Old Dogs, New Tricks: The Ancients Have Some Things to Tell Us

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.
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.
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.