The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice. —Mark Twain
Humans like to think we’re the smartest beings that have ever inhabited this planet. We may be correct. History indicates that whatever preceded us didn’t have a great deal of luck when it came to surviving what the universe threw at them. We, on the other hand, are pretty sure we’re different. We are convinced that we have everything under control and can almost certainly mitigate any natural disasters. Confident beings, we are.
However, given the choices we’re making, history may judge us no more intelligent than the dinosaurs. We gleefully ignore science. We intentionally pollute our air and water, the very things we need to survive. Our planet is over-populated beyond its ability to sustain life. Yet, we refuse to use genetically modified foods that could feed the planet. We love war. Not only that, humanity has a long history of people not getting along with their closest neighbors. Anyone looking at us in retrospect would consider our violent tendencies a negative character trait.
Humans, however, are focused on the here and now. We pay attention to us. The past is the past. Let the future worry about itself. The earth is slowly baking? Meh, it’s just a periodic thing that happens. Humanity may be in the process of committing one of the biggest fuck-ups in the history of the planet. Yet, does history actually care? Looking beyond our meager existence as a species, we are as easily forgettable as Australopithecus afarensis. The fact you don’t know whether I just made up that name proves my point.
How We Look At History
Humans are the latest, but most likely not the last, in a long evolutionary line of hominids. Our earliest bipedal ancestors existed some six- to eight-million years ago and were considerably smaller than we are now. Our best connection with this time is a single skeleton from about three million years ago. Scientists named the skeleton Lucy because she was, in a very real way, a person. Lucy’s skeleton was found in 1974 in a shallow Ethiopian stream bed. Researchers announced this week that we finally know how Lucy died. She fell, feet first, from a high distance, most likely a tree.
Studies of Lucy’s skeleton take a lot of time. She is the only one of her species we have encountered. She is the only one of her species we are likely to ever encounter. Therefore, while anthropologists study her remains at the microscopic level they try to make conclusions not only about Lucy’s life but her entire species. Did Lucy live or sleep in the trees? When she fell, why was no one around to save her? Each question answered raises a dozen more.
Inevitably, someone asks about the accuracies of these findings. We’re using the best CSI-like technology available. We’re drawing conclusions and making discoveries about Lucy’s time period that would have been unthinkable 40 years ago. Yet, we have no way of knowing exactly how accurate the findings are. No one from that period in history, nothing written, no form of communication still exists. Lucy’s life matters because it is the only glimpse we have into her species. Without her, we wouldn’t have a clue. History wouldn’t care.
How History Looks At Us
Back in 2011, geologists and other scientists who study history in large time frames declared that we have entered the Anthropocene—Age of Man. They all agreed that the impact of humans on this planet was significant enough to deserve its own epoch. In a National Geographic article on the topic, writer Elizabeth Kolbert relates an experience she had with stratigrapher Jan Zalasiewicz. As they were examining an outcropping of rock in the Scottish Highlands, Zalasiewicz pointed toward a particularly dark-colored stratum about three feet wide and said, “Bad things happened in here.”
By “bad things,” Zalasiewicz was referring to mass extinctions, a global calamity of some sort that was so severe as to change the color of the sediment left behind. Known as the end-Ordovician, this was one of the biggest earth-shaping extinction events in the last half-million years. The event is significant because, without those changes, humans might never have evolved on this planet. Even if they did, we would have been very different creatures.
Flash forward 100,000 or even a million years now, and realize that the way in which Zalasiewicz views that stratum of rock is exactly how future scientists will view the sedimentary remains of the Anthropocene. At some point all that will remain of us, of our society, of our technology, of our philosophies, our quarrels, our wars, and our politics is sediment. Our means and methods of communication might give researchers more insight into us than we have into Lucy’s time period. Ultimately, however, it’s all just a giant slab of rock underneath other giant slabs of rock.
History Isn’t Detail Oriented
I’m going to be blunt: History doesn’t give a shit about the petty details of our lives. We don’t’ give a shit about the petty details of Lucy’s life. Future inhabitants of this planet, whatever they may be, won’t give a shit about the petty details of our lives. Even if they are somehow able to access and decode this strange mess we call social media, they won’t care. They have no reason to care. What future species want to know about us is the same thing we want to know about Lucy: How did her species affect our species?
Lucy’s Australopithecus afarensis species represents a link in an evolutionary chain. We are another link in that same chain. What matters to the ultimate course of history is whether we make that evolutionary chain stronger or weaker. We’re arrogant bastards sure that we are strengthening that chain, but our estimations may be biased. Where we stand now, we can either start paying attention to our planet and focus on preserving both it and us or we can fuck it all up and end up being the weak link in our evolutionary chain. This is how history ultimately views our species.
When you ask yourself whether your life matters, consider this context of history. Does your life make us stronger, weaker, or indifferent? If your life is represented by a stratum of rock, do you change the color or do you blend in with those around you? If we, collectively, fuck up this evolutionary chain, history is not going to be kind in its view of us. They’ll look back and, regardless of the details of our lives, consider our whole species imbecilic.
So yeah, history cares if we fuck up. Maybe we should as well.
Smart or Stupid, Is That A Question?
I’m not the smartest fellow in the world, but I can sure pick smart colleagues. —Franklin D. Roosevelt
Is there a problem with being smart or are we trying to justify stupid?
Americans, apparently more than any other country, have an obsession with being smart. We heap praises on those who demonstrate intelligence beyond the norm and we get upset when we realize that our educational system is producing graduates who can only read at a fifth-grade level. Even our television viewing skews toward characters we perceive as smart. Programs such as Scorpion and Elementary (based on the character of Sherlock Holmes), consistently generate high ratings. We even like our comedy smart. The highest rated sitcom, for multiple seasons, is The Big Bang Theory, where we watch allegedly intelligent scientist bumble their way through life. One of the reasons we like that show is because it delivers lines like these:
The bluntness of the exchange makes us laugh, but at the same time, we recognize the intelligence of Sheldon’s response and consider ourselves smart when we use that line on someone else the next day. We like being smart. Although, perhaps more correctly, we like thinking that we’re smart. Many of us are lacking in cognitive skills. The intelligence of television characters doesn’t rub off and make us smarter. Some people are stupid.
We Have A Problem
Once upon a time, the rate of acceleration in IQ among high school graduates was pretty impressive. Psychologist James Flynn found that from 1932 to 1978, IQ scores in the US increased by 13.8 percent. Putting that in other terms, a score that was average in 1932 would be in the bottom 20% in 1978. Yay us! I’m in that 1978 group. We’re smart!
Unfortunately, that trend failed to continue. Just because we give allegiance to intelligence doesn’t mean we’re all doing well in the brain category. Measurements are tough to come by and even more difficult to verify, but that are glimpses of where we stand. Consider that the College Board, the entity that administers the SAT, considers a score of 500 as a benchmark for who will do well in college. Not everyone takes the SAT, but if we look at states where the test is free and participation over 90 percent, we find that only 33 to 40 percent scored above that benchmark.
An article published this month in The Atlantic, while trying very hard to convince us that there is an unfair war on stupidity, admits that:
… less intelligent people are more likely to suffer from some types of mental illness, become obese, develop heart disease, experience permanent brain damage from a traumatic injury, and end up in prison, where they are more likely than other inmates to be drawn to violence. They’re also likely to die sooner.
Being Smart Isn’t Easy
I was amused by Jeffrey Zacks’ essay published on aeon disproving brain-training games and exploring how difficult it is to expand our level of intelligence. His list of things that are marketed as improving our intelligence, such as programs offered by Lumosity, which rocketed to a high of 50 million users, and PositScience, which isn’t quite as popular but uses a similar methodology, is long. He makes a very good case against brain-training, especially.
One of the general issues with many of the concepts that are supposed to help us improve our brains is that they only focus on one particular segment, usually related to memory. For example, does anyone else remember those little plastic games with the tiles that moved around to create a picture, or put numbers in order? Those little devils actually help advance our cognitive ability, but only in the area of recognizing patterns. Likewise, those tricks for helping remember people’s names do improve some memory skills, but only in terms of memorizing lists. The effects are not transferable.
While we think of Adderall and Ritalin as being primarily used with children who have attention deficit issues, there is evidence of them improving the cognitive ability in normal adults as well. This area of study might actually be promising accept for the fact that the effects are short term. They give a momentary boost of cognitive enhancement, but then it stops as the drug wears off and over time the “crash” goes below the starting baseline. Users are trading a moment of lessened ability for a moment of enhanced performance. Oh, and the drug that works best? Nicotine. Go figure.
Solutions Are Available
Strip away the biases of both articles, and what we find are solutions that can make us all smarter and reduce the rate of stupidity (yes, I’m using the word) that seems to be prevalent over a frightening number of people. We simply cannot excuse the growing trend among those whose cognitive abilities are diminished to demonize those who are smart. Atul Gawande, in his commencement address to the California Institute of Technology, made an interesting conclusion after talking about the growing distrust of science:
Even more than what you think, how you think matters. The stakes for understanding this could not be higher than they are today, because we are not just battling for what it means to be scientists. We are battling for what it means to be citizens.
Indeed, we need to be smart and that means we need to do the things that not only make us smarter, but put us back on track toward making our children and grandchildren smarter as well. Top priorities must be decreasing poverty and improving the quality and availability of early childhood education. One of our most stupid moves comes when we oppose funding that can solve both those problems. At the same time, nutrition and exercise, especially cardiovascular activities such as swimming, biking, and walking, are among the best ways to not only increase cognitive ability but prevent its decline as we get older. We have options.
Is This Really A Choice?
One thing for certain is that I’m not going to stop calling out those actions that are stupid. Perhaps we do need to be more careful in clarifying that, generally speaking, it is one’s actions and not the specific individual who is stupid. At the same time, though, we must realize that we are not nearly as smart as we like to think. We could be much smarter, even if we’re older and out of school. Our future depends on increasing our country’s overall intelligence so that we don’t do something incredibly stupid like nominating a bigoted, racist, homophobic, xenophobic, reality television host for president.
Oops, it may already be too late.
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