Context with Brad Harris

"Notes on Nationalism" was an essay written by George Orwell in 1945, just as World War II was ending. It caused quite a stir at the time, but most people these days have never heard of it. Nonetheless, "Notes on Nationalism" remains one of the most powerful examples of Orwell's timeless insight into human nature; in this case, focused on our instinct to gang up on each other, our instinct for tri...

Like many others, I've begun to worry about the fate of higher education in American society. Having spent most of my professional life in academia, my instinct is to regard the university system as sacred - as Wisdom's Workshop , to borrow the historian James Axtell's recent book title. Liberal democracy relies on a very well educated citizenry. And, modern civilization more generally relies on a...

In this episode, I invited the philosopher and author Stephen Hicks on the podcast to chat about his book, Explaining Postmodernism .   Stephen has been a Professor of Philosophy at Rockford University in Illinois for nearly 20 years, and he's published widely on the history of philosophy, ethics, and politics.   The reason I invited Stephen on the show is because I think postmodernism planted the...

What's that line attributed to Mark Twain?... "History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes." As the authors Neil Howe and William Strauss wrote in their best-selling book The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy - What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny , published in 1997, "The reward of the historian is to locate patterns that recur over time and t...

Plague, political upheaval, the looming prospect of another civil war... what century are we in? To retain historical perspective, and to find inspiration in how humanity has recovered from far greater upheavals in the past, we turn to Barbara Tuchman's classic work, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century . What we find in the late Middle Ages is a vision of hell, along with overwhelming ev...

I went slightly mad producing this episode. But then, the line between our reality and the fiction of 1984 has become far too blurry for my comfort. George Orwell wrote 1984 in 1948 - a very different historical context with very different threats. And yet, the dark sides of human nature he explored through his novel are still very much with us today. He saw with his own eyes, as did everyone else...

"Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it." Lately, it seems like our society is attempting to replace truth with power, forgetting that all other societies that have done this have failed miserably. One of the worst features of our society, we are told, is wealth inequality. But, what is the historical truth about wealth inequality? Drawing inspiration from Walter Scheidel's book, The Gre...

It's hard to remember how intelligent humanity can be when we are relentlessly bombarded by bad news. Author and mathematician Steven Strogatz helps to remind us with his recent book, Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe . The history of calculus may seem irrelevant to most of our going concerns, but as Strogatz shows, the spirit of calculus expresses one of the best i...

Carl Sagan was a brilliant popularizer of science.  His book, The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark , helps to inspire clear thinking when chaos reigns supreme.  Here, I share my thoughts on the important themes of that work.   To access bonus episodes and all regular episodes ad-free, join me on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/context Learn more at https://bradharris.com

There is an overlooked rule in history: far more is lost and forgotten than is preserved and remembered. Humanity has made incredible progress - we know more and we're more powerful than we've ever been. But, are we getting wiser?  What if our ignorance outgrows our potential? What happens when rich and powerful societies lose their wisdom and forget what made them great in the first place?  It's...

Today, we explore the origin of the modern concept of a fact. We take facts for granted, but they represent an invaluable intellectual technology less than 400 years old, which was forged in a fight between two of history's brightest thinkers battling over the best way to rescue their society from the madness of medieval barbarism.   There is a book that gives us a front row seat to that fight:  L...

Today I'm speaking with Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen , a historian from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. It would be hard to find a scholar better equipped to enhance our historical perspective on how we decide what's true. Jennifer and I challenge each other's thinking on several questions, including:  Were Enlightenment ideas about natural rights discovered or created? Does the distinction be...

Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind , published in 1987, became one of the most influential books of the last 50 years by instigating a battle over the soul of the American University that's been raging ever since. The book sold millions of copies, becoming a powerful weapon in Bloom's fight against what he identified as a morally and intellectually crippling form of relativism infectin...

In this episode, we witness the debate that raged over the birth of what is perhaps the most powerful idea in history; the idea that supports our ability to make the world a better place, and the idea that defines the meaning of America. This is the idea that conversation , that argument , that free expression  represent the best path to progress and to justice for all, and that to institutionaliz...

Niall Ferguson is one of the most influential historians of our generation. His professional effort extends well beyond academia to ensure that policy makers and the public better understand how to apply historical lessons to current issues. Niall and I connected to further discuss some of those issues. We talk about the changing politics of academia, the growing challenge of interpreting history...

Niall Ferguson, perhaps the most famous historian of our generation, offers yet another breakthrough in his latest work, The Square and the Tower . Through groundbreaking research, Ferguson reveals how social networks, from the Freemasons of the middle ages to Facebook in the 21st century, disrupt established hierarchies to divert the course of history, both for better and for worse. Join me on Pa...

Is there a logic to history?  Many scholars balk at the idea of searching for such logic, insisting that each culture may only be understood on its own terms. In Why the West Rules - For Now , Ian Morris counters that if we look beyond the facade of culture to how human biology, sociology, and geography interact, it is possible to discover a fundamental pattern in history to help us answer the big...

Today, I'm speaking with Bryan Ward-Perkins, author of The Fall of Rome, and the End of Civilization .  It has become fashionable to argue that Roman civilization never collapsed, but was merely transformed by Germanic culture. Although this counter-narrative can illuminate intellectual developments of Late Antiquity, it verges on cultural relativism that threatens to obscure real differences in h...

The Two Cultures  by C. P. Snow was one of the most influential lectures of the 20th century, triggering an intense epistemological debate within higher education regarding the status of science that has persisted to this day. The main theme of Snow's lecture was to raise alarm about the growing knowledge gap between modern society's scientists and everyone else, and to reinvigorate respect for sc...

Merchants of Doubt is not just a book about how illusions of scientific controversy have been constructed, it's also about the people who constructed them, and its most shocking revelation is that the very same people used the very same strategy to prevent regulation on cigarette smoking, acid rain, the ozone hole, and global warming over the span of nearly 50 years. Support Context and access bon...

If civilization collapsed, and our descendants could rediscover a single work to get humanity back on track scientifically and technologically, Peter Atkins' Galileo's Finger: The Ten Great Ideas of Science , would be a contender. If there are miracles, Atkins would argue that they are not found in the surreal conjectures of things unexplained, but in the tangible power of our otherwise small mind...

In this episode, we're shifting gears and I'll read an article that I published in 2013 in the journal American Scientist called "Evolution's Other Narrative." Here is a link to the article: https://www.americanscientist.org/article/evolutions-other-narrative Given our conversation last time about the importance of disease in the history of civilization, I thought this article would be an interest...

The history of disease demonstrates both the accidental nature of history and the triumph of human reason that can enable us to gain some control over our fate; most of us no longer suffer the death of half our children, among other nightmares. William McNeill's book, Plagues and Peoples , was the first comprehensive history to capture this balance, and after more than 40 years it remains one of t...

In 1493 , Charles Mann shows us how Europeans emerged at the center of a modern, globalized world by establishing the Columbian Exchange; a system they created but could not control, and with consequences none of them could imagine. Support Context and access bonus content, including a 20-minute interview with author Charles Mann himself, by supporting the show on Patreon at https://www.patreon.co...

Genghis Khan was so influential that, to understand how Europe began to shake off its medieval provincialism, how the Islamic world lost much of its momentum, and how China's unparalleled technology trickled beyond its borders and reshaped the fortunes of the West, it's well worth studying the legacy of this single Mongolian man. To support Context and access bonus episodes, visit patreon.com/brad...