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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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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