IF NIETZSCHE WERE A NARWHAL: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity
By Justin Gregg
320 pages. Little, Brown & Firm. $29.
“Human, all too human”: It’s a thought that occurred to me a number of occasions whereas studying Justin Gregg’s “If Nietzsche Had been a Narwhal,” and never simply because the phrase additionally occurs to be the title of a piece by Nietzsche himself. Gregg’s intelligent and provocative e book is filled with irreverent notions and humorous anecdotes — the inventive upside to being a human animal. However our means to summary from our instant expertise means we are able to take that creativity too far.
“If Nietzsche had been born a narwhal,” Gregg writes, “the world would possibly by no means have needed to endure the horrors of the Second World Battle or the Holocaust.” Say what? This appears to be a sterling instance of what Gregg calls our species-specific penchant for “sudden ludicrousness.”
Such rhetorical contortions are in all probability the consequence of what he derides as our obsession with causal inference. Nonhuman animals get by simply positive on “discovered associations.” They hyperlink actions with outcomes, with out having to grasp why one thing is going on. People, although, are “why specialists.” We have to search for causal connections — resulting in some unbelievable achievements but additionally to some weird practices. Gregg factors to the outdated medieval treatment of rubbing a rooster’s keister on a snakebite wound.
Gregg research animal conduct and is an professional in dolphin communication. He reveals how human cognition is very complicated, permitting us to color photos and write symphonies. We are able to share concepts with each other in order that we don’t must rely solely on intestine intuition or direct expertise so as to study.
However this compulsion to study will be superfluous, he says. We accumulate what the thinker Ruth Garrett Millikan calls “lifeless information” — information concerning the world that’s ineffective for every day residing, like the space to the moon, or what occurred within the newest episode of “Succession.” Our collections of lifeless information, Gregg writes, “assist us to think about an infinite variety of options to no matter issues we encounter — for good or in poor health.”
“If Nietzsche Had been a Narwhal” is usually fixated on the in poor health, or the best way that people insist they’re enhancing issues when they’re in the end mucking them up. There may be already a stuffed shelf of books about how we aren’t as good as we prefer to suppose we’re, or how our smartness can lead us astray: David Robson’s “The Intelligence Lure,” Leonard Mlodinow’s “Emotional,” books in behavioral economics by Daniel Kahneman or Dan Ariely. However Gregg makes a much bigger case about how human intelligence has deformed the planet as nicely. He explicitly ventures into the battle between optimists like Steven Pinker and pessimists just like the British thinker John Gray.
Complicated thought typically seems to be a long-term legal responsibility, Gregg says. The massive brains which have allowed us to proliferate as a species, domesticating the pure world, have additionally empowered us to wreak a lot ecological havoc that we’ve unwittingly created the situations for our personal extinction. Fossil fuels have generated prosperity whereas hastening an apocalypse. Human ingenuity has been used to find penicillin and to commit atrocities. Surveying the chickens in his yard, Gregg appropriately predicts that they’re extremely unlikely to “unite en masse to rain loss of life down upon the world in pursuit of glory for the Nice Hen Nation.” People, although, are one other matter. “Narwhals,” he factors out, “don’t construct fuel chambers.”
True sufficient, and it’s price eager about how a lot hassle people can create when our ambitions prolong past our instant wants. However Gregg, in his very human want to dramatize the stakes, will be vulnerable to overstatement — often glossing over the animal expertise whereas demonizing the human one. We’d not be in any hazard of chickens creating the Nice Hen Nation, however they do have a literal pecking order. Gregg notes that his hen Shadow is all the time the primary to seize any meals that he tosses into the coop. Dr. Becky eats final. Gregg marvels at how secure their social construction is. Secure, sure; however is it simply?
Go away it to a human to ask a query about justice, which has nothing to say about pure choice, or what Gregg calls “the good arbiter of usefulness.” People can agitate for change and even revolution as a result of they will think about a actuality that doesn’t exist. It’s not as if Gregg rejects this reality, however he’s principally writing in a extra polemical vein than an exploratory one. He extols how a lot “happier” and “more healthy” we’d be if we adopted the lead of nonhuman animals however he doesn’t contact on how, nicely, ableist nature will be: The sick, the weak and the outdated hardly ever stand a lot of an opportunity within the wild.
People can be surprisingly cooperative. The primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has famous that people will often spend hours collectively on a crowded airplane with out (normally) resorting to violence, whereas when she envisions a planeload of chimpanzees, “bloody earlobes and different appendages would litter the aisles.” Gregg warns us towards being too impressed with ourselves, since not like human animals, chimps have by no means been noticed killing “each” member of a rival group. Whereas chimps will be murderous, they’re not genocidal. People cooperate, which sounds good, however too typically we cooperate with some individuals so as to destroy others.
However, we are able to generally go to decidedly “unnatural” lengths so as to prolong compassion to strangers, and even to different species. Human existence isn’t inherently good or evil; regardless of Gregg’s comedian distortions — that are undeniably entertaining — the extra delicate suggestion that programs by his e book is that, in contrast with nonhuman animals, our existence is extra excessive. Along with chickens, Gregg retains honeybees. The male honeybees, or drones, are outfitted solely to mate: Their tongues are too brief to permit them to extract nectar, and so they don’t have stingers that might allow them to guard the hive. So after the drones have performed their work of mating with new queens from different colonies, the feminine bees will push them out.
These helpless drones will starve or freeze to loss of life, in what Gregg calls “a tragic — however totally pure — state of affairs.” He takes pity on them, inserting them in a field on his deck with some honey, offering them with a respite earlier than their impending doom. “I need to give them one last second of happiness,” he writes. I’d prefer to see a narwhal strive to do this.
