In this review of three new books, Robert Jensen ruminates on what we can learn about contemporary crises by thinking about human origins. He begins:

We label as “crazy” those members of the human species whose behavior we find hard to understand, but the cascading crises in contemporary political, economic, and cultural life make a bigger question increasingly hard to ignore: Is the species itself crazy? Has the process of evolution in the hominid line produced a species that is both very clever and very crazy?

Reflecting on the limits of our ability to control the larger living world, Jensen concludes:

We may not be godlike in our ability to know good and evil, but we can, as Kunstler recommends, do our best to understand the signals that reality is sending and act intelligently. The same consciousness that brought us to this place in history provides the vehicle for getting us out. We are stuck using the asset that got us in trouble to try to get out.

This suggests to me that there is, indeed, a god: the God of Irony.

The essay — which draws on books by James Howard Kunstler, Michael T. Klare, and Ian Tattersall — is online at Al Jazeera English and the Energy Bulletin.