Professor Dipesh Chakrabarty: Smuts Lecture Series (Lecture 1)

Professor Dipesh Chakrabarty (University of Chicago)

Since the nineteenth century, and especially since the Cold War, economic growth and access to cheap energy have created infrastructures for boosting human population, living standards, and longevity. Global ideas about the good life for humans and how best to support these aspirations assume narratives of continuous growth. The same infrastructures, however, have interfered with the long-term earth-system processes that support all forms of life, including that of humans. The three lectures analyse this contradiction that constitutes the climate crisis and highlight the sense of facing a predicament that marks all climate debates - from politics to policy.

The series consists of three lectures that are free and open to all. Tickets via Eventbrite:

• Smuts Memorial Lecture One: Questions Concerning Longevity

• Smuts Memorial Lecture Two: The Sky and the Planet: A Cultural Critique of Technology

• Smuts Memorial Lecture Three: Wars on a Climate-stressed Planet

Lecture One Abstract: Questions Concerning Longevity (Thursday 23rd October)

This lecture examines the history of human longevity to argue that the Great Expansion of the human lifespan after WWII and during the period of the Great Acceleration in human history - both made possible by a growing entanglement of technology and biology - stands for a certain emergent consensus in human politics that ends up blurring the Enlightenment distinction between the moral and animal lives of humans.