Dan McCollum — A failure of intelligence on a planetary scale
By Dan McCollum
Some years back, in a complete fit of anger and disgust with the human race over its sordid record of stupidity, violence and destruction, I began an essay that I titled, “Homo Sapiens, the Stupidest of the Great Apes.” After a dozen or more failed starts over the years, I found that I was unable to come to a coherent understanding how such a promising evolutionary start for a human race that could develop such beauty and brilliance could yet descend into a continuing state of chronic depravity. Finally, I have come to some possible understanding as to how this could have come about, somewhat alleviating my outrage.
We find ourselves on a miniscule planet in a seemingly infinite universe on which conditions existed that allowed life, living organisms, to develop — liquid water surrounding solid land masses with abundant mineral resources at a proper distance from a star that provided energy. After many millions of years, from the simplest of early life forms, in a process we have come to call evolution, a complex of diversified organisms has come about, eventually including mammals — and us. Absolutely no scientifically verifiable evidence exists regarding any supernatural power playing any part in the above circumstances.
In human evolution, our closest living relatives are chimpanzees. We, as they, are members of a group known today as the Great Apes. A break occurred when our ancestors diverged, becoming bipeds when our former front legs became arms. For the first time, the evolutionary, natural process creating life on Earth chanced to produce a race of creatures eventually equipped both physically and mentally to become a force for change quite apart from the process that had created it. Like our cousins the chimps, we are social creatures, but unfortunately, like our ape ancestors, we are also burdened with a predisposition toward male-oriented dominance, partly owing to size, but with an inadequate counterbalance to male aggressiveness.
Most of humanity’s 200,000 years on the planet were spent in a slow process of expanding over virtually all inhabitable surfaces. Discovering the Promethian gift of fire, humans formed into bands and then tribes, and developed primitive skills for survival. As groups disbursed in relative isolation from one another, they developed unique peculiarities in culture and language. Over time and geographic dispersal, differences and conflicts were inevitable.
For most of humanity’s time, we have been a benign presence in regard to our load on the planet, gradually allowing us to become increasingly competitive as we sought to survive. It was only after the early development of agriculture, likely just 13,000 years ago, that settled populations of humans began to collect. These assemblages of human intellectual interchange accelerated change, innovation and technology. The result gave humans increasing access to the wealth of the planet, expanding competition among our kind for control of space and resources. City states morphed into regional empires, creating what has come to be called “civilization.” As human populations increased and dispersed, differences in culture and languages were inevitable. All this “progress” was marked by a growth in what Robert Burns called “man’s inhumanity to man” — the expansion of interspecies rivalry, warfare, subjugation of women and slavery.
No command from on high was necessary for humans to be fruitful and multiply. Fast forward to 1798, when a numbers guy anonymously published his “Essay on the Principal of Population.” Thomas Malthus predicted that the growth of food production could not indefinitely support the disproportionate birth rate of his fellow humans. His second statement, following in 1803, brought additional credibility to his predictions. While alarming far more people than actually read his writings, the world did not end. All this even before Charles Darwin figured out how we really got here.
I was born barely less than two years before the German invasion of Poland, the start of World War II, and four years and two months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, putting my country into the most murderous war in human history. While the war ended in 1945, we have lived under the threat of nuclear annihilation through the Cold War from two powers with atomic capabilities to eight or more today.
All the while there was more bad news: In 1896, Swedish geophysicist Svante Arrhenius was the first scientist to identify the relationship between the amount of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere and global temperatures, that a rise in the percentage of carbon dioxide would be related to a rise in temperature. Rapid increases in access to and use of fossil fuels in the last 250 years is directly related to human activity. Global warming has led to glacial melting and consequent release of the stored methane present in arctic permafrost, which has now become another major greenhouse gas, promoting rising ocean levels.
Some experts believe that the possibility for collective human action to arrest the mounting catastrophe of global warming must occur this century or the problem will be irreversible. Given the current antagonistic state of human affairs, that possibility seems remote.
The human population, facilitated by technology, ballooned to an estimated 8 billion people in this 21st century! In no way can our planet indefinitely and comfortably support anything remotely close to that load at any level of ongoing sustainability. Thinkers over time have raised concerns only to be blithely ignored, confronted by a general weakness in both human judgment and reflection. Progress, driven unwittingly by intelligence and opportunity, but without the ability to anticipate long term consequences, has led to where we now are.
I have lost my anger. Our plight was inevitable. We are defenseless against ourselves. It is a classic Greek tragedy, played out from its onset 200,000 years back to the present, a situation not destined to end well. Pogo was right, “We have met the enemy and they are us.”
FFRF Member Dan McCollum was one of the children at the heart of the landmark court case, McCollum v. Board of Education, in the 1940s that halted religious indoctrination classes in public schools.
