One of Earth’s most intelligent creatures, the novelist Margaret Atwood, was asked in a magazine interview in 2019 to name her greatest fear. “That human beings will follow their stupid and greedy side, rather than their smart side, and go down the plughole,” she replied. “We’re circling the rim.”

Six years on and the suck of that plughole is threatening to become irresistible. The existential forces of warfare, climate change, artificial intelligence, social inequality and disinformation are aligning and Atwood’s words, as so often, have the ring of prophecy. Humankind just might prove the species that was too selfish to save itself.

There was a time when we might have expected that if a day ever arrived when our planet’s political leaders were seeing masses of people being exterminated on their screens, they would rush to stop it. Instead, they let it go on for 20 months – so far – and let the corpses of more than 55,000 men, women, children and babies pile up in Gaza.

We might have expected that if scientists’ predictions came true and environmental pollution started making human life untenable in parts of our world, we would instantly mend our ways. Instead, we’re drowning in outsize cars, aerosols, plastic, data centres, incessant air travel and an insatiable shopping spree while climate refugees are drowning at sea.

We might have expected that should a proven liar, sex offender, falsifier of business records and instigator of an insurrection ever become president of the United States and behave as a despot, other world leaders would have the guts to tell him what’s what. Instead, they queue up bearing him gifts and obsequious invitations for state visits.

Political integrity is so last year.

The thing about human evolution is that it will not stop until every last one of us is gone, and the way we are evolving does not augur well for our long-term survival. It is only 89 seconds to midnight on the Doomsday clock, the closest its hands have ever come to the moment of Apocalypse. And still the EU has decided to pour........

© The Irish Times