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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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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