Explore every episode of the podcast Context with Brad Harris

Why did we stop believing in utopia?

By the late 19th century, many Americans had come to believe that the future would be defined by peace, prosperity, and moral progress. But over the next century, optimism gave way to fear—war, nuclear weapons, and runaway technology began to reshape our vision of what was possible.

In this episode of Context, we explore how our ideas about the future have evolved—from Edward Bellamy’s best-seller Looking Backward (1888), to H.G. Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come (1933), to The Terminator series (1984), and finally to Brian Christian’s The Alignment Problem (2020). Along the way, we trace the rise of techno-utopianism, the shock of dystopian realism, and the ethical dilemmas now posed by artificial intelligence.

The history of the future has never mattered more.

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Is it possible that war, for all its horror, once played a vital role in human flourishing—and that its disappearance has left a cultural and spiritual void?

In this episode, we explore the provocative thesis that war has historically served not only as an engine of destruction, but as a forge for meaning and social cohesion. Drawing on J. Glenn Gray’s The Warriors, with insight from William James, Nietzsche, and Durkheim, we examine what modern society loses when it loses war—not just as a military phenomenon, but as a psychological and cultural one.

What happens to masculinity when its most historically sanctioned outlet evaporates? What fills the vacuum when existential struggle is no longer a shared reality? And could space exploration become the next great crucible that gives our civilization meaning without violence?

This is not an argument for militarism—but a call to confront what war once offered, and to ask what might replace it in a civilization that seeks to remain vital.

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"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 tribalism.

Orwell never used the term "tribalism" himself -- he wrote this essay a generation before that term became widespread. However, I suspect his essay was a primary factor in raising awareness of the social pathology of tribalism, and his diagnosis of the problem precisely captures the liabilities of tribalism plaguing us today.

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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 significant number of us possessing hard-earned historical perspective on what is true and what is good, and hard-earned scientific perspective on the full reach of human potential.

Any threat to the university system should worry us. Today, there appear to be multiple, and the most frustrating thing of it is... those threats seem to be mostly self-imposed.

In this episode, I highlight those threats and explore the history behind the legacy of modern knowledge.

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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 seeds of the illiberalism that's erupting throughout our society today, and Stephen Hicks literally wrote the book on that development.  In my opinion, his insight is critical because the battle of ideas postmodern thinking provokes could very well determine the fate of liberal democracy our lifetime.

To learn more about Stephen Hicks, I encourage you to visit his website, stephenhicks.org, or follow him on Twitter.

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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 to discover the natural rhythms of social experience.”

According to the pattern they predicted, we should currently be in the midst of a great historical crisis. Are we? If so, what happens next?

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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 evidence that the best of humanity can endure the worst.

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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 who lived through the World Wars and totalitarian genocides back then, where the worst of human nature can lead if left unchecked.

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"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 Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality, we explore the history of wealth inequality and discuss how the cure has tended to be far worse than the disease.

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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 ideas humanity has ever had: greatness is not to be found in the end, but in the effort.

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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.  

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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 happened before, and there is a Pulitzer Prize-winning book by historian Stephen Greenblatt that tells the tale, titled, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. Here, we look to this book for insight on how a paradise of wisdom was once lost.

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A century ago, Oswald Spengler warned that Western civilization was entering its final phase—not from war or catastrophe, but from cultural exhaustion.

In The Decline of the West, he argued that every great society passes through organic stages of growth and decay—and the West, he claimed, had already entered winter.

In this episode of Context, we revisit Spengler’s audacious and unsettling vision. We explore the patterns he identified—technocracy, Caesarism, the erosion of civic virtue—and ask whether Spengler’s predictions still hold up. Are we watching a great civilization fade… or transform?

Topics include:

• Spengler’s life, method, and seasonal model of civilization

• Parallels between ancient Rome and the modern West

• Technological achievement vs. cultural vitality

• Why memory and myth matter for renewal

• The possibility of rebirth—and what spring might require

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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: Leviathan and the Air Pump, published by the historians of science Steve Shapin and Simon Schaffer. It covers the conflict between the Scientific Revolutionaries Thomas Hobbes and Robert Boyle concerning how new knowledge could and should be created, and out of which the concept of an objective fact as we now know it was born. 

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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 between objective truth and pragmatic truth really matter?

How do we reconcile timeless values with scientific disruption?

To explore these ideas further, I recommend two of Jennifer's books: The Ideas That Made America and American Nietzsche.

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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 infecting America's educational system. Allan Bloom sought to remind us that the goal of education is not to become open to all ideas, but to cultivate the search for the best ideas.

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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 institutionalize this idea via a Constitutional right to the freedom of speech is the best way to preserve a prosperous society.

A historian named Joseph Ellis captured the story of that debate in Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation, which won the Pulitzer Prize in History, and in this episode we’re going to learn why this most prestigious honor was so well deserved.

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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 productively, the problem of judging the past by the moral standards of the present, and more.

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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.

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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 biggest historical questions, from why the West rules for now, to what will happen next.

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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 how people flourish or suffer. Ward-Perkins' book is a welcome reality check of how dark the post-Roman age really was.

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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 science among cultural elites who were increasingly dismissive of it.

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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.

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We often think global power is all about armies and technology. But what if the most decisive battles are fought through stories?

In this episode of Context, we explore the concept of narrative warfare—the battle over how nations interpret their past, define their identity, and imagine their future.

From Manifest Destiny to the 1619 Project, from China’s “Century of Humiliation” to Russia’s myth of the “Third Rome,” we examine how national stories shape the world order—and what happens when a superpower like America stops believing in its own.

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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 minds to achieve cosmic insights through experiment and mathematics. Here, he distills his choices for the most profound of those insights.

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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 interesting supplement to our understanding of humanity's co-evolution with microorganisms.

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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 the most insightful narratives on how disease has both shaped and been shaped by civilization.

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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.com/context or through the website at https://bradharris.com.

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.

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The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a classic in the history of science, and one of the most cited books of the twentieth century. Thomas Kuhn insightfully challenged our assumptions about how science works, but his opaque style ignited a cultural movement energized around the misinterpretations that objective truth was an illusion and that scientific progress was just a conceit of western civilization. These ideas became pillars of postmodernism, and no one was more frustrated by the folly of their development than Thomas Kuhn himself. 

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Margaret Jacob’s book helps us understand how scientific knowledge became integrated into the culture of Europe through the 1600s and 1700s, and how the different social and political conditions of different European countries influenced the application of science to material prosperity. Jacob enhances our understanding of the role of science in the Industrial Revolution, and provides insight on why Britain’s distinctive approach to the utility of science enabled it to industrialize generations earlier than any other country.

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The Wealth and Poverty of Nations was published by David Landes in 1998, and it has occupied a preeminent place on the bookshelves of scholars ever since. Landes boldly argued that historically unique cultural values of curiosity, novelty, and private property empowered European society to lead the modern world; a history that offers invaluable lessons for our own time.

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Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies was published by Jared Diamond in 1997. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998, along with several other awards. The fundamental question that Diamond seeks to answer through this book is, why did history unfold so differently on different continents such that Eurasian societies became so disproportionately influential in creating the modern world? 

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This is a short preview of a supporter-only bonus episode.

In this episode, I explore the psychological and philosophical reasons we keep projecting something human into our machines. From ancient automata to Boston Dynamics, from Descartes to modern AI, we’ve been building mechanical reflections of ourselves for centuries.

But why? What does it say about us that we want our machines to seem alive—even when we know they aren’t?

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We didn’t cure boredom—we erased it. And in doing so, we may have lost one of the most quietly powerful forces in human development.

In this episode of Context, I explore boredom as a lost human experience—not a problem to eliminate, but a signal for reflection, imagination, and growth. From ancient philosophers to Enlightenment thinkers, boredom once played a vital role in the human condition.

But today, it’s nearly extinct. Our lives are saturated with stimulation, leaving little space for silence, solitude, or introspection. What happens when we’re never bored—never still, never alone with our thoughts?

We’ll look at the cultural disappearance of boredom and what that tells us about our distracted age. And we’ll consider why boredom might be worth reclaiming—not just for our creativity, but for our humanity.

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The SEC was created to protect investors—but is it now protecting incumbents instead? In this episode of Context, we explore the rise of unelected bureaucracies and their hostility to innovation, using crypto regulation as a lens into a larger democratic dysfunction.

From the roots of the administrative state to today’s battle between blockchain pioneers and entrenched financial regulators, we explore how bureaucratic overreach can derail progress—and what it would take for America to rediscover its courage to build.

Topics include:

• SEC vs. Ripple Labs and Coinbase

• Regulatory capture and the death of oversight

• Blockchain, XRP, and the Internet of Value

• American innovation and bureaucratic stagnation

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In this episode, we examine Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, a chilling warning about how societies drift into tyranny—not through force, but through the seductive promise of central planning.

Written in the shadow of fascism and communism, Hayek’s argument is more relevant than ever: when the state takes control of the economy, it inevitably takes control of our lives. What begins as progress can end in oppression.

This is the road to serfdom.

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There’s a lot that’s dividing Americans right now - lots of divisive narratives that have captivated lots of people. One of those narratives features the apparent widening political divide between urban and rural culture. But, the truth is that the evolution of America’s urban and rural communities has always been symbiotic.

One of the best historical case studies of that symbiosis highlights the city of Chicago and the rural American west, documented by William Cronon in his award-winning book, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, published in 1991. In this episode, we reconsider the relationship between urban and rural in light of that history.

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The modern world is defined by acceleration. But what if the most stable—and perhaps most human—version of ourselves existed long before civilization?

In this episode, we explore the world of the Cro-Magnon: anatomically modern humans who thrived in Ice Age Europe. For hundreds of generations, their way of life remained remarkably unchanged. What was it like to live in near-perfect evolutionary harmony with the environment?

Civilization ultimately emerged as a hedge against danger, especially for those with children to protect. But in exchange for safety and surplus, we surrendered something more elemental and spiritually sustaining.

This is the story of that trade-off—and of what we lost in the bargain. This is the story of a time before history began, when we were most human.

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Modern life runs on hidden engine rooms—vast, intricate systems most of us never see. The Haber-Bosch process, which turns air into fertilizer, is one of them. It feeds billions, yet almost no one outside of science or industry could explain how it works or why it matters.

In this episode, we explore Haber-Bosch not just as a technological marvel, but as a parable for our dependence on complex systems most of us barely understand. From the fight over bird droppings in the 19th century to the industrial alchemy of fixing nitrogen, we trace how human ingenuity transformed the limits of nature, and how that transformation fostered both abundance and fragility.

This is a story about the machinery that sustains us, and the risks we run when we forget it’s there.

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