Are Human Beings Intelligent?

“So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.” Bertrand Russell     

Human beings arrogantly assume they are intelligent creatures having compared themselves to "lower" life forms that haven't invented wheels, money, or TV. Well, birds don't need wheels, monkeys barter sex for food, and lizards didn't write those awful final seasons of "Friends.” To be sure, humans do have a knack for turning abstract thoughts into inventions and for synthesizing information to predict the future. But if that’s all our definition of intelligence* entails, then I will retract what I’m about to say about human intelligence; um, that is, that humans are not intelligent. Sure, on occasion, humans do display an ability to reason, which is the other common requisite for intelligence and is the link between abstract thought and invention. But if we’re talking about how often we collectively exercise the ability to reason, especially in our day to day lives, then we don’t seem all that intelligent as a species. It seems that a number of other so-called intelligences take precedence as we go about our lives; interpersonal intelligence and bodily kinesthetic intelligence, for example. While using reason to create tools and predict the future is great, rare is the person who takes reasoning seriously as a tool for running their lives, much less the lives of anyone else.  

[* - I’m discounting our ability to communicate in a variety of ways as a facet of intelligence as many animals can do as much, though not with the same complexity. But I discount the complexity of human language as well because that complexity also drives misunderstandings.]

We are all aware of the headlines that alert us to common acts of stupidity, such as the man who calls police to report the theft of the marijuana he was illegally growing in his attic; as commonly reported by sources such as News of the Weird and the Darwin Awards. More examples of human stupidity include building huge cities in earthquake prone areas. Stupid. Living in a trailer home in Tornado Alley? Stupid. Giving teachers paychecks that are dwarfed by multi-million dollar high school drop-out athletes and rappers because the human need to be entertained is greater than the human need to be skilled or educated? Stupid. Oh, and have you ever heard Celion Dion cover AC/DC? I’m not even kidding! The average human is about as smart as a box of rocks, and that’s probably giving people too much credit as well as being an insult to rocks.

While these sorts of headlines tackle the everyday stupidity of humans, there are far worse examples of humans not exercising their supposed intelligence. Take for example the eagerness of the agriculture industries (BigAg as it is known in the U.S.) who stealthily implements genetically altered foods into our food chain without studying the long term effects these foods might have on us or the environment. Here, the afore mentioned ability to synthesize information in order to predict the future goes right out the window for the sake of the short term monetary gain by a minute handful of people. In this respect, we might also take for example industries that pour their toxic wastes into rivers and oceans and endanger what is arguably our most important resource, water. Moreover, what of energy companies that intentionally suppress the advancement of clean, renewable energy? And what about cloning? International law notwithstanding, surely humans will soon be cloned with regularity. Who will control this technology and for what purposes? Sadly, our ability to create is forever outpacing our ability to philosophically deal with the ‘intelligent’ Dr. Frankenstein within us. So, are we intelligent?

That’s a good question to ask oneself, especially when one believes in a god. Meta-studies appear to indicate a correlation between intelligence levels and strength of faith, where the more education one has appears to lead to a higher percentage of agnostics and non-practicing theists, if not outright atheists. There's a reason why religion is not taught in public school and colleges; it is not compatible with reason. If a theist is to seriously think about human intelligence, they should find themselves asking exactly why any supposedly intelligent creator would create an intelligent species with such an inceredible capacity for stupidity. Why would God create something so dumb that it would proclaim itself, in the face of an entire universe, as the pinnacle of creation? We’re talking about an entire species dedicated to the Black Swan Syndrome; we don’t know of any life as intelligent as humans, so humans must be the most intelligent in all the universe! We can continue to ask these types of questions: Why would a god create humans with such poor reason, who are constantly making choices that endanger their lives or otherwise make themselves unhappy? And why, in the name of all that is holy, would God like to be worshipped by these idiotic creations? Even the robots humans build do not require that the robots worship their creator.

The reasonable answer to these types of questions is that God, were He to exist, is a moron. But we do have to give credit where credit is due, for in a single stroke of cleverness, God gets off the hook for creating such dumb things as people by the virtue of faith. That’s right, faith, the dumbest psychological position a person can commit to; this is what excuses God from having made humans as unintelligent as they are. Human being are so unintelligent that it takes something like a human to create and define the word ‘intelligence,’ assign the word great moral value, and them proclaim itself to be intelligent. In much the same way that God cannot be moral by proclaiming to be the standard of morality, humans cannot be intelligent by proclaiming to be the standard of intelligence.

Naturally, someone is going to disagree with me and say something like, “Well, other animals cannot ask themselves why they exist,” which goes to show you exactly how stupid humans are as the person making this argument obviously hasn’t first asked if their argument is even logical. Humans aren’t intelligent. For every example one could give in favor of human intelligence, ten examples of human stupidity can be given in response. By contrast, humans are far more arrogant than they are intelligent, which would explain why supposed alien abductees claim aliens use people as lab rats. But this merely shows how dumb the aliens are, too. I don’t think they’re going to learn much from us. If they were smart, they’d already know that.

A Clarification or an Apology?

A clarification or an apology? Think of it as one of those choose-your-own-adventure stories…

Regarding the criticism directed towards me for my last blog (in which I defend the business strategy of Abercrombie & Fitch) it has become clear to me that, generally speaking, people place more value in emotions than in analyzing issues with intelligence. This is not to say people who place more value in their emotions are unintelligent, simply that their lives are less governed by reason. In saying so, I suppose it seems obvious that I place less value in reacting emotionally to life’s various situations, preferring to analyze situations before reacting or making decisions. Naturally, it is not always practical to act in this manner, but I generally do so with situations that allow it. As such, I tend to accuse others of being oversensitive, whereas I have been accused of being unsympathetic or lacking empathy towards others. Having taken some time to reflect upon this disconnect, as it were, I found myself asking this question: Is it better to approach life emotionally or with reason (more precisely, with more emotion than reason or with more reason than emotion)? 

On the surface, it may seem that taking the latter approach to life robs a person of the many immediate pleasures any given moment may offer. To a certain extent I agree as there are certainly situations in which it is enjoyable to stop thinking and enjoy the moment. I suspect this is why people place such a high value on emotions. I’ve certainly been told that emotions are what make us human, but hearing this much makes me wonder if the advocates of emotions think we became intelligent (notice I didn’t say reasonable) by accident or as some kind of afterthought. As humans, we are both emotional AND intelligent; the question is whether one of these aspects of our existence should be held in higher regard than the other. 

In thinking about this – since I invest more time reasoning than living emotionally – I’ve come to a conclusion that surprised me. That conclusion came about by reflecting on the state of the world; at any given time in history, even now, the general state of the world has been one of misery, certain perspectives be damned. (Perhaps that is why optimistic people are in such short supply.) So, I thought, what has caused the world to be so miserable? At first I thought that it was because people tend to react to the world without thinking. All of humanity’s worst qualities such as anger, arrogance, bigotry, dominance, entitlement, tribalism – people assume these traits too often before giving the slightest thought as to why they act in the manner they do. Though we do cooperate when it benefits us (when we reason), think of how often we act benevolent with each other when we stand nothing to gain. I’m not saying people never act kind without expecting some kind of reciprocity, it just happens less than when cooperating is more than a zero-sum game. I do not believe people are basically good; given the chance to take advantage of another, more people give into the temptation than not, as several notable experiments have borne out. [e.g. the Stanford prison experiment, the Milgram experiment, etc.]

Next, I began to think about all the good human intelligence has wrought please insert sarcasm here. The advancement of atomic energy came at the behest to weaponize the technology, cars which get us to the restaurant faster so that we can eat a steaks (both contribute to our poisonous atmosphere), genetically modified plants that cannot reproduce on purpose; it would be easy to get carried away here. But when we think of the most recent tech “advancement,” Google Glass, I discovered the common denominator between emotions and intelligence that puts the human race at a disadvantage: People tend to apply emotion and intelligence before applying REASON to life’s myriad of situations. It’s not hard to think of what the unintended consequences of Google Glass might be, but did its inventors stop to think it might do more harm than good? No, I’m sure they automatically assumed the benefits of Google Glass outweigh its possible downside. (That is to say, it’s all about the money.) 

While I said earlier that human beings are both emotional and intelligent – weakly implying that both are important aspects of our existence – I think either on its own without any application of reason has been a bust for humanity. I think it is okay to be emotional…but not without also being reasonable. It is also okay to be intelligent, but not without being reasonable. And so I have discovered that reason trumps both emotion and intelligence. This, I believe, is where much of my dissatisfaction with my opponents in the Mike Jeffries debate came from, my belief that they were being unreasonable which they often took as an attack on intelligence. To be fair, I didn’t make this clear though I’m not sure saying, “I’m not attacking your intelligence, it’s that you’re not being reasonable,” would have helped. Or perhaps it would have if we as a species took the attitude that we need to stop, collaborate, and listen to each other. We need to stop perceiving that disagreements are attacks. We need to think about things before assuming all those ugly human traits I alluded to earlier, myself included.

I suppose it’s up to the individual to be more emotional than reasonable or more reasonable than emotional, but I certainly believe that abandoning reasoning altogether is one of the worst things a person can do not only for themselves, but for the world. I will not apologize for taking umbrage in instances where reason is abandoned when it is needed most. Not now, not ever.