Too Smart for Our Own Good

It was because we humans were so smart that we were able to invent a whole new way of life for ourselves as a species – civilization. And it is because of our uniquely taking the path of civilization that humankind now has a major task we have to accomplish together to avoid destroying ourselves.

That task is to re-order our civilization so that it can survive on this planet for the long haul.

• We’ve got to re-invent the international order so that a nuclear holocaust – of the kind that historians say was a real possible culmination of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 – cannot happen. Because if it can happen, eventually it will.

• And we’ve got to reform our global economic system so that the activities of our species don’t bring the biosphere — on which we depend for our survival — down on our heads. I.e., so our civilization doesn’t kill itself off through an environmental catastrophe – a possibility that the current climate crisis proves is a real danger.

And we don’t have many generations in which to accomplish this huge challenge.

One must wonder: How well-equipped are the nations and peoples of the world to come together to accomplish such a global re-ordering?

Our present civilization shows a variety of obstacles to accomplishing this vital but difficult task. Here I will explore but one of them.

To understand that particular obstacle to our meeting that challenge — to work together to accomplish such an ambitious undertaking — we can draw upon the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel.

In that story, too, humankind is represented as undertaking — collectively — a great task, and they fail. The reason for the failure is that they cease to be able to understand each other. They become unintelligible to each other because they “don’t speak the same language.” And because they fail to understand each other, they are unable to collaborate.

It’s not relevant to the present point that this “confounding” of the people’s languages was presented as a deliberate tactic used by God to prevent the Tower being built. Whatever God’s objection to the Tower — the sin of pride or the sin of hubris? — the present task of re-ordering our civilization is the opposite of sin. Our present great task of reordering human civilization is urgently required, lest human civilization destroy itself (and bring down much of the rest of Life-on-Earth with it).

What’s relevant in the Tower of Babel story is this: The people fail because they cease to understand one another. No longer able to “speak the same language,” they can no longer collaborate — their shared purpose dissolves in mutual incomprehension.

In that regard, humankind is in a similar situation. The differences among us — of language, worldview, culture — are vast. And a degree of mutual incomprehension is inevitable in a species that became “the cultural animal.”

Every child is born “programmed” to learn a language, but what language it will learn is up to the culture into which it is born. We who speak English were just as ready at birth to learn to speak Mandarin Chinese or the click language of tribes in West Africa.

So also with the learning of culture in general. Our species adopted “culture” as a central strategy for survival. The path of culture requires a level of intelligence exceptional among the earth’s creatures, and as our species went deeper into culture, our species developed a big neocortex to open up vast “programmable space” in the human mind. Separate cultures would inevitably fill that space in different ways.

It was inevitable that “the cultural animal,” which spread all across the planet even before the rise of civilization, would develop not only a multiplicity of languages, but also profoundly different cultures. History and anthropology both make clear that much of what people think and feel is not handed down in their DNA, but instilled by their cultures.

(On the many apparent inevitabilities involved in the Human Story, see Inevitability: Why the Human Story Is Almost Certainly But One of Many Such in the Cosmos.)

As cultures have used our “vast programmable space” to develop in a myriad different directions, they’ve also produced a correspondingly vast range of human consciousness — different ways of thinking, feeling, expressing, being.

We’ve retained important inborn tendencies. But compared with other, non-cultural species, those biologically inherited shapers of our nature are a smaller determinant of who we become.

All of which means that the inevitable diversity of cultures spread across the planet made it inevitable we humans would become more different from each other than other creatures.

(Cats each have their own personalities. But if we mapped the total variety of the world’s cats’ consciousness and compared that map with the range of variation among the world’s peoples, our species’ range would be orders of magnitude greater.)

This vast programmable space is humanity’s greatest strength — but it has also put us in a precarious position. Here’s the one-two punch we face now:

• It has enabled us to break through — first into culture, then into civilization — and inevitably arrive at a moment, visible now in history, when we must re-order civilization on a global scale to keep from destroying ourselves, whether through war with weapons of mass destruction or through ecological catastrophe caused by our economic and technological systems upsetting the balances on which our survival depends. (The Fate of Human Civilization.

• But then we get hit with the inevitable challenge posed by the inevitable cultural differences that can get in the way of the mutual understanding and global cooperation that will be required for us to meet that challenge.

The same intelligence that enabled us to be the first species to extricate ourselves from the niche in which we evolved biologically, and thereby plunge ourselves into a social evolutionary process that could destroy us (See How Civilization Has Been Warped by the Selection for Power), has also made it inevitable that we, as cultural animals, would find it a challenge to achieve the meeting of minds that the long-term survival of civilization will require.

Too smart for our own good.