A Nonviable Organism

**Update below

Philosopher Kate Soper interviewing Noam Chomsky in 1998.

QUESTION: Can I ask you about your position on the possibility of ecological constraints on the realisation of human needs? Do you think -- even if there were the political will to achieve it -- that it might be impossible, for ecological reasons, to provide the necessary conditions for continued human flourishing?

CHOMSKY: Humans may well be a nonviable organism.

QUESTION: Do you think they are?

CHOMSKY: It's very likely. From an evolutionary point of view, higher intelligence seems to be maladaptive rather than adaptive. Biologically successful organisms have a rigid character and are well adapted to a certain environmental niche. If higher intelligence helped adaptation you would expect it to have arisen over and over again. However, it didn't. It arose in a single, not particularly successful organism, Homo Sapiens. And while the human population exploded, human societies developed in a way that has caused enormous damage to the environment. The human race could destroy itself and much organic life as a result.

I've been thinking this for a while now. We are not a species that seems interested in continuing to exist AS A SPECIES. You and I want to continue breathing, eating, loving, etc., but there is a real lack of understanding about how important it is to live within a framework of biological and even geological/geographical equilibrium. In other words, we don't seem to give a fig about anyone or anything but our little ol' selves.

Now, I blame the brain and I guess I blame the evolution of this brain. The human mind semms to create more problems than it solves--or maybe it creates problems in order to solve them. Maybe it's a brain that could become something more before its species blows itself up or starves its members or causes them to be decimated by a methane storm--but I'm beginning to be more skeptical of this as the teevee keeps showing us how dumb we are and how much more we're devoted to the abstraction that is money.

I've always contended that my grandma was a little batty in her somewhat literal understanding of bible portents...but I've believed for many years now that it makes just as much sense that we're trying to BECOME those portents--because they are part of our mental DNA now--not the Iliad or the Odyssey but Revelation feeds us...the end times...the Rapture...the big bang that ends us like it began us. By fire we were made and by fire we will end.

There's no love in that thought. Sorry.

**Update:
As if on cue.