What if the books that shaped Western civilization also contain the seeds of its destruction, and reading them carefully is still the most urgent thing we can do?
In this First Friday Lecture from the University of Chicago’s Graham School Basic Program, Amy Thomas Elder makes an urgent case for the humanities in an era of nuclear threat, climate crisis, and civilizational dread. Drawing on her course “The Ends of Humanity,” Amy argues that great books aren’t an escape from our existential situation. They may be our only tools for truly comprehending it.
At the heart of her argument is a paradox she calls reading “against apocalypse.” The Western canon (its philosophy, literature, political texts) gave us scientific progress, democratic rights, and the ideal of individual liberty. But Amy asks whether those same ideals also produced nuclear weapons, unchecked capitalism, and a cultural inability to act collectively in the face of catastrophe. Rather than abandoning the canon, she proposes we read it with a double vision: recovering the deeper grammar of our humanity while holding the tradition itself under genuine suspicion. Amy moves through close readings of the Declaration of Independence as both a profound statement of philosophical anthropology and a possible root of the narcissistic individualism that makes collective action so difficult, and Moby Dick as a prophetic meditation on human industry, the death of God, and the heroic logic that may have led us to split the atom. She draws on Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, Hans Jonas’s heuristics of fear, and Amitav Ghosh’s critique of the individualizing imaginary to argue that comprehending existential risk is not primarily a scientific or political problem. It is a humanistic one.
About the Speaker:
Ms. Thomas Elder is Claudia Traudt Distinguished Instructor in the Basic Program. She holds a BS in biology and advanced degrees in classics and the study of religion. Her research at the University of Chicago Divinity School dealt with allegory and textual interpretation in early Christianity. She has taught in settings including a museum, middle school, high school, college, and seminary. For many years, she taught in and directed the Odyssey Project, a college-level humanities program for adults living on low incomes, as part of the Bard College Clemente Course. She has been a Basic Program instructor since 1999.
