Big Brains, Big Problems

"If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal

By Justin Gregg

(Little, Brown, 308 pages, $29)

Okay, let's clear things up, right from the get-go. Friedrich Nietzsche was not a narwhal, and never will be. But according to Justin Gregg, adjunct professor of biology at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, Canada, the gloomy 19th-century German philosopher would have been happier if he were. Despite its puckish title, Mr. Gregg's book "If Nietzsche Were A Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity" makes some extraordinary and thought-provoking points. It is not only engagingly written, but its controversial thesis is worth taking seriously.

The following bit of black humor isn't drawn from Mr. Gregg's book but summarizes much of its argument. After a worldwide nuclear holocaust, the few surviving amoeba-like creatures hold a meeting at which they decide to try evolving again. But before they do so, they together make a solemn vow: "This time, no brains! "

"If Nietzsche Were a Narwal" begins, appropriately enough, with the great depressive himself, who had plenty of brains. "Nietzsche," Mr. Gregg writes, "both wished he was as stupid as a cow so he wouldn't have to contemplate existence, and pitied cows for being so stupid that they couldn't contemplate existence." Mr. Gregg then maintains that if Nietzsche had been graced with the brain of, say, a narwhal (one of the author's favorite marine mammals), he wouldn't have suffered his devastating Weltschmerz. Of course his complexity of thought, along with his written output, would have been, well, somewhat limited, but . . . From here on, Mr. Gregg's book becomes far more serious, demanding our attention and challenging our presuppositions.

Mr. Gregg maintains, for example, that death awareness -- widely considered a hallmark of human intelligence -- isn't all it's cracked up to be. While the human understanding of time and gift of foresight have their perks, when it comes to death, is ignorance bliss? Mr. Gregg thinks so. "The day-to-day consequences of death wisdom" -- grief, dread, nihilism, mental and emotional anguish -- "really do suck," he writes. "I believe that animals . . . do not suffer as much as we do for the simple reason that they cannot imagine their deaths."

Not surprisingly, the author strongly suggests that we reconsider our "unshakable belief" that intelligence, however we define it, is a good thing, "a magic ingredient that you can sprinkle onto a boring old monkey, or a robot, . . . and create something better." Should we really be so confident as to the added value? His answer is a resounding No. "We can, and often do, use our human intellect to divine the secrets of the universe and generate philosophical theories predicated on the fragility and transience of life. But we also can, and often do, harness those secrets to wreak death and destruction, and twist those philosophies to justify our savagery. With an understanding of how the world has been built comes the knowledge to break it. Humans have both the capacity to rationalize genocide and the technological competence to carry it out."

We humans are besotted by intelligence, especially our own. And yet "intelligence is not the miracle of evolution we like to think it is. We love our little accomplishments -- our moon landings and megacities -- like parents love their newborn baby. But nobody loves a baby as much as the parents. The planet does not love us as much as we love our intellect." In fact, "our many intellectual accomplishments are currently on track to produce our own extinction, which is exactly how evolution gets rid of adaptations that suck."

Our braininess has enabled us to cure diseases, to write symphonies and books, to invent science and develop complex ideas and societies. But it has also -- especially by way of our vaunted linguistic capacities -- enabled us to deceive ourselves and others. To be sure, animals sometimes lie (see the broken-wing display of a piping plover), but when people do it, it's a different story. Literally. We're smart and have language that allows us to misrepresent the truth, all the time knowing full well that we're lying.

As for ethics and morality, Mr. Gregg notes that, while human cognitive skills "have molded the human moral sense from the clay of animal normativity," our moral reasoning "often leads to more death, violence, and destruction than we find in the normative behavior of nonhuman animals." Animals, not unlike humans, typically have norm-based systems, but deviations rarely result, as they do with us, in mass death and suffering. For doubters he marshals an array of egregious examples, each of which makes a case for human exceptionalism, though not in a way to make anyone proud. Despite instances of infanticide or within-group violence among some species (see especially our great-ape cousins), animals do not commit genocide. So much for cognitive capacity.

Nonetheless, some of the cognitive concepts introduced in "If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal" are nothing less than brilliant. Take "prognostic myopia," which Mr. Gregg defines as "the human capacity to think about and alter the future coupled with an inability to actually care all that much about what happens in the future. It's caused by the human ability to make complex decisions availing of our unique cognitive skills that result in long-term consequences. But because our minds evolved primarily to deal with immediate -- not future -- outcomes, we rarely experience or even understand the consequences of these long-term decisions." Think nuclear weapons, greenhouse gases, long-term pollution for short-term profit. Our "shortsighted farsightedness," argues Mr. Gregg, is "an extinction-level threat to humanity."

It is startling to consider that our very intelligence may have made humans no better morally, even no better off physically, than other species. Indeed, by many measures of evolutionary success (number of individuals, persistence over time, likelihood of persisting into the future), Homo sapiens is doing poorly compared to many other species. And not benefiting the Earth, either.

Mr. Gregg concludes, glumly but effectively, that "there's good reason to tone down our smugness. Because, depending on where we go from here, human intelligence may just be the stupidest thing that has ever happened."

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Mr. Barash, a professor of psychology emeritus at the University of Washington, is the author, most recently, of "Threats: Intimidation and Its Discontents."" [1]

1. Big Brains, Big Problems
Barash, David P. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 21 July 2022: A.15.