Noam Chomsky: The End of History?

[marmar]

from In These Times:


The End of History?
The short, strange era of human civilization would appear to be drawing to a close.

BY NOAM CHOMSKY


It is not pleasant to contemplate the thoughts that must be passing through the mind of the Owl of Minerva as the dusk falls and she undertakes the task of interpreting the era of human civilization, which may now be approaching its inglorious end.

The era opened almost 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, stretching from the lands of the Tigris and Euphrates, through Phoenicia on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean to the Nile Valley, and from there to Greece and beyond. What is happening in this region provides painful lessons on the depths to which the species can descend.

The land of the Tigris and Euphrates has been the scene of unspeakable horrors in recent years. The George W. Bush-Tony Blair aggression in 2003, which many Iraqis compared to the Mongol invasions of the 13th century, was yet another lethal blow. It destroyed much of what survived the Bill Clinton-driven U.N. sanctions on Iraq, condemned as “genocidal” by the distinguished diplomats Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, who administered them before resigning in protest. Halliday and von Sponeck's devastating reports received the usual treatment accorded to unwanted facts.

.....(snip).....

The likely end of the era of civilization is foreshadowed in a new draft report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the generally conservative monitor of what is happening to the physical world.

The report concludes that increasing greenhouse gas emissions risk “severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems” over the coming decades. The world is nearing the temperature when loss of the vast ice sheet over Greenland will be unstoppable. Along with melting Antarctic ice, that could raise sea levels to inundate major cities as well as coastal plains. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://inthesetimes.com/article/17137/the_end_of_history

[cilla4progress]

1. Well, sadly,

I believe Chomsky is correct.

Not a matter of if, but when ...

[PATRICK]

2. It is self apparent

that like any single tribe or state in history things will not go on as before, not even with concessions toward incremental progress(which is painfully insufficient and dangerously repressing pressures). In fact our spectacular science and technology- if we ever get to apply it as we could but are not allowing ourselves to- might only serve to alleviate and dam up changes toward a more catastrophic failure point. That latter is constantly fooled by the success and adaptability that defeats doomsayers. The more the population is upped and the food chain gamed to the breaking point the more it is a question of when something trivial or unavoidable sets loose all of our unresolved social evils and divisions upon itself in a fenzy of desperation denial and last elite surges for power.

Climate change. Human change(tech power, power over DNA and human race development itself).
These guarantee that the sordid history of the unexamined post nomadic life will end. The continued- and might I comment ultimately and extremely stupid nature of human society is the scariest element in both the calamitous and the unknown world inexorably and inevitably approaching.

How would we have liked to face the advancement of the human race beyond disease, ignorance, destructive competition, moral pathologies? Well, we have blown all that already. Instead we have a multiple crisis, mostly of our making and stubborn support of the short sighted.

To be a human and not an unsuccessful mammalian oddity is to use that brain and that foresight for all that it is worth, and its worth is prejudicial and never prefect. Stupidity we relegate to the abuse and repression of human intelligence for often infantile pleasures.

And stupidity has been self-delegated to rule these last days. Like some Warner brothers cartoon where Wile E. Coyote sees his own Acme bomb in his hands, pulls out a watch, sees his time has run out, holds out his arm and flinches.

[pscot]

3. We're probably the only species

that will have caused its own demise. Intelligence looks like a serious evolutionary mistake.

[yurbud]

4. we didn't figure out a counter-balancing force to greed and sociopathy soon enough

and when greed and sociopathy found their perfect expression in the immortal corporation, we were really screwed.

The only other institutions that come close to the focus and perseverance of greed are religion and unions.

Greed has co-opted religion and is systematically trying to destroy unions.

Democracy itself seems to have no focus or inherent values. Sometimes it works well for a while, then too many people take it for granted, stop paying attention, and the greedy can have free rein with it.

[yurbud]

5. a truly ironic passage: grain rotting to ship Dakota oil first

A day before its summary of the IPCC conclusions, The New York Times reported that huge Midwestern grain stocks are rotting so that the products of the North Dakota oil boom can be shipped by rail to Asia and Europe.

One of the big arguments against biofuels is farmers would sell all their crops for fuel instead of food, so we would starve and food prices would skyrocket.

Oil companies are proving they can get the same result without using biofuels.