In his 2003 book ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’ Bill Bryson describes how a formidable group of intellectuals were unravelling some of the deeper mysteries of reality culminating in the publication of the Principia Mathematica (considered one of the greatest scientific books ever written), “a rather less desirable milestone was being passed on the island of Mauritius, far out in the Indian Ocean some eight hundred miles off the east coast of Madagascar. There, some forgotten sailor or sailor’s pet was harrying to death the last of the dodos, the famously flightless bird whose dim but trusting nature and lack of leggy zip made it a rather irresistible target for bored young tars on shore leave. Millions of years of peaceful isolation had not prepared it for the erratic and deeply unnerving behaviour of human beings.
We don’t know precisely the circumstances, or even year, attending the last moments of the last dodo, so we don’t know which arrived first, a world that contained a Principia or one that had no dodos, but we do know that they happened at more or less the same time. You would be hard-pressed, I would submit, to find a better pairing of occurrences to illustrate the divine and felonious nature of the human being—a species of organism that is capable of unpicking the deepest secrets of the heavens while at the same time pounding into extinction, for no purpose at all, a creature that never did us any harm and wasn’t even remotely capable of understanding what we were doing to it as we did it. Indeed, dodos were so spectacularly short on insight, it is reported, that if you wished to find all the dodos in a vicinity you had only to catch one and set it to squawking, and all the others would waddle along to see what was up.”
Humans are both profoundly smart and perilously stupid. Caring and uncaring. However, a disproportionate picture of humanity is presented through a hasty generalisation that because we are all human we are all the same and therefore as a species equally responsible.
The quoted Bryson passage above speaks of ‘no purpose at all’ for the killing of the last Dodo, but this kind of action is sanctioned by the concept that ‘Man’ was given dominion over nature by God, so, the Dodo doesn’t matter to the sailor. ‘Take what you want’ – is implied in this idea of dominion. You are separate from nature. It is almost as if this exceptionalist entitlement was formulated by unscrupulous actors. A God-mandated right to exhaust and extract from nature. This idea is a structural and collective organising principle.
Hello colonialism, hello othering. Our intelligence is amazing, and our delusions are dangerous.
At this current moment, our sophisticated collective intelligence is manifest in all manner of incredibly powerful technology. Technologies we no longer need sophisticated knowledge of to deploy. Meaning it may often be in the hands of the part of our humanity that whimsically clubs the last of a species to death.
Maybe, if we use a designed precaution to innovations these powers will land less and less, as Carl Sagan would have it, in the hands ‘of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true…sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
Can we slow down a little for better progress?
Do you recognise parallels from your own knowledge and experiences?
How do you think we can protect ourselves and advance ethically?
#Smartdummy #Cleverclot #RegulateStupidity #CriticalThinking #Determinism #Intelligence
#NotAllBad #Change
The curse of Western exceptionalism, the Enlightenment and cocaine.