Episodios
-
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.
To support the show and unlock *supporter-only episodes, join me on Patreon or subscribe in Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
-
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
If you value this show, please take a moment to give it a five-star rating.
To unlock *supporter-only episodes, join me on Patreon, or subscribe in Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
-
¿Faltan episodios?
-
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.
Support the show and access supporter-only episodes: patreon.com/bradcoleharris
-
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?
🎧 To hear the full episode, head to: https://patreon.com/bradcoleharris
-
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.
🎧 Support the show and access bonus episodes at https://patreon.com/bradcoleharris
-
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
Support the show: patreon.com/bradcoleharris
-
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.
-
If you like this stuff and you'd like to hear more, please support my work on patreon: https://www.patreon.com/bradcoleharris
-
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.
To help support Context and access bonus content, join me on Patreon.
Learn more on my website.
-
"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.
To help support Context and access bonus episodes, join me on Patreon.
Learn more at bradharris.com
-
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.
To help support my work and access bonus episodes, visit patreon.com/bradcoleharris
Learn more at bradharris.com
-
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.
To help support Context and access bonus episodes, visit https://www.patreon.com/context
Learn more at https://bradharris.com
-
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?
To help support Context and access supporter-only episodes, head to patreon.com/context
For more information visit bradharris.com
-
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.
To help support Context and access supporter-only episodes, head to patreon.com/context
For more information visit bradharris.com
-
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.
Context is now entirely listener-supported. If you think these ideas are important and you'd like to help spread them, sign up at https://www.patreon.com/context
Learn more at https://bradharris.com
-
"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.
To support Context and access bonus episodes, join me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/context
Learn more at https://bradharris.com
-
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.
Support the show on https://www.patreon.com/context
Learn more at https://bradharris.com
-
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 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.
To help support Context and access bonus episodes, visit patreon.com/context.
For more information, visit bradharris.com.
-
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.
Visit my Patreon page to access bonus episodes.
Learn more at bradharris.com.
- Mostrar más
