When it comes to truth and cynicism, Kurt Vonnegut takes the cake. Not that I agree with his final assessments, not at all, but he keeps me honest by asking the right questions and positing his answers in interesting scenarios. So it was that, when thinking of Mankind’s greatest attribute, intelligence, I had to go back to Vonnegut. I had several of his works to choose from, but the one where Vonnegut baked the cake most thoroughly on this subject was one he wrote fairly late in his life, Galapagos. I might have mentioned this book in another essay, but what do I know? I am fortunate to not be overburdened with our subject, intelligence, but I suppose we should move on from that discussion, ASAP.
Yes, intelligence: the reader might remember Vonnegut’s great work, Cat's Cradle, where the Einstein of the age creates water (Ice Nine) that, once it begins to freeze, freezes all other water it comes into contact with. What happens is that somehow, this water is poured down a common household drain, and that, as the story closes, begins the end of all life on Earth. So, the smartest guy of our species creates something just because he can, which kills us all. We can equate that to the nuclear bomb, as well. Far better, we might think, to be stupid.
In Galapagos, we read that an experimental virus has gotten lose. Everyone dies except a man and several girls and a woman who get away in time to flee to the Galapagos Islands, a place with no other humans and far enough away from the mainland to not be infected with the virus. They survive and reproduce, but they cannot build ships and sail back to the mainland or any other place where humans have lived because the virus can last thousands of years without a host. So – in line with Charles Darwin and his evolutionist theories clarified by his trip to these Islands in the 19th century – they stay on the Islands and evolve with the conditions to which they are subjected. Because they are stuck there, and their source of food is found primarily in the water, the more successful ones become better and better swimmers and divers. To do so, however, their heads must shrink to become sleeker and more seal-like. With this, their intelligence recedes along with brain mass until, after many millennia, they simply become analogous to seals, including their intelligence. Thus environmental forces and the random causes of mutation eliminate the inward-looking intelligence that once briefly ruled the larger animal kingdom. Intelligence, according to this, is an evolutionary dead end.
Could we get more cynical? Yet, sticking strictly to basic evolutionary theory, what happened in Galapagos might well happen in the real world.
Two main questions and their counterparts arise from this in my limited brain pan. One: is evolution solely controlled by reactions to the environment and random mutations, or is it directed by a greater intelligence? And two: is intelligence fundamentally a curse, or can it also be a (long term) blessing?
To the first: let’s not go there for this essay and go directly to the second.
The myths – meaning “sacred stories” – give us the best sources that humans have devised concerning intelligence. From the Greeks, we know through Pandora’s Box that curiosity killed the cat. From tinkering with the box – our world – with our peculiar form of intelligence, all the troubles came, and continue to come pouring out. Fortunately, something divine held back the last fury in the box which would have destroyed us all, because it would have destroyed our most essential attribute: hope. Because we are gifted and cursed with the knowledge of our ultimate demise, without hope, all would become futile. Why bother with anything when it all will end in ruins or in the grave? To this, hope gives us an answer that we cannot quite understand except for one word: because. Hope brings us to think that there is something more, even though we can’t fully imagine or understand what.
With this we might want to whistle on happily past the graveyard, except that hope, too, can be a curse. In another set of myths, the Bible, we see that the pursuit of knowledge, symbolized in the forbidden fruit, ended our time in real-world bliss. In the story of the Tower of Babel, we see how the pursuit of knowledge – whose end is to make us “like gods,” as the serpent said, is manifested. This pursuit, too, is hope: the hope that we can control our destinies and eliminate the bad to which we feel unjustly subjected. However, as Vonnegut shows us all too painfully, such tinkering with the fundamentals will always lead us to disaster because we are NOT gods - because we cannot control all possibilities. Bad water is poured down the drain by an unknowing housewife; and someone touches a virus-laden glove to his peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Oops, we’re all dead. To which an omniscient creator or creators might think, “Oh well, another experiment gone horribly wrong.”
What we are discussing here is not mere mythology, however, or science fiction or even a dalliance over mistakes of the past. We have knowledge now that can lead to a very bad end pretty quickly. Putting nuclear power aside, China is currently pursuing god-like experiments related to manipulating DNA. One of these - politics aside - most likely led to the escape of the Covid 19 virus, leading to the death of millions. Some of the worst experiments involve an energetic pursuit towards the creation of more “functional” humans. I have heard, for instance, that ape-human hybrid embryos have already been implanted into human and chimp mothers and successfully birthed. Although this might be only speculation now, there is no question that the Chinese are trying to create “better” humans for warfare, for certain functional types of intelligence and, perhaps, for passivity in the face of a dominant class. This would be Brave New World without Anglo humanism, as bad as the latter would be. And if the Chinese are doing this, might not some other nations be involved in such experiments as well?
What could go wrong with such programs, right? Such a discussion would fill a night and empty many a pitcher among graduate students in various fields. Better put, what wouldn’t go wrong?
Such it is that evil people whose souls are distorted by a need for power, or scientists who think of nothing beyond the immediate challenge of a particular process, are crushing hope through their own myopic version of hope. When I think of such technologies and what might be in store for future generations, I do not want future generations at all. Better our children went off to live by themselves than to breed more generations who almost certainly will live in nightmarish dystopias.
However, most of us, even those who are aware of the dark possibilities, are not mired in depression, at least not for long. Charles Darwin and Kurt Vonnegut might say that we look brightly towards a dark future because it is in our DNA. In their thinking, we are and must be programed to have hope for the future despite all reasoning because it is essential for purposes of reproduction. I think it is clear, though, that we are more than genetic automatons. Some of us, after all, consciously choose not to reproduce despite having the biological urgings to do so. And so we must return, after all, to the fundamental nature of hope.
What was hope for the Greeks and Romans who well understood the insurmountable evils of human life? I am not close to being an expert on our intellectual forbearers, but much like traditional people just about everywhere, they found hope in courage, called by some the “Roman Virtue.” This courage might lead to tragedy and often to death, but it lends to humans something greater than quotidian selfishness and banality. It was evident to many then that self-sacrifice made us greater than life, made us epic in character. Humanity survived not on bread alone, but also by sacrifice for an ideal or for family or for country or for all of the above. In essence, hope existed because humans could raise themselves above the animal desire to live simply for the sake of living. In other words, if they had had their own Darwin, they would have as a retort that hope exists because we as a species have the intelligence to deny the instincts for survival under certain circumstances, and so will ourselves to rise above our animal natures.
In that hope still lies. For many religions, this quintessential characteristic of our species has been raised to heavenly levels, including through the one human-god who was (and is) worshiped exactly because he had the divine intelligence to deny his urge for physical survival, and in so doing, give the rest of us hope that we can approach the eternal God-nature. Through such actions we understand what hope is and what power there is in superseding natural law.
Darwin was not a cynic, but rather a product of an industrial age that caused him to focus solely on the functional laws of nature. Vonnegut was a cynic who could not (at least in his works) bring himself to believe in virtue and the hope that comes with it. There are also those among us who hinge hope on the purely material even as they seek some inherent, immaterial goodness in the collective. But hope in its purest form defies form and any selfish motive we might have for it. Pure hope is pure spirit, and pure spirit is without worldly guile or need. This is where hope has always lived, and this is the hope that our intelligence allows us to see. This type of hope must be encouraged. Without it, we are nothing but seals with big heads who, realizing the pointlessness of physical being, just might end the pursuit of life all together. Without hope, we would prove to all the natural world that intelligence is, in fact, the greatest of defects in evolution.
When it comes to truth and cynicism, Kurt Vonnegut takes the cake. Not that I agree with his final assessments, not at all, but he keeps me honest by asking the right questions and positing his answers in interesting scenarios. So it was that, when thinking of Mankind’s greatest attribute, intelligence, I had to go back to Vonnegut. I had several of his works to choose from, but the one where Vonnegut baked the cake most thoroughly on this subject was one he wrote fairly late in his life, Galapagos. I might have mentioned this book in another essay, but what do I know? I am fortunate to not be overburdened with our subject, intelligence, but I suppose we should move on from that discussion, ASAP.
Yes, intelligence: the reader might remember Vonnegut’s great work, Cat's Cradle, where the Einstein of the age creates water (Ice Nine) that, once it begins to freeze, freezes all other water it comes into contact with. What happens is that somehow, this water is poured down a common household drain, and that, as the story closes, begins the end of all life on Earth. So, the smartest guy of our species creates something just because he can, which kills us all. We can equate that to the nuclear bomb, as well. Far better, we might think, to be stupid.
In Galapagos, we read that an experimental virus has gotten lose. Everyone dies except a man and several girls and a woman who get away in time to flee to the Galapagos Islands, a place with no other humans and far enough away from the mainland to not be infected with the virus. They survive and reproduce, but they cannot build ships and sail back to the mainland or any other place where humans have lived because the virus can last thousands of years without a host. So – in line with Charles Darwin and his evolutionist theories clarified by his trip to these Islands in the 19th century – they stay on the Islands and evolve with the conditions to which they are subjected. Because they are stuck there, and their source of food is found primarily in the water, the more successful ones become better and better swimmers and divers. To do so, however, their heads must shrink to become sleeker and more seal-like. With this, their intelligence recedes along with brain mass until, after many millennia, they simply become analogous to seals, including their intelligence. Thus environmental forces and the random causes of mutation eliminate the inward-looking intelligence that once briefly ruled the larger animal kingdom. Intelligence, according to this, is an evolutionary dead end.
Could we get more cynical? Yet, sticking strictly to basic evolutionary theory, what happened in Galapagos might well happen in the real world.
Two main questions and their counterparts arise from this in my limited brain pan. One: is evolution solely controlled by reactions to the environment and random mutations, or is it directed by a greater intelligence? And two: is intelligence fundamentally a curse, or can it also be a (long term) blessing?
To the first: let’s not go there for this essay and go directly to the second.
The myths – meaning “sacred stories” – give us the best sources that humans have devised concerning intelligence. From the Greeks, we know through Pandora’s Box that curiosity killed the cat. From tinkering with the box – our world – with our peculiar form of intelligence, all the troubles came, and continue to come pouring out. Fortunately, something divine held back the last fury in the box which would have destroyed us all, because it would have destroyed our most essential attribute: hope. Because we are gifted and cursed with the knowledge of our ultimate demise, without hope, all would become futile. Why bother with anything when it all will end in ruins or in the grave? To this, hope gives us an answer that we cannot quite understand except for one word: because. Hope brings us to think that there is something more, even though we can’t fully imagine or understand what.
With this we might want to whistle on happily past the graveyard, except that hope, too, can be a curse. In another set of myths, the Bible, we see that the pursuit of knowledge, symbolized in the forbidden fruit, ended our time in real-world bliss. In the story of the Tower of Babel, we see how the pursuit of knowledge – whose end is to make us “like gods,” as the serpent said, is manifested. This pursuit, too, is hope: the hope that we can control our destinies and eliminate the bad to which we feel unjustly subjected. However, as Vonnegut shows us all too painfully, such tinkering with the fundamentals will always lead us to disaster because we are NOT gods - because we cannot control all possibilities. Bad water is poured down the drain by an unknowing housewife; and someone touches a virus-laden glove to his peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Oops, we’re all dead. To which an omniscient creator or creators might think, “Oh well, another experiment gone horribly wrong.”
What we are discussing here is not mere mythology, however, or science fiction or even a dalliance over mistakes of the past. We have knowledge now that can lead to a very bad end pretty quickly. Putting nuclear power aside, China is currently pursuing god-like experiments related to manipulating DNA. One of these - politics aside - most likely led to the escape of the Covid 19 virus, leading to the death of millions. Some of the worst experiments involve an energetic pursuit towards the creation of more “functional” humans. I have heard, for instance, that ape-human hybrid embryos have already been implanted into human and chimp mothers and successfully birthed. Although this might be only speculation now, there is no question that the Chinese are trying to create “better” humans for warfare, for certain functional types of intelligence and, perhaps, for passivity in the face of a dominant class. This would be Brave New World without Anglo humanism, as bad as the latter would be. And if the Chinese are doing this, might not some other nations be involved in such experiments as well?
What could go wrong with such programs, right? Such a discussion would fill a night and empty many a pitcher among graduate students in various fields. Better put, what wouldn’t go wrong?
Such it is that evil people whose souls are distorted by a need for power, or scientists who think of nothing beyond the immediate challenge of a particular process, are crushing hope through their own myopic version of hope. When I think of such technologies and what might be in store for future generations, I do not want future generations at all. Better our children went off to live by themselves than to breed more generations who almost certainly will live in nightmarish dystopias.
However, most of us, even those who are aware of the dark possibilities, are not mired in depression, at least not for long. Charles Darwin and Kurt Vonnegut might say that we look brightly towards a dark future because it is in our DNA. In their thinking, we are and must be programed to have hope for the future despite all reasoning because it is essential for purposes of reproduction. I think it is clear, though, that we are more than genetic automatons. Some of us, after all, consciously choose not to reproduce despite having the biological urgings to do so. And so we must return, after all, to the fundamental nature of hope.
What was hope for the Greeks and Romans who well understood the insurmountable evils of human life? I am not close to being an expert on our intellectual forbearers, but much like traditional people just about everywhere, they found hope in courage, called by some the “Roman Virtue.” This courage might lead to tragedy and often to death, but it lends to humans something greater than quotidian selfishness and banality. It was evident to many then that self-sacrifice made us greater than life, made us epic in character. Humanity survived not on bread alone, but also by sacrifice for an ideal or for family or for country or for all of the above. In essence, hope existed because humans could raise themselves above the animal desire to live simply for the sake of living. In other words, if they had had their own Darwin, they would have as a retort that hope exists because we as a species have the intelligence to deny the instincts for survival under certain circumstances, and so will ourselves to rise above our animal natures.
In that hope still lies. For many religions, this quintessential characteristic of our species has been raised to heavenly levels, including through the one human-god who was (and is) worshiped exactly because he had the divine intelligence to deny his urge for physical survival, and in so doing, give the rest of us hope that we can approach the eternal God-nature. Through such actions we understand what hope is and what power there is in superseding natural law.
Darwin was not a cynic, but rather a product of an industrial age that caused him to focus solely on the functional laws of nature. Vonnegut was a cynic who could not (at least in his works) bring himself to believe in virtue and the hope that comes with it. There are also those among us who hinge hope on the purely material even as they seek some inherent, immaterial goodness in the collective. But hope in its purest form defies form and any selfish motive we might have for it. Pure hope is pure spirit, and pure spirit is without worldly guile or need. This is where hope has always lived, and this is the hope that our intelligence allows us to see. This type of hope must be encouraged. Without it, we are nothing but seals with big heads who, realizing the pointlessness of physical being, just might end the pursuit of life all together. Without hope, we would prove to all the natural world that intelligence is, in fact, the greatest of defects in evolution.
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