As a young officer in World War I, George Marshall’s sterling reputation started forming when he planned and executed a nighttime movement of more than a half million troops from one battlefield to another, leading to the armistice. Between the world wars, he helped modernize combat training, restaffed the U.S. Army’s officer corps with future leaders such as Dwight Eisenhower, Omar Bradley and George Patton, and served as army chief of staff in the run up to Work War II, when his commitment to duty came face-to-face with the realities of Washington politics.

Roll sets his biography of Marshall against the backdrop of five major conflicts—the two world wars, Palestine, Korea and the Cold War—and focuses on the nuances and ambiguities of Marshall’s education in the use of military, diplomatic and political power while watching America emerge as a global superpower. Roll’s conclusion could hardly be clearer: Principled leadership matters.

Monday Night Philosophy revives an almost forgotten aspect of 20th century American politics, played out mostly in the Midwest. The progressive Republican Party that came to power in Minnesota with Harold Stassen’s election in 1938 had already faded into near obscurity by the 1990s, but Minnesota’s modern success story sprang from the ideas and ideals of that dynamic political movement, which emphasized effective government. Issues that are anathema to today’s GOP—environmental protection, assistance for vulnerable citizens and economic opportunity for low-wage workers and the middle class—were at the heart of the party’s agenda. Minnesota Republicans held that working across the aisle was a mark of strength, not of weakness or disloyalty.

Senator Dave Durenberger grew up in and helped build that party and explains how Minnesota’s progressive Republicans earned voters’ trust and delivered on their promises. Progressive Republican ideas only fell out of favor when an increasingly anti-government, anti-tax national party shifted Republican thinking to the Right. In the ensuing partisan realignment, both the Republican and the Democratic parties have lost public trust. Durenberger argues that the principles and practices of progressive Republicanism are a fitting remedy for what ails American democracy today.

Author Dave Durenberger is interviewed by George Hammond.

Monday Night Philosophy and almost all physicists agree that quantum mechanics is among humanity’s finest scientific achievements. But ask what it means, and the result will be a not-so-scientific brawl. For a century, most physicists have followed Niels Bohr’s Copenhagen interpretation and dismissed questions about the reality underlying quantum physics as meaningless. That is why, even though it is a mishmash of solipsism and poor reasoning, the Copenhagen interpretation has endured, with Bohr’s students vigorously protecting his legacy, and the physics community favoring practical experiments over philosophical arguments. As a result, questioning the status quo has almost always meant professional ruin. And yet, from the 1920s to today, physicists such as John Bell, David Bohm and Hugh Everett persisted in seeking the true meaning of quantum mechanics. Join us—first for the gripping story of this battle of ideas and the courageous scientists who dared to stand up for seeking truth, and then for reexamining the littered trail of half-understood research results in the never-discarded quest for answering the fundamental questions that can be summed up as: “What is real?”

Author Adam Becker is interviewed by George Hammond.

Peter Dale Scott, Author, The American Deep State
George Hammond, Author, Rational Idealism
Anthony Alfidi, moderator

Monday Night Philosophy makes an assumption tonight: Warfare is an ineradicable aspect of human (and other simian) life caused by our conflicting desires. If war is here to stay, though, can we still tame it the way other social problems have been institutionalized or hemmed in by written and unwritten rules that almost everyone would be ashamed to violate? Can our daily life moral or ethical schemes be extended to restrain this most violent and destructive part of our lives? Our panel will discuss that in the 21st century context of drone wars, non-state actors, collateral damage, heightened security and an ever more level playing field for inflicting violence due to technology.

Boghosian documents the disturbing increase in surveillance of ordinary citizens and then explains the danger she believes it poses to our privacy, to our civil liberties, and to the future of democracy itself. Since the news recently broke about how widespread government surveillance actually is, Boghosian has been interviewed in more than 30 media outlets nationwide. Come find out how deeply embedded our surveillance culture has become.

Monday Night Philosophy explores the patterns of emotion and thought of our fellow primates, chimpanzees, as seen by one of their human interpreters. Speede helped found a forest sanctuary in Cameroon for captive chimpanzees and, by living for more than a decade with those she rescued, came to understand their emotional complexity, giving her insights into human as well as chimpanzee psychology. Reality or anthropomorphism? That is tonight’s question.