonial, capitalist, or Christian sins? What you get, I think, is what we have now. You get generations who can identify every atrocity committed in the name of Western expansion but cannot tell you what the Magna Carta was, why the printing press mattered, what free speech looks like in practice, why Shakespeare is better than any writer alive today, or why racism is not acceptable, no matter who the target. It therefore turns out, at least by my consideration, that the greatest defenders of Western civilization are not soldiers, though I salute ours, nor professors, nor even our greatest artists and poets, much as I may feed my soul on their good works. Rather, I am convinced that it all comes down to parents.

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In 1908, the town of Fairmont, West Virginia, sat that summer beneath a grief too large for its churches to hold. Months earlier, the earth at Monongah coal mine had opened and taken its men, some 360 of them, fathers and sons descending together into a black shaft that would never give them back. It was the worst mining disaster in our nation’s history. Grace Golden Clayton, whose own father had died in the tragedy, watched the town’s women become widows all at once, its children become fatherless, and she could not let the men pass without ceremony. So on July 5, 1908, in her local church, she asked that a day be set aside for fathers. But it would not yet be a holiday.

The following year in Spokane, Washington, a woman named Sonora Smart Dodd, who had been raised by her widowed father William Jackson Smart after her mother died in childbirth, conceived the idea of Father’s Day after hearing a Mother’s Day sermon. She decided fathers ought to have a day too, and began a letter-writing campaign to garner support for the idea. A lot of men found paternal sentimentality emasculating, however, and Dodd struggled for decades against ridicule and suspicion by those who felt the proposed holiday was nothing more than a florists’ and retailers’ invention, like how some folks today claim Valentine’s is just a way for Hallmark to sell cards. It was not until 1966 that her dream became a reality when President Johnson issued the first presidential proclamation of Father’s Day. In 1972, President Nixon made it a federal holiday. Six years later, Dodd passed away at the age of 96.

But while critics saw this as consumer capitalism’s absorption of domestic ritual, it also represented an evolution in the American concept of fatherhood itself. The notion of a “good father” began to shift from that of a distant patriarchal authority toward a more emotionally expressive, nurturing ideal that postwar America increasingly chose to celebrate. Every correction is an over-correction, as I like to say, and I do tend to think we went a little too far in this direction. But above all, I believe that a father should set an example of what kind of person to be in this world, how to treat others, how to be wise and kind, how to chart one’s course and weather any storm. And I think when that example is properly set, it helps lay the very foundation of who we are as a society. And we are a great people.

We are explorers, inventors, warriors, and poets. But before any of that, we are storytellers, and that fact explains more about human history than anything else. We humans are the only species that navigates a world it has narrated into existence. We layer invisible architecture on top of physical reality and then live inside that architecture as if it were load-bearing because, astonishingly, it becomes load-bearing the moment enough of us agree to act as if it is. That’s why maintaining our stories is so crucial. Narrative, once it scales, starts behaving like physical infrastructure. It gets written into law. It gets enforced by police, courts, banks, and zoning boards. This is our magic. We can tell a story and make it true.

And if we stand by the values and principles contained within our best stories, the stories that made our nation great, then I do believe we can weather just about any storm. Indeed, we can save the West. And, beautifully, it happens to be true that the best way to do this is with love. I am talking about the love of a parent for their child because, it turns out, Mom and Dad weren’t just raising you. They were laying a brick on the wall of Western civilization itself. You, you beautiful thing, you are that brick. So teach your children well. Feed them on your dreams. And to all you dads out there, Happy Father’s Day.