Andrew Klavan’s recent commentary—and the new book and podcast discussions that accompany it—do something our culture desperately needs: they pull a classic work of literature back into the center of the argument about what makes life worth living. Klavan points to a single, pivotal scene in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol as a mirror held up to human nature, showing both our capacity for cruelty and our capacity for sudden, redemptive change, and he challenges Americans to notice what that mirror reflects about the human soul.
This isn’t academic hair-splitting; Klavan speaks from hard-earned experience. A celebrated crime novelist who has wandered through the darkness of human depravity in fiction, he has repeatedly said that books like Crime and Punishment forced him to reject the moral relativism fashionable in elite circles and to recognize an inner moral law that points to something higher. His personal conversion and decades of wrestling with evil give his cultural critiques weight, because he’s seen the consequences of moral bankruptcy both on the page and in real life.
In The Kingdom of Cain and in his public talks Klavan argues a provocative but simple idea: confronting darkness honestly—whether in Dostoevsky or in real headlines—can be the very thing that points us back to God and to moral sanity. He refuses the sentimental myth that art must only soothe; instead he insists that honest art exposes our wounds so that genuine healing can begin. For conservatives tired of soft relativism, that is a desperately needed reminder that truth and redemption are not sentimental add-ons but the backbone of a flourishing society.
The scene Klavan highlights in A Christmas Carol is not merely nostalgic chest-thumping about charity; it is an incisive lesson about the inner work required for a better life. Dickens shows that the cure for cynicism is not government coercion or hollow virtue-signaling but repentance, personal responsibility, and real acts of neighborly love—virtues that modern progressivism talks about while hollowing them out with ideology. Klavan’s reading of the scene is a rebuke to a culture that thinks moral truths are optional and reminds us that character is formed in the small, private moments as much as in the public square.
If you’re wondering how this translates into politics and policy, the lesson is plain: you cannot legislate inwardness, but you can cultivate institutions that nurture it—families, churches, civic associations, and a literature that teaches virtue rather than erases it. Klavan and other conservative critics of our cultural moment insist we must rebuild those institutions with clarity and courage, not by surrendering them to the managerial bureaucracies and cynical technocrats who pretend to know how to engineer souls from the top down. Our recovery will be cultural first and political second, because politics without a moral people is only tyranny in slow motion.
This is why reading Dickens, Dostoevsky, and modern writers who dare to look at evil up close matters more than another round of think-tank wonkery. When ordinary Americans rediscover stories that teach conscience and courage, they rewrite the rhythm of daily life away from consumerist selfishness and back toward sacrifice, duty, and neighborly love. That is not nostalgia; it is resistance to the project that would turn us into efficient, hollowed-out cogs of an indifferent state.
So here’s the plain truth to hardworking Americans: your life, your neighborhood, and your country will not be saved by elites who pat themselves on the back for the right opinions. They will be saved when we insist on truth, read the books that formed our civilization, teach our children to love what is good, and live the small acts of virtue that turn a Scrooge into a benefactor. Klavan’s argument is a call to arms of the soul—one conservative should accept gladly and act upon proudly.
