Name: If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal
Rating: 4.3 (195 reviews)
Author: Justin Gregg

Zusammenfassung von If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal

Justin Gregg

What Animal Intelligence Reveals about Human Stupidity

4.3 (195 Bewertungen)

18 Min.

Kurz zusammengefasst

If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal by Justin Gregg is a brilliantly funny and insightful book that explores the philosophical musings of the great German philosopher as if he was a narwhal. It takes us on an imaginative journey into the depth of the sea and our own minds.

Inhaltsübersicht

What’s in it for me? Discover the many ways in which humans fail at being smart creatures.

In 2012, a peculiar contest was organized by the British newspaper the Observer. Three teams were pitted against each other to find out who would be better at picking stocks. Each team was given £5,000 and the one with the most money after a year would be declared the winner. The twist? One team consisted of three professional investment managers, another was a group of schoolchildren, and the third was a cat named Orlando.

Can you guess where this is going? That’s right, Orlando, whose technique for picking stocks was based on randomly dropping a toy mouse onto a grid of numbers, came out on top. The cat ended the year with £5,542, the investment managers came in second with £5,176, while the kids came in last with £4,840.

Now, this example is extremely anecdotal, but it does make a point. Human beings like to think we’re far and away the big evolutionary winners when it comes to intelligence. No other animal tops human brain power. Right? Well, as we’ll see, the answer to that question may not be so clear-cut. If we were to judge the winner by how they used their intelligence to create comfort and happiness, or with regard to ensuring their future survival, humans might actually be pretty dumb.

In this Blink, you’ll learn

why people used to put chicken butts on their snake bites;
why our battle against bedbugs was an epic fail; and
why we may be doomed with shortsightedness.

Human cognition may be unique, but it isn’t necessarily advantageous.

Why is the sky blue? Why can’t cats and dogs talk? Why are people mean to one another? If you spend enough time around a child who’s just learned to talk, you’re probably familiar with these kinds of why questions. But as we grow older, the questions may change but we don’t stop asking why.

As the author puts it, human beings are a why specialist species, and it’s one of the fundamental things that differentiates human animal thinking from nonhuman animal thinking. Our ability to ask and ponder these questions is generally seen as a positive thing. After all, it’s what makes philosophy, science, and the arts possible. So it must be a good thing, right? Well . . .

Interestingly enough, the great German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about envying the cows in the field, who went about their day chomping grass and being completely unbothered by such existential questions as the meaning of life. Nietzsche had a good reason for envying the cows, too. The older he got, the more these why questions seemed to take a toll on his psyche. Eventually, he became catatonic and ended up in a mental asylum in Switzerland. Nietzsche isn’t alone, either. The awareness we have of our own mortality has led plenty of people into thoughts of nihilism, depression, hopelessness, and even suicidal despair.

And then there’s the problem of how we use the grand ideas that we come up with. For every invention, work of art, or philosophical breakthrough, there tends to be a devastating downside – the kind that only human beings could come up with.

For example, after Nietzsche died, his anti-Semitic sister began to alter and promote his work as a philosophical justification for what became the genocidal Nazi agenda. This, despite the fact that Nietzsche wrote about how he despised anti-Semitism.

Like asking existentially probing questions, using the ideas that come from such questions to justify mistreatment, killing, or genocide is a uniquely human thing – and a seemingly inevitable one. Time and time again, we’ve used religion, philosophy, and bogus science to justify the horrible things we’ve done to one another.

So let’s ask ourselves, What if Nietzsche were a narwhal? Sure, narwhals may be fascinating marine mammals, but they can’t write symphonies or send other narwhals to the moon, can they? And all research suggests that narwhals, or any other animal aside from humans, aren’t intellectually capable of contemplating their own mortality. But maybe that’s a good thing. Shouldn’t it be considered an advantage that a narwhal will never experience a life-threatening existential crisis?

If you’re not yet convinced, hang in there. In this Blink, we’ll look at how our evolution into being why question specialists goes hand-in-hand with being profoundly self-destructive.

Evolution led to new ways of thinking, which came with plenty of downsides.

If you ran to the village doctor after being bitten by a snake, you probably wouldn’t expect the treatment to involve a chicken butt, would you? But then you don’t live in Wales in the year 1000 AD. Just to be clear, men received the treatment of a live cockerel butt being held upon the wound, while women were prescribed a hen’s butt.

This sort of medical treatment may not make any sense today, but it is a good example of where our why specialist thinking took us.

Our inability to consider long-term consequences is threatening our survival.

Let us apologize beforehand. But we’d like you to picture, for a moment, the common bedbug. We know, this pesky little bloodsucker isn’t a great image to have in your head, but they are pretty fascinating. For starters, the common bedbug is so thin that it can fit into just about any space that a single piece of paper can fit. And a bedbug knows your behavior. It studies you. Its whole biology is focused on knowing when you’re asleep. It’s attracted to the heat, odor, and the carbon dioxide your body emits. They learn your schedule, know when you’re asleep – be it day or night – they’ll know when to make their move and feed off your blood.

Yeah, it’s gross, but still, that’s pretty smart. They even know how to find great places to hide, like between the pages of the bibles that sit next to hotel room beds. This kind of hiding serves them well in avoiding bug bombs and pesticides. Young bedbugs will even hide out in the old exoskeletons of dead bedbugs as an extra layer of protection until the pesticide gasses have passed.

Kernaussagen in If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal