BBC Reith Lectures: The Human Superiority Complex
The BBC's annual series of lectures from a major academic figure.
Earth: the Ladder and the Web.
This lecture traces the rise and consolidation of the ‘human superiority complex’ in the Western imagination. It begins with the oldest written world story, The Epic of Gilgamesh, which carries a dire warning against human exceptionalism. From there it ranges widely –– from Aristotle to neoliberalism by way of Descartes, Blake, Björk and the Sycamore Gap Tree –– in its mapping of how we came to forget ourselves as animals among other animals, tangled in a web of life rather than poised aloof atop a pinnacle. It ends with a counterblast against ‘Planet-B thinking’: the oligarchic rapture-dream of abandoning an exhausted Earth for a new life on Mars.
Recorded in London.
The Reith Lectures are presented by Anita Anand.
Series producer: Jim Frank
Editor: Clare Fordham
On radio
Broadcast
- Sat 28 Nov 202619:06GMTBBC World Service except East and Southern Africa & West and Central Africa
The Reith Lectures on Radio 4
Archive recordings from the BBC's flagship annual lecture series going back to 1948
