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You Need to Read More
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You Need to Read More

On the humanities, literature, and publishing in the era of DEI and AI.

Substack has become the hub of some of the most interesting writing you’ll find anywhere. It’s also become home to a cadre of writers struggling to reclaim the humanities and fiction in particular from modern-day book burners who see great literature as little more than vehicles to explore trite ideological fixations. Mark Twain’s Roughing It, a semi-biographical account of the author’s wild ride through the American West, is lobotomized and dissected as a study of colorism, sexism, colonialism, and so on. No doubt Frank Borman and Jim Lovell agonized over these themes as they read it aloud far above the Earth during one of NASA’s Gemini spaceflights. Or could it be that they read it because they saw their pioneer spirit in 1965 reflected back at them in a book published nearly a century earlier? Back when men traveled with stagecoaches instead of rockets, before we had to look to the stars for a new frontier.

Left: Illustration from Roughing It, 1872, artist unknown. Right: Gemini 7 as seen from Gemini 6, 1965.

Great works are the result of struggle, adventure, sorrow, and conflict. That is to say, they are the product of fundamentally human things, which is really what the humanities are supposed to be about: the examination of the human in this grand, not wallowing sense. Literature is part of that.

Maybe the frontier now is the inner world of real human beings, the kind that is being suppressed by stifling cultural strictures that are still in place, the kind that is threatened with replacement by artificial intelligence that churns out mimetic slop.

doesn’t think AI can ever truly replicate human creative power because it is not endowed with a soul. Libes is part of the cadre of people that I mentioned earlier and is the author of several poetry collections, the founder of Invictus Prep, and the publisher of , a magazine that, in her words, “aims to promote literary education and foster appreciation for the written word.”

We sat down for a talk about the humanities and what it’s like trying to get published in the mainstream as a conservative writer of poetry and fiction when the gatekeepers seem to hate you for existing. We also talked about why conservatives should not give up on these things. Thomas Fleming once wrote that a “Ph.D. in physics or sociology is simply a barbarian if he cannot tell who dragged whom around the walls of what city, because a scientist unfamiliar with the Iliad is an alien in his own civilization.” That was in 1987, and the situation hasn’t gotten any better. It’s time it should.

I hope you’ll enjoy this overdue latest episode of the podcast with Libes, and keep an eye out for more to come.

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