Reading Craig Dilworth’s book “Too Smart for Our Own Good” (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Too-Smart-our-Own-Good/dp/052175769X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1338150827&sr=1-1) I
often find myself disliking his academic style.
The reason people like Richard Dawkins are much better known is not
because the ideas he expresses are any more valid, but because he does not use
academic jargon. To some extent
academics are trapped into a system in which they cannot advance their careers
without having their writings approved by “peer review” and there seems to be a
conspiracy amongst academics to encourage the use of jargon simply to impress
each other.
Dilworth’s book explains how and why human beings are
destroying their future. It’s about
human ecology, a science which hardly existed before 1960 . To study human
ecology it is necessary to step outside our species and look at how we behave
in an objective and scientific fashion. The science is searching for answers to
such questions as “what do humans do and why do they do it?” You can’t even begin to ask such questions
unless you are prepared to view homo sapiens as one of many similar species of animal
with very similar genetic make-up and, in many ways, very similar behaviour.
The paradox is that taking an “objective” view of your own
species is something only human beings can do. All animals and most humans can
only view life from within the constraints of their instincts and culture.
Their concerns are mostly with food, territory, and reproduction. Most of us live our lives within the culture
we have inherited from many previous generations. We don’t question ideas like “economic growth”
because it’s been with us all our lives. Our livelihoods depend on the use of
fossil fuels, but so did those of our ancestors.
To understand why our instincts and culture are leading us
to catastrophe we have to step outside our normal lives and look at how our species
has behaved over the thousands of years we have been in existence. What is so extraordinary is that the body of
accumulated knowledge which now enables us to do this has only just reached the
point where the pieces start falling into place. The central ideas come from Darwin, but
amazingly it turns out that (as I recently discovered) the implications of his
thesis have not been truly understood until quite recently. For many years the phrase “survival of the
fittest” has been misunderstood and derided. Now at last we are beginning to get a true
understanding of what we have been doing all this time, and the implications
are truly horrifying.
Just as we begin to say “ah, that’s what has been happening”
we realise that it is probably too late to do anything about it. Is there a grain of hope in the “probably”? There may still a chance that the worst can
be averted, but to do so we have to hold that contradiction in our hands; we
have to know that we are just another species with all our inherited baggage,
but also know that we have the unique capacity to look at ourselves. What we
have to do is use our humanity to outwit our humanity.
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