I was reviewing Frans De Waal’s book The Bonobo and the Atheist once again in preparation for a Sunday School lesson on why we need to stop trying to fix stupid. As Mark Twain so aptly said, “Don’t argue with stupid people … they will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.”
Yes, I know we should not think poorly of others, but I am observing that intellectual elites have a unique form of stupidity. They think they know things others do not. Once again, from Mark Twain: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” We really need to simply “let it go” and trust over time things will correct to sanity.
The reason I start this blog with a reference to his book about his battle with traditional faith and modern critical thinking s that Frans suggests the enemy of science is not religion. The true enemy is the substitution of thought, reflection, and curiosity about things we accept as dogma. He points out that convictions never follow straight from evidence or logic. Convictions reach us through the prisms of human interpretation. As a French philosopher aptly summarized, “strictly speaking, there is no certainty; there are only people who are certain.” The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Our senses as well as sensibilities are dulled and getting duller! Chillingly, Frans suggests we still know little about the capacities of the apes, both in captivity and in the field, but in the last few years, we have been getting closer. According to his extensive writing, they are not nearly as selfish as had been assumed and might beat the average priest or Levite when it comes to humane behavior.
Other primates make us look rather stupid about sensing things around us. They can out-hear, out-smell, and out-smart dangers in the wild so much better than we can. We moderns have dulled our memories because we rely on reading and writing, and virtually none of us can read Braille even when we focus on doing so. Go ahead and try it sometime.
Perhaps the best recent book that makes my point is The Arrogant Ape by Christine Webb, which delves into the myth of human exceptionalism and why it matters. She aptly points out that Darwin considered humans only one part of the web of life, not the apex of a natural hierarchy. Yet today, many maintain that we are the most intelligent, virtuous, successful species that has ever lived. According to Webb, this flawed thinking enables us to exploit the earth towards our own exclusive ends, throwing us into a perilous planetary imbalance. But are this view and way of life inevitable? The Arrogant Ape shows that human exceptionalism is an ideology that relies more on human culture than our biology, more on delusion and faith than on evidence.
My point is that humility seems to be missing everywhere. That is why I don’t refer to AI as Artificial Intelligence but rather as Arrogance and Ignorance.
Remember that humility is a mindset of accurately assessing oneself, recognizing limitations, and thinking of oneself less, rather than thinking less of oneself. It involves a lack of arrogance, a willingness to learn from others, and a focus on serving others’ interests, as exemplified by Jesus washing the disciples’ feet. For many, true humility also includes a deep spiritual reverence and a dependence on God, but that may be a personal perspective.
It seems that today’s world is dominated by arrogance … just about everywhere you look. The result is a horror story is very likely to end badly … I can feel it. Can you? Perhaps today’s mid-term election results will point to improvement.