How to (Actually) Save the West

Read the great books...

I recently had a shocking realization:

It is now not only possible, but the norm, to go from kindergarten to PhD in the West without reading a single word of Homer, Plato, Virgil, Augustine, or Dante.

This is how you erase a culture, and it’s working.

If you spend enough time online, and you read what people are saying about the West — about its culture, its history, its religion — you’ll notice that everyone has very strong opinions. But few people know much of what they’re talking about.

People talk about Christianity without ever reading Augustine’s Confessions. They talk about Western values without understanding where those values came from. People construct entire worldviews from clips and headlines.

At some point, you realize that if you don’t go deeper yourself, you’ll end up thinking the same way.

That’s where this started for me. I looked at what educated men read 100, 200, even 500 years ago, and noticed they were reading what had already endured. There was an assumption that if a book had survived generations, it had something in it worth understanding.

Reading older books allow us to understand how things developed over generations, and gives essential context to the here and now.

For instance, read Homer’s Iliad and you’ll start to see where ideas about honor and endurance come from. Then, move to Virgil’s Aeneid and responsibility becomes central. Then read Augustine’s Confessions and you’ll realize how seriously people used to take the inner life. Then, Dante’s Divine Comedy will reveal to you a world in which everything has structure and consequence.

Once you’ve read all these, you simply cannot go back to surface-level thinking. You’ll see that the West isn’t just a place or a political idea — it is something that was shaped, piece by piece, by books and ideas that faced the scrutiny of centuries.

This is what pushed me to start the Athenaeum Book Club.

I’ve been building this for the past 11 months, and it genuinely feels like the most important project I’ve ever worked on. I get daily messages from people telling me they’ve been looking for something like this for years and couldn’t find it anywhere.

At Athenaeum, we read a new classic text every month, and we now have close to 40,000 readers following along. We have an incredible “inner circle” community actively participating in the biweekly discussions: reading, thinking, and engaging deeply with the material, together.

The hunger we are seeing for returning to the great books of Western Civilization is beyond anything we ever expected. It feels like the beginning of something truly special.

These are the books we’ve read so far (we’re about to start Crime and Punishment):

To preserve a culture, you must continually study the books and ideas that created it.

That is why the Athenaeum Book Club was created. Together, we are reading the books that form the mind and shape the spirit — the books our ancestors read. We’re doing it honestly and openly, in dialogue with each other.

If this sounds like something you’d like to be a part of, please join our community, and consider supporting our mission with a paid membership. You’ll get:

• Live community book discussions (biweekly) and recordings

• Access to our incredible community of readers

• Regular essays to guide you through the books we’re reading

• The full library of articles, essays, and podcasts

• The ability to vote on what we read next…

Athenaeum is funded ENTIRELY by the members of this incredible community. Join us!