Building a New Intellectual Movement

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Bonus issued as non withdrawable bonus bets, which expires seven days after receivt. restrictions applies, see full terms at fanDuoolot com slash sportsbook gambling problem called one eight hundred gambler or one eight hundred My Ret. When I got to Colombia, I was very much expecting these sorts of lovers of tradition, lovers of the humanities And literature, I think is an exploration of what it is to be human of civilization And that is not what I got atlumbia up Hey everyone, it's Andrew Clan with this week's interview with Lisa Libes. and you may never have heard of Lisa Libes, but I am very good at ferretting out talent. And I have to tell you, this is a very talented young lady who is a writer and founder of Pens and Poison, which is a substack and a YouTube channel devoted to promoting the love of literature and the humanistic And her story is amazing. herer writing is excellent and the stuff she has to say is stuff you will want to hear. Lisa, it is so nice to meet you. I've been admiring you from afar, but now I get to admire you still from afar, but less afar Well, thank you so much. It's so great to be on the show, Andrew. Oh I'm really happy to get to talk to you. I was Well, I think I want to just leave it to you to tell people What happened? The video that I found that I stumbled over, when I stumbled over it, it had like ten views and then it went up over a hundred thousand in a couple days And it was about what happened to you at Columbia University. And I think I want to start there because your story is a story that I think is happening to a lot of people and is the reason why The liberal arts are vanishing from colleges. this is Columbia. So this is a big Ivy League school. How'd you get there And what were you expecting Yeah. so I mean, I come from a just Rndom immigrant family, right? I had never really had those connections to get to the Ivy League. so I worked very, very hard to get to Columbia I'd always had the dream to study literature and to also contribute my own writing to the literary tradition. know I'm working on a couple of novels as well. So literature has just always moved me in so many different ways and has always just allowed me to ask these very important questions about what makes us human And what is unique about the human tradition, right? And what is unique about just being a human being and That is, you know, that's what we call the humanities And I worked very, very hard to get to Columbia University. I was, you know writing novels in high school. I was doing all of these you activities, all the things you need to do to get to these kind of Ivy League schools without, you the sort of connections to get there And when I got to Colombia, I was very much expecting these sort of lovers of tradition, lovers of the humanities And you know, again, it was my dream to be kind of in New York City to study at this amazing school. You have this kind of know Greco Roman architecture at Columbia University. You have this beautiful library with the names of these kind of famous ancient Greek scholars on the facade of the library. And I get there And what I am met with is something very, very different from what I'm expecting. I again, I'm expecting the kind of lovers of the humanities, lovers of tradition. And in many ways, I think literature is a conservative tradition because It calls back to thousands and thousands of years of building up civilization, right? And literature, I think, is an exploration of what it is to be human of civilization And that is not what I got at Columbia at all. I get to Colombia and on the very first day in my English literature seminar, it's a seinar that everyone has to take in the English department, we are given the writings of a man named Edward Sed. Oh. I don't think his name is very well known outside of the accademy But he is he is essentially responsible for this narrative that you hear Ged today that, you know, the Jews are settler colonists and all the he sort of started up all the anti Israel sentiment in many ways, and he was the name of a professor at Columbia. And so he, you know Columbia University world really, really revevers him. and that was the text that we were given on the very first day of my seminar that we had taken. and I was expecting, again, to read some sort of literature on the very first day or at least to talk about the literary tradition and all of a sudden, we're given this essay from one of his books, culture and Iperialism. And he talks about Mansfield Park which is one of Jane Austin's lesser known novels My impression is that no one in the class had ever read Mansfield Park. because again, everyone's eighteen years old. it's freshman year of college. I don't think people are sitting around reading Mansfield Park. I happen to have read it because I was just reading a lot of literature just in high school for my own edification and Evert playl his argument in the book. is essentially that Jane Austen is complicit in imperialist expansion in British colonialism And he gets this from Mansfield Park, which is essentially a novel about virtue. It's a novel about marriage. and Jane Auston likes to explore the marriage question. And I had read it maybe six months ago, so it was still fairly fresh in my mind and I'm sitting there and is this the same novel? Is this like maybe a modern retelling of Mansfield Park? What's going on? And there's one line in Mansfield Park where one of the characters, he owns a plantation in Antigua which is, you know somethingomet that many Brits did at the time. and it's not relevant to the novel at all. It's maybe just a side detail that Jane Austen throws in for whatever reason. And Edward Sid takes this one line and decides that Jane Austin is this evil British colonist and that you know therefore Mansfield Park is a novel about colonialism We need to decolonize the tradition of Victorian literature And I'm sitting there. I'm eighteen years old. This is my very first day of college at an Ivy League school. What is going on The thing is I never really thought of myself as a conservative at that time. I was very politically active. I didn't It was maybe just a standard run of the mill Donemocrat I It's instructed much more. They'll do that to me U Su, but again, I I just I just considered myself a normal human being who was just there to appreciate this longstanding tradition of the arts and humanities And I get This. I get this, you know, Edward Sed talking about imperialism. And so I'm confused. And I thought, okay, maybe it's one professor is a little bit one kid Fad else I get I take other classes where're reading Judith Butler who is this radical gender scholar who is essentially responsible for this idea that Gender is a social construct she. picks up on someone who are going to put that idea forth and then she she picks up on that and really runs withhead and, you know, the whole The whole issue we're having today with the conversation about gender is essentially Judith Butler's writings so we're reading Judith Butler And we're reading Carl Marks. My family comes from the Soviet Union. My parents came here on political asylum on the run from socialism, socialism is not talked about very positively in my household And Again, we're reading Carl Marks. I came back for a winter break was my, you know, reading list. And my parents looked at it and it was like Carms, like Siderk Anglles, like all these markx of scholars And my dad goes We didn't leave the Soviet Union for my daughter to be reading markarks at Colombia University. What is going on I'm so I started to see that there was a problem with the way that English literure was being taught at these universities and I wanted to do something about it. so Here we are. I you know wanted to kind of bring awareness to this issue and talk a little bit about why the humanities have become ideologically captured. and that is something that I'm you know happy to explore further today. I would like I have to tell you E was Sid was a friend of my father in law, who is a very brilliant English professor at Berkeley. And I read his first book Orientalism and just thought this is one of the worst pieces of garbage I've ever read. And then I finally I wrote a thriller novel called Empire of Les, which has an Edward Said character, and the hero ends up shattering his kneecap with a hammer So that tells you how I feel about Edward Said. But that line, that line about Jane Austin was a famous moment backack in the nineteen eighties, when he wrote that, I mean everybody was like, that's a little over the top. And then very quickly the left hand is said, no, no, this is very true about Jane Austin. I don't know if you've read the book after Virtue, but I mean his take on Austin is so much more brilliant than all about virtue So ye, so let me ask you this I have my theories about where this came from. What do you think cause this to s on the way it did So I think to answer that question, I'd like to give a little bit of an overview of how literature was traditionally studied in the academy. and we can maybe go back to the ancient Greeks. So the ancient Greeks had this idea Paidia. of civilizational education and it was essentially what we would call think of today as the liberal arts tradition. So you studied rhetoric, grammar, you studied science, math, and then you studied also music poetry and philosophy and these were the sorts of subjects that the Greeks thought would allow you to become a morally upstanding citizen. So the idea was to brain kind of your ideas of morality into the way that you go through your daily life and then you know, that would contribute to the development of the ancient Greek pololis or the city state and then you know, we had that the revival of that tradition during the Renaissance. And then this critic, Matthew Arnold, who is also a poet, he's most famous for his home Dover Beach, Matthew Arnold comes in in the nineteenth century and he essentially runs with this idea and he says that we should be studying the humanities on a broader scale in our university system. So Matthew Arnold was one of the first proponents of what we would think of as the liberal art tradition. And he draws very much on the Greeks. He thought that Victorian society was maybe a little bit too overly moralized. So he said that we should return to the tradition of the Greeks. We should have moral education, but we should also have what he called sweetness and light which is a fancy way of saying beauty and knowledge. essentially. So to Matthew Arnold, the liberal arts were always about kind of beauty, tradition, knowledge and also morality and That is the tradition that we saw in the academy in the early twentieth century. So there's a scholar named Irving Abbt. He pioneered the school of thought called New Humanism in literature And the idea of humanism was again, that litature was supposed to teach you something about morality, teach you something about being the kind of best virtuous citizen in the world. my favorite poet, Tas Elliott was a friend of Irving Babbot. So Elliott also looked at, you know he wrote a lot of bliterary criticism and he says essentially that literature is about tradition is about exploring the longstanding tradition of the voices that came before you. So he puts these ideas together and In the beginning of the twentiet centy, that is how we studied literature is we had this idea of beauty, we had this city of truth, morality This is what I like to think of as genuine authentic literary study. and I think that So much with Woodtercher is about helping us understand what it is that makes us into morally outstanding citizens and what it is that makes us, again, human new humanism. So that starts to develop in the academy, but Irving Babbittt, because he's more conservative leaning starts to get some opponents And there are a couple of theors, particularly around the nineteen sixties I don't wantan to sound like Jordan Peterson and just blame postmodernism for everything but many No, I think people came from They came from the postmodern tradition and they basically said, you, there's no objective truth. If we're teaching morality through literature, that's racist That's, you know only paying attention to one tradition of Judeo Christian morals. We shouldn't have such thing as objective morality. and it doesn't matter what the author says So there's this critic nam Rlland Bart, who comes in he writes this essay called death of the author, where he essentially argues that the author' background is completelyirrelevant, the historical context is completely irrelevant. We should just look at the text and think about what the text means for us Fair enough that then That's a slippery slope. And that brings us then to so many literary critics who start reading literature only in relation to themselves rather than looking at the actual traditions that literature comes from. Jacque Derida, who is another kind of postmodern Literary critic comes in and says that the tradition of Western metaphysics is racist and oppressive, and we should be dismantling all these hierarchies and binaries And so many of these critics are writing specifically about literature and are in these English departments across the Western world, them France, in Germany, you have the Frankfurt School, which is kind of these new Marxist who came in and also try to put Marxism into literature. you have these critics across the Western world who are starting to develop this new kind of radical leftist tradition. And at the same time, many writers of literature are also participating in radical leftism. Jean Paul Sardre, who is an existential writer, he was very much left leing, right? So his He was very much a radical Marxist. he was in all of the French Marxist parties. He was in favor of violence using violence to overthrow oppressive states And so he's writing literature. And many of these ideas seep into the literature that he's writing and then also A lot of publishing becomes a little bit ideologically captured. So there's this publisher named Victor Galons and he is Essentially again, this radical Marxist, he's very pro stalin. he famously refused to publish animal Fm because it was a criticism of felinism and Oal had to go elsewhere. So Victor Golants kind of runs the publishing industry in the twentieth century, the mid twentiet century. And so they're in cahoots with these you know, literary critics. And eventually these radical leftist ideas become one with the study of literature just because at this particular societal moment Literature was very much left leaning and so many authors were left leaning. The other thing that's happening in America is we have McCarthy Erab So A lot of the Marxists who were denied position kind of in government and elsewhere, the accademy said, come to us, we'll take all of you. So there was this take in Marxist scholarship in the academy because so many kind of Marxist thinkankers just weren't allowed elsewhere in society. and the way that tenure works is existing professors decide who to hire as the next sort of academic. So you have this proliferation of Marxist ideology in the academy. You have these literary scholars who are writing in the postmodern tradition, who claim that objective truth doesn't exist. And very, very quickly, you et this literary world where radical leftism is almost inseparable from literary study itself. And again, it's developed like this historically And it's a little bit unfortunate that it did, but that is where we're at today and that's based on my understanding, my theory Hey, remember when you were younger and you could survive on four hours of sleep, caffeine and frozen pizza and somehow still function? at a certain point that stopped working, didn't it? Honestly, this time of year makes sleep even harder for a lot of people. Summer travel starts, bedtimes drift later, everybody's routine becomes slightly chaotic for school break, which is why the quality of your sleep setup mattering a lot more than people think. That's one reason Helix has become such a popular mattress brand. Helix makes mattresses tailored to different sleep styles and preferences because not everybody sleeps the same way. Some people sleep hot, some need extra support, some toss and turn constantly. Some, like me, just never sleep. 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That's helixleep dot com slash Kaven for twenty seven percent off sitewide. Make sure you enter our show name after checkout so they know we sent you Hixleep dot com slash Kaven, but you have to know how to spell it. Try and find, I'll tell you, it's KLA VM Well, no, I think that's a pretty good history actually. I mean, you mentioned Dover Beach, which of course is about the long mean the melancholy, long withdrawing roar of faith, the seea faith And I think that In some ways all of these ideas were inherent in that withdrawal. I mean, I think in some ways, they grew up naturally. onnce you have no God, you have no objective moral standards. So I guess what I'm interested and for the audience, we're talking to Lisa Lbas, who's sububstack is called pins and pooison, and it' if you're interested in literature, if you're interested in what we're talking about now, it how we got into a state where nobody is teaching literature where you can actually get an English degree without reading Shakespeare or only hearing about. I loved a comment you made in your video about how they only talk about Shakespeare discuss the fact that he was probably a gay woman and probably black, I guess So soorry. So this This loss of faith, which seems to me to have been a true true event in the history of the West is something that I think we're at a turning point now. It's going to go one way or the other. I'm interested in you personally. I mean, you obviously have what it takes to be an academic. I believe you mentioned that you wanted to be an academic. you had come to Colombia. So I have a couple of questions ask in a. O, did you finish your degree at Columbia? That's the first thing. You must have at some point decided you were not going to be part of this academic world Well let's just start with that. just briefly, tell me how you reacted to finding out that your dream of coming to Columbia and getting becoming a professor was not going to pan out Yeah, so I I went to Columbia for my undergrad. I finished my undergrad so I have bachel's from Colombia and then What happened during my undergrad was in the final year of my undergrad, I was kicked out of my senior thesis program for citing a scholar named Camille Palia Yes, we all we know, commit.. And you were kicked out you were kicked out for sighting you were kicked out for sighting her I it's indirectly. was it was a very oblique that's my theory. I don't exactly know why, but they basically said, yeah, we're not. Let you do what these l. Yeah. I was like, all right U so So they don't like Camil Pelia at Columbia University. She is a little bit controversial in many ways. but I applied then for master's programs because I was essentially told I need to, you know have that thesis completed in order to then ly for PhD. so I've been in a master's program at Colombia And I was initially first couple months of my master's program. I was preparing PhD applications, I was doing all the you know standard, I'm going to become an academic, all of this. and I was just you know kind of clenching my teeth through the whole process. byy then I very aware of what was going on, and what I'd have to do and to kind of get through this And then COVID happenens It was twenty twenty. And the whole world sort of shut down. Most programs weren't accepting PhD applications that year. So I had this one year to just think about, okay, what am I going to do with the rest of my life? And at first I was like, okay, whatever I'll know, work for a year and then go apply for PhD's Again, and over that year, I had just a year of I don't want to say COVD was normal. but I had a year of normalcy of not being in this pemic environment and I started to realize that there are actually normal human beings, which is not something that I had really picked up on n at Colombia because I thought everyone was crazy. But I was just, you know, I was working a normal job. I was interacting with humans who had normal ideas. And so I thought, why should I hold myself up in an ivory tower for the rest of my life and continue to talk about you know, radical marks of gender ideology in Shakespeare when I There are so many different ways that I can get my perception of literature out into the world. So I worked for a couple years and then last year, actually, I started writing on Substock. I started doing social media I do a lot of work with like Instagram, where I talk about literature. And at first I was hold that nobody was going to listen to me because there was zero audience for people who are interested in literure and people who are conservative I was told that there was no V diagram overlap. And I very quickly found out that that was false And that you my Instagram grew very, very quickly. I haven't been doing it for so so long. I ran this article on Substack called Leave Literature alone. that blew up gotght the attention of some very big names that I admire. And all of a sudden, you know people were reaching out to me actually, I saw that you had a Clifton Duncan on a couple months ago. He was one of the first people who like formally reached out to me and he was like just. you know you're You're in the communities, keepeep doing this. There is an audience. for this. So He's fantastic. He sort of motivated me to keep going. And I think that you know, I'm talking about many of these ideas now kind of outside of the academy. And again, that video I just did about my experience at Columbia up because I think that there's a first for people who love the humanities, but who feel pushed out of the academic world or the publishing world or these sorts of kind of radically left leaning spaces in the humanities because It's not mainstream, but I do think that Actually the majority of lovers of literature or the humanities in general probably are a little bit conservative leaning because to me, literature again is a tradition It's a tradition of understanding kind of the development of civilization and That's a conservative pursuit on its own. Yeah, you know, it' it's very moving in some ways. You, onene of the things that I object to about this pubiticization of criticism and the kind of teaching that you're talking about is that The literature is essentially silenced. The voice of these I mean, Jane Austen is probably the greatest female novelist in the English language. You're talking about a sort of a vision of the world that you can only get from this genius writer But it's silenced under the absolute tyrannical voice of Edward Said and whoever else they're papering over. It's like just laying a screen on top of it so the words can't get out. So what I'm interested in, you start this substack that obviously is getting some, you've got subscribers, you've got people watching your videos. Where do you plan to go with us? What What is the plan Yeah, I mean, I definitely just want to grow it as much as I can. I want to talk about literature from the sort of this new humanistic perspective from the perspective that it always has been talked about for thousands and thousands of years. againain, the Greeks had their Paideea, the Romans then took the idea of Paida and actually renamed it into Humanitas, which is where we get the word. But humanity is rightised So this from the liiberal arts tradition I've the humanistic tradition. and I really want to talk about literature from that perspective. I definitely I think people resonate with personal stories. Every time I do a little bit of a personal story, it tends to do fairly well. So I want to talk about you know my experiences and I want to about the fact that I think that we're not alone in this slight. and you know, people always say, oh, you know, conservatives don't read literature. I don't think that's true I think that maybe conservatives don't read contemporary literature that's coming out today that's all about Marxism and whatnot because you know the publishing industry likes to push out these So againain, Marx with the books from Marxist authors like Sally Rooney And I do think that I know so many well bad conservatives, I know so many conservatives who are who love this tradition and who see literature as you know a broader extension of the kind of Western civilizational tradition. And I want to talk about literature from that perspective. And you know, I've only been doing this for a year, a little bit less than a year. so I think I've I've gained ite a following in that time, I think there is a thirst for people who appreciate literature from a more traditional perspective. And I will just keep doing that until we start to separate radical leftist ideology and literary study. And have you said you write novels as well? Have you had any run inss with the publishing industry it ind of Oh yes. What a sound. o yes. Yeah. So I'm working on a book right now, nonfiction book actually about the ideological capture of the publishing industry. So this is the a subject that I've been very much mired in for the past couple of months. So I I have three novels that I've been trying to get published The best one, I think is the second one out of those three. and it's about tradition of classical music I don't if you're familiar with the book, Dr. Faust Mamasman.. Yeah. so it's It's sort of a modern retelling of Dr. Faustus in many ways, and it's about this Faustian composer who essentially sacrifices so much of his life for his music and then obviously that Do doesnn't go so well at the end. So it's set kind of in the twenty first century and it's about kind of the pursuit of beauty. and the importance of beauty in the creation of the artistic tradition so I start to send this novel out. everyvery time I send a novel out, I get good interest from Publishing world, peopleeople read my novels But I always get these bizarre responses. And one of the responses I got was a literary agent who told me that I did not explore privilege enough in my novel and that the novel wouldn't resonate with contemporary audiences because it contains depictions of supportive men People don't believe me when I tell them these stories, it is amazing. Yeah.. I have a screenshot of those in one of my videos. And so I'm sitting, I wrote a novevel about this music and beauty and again, the search for truth. and he's complaining that there's not enough privilege and that the men in the main character's lives are supportive, so therefore, you know it's not going to res with a contemporary audience So you know, again, I started to see that the same sorts of ideologues who were in the academy were then going into the publishing industry because if you think about it, it's just These English majors are graduating from Columbia University and then where do they go? They go to you know, these penguins, whatever. Right. So they're there. Um, And it's it's been it's been a struggle. I am in talks with a couple of publishing houses right now. so fingers crossed, we'll see what comes of that But it's been an uphill battle. to get the attention of so many of these literary agents. I know you write more kind of thriller novels. Yeah I'm writing but I have I publish I publish with the great Ato Penzler who is in fact one of us, and I think that that makes a fantastic. But Bon, you're part of I'm running out of time. so I've got to wrap. But you're part of a movement, I think. I've seen this a lot. I mean, my son is also part of it. He's teaching in Austin, Texas sometimes, but he also does stuff on He does what you do He's a PhD from Oxford in Yale and he puts his stuff up online and it gets You know, he's a classicist and it gets traffic as well. And I think that there are there's a new publish out called ArRc and there's always Roger Kimbeall over at enncounter. And I think that there's places to go and this stuff is catching on. And think I think you're part of it. I think you're going to be a major part of it. I noticed you, so other people are going to notice you as well Let me just remind people it's Lisa Libis. LI Z A L I B E S. herer site is pins and poison. If you are interested, you can tell she is a professor. She's obviously got the goods to be a professor. If you are interested in how we got here, but also in literature, a great site on sububstact pens and poison. Lisa, it's a true pleasure to meet you. I'm glad you're out there, and I'm sure we'll talk again. I thank you very much for coming on. Wonder to meet you too. Thank you so much for having me on All right, there's something that gives me hope, right? A young person who actually had the gumption to get out of the academic prison and knows exactly what they're doing and why they're doing it. And I think that this is like I say, it's part of a movement. You know, this is not something that happens overnight. It's not something that happens because we just hope it'll happen It's something that happens just like the left took it over. They took it over by moving into institutions. We have to create institutions because those institutions are gone and we can take them down. The only way to take them down is by competing with them. Lisa Libis pins and poison on Substack. If you're interested in literature, she is just a good solid writer and obviously, as you can see, well informed. And also, of course, you wantan to come to the Andrew Claven show where I will be, and I'm waiting to see you there