Are We Becoming Stupid?
Is this a struggle for consciousness?
Would it be permissible to paraphrase Darwin? If so, may we posit the idea that evolution eliminates the stupid? I don’t mean to imply that an animal species that cannot keep up with petro-chemical-induced climate change and is therefore herded toward extinction is stupid. Quite the contrary. In fact, if a species is here, now, we can safely understand that it is not stupid—that it made a successful journey through evolution. It negotiated all the arts of Nature’s deals in order to earn a niche in this present fabric of life.
Yet, what if a species turns toward stupidity? What if it could not even understand how to properly dispose of its own body waste (a negotiation even the common grey squirrel has already worked out satisfactorily with Gaia)? What if it couldn’t control its predation? What if its own cleverness turned Fortune’s Wheel in such a way as to come around and have it smack the species in the back of the head with a cosmic dope slap? What if its own raison d’etre, reproduction, became a torrential tide of suffering, starvation, poverty, disease, endless war and environmental suicide? Do you know of any other species that prosecutes endless genocidal wars against its own?
I ask these questions because I have pondered the present moment in human history, both environmentally and politically. In both areas, one may argue that an ever-increasing descent into some kind of dementia is evolving. Perhaps we can look at both concerns with what I hope can be at least a modicum of objectivity.
I confess, I admit, and I come clean. Who isn’t pondering political stupidity these days? What with Der Gropingfuhrer now banished (we hope) to his palm-tree-golf-tee-laden version of the Island of Elba, and with the dust (and smoke and tear gas) starting to settle, we are peeking out from behind trees and over bulwarks, hope dancing in our eyes as we sing songs of rebirth (Heaven help us if it is Kumbaya).
However, is this wise? Is it intelligent? Is myopia such a ubiquitous condition that it affects all of us? It’s no epiphany to understand that Trump is only a symptom of what ails us. He is hardly the source. If we pan out we can see that for decades our political landscape has been slowly conquered by Congressional cabana boys, oligarchs, self-serving corporations and “dark money” (doesn’t this phrase evoke even a momentary pinch of fear in your gut?).
The late, great American historian Gore Vidal sums it up rather succinctly, “Persuading the people to vote against their own best interests has been the awesome genius of the American political elite from the beginning.” But wait…doesn’t this imply some kind of stupidity? Does every rube watching the medicine show walk away with a bottle of snake oil? Does the majority of the townsfolk? What’s happening here?
Whether you are storming the Capitol because you believe that Obama and Hillary are cannibalistic Satanists or you are smug and pleased that your new Tesla is helping the environment recover from the disappearing glaciers, isn’t the level of stupidity in each case oddly competitive? When we give overarching power to men and women who covet nothing but…overarching power…and not our children, our health, our civil liberties, our right to peaceful co-existence, and our ability to live above poverty with some kind of dignity, what are we doing?
An alpha leader in any wolf pack would not last long if the group starved and experienced a collapse of its territory under such leadership. Then again, wolves are seriously smart. Earthworms are smart. Mosquitoes are brilliant. The squirrel who just emptied your bird feeder for the umpteenth time is an engineering scholar. Yet we see neither sanctity in their survival nor in our own. They ALL must die muahahahaha. Why are we killing everything? Would the wolves kill every deer, rodent, and buffalo? What then?
A human society (nay, any society, group, pack, herd or flock) that cannot understand its own best interests is doomed to extinction. To wit: some sociologists currently have decided that, in fact, racists “reason”—I use the term lightly!—that eschewing their own best interests is acceptable if that means those of another skin color suffer even more than they. Does this mean that human stupidity eventually morphs into insanity? Where on that Dumb-ometer are we presently?
Some philosophers argue that it is not stupidity per se, but rather that intellectual disease which inflicts only the human mind: hubris. Hubris is a form of intellectual arrogance that invites humans to question the power and wisdom of the gods. Nowadays, perhaps we can couch this in terms of humanity’s driven desire to outsmart, control, re-shape, profit from and ultimately dispose of nature sans karma. A free ride, no payback.
The very term “arrogance” is derived from the Latin prefix “ad” and the verb “rogare”, to question. Yes, arrogance means to press for more and more questions. That’s nice if it is a prosecutor honing in on the true intentions of some horn-helmeted nut case running around the Capitol. However, what are we doing when we arrogate that power to putting Nature not only on the witness stand, but in prison, with a death sentence over Her head? You tell me. Is it stupidity? Is it like the brainless chump who is sitting out on a high branch and who is sawing between himself and the trunk because he needs firewood?
We are at a serious—perhaps terminal—turning point. I can’t help but see the 2020s as an intellectual crisis for our species. Socrates advises that “The unexamined life is not worth living.” In a sense, his point is that we are humans, i.e., our niche in nature is the ability to THINK. If we don’t use that astounding cosmic happenstance to nuzzle our way back into the good graces of the Great Mother, then we are like a horse that cannot run, a wolf that cannot smell, a bird that cannot fly, a worm that cannot turn the soil, a robin that knows neither when spring has come nor how to build a nest. It may not be stupidity, but it is certainly extinction.
