With Western civilization crumbling, illiberalism surging, Jew hatred rising on the left and right, once venerable institutions turned untrustworthy, and rank bias sprouting everywhere (think Fuentes, Tate, Carlson), reading fiction feels like betrayal. Who has the luxury for stories when Western civilization is under siege?
I love science fiction (fantasy’s a distant second), but reading fiction always gnaws at me with guilt. That changed after talking with Clay Greene, Assistant Professor of Literature at the University of Austin (UATX). Clay dismantled my doubts, proving literature is far more than an escape. It is ammunition for the War. By helping me reflect on some of my favorites, Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War and Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Clay changed my view. Fiction tackles civilizational woes directly, and it is one of the many things worth fighting and dying for. Thanks to our conversation, I’m dusting off my sci-fi stack.
The Sublime and the Beautiful
At UATX, Clay teaches “The Sublime and the Beautiful,” blending Eastern and Western texts, theists and atheists, to explore how beauty integrates with truth and goodness. My guilt stemmed from seeing fiction as dereliction amid “pressing civilizational concerns.” Clay did not coddle me. He probed my top picks and mirrored them back, showing how literature prophesies threats and sharpens our tools.
Take The Forever War (1974), Haldeman’s Vietnam-inspired sci-fi masterpiece. Protagonist William Mandella, a drafted physicist, fights aliens in interstellar skirmishes. Relativity twists time: Missions feel brief to him but span decades on Earth. He returns to a dystopian, overpopulated world enforcing homosexuality for population control. The war? A propaganda-driven farce, ending in truce. In essence, it is gritty anti-militarism, dissecting isolation, futility, and war’s dehumanizing grip. Epic.
Clay hinted, does this not echo the fight for Western civilization? Endless conflicts warp us, just like today’s culture wars. Mandella’s alienation parallels how rapid shifts isolate individuals. It’s not fluff. It’s why we fight. And I agree: Haldeman lays bare the peril and the absurdity, forcing questions about lost agency, human bonds, and what’s worth saving in a civilization.
Then there’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971). Thompson’s gonzo whirlwind. Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo, fueled by LSD and ether, rampage through Vegas under the guise of covering a race. Amid hallucinations and Nixon tirades, it is an autopsy of the American Dream. It satirizes the 60s counterculture’s plunge into greed and nihilism. Vegas embodies rigged excess; illusions hawked as dreams. And yet, it’s an embodiment of the West. There are no Vegases in the Islamic world.
Clay pressed me: Doesn’t Thompson prophesize decay? Doesn’t he strip freedom’s facade and reveal corruption. Nah. Thompson’s raw style uncovers truths philosophy might soften, beauty amid ugliness, warning of eroded goodness. My guilt? It started cracking. These are not diversions. They are among the goods that make the West unique.
That was my turning point. I began skeptical, weighed by duty. Clay used my own choices to invert my skepticism: The vision of Gonzo racing through Vegas contrasts with Mandella fighting an endless war. That’s what freedom allows people to do: To write free from constraint. No Soviet reeducations. No Islamic blasphemy laws. No authoritarians guarding their fiefdoms. If you can’t allow yourself to engage those worlds, what’s the point?
My guilt is (mostly) gone. Fiction emerges as an ally undergirding the salvation of the West.
(Off-camera, we touched on Dostoevsky. Clay, once an atheist? swayed by The Brothers Karamazov, highlighted suffering’s aesthetics. The Crucifixion: A gasping man between thieves. It is horrific, yet redemptive. Dostoevsky insists on unity. Sever it, and we are adrift. I am more drawn to Tolstoy’s humanism in War and Peace, but Dostoevsky compels a raw triad clash.)
Literature pushes back: Dostoevsky in torment, Haldeman in combat, Thompson in chaos. For people who cherish liberty, literature is not retreat. It is a perpetual glimpse into freedom.
This conversation helped shift my mindset. Fiction is not indulgence. It is essential. Dive in: Haldeman for endless strife. Thompson for shattered illusions. Dostoevsky for tormented redemption. Civilization will not self-rescue, but as Solzhenitsyn wagered, beauty just might.
Guest post by Clay Greene
The literary obsession of the modern academy is critique. Appreciating how literature works is therefore a lost mission. This is unfortunate, because to cultivate appreciation of literature helps us appreciate our own psychology, biology, and forms of life. The great philosopher Aristotle founded the subject of literary criticism in his Poetics, not by examining the recondite meanings of literary texts but by examining the ways Greek tragedy and poetry play upon us, our emotional tendencies, experiences of time and action, and judgments upon character and history.
As the first subject of literary criticism, the art of appreciation also teaches us how literary forms create the world which human beings inhabit, from ancient Greece, Rome, and Israel down to the present. To study the rhythms of a film or a novel is to understand how human beings experience the passage of time, how we can be tricked into conceiving a limited form like a novel into a mosaic of an entire life, or, as in the case of epics like Tolstoy’s, into an entire historical epoch. Samuel Johnson famously dispatched the illusion that audiences of a play cannot use their imagination to move swiftly from a scene in Italy to a scene in Egypt, because he understood that the tissue of fiction, what John Gardner called the fictive dream, places us outside ourselves in a virtual realm subject partly to its own laws, rather than the stricter laws of reality.
At the same time, the virtual forms of literature have inevitable ramifications for the way human beings experience their own life and times. Thus, the Roman historians come to see current events like the fall of the republic in the colors of Greek and Latin tragedies. Likewise, the famous Emma Bovary of Flaubert’s novel incarnates a familiar modern type: the reader of romantic novels who mistakes their exaggerated heroes for the figures of real life and wastes herself for lack of a properly romantic life. Nations and peoples also conceive their past and present according to literary form. For instance, most educated people of the Anglo-American world unthinkingly conceive English medieval history through the prism of Shakespeare’s Henry V. Statesmen have often made political and military decisions based on expectations born from literary example, imagining that campaigns and elections have the character of drama.
“It is difficult / to get the news from poems”, writes William Carlos Williams, “yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” Most of us do not believe we are miserable for lack of poetry, but to lack what is found in poems is to lack the structure of expectation and meaning in a life. Poems are built out of life and continuous with it, and to understand the nature of poetry is also to understand human psychology in a far deeper way, at both an individual and collective level. In our conversation, I attempted to convince Peter that the value of understanding literature exceeds its contribution to the human scramble for sex, money, and status. The structure of literature is the structure of the soul, and to live more deeply into a life of literature should be the goal of any proper literary education, regardless of whether we want to be writers or critics. Because human beings live in literary forms, our existence deepens corresponding to our understanding of the subterranean rhythms of expression and human meaning that underly our lives, our histories, and our poems.
Literature is philosophy’s playground. You get to play with ideas distilled down to their essence. It’s an experiment of meaning. It’s also a gateway to critical thinking - like Animal Farm is a stepping stone to The Gulag Archipelago. Distilled and yet concentrated. No one should feel guilty about diving into that.
It could be argued that we're all in some kind of trouble precisely BECAUSE we're not reading as much fiction as we used to.
I increased my novel reading tenfold at least by borrowing books from the library and moving heaven and earth to return them on time. That's how I managed to read voraciously as a kid. I would up reading more books this year than in the last few years combined. Of course it helped that I was down to one job (instead of two) and was no longer working 17-hour days grading essays and prepping -- five -- academic writing classes.