Los Altos Institute Archive

The class discusses the utility of the idea of Western Civilization.

In this episode, we return to the theme of the West in war propaganda, focusing on the ideas of JRR Tolkien and Edward Gibbon in modern war propaganda.

Post-colonial theory is largely a theory of and about the idea of Western Civilization. In this episode, we discuss the plurality of opinions and thinkers in this academic movement and outline some common positions.

We discuss the influence of Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West and its influence on the political movements of his day and those of the present, and how the idea of Aryanism interacts with ideas of "the West."

In this episode we talk about how nineteenth century ideas of whiteness reshaped the idea of Western Civilization.

The Enlightenment was a global event that had peculiar and specific effects on the West.

We discuss the importance of Henry the Navigator and the highly contingent character of Europe's rise to global hegemony during the Age of Discovery.

We discuss the Crusades from an ecological and intellectual rather than military perspective and tease out emerging features of the West in the Middle Ages.

We discuss the emergence of "Western Civilization" as a religious idea developed near Paris in the High Middle Ages.

We discuss how feudalism arose out of reforms designed to save the Western Roman Empire from structural decline and the Darkening of the Sun.

We discuss the competition between the Greeks and Phoenicians in colonizing the Mediterranean of the Axial Age.

We begin with the earliest texts of the Western Canon: the Iliad, Odyssey and Histories.

This is the first part of our thirteen-part course on the history of the concept of Western Civilization.

Mormonism, Scientology, Nation of Islam, original Sandinismo: is Wokeness part of the lineage of American Space Religion?

The particular history of Jansenist secularization in Quebec and the Social Gospel in English Canada prepared the ground for our extraordinary Wokeness.

This is the first part of a two-parter about the historical and theological underpinnings of Canada's unique susceptibility to Wokeness.

Some people mistakenly call Wokeness "cultural Marxism" because it organizes the world into a binary. But that binary isn't Marxian at all. It is far more like the Kingdom of Peace/Kingdom of War Islamic idea or, closer to the mark, Manicheism's Sons of Light/Sons of Darkness.

This lecture was requested by one of the students and caused the remaining lectures to be reorganized. It is the only lecture that does not contain a religious history component. Instead, it engages with movements in the present that are oppositional to Wokeness, radical feminism, black conservative intellectuals from the Thomas Sowell tradition and, in Canada, convoyists.

Universities came into being in response to excessive orthodoxy in higher education. Could the same thing be happening again eight hundred years later?

Wokeness seeks to resolve a central paradox of Protestant Christianity: the relationship between its two most prized emotional characteristics, restraint and sensitivity.

Wokeness offers what appears to be a novel approach to language in religious tradition. But is it novel?

Postmodernism is often blamed for the Woke moment, and unfairly so. Nevertheless, there is a complex relationship between the French poststructuralists, Wokeness and American traditions of popular literacy.

This class was on self-harm and asceticism in the Western tradition. In the discussion portion, it turned into a lively discussion of drag.

The idea of progress is a theory of sacred time based on postmillennial evangelicalism. Wokeness is one of its descendants.

This class elaborates on my essay on the Donatist movement, in which I explain points of resemblance between modern Wokeness and the new brand of orthodox Christianity we associate with Constantine, the Council of Nicea and the Donatist Crisis of the fourth century.

This is the course introduction in which the approach of the course is explained. We are examining Wokeness only one angle, the theological and looking at past events and movements that resemble its key doctrines.

Indigenous actions in the Western Hemisphere 1978-92.

The Arctic and Indigeneity: from the Sami and Inuit conquests to the Frobisher expedition.

Los Altos Institute sponsored a public lecture by Ira Zbarsky on his forty years of eco-anarchist bioregional organizing in Eastern Ukraine, Guatemala, Mexico and BC on November 28th. You can listen to it here.

We wrap up the course in a fairly freewheeling discussion.

In this class, we try to situate the globalization debate in a broader historical context.

The rise of Bannonite populism is explained as the context for the rise of the anti-globalist right.

This class covers the rapid twenty-first century decline in anti-globalization on the Left.

This episode examines the beginnings of right anti-globalism with Henry Cabot Lodge Sr. and Enoch Powell.

The period from 1992-2012 was the golden age of the anti-globalization left.

This lecture deals with the resurgence of original capitalism under the new brand of "neoliberalism."

Central to Los Altos Institute's analysis is the continuing global significance of twentieth century villagization movements. 

This lecture covers the Keynesian period of globalization.

We often under-count the global significance of the Mexican revolution, despite being part of NAFTA. Much of this lecture is about why we should not.

This lecture examines the expansion of the world economy to include West Africa and the Americas.

A "world economy" has long existed, connecting the economies of Europe, Asian and East Africa since 800 BCE.

The populist right has recently turned against economic globalization, investor rights and their advocates, especially the World Economic Forum. This introductory lecture sets students up for a course on the history of economic globalization and the movements that have arisen to oppose it.

In this final episode, we talk about the two schools of thought in American imperialism and their twenty-first century prospects.

In this episode we wrap up the course narrative by looking at the 2009 Honduran coup and its consequences.

In this episode we examine the rise of structural adjustment programs and their first tests in Argentina

In this episode, we discuss the introduction of neoliberalism and its original testing not in the UK or BC but in Chile under Augusto Pinochet. 

We examine the founding of the Alliance for Progress, its spawning of the School of the Americas and the strange case of the Peruvian dictatorship of the 1970s.

In our second episode on the Brazilian dictatorship, we look at the "diversity politics" of the authoritarian junta.

We begin our two-episode look at the distinctive features of Brazil's 1964-85 dictatorship that made it the most successful of the US-backed bureaucratic authoritarian regimes.