CATEGORY: HISTORY(27 min)

General lack of knowledge

It’s impossible to tell the story of our world without telling the story of war. Conflicts between nations have shaped every age and every country on every inhabited continent. Yet today, many institutions have dropped the ball on teaching military history to their students, depriving them of a vital piece of education.  

Victor Davis Hanson, winner of ISI’s 2022 Conservative Book of the Year award for The Dying Citizen, pens a reminder of military history’s importance in The New Criterion. He says that without studying this topic, the U.S. has already fallen into blunders that could have otherwise been avoided. 

Among these U.S. military blunders is the complete surrender to social justice movements and woke ideology that has led to a “fetishization of ethnic and racial identity,” according to Hanson. He argues this will deprive the armed forces of their wartime effectiveness and of excited new recruits.

Hanson then overviews several predictions that could have easily been made about events in the past few decades, such as Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and Ukraine’s successful resistance. Human nature, Hanson reminds us, doesn’t change.

Read the entirety of Hanson’s plea right here.

CATEGORY: TECHNOLOGY(17 min)

Into the metaverse

While some in America deliberately avoid studying human nature, others are attempting to change it for the better. Unfortunately, like most efforts to bring our kind to utopia, a new technology-driven movement will also have little success… and some dangerous side effects.

For City Journal, John Ketcham analyzes the metaverse, a longtime goal of tech companies most notably highlighted by Facebook’s rebranding as Meta. The object is to create a place where virtual and augmented reality allows people to “be” anywhere they want to be “with” anyone they want.

Ketcham frames this push as a sort of re-creation effort; one that seeks to establish a utopian “place” where people can be their very best. But Ketcham reminds us of the numerous issues with this mindset, starting with the fact that utopia is unachievable as long as human beings are flawed.

Ketcham also points out that the metaverse will in fact lead to more harm than good, such as widespread instant gratification, the degradation of human relationship, and a complete loss of self-control.

Discover more of Ketcham’s warning here.​​​​​

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CATEGORY: DEBATE(VIDEO)

Death and data

With these new advances in technology come a host of ethical challenges and dilemmas that have tested what humans are willing to tolerate. But technology has not advanced—and will not advance—to the point where death is no longer an issue. For millennia, one of the greatest goals of scientists, inventors, and theorists has been to find out a way to defeat death. 

But should death even be treated as an enemy in the first place?

In a 2019 debate from our ISI archives, investor and philanthropist Peter Thiel takes on neurology professor William Hurlbut from Stanford University over that very question. This debate may shift the way you view death in relation to today’s technological advances, and you can watch the entire event right here.

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