A polemic takes aim at mankind’s hubris
IF NIETZSCHE WERE A NARWHAL What animal intelligence reveals about human stupidity
JUSTIN GREGG 320pp. Hodder. Paperback, £10.99.
MISANTHROPY IS MAINSTREAM. The state of the world makes all too plausible the idea that humans truly are exceptional – not in our capacity for reason, value and knowledge, but rather in our talent for destruction. Perhaps nature would be better off if our whole species were removed from its gene pool.
One response to such pessimism about our nature is that our troubles and sins arise simply because we are not exceptional enough. Whatever else we are, we are animals living particular, finite lives in a world of limited resources. We are, always already, fallen. The best we can do, through wisdom or faith or compassion, is hope to energize the better – here meaning the non-animal – half of our nature. (The modern fad for transhumanism corrupts this hope into a fantasy of becoming cyber-angels – accelerating the evolution of mind and bodies until we reach escape velocity from the natural, or even the real, world.)
A second response holds that salvation lies not in trying to enhance what makes us unique, but in recognizing more fully that we are not angels-inwaiting but dependent animals, rediscovering our place in a larger whole and folding ourselves more successfully into what we share with other kinds of creature in the world. Our watchwords, by these lights, should be not curiosity, exploration and mastery, but acceptance, humility and equilibrium.
Aimed firmly at the popular science market, Justin Gregg’s If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal offers an entertaining, if sometimes peculiar, twist on the arguments for being ashamed of ourselves. His central thesis oscillates between the claim that reason itself is our undoing and the claim that our other capacities are peculiarly ill matched to house it. The central idea is what the author calls “prognostic myopia”. This seems a rather fancy way of saying that we human beings are, by nature, short-sighted. Our cognitive skills have a temporal reach that our affective capacities cannot match. We are capable of thinking about the future and taking actions that will profoundly affect it – but we can’t manage actually caring about it. From an evolutionary point of view, Gregg contends, this means that human beings were always a disaster waiting to happen.
The argument is illustrated with accounts of other animals doing very well without the benefits of reason, along with examples of stupid things done by humans trying to reason, and with supposed theoretical insights from the cognitive sciences. These include the “theory of mind” (how one creature understands another as another) and “mental time traveling” (“remembering and imagining”, as the more unscientific might s
