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.

We end with some concluding thoughts with issues raised in the course but no answers.

In this episode, the instructor argues that globalized indigeneity does not refer to an uptick in grassroots engagement but rather a restructuring of patronage structures.

Indigenous actions in the Western Hemisphere 1978-92.

We finally reach the moment of the actual Fourth World declaration.

Students are introduced the the surprising intersections between discourses of Indigeneity and nationalism in Taiwan and Egypt.

Indigeneity in the white settler states.

Beginning in the 1680s, Indigenous people began coming together to form military and political coalitions that sought to include all Indigneous people in a common front against European invasion.

Bantu speakers and others in sub-Saharan Africa. 

History of Polynesian peoples up to the present day.

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

Indigeneity does not work the same way at all times and place. Here is a talk on how it worked when it got going.

For as long as there has been ethnography, there has been the trope of ancient, primitive, noble savages who have some kind of connection with the natural world that civilized people have supposedly lost. 

The first episode describes the idea of the Fourth World, that global community of nations and peoples that remain colonized. 

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.