Far More Clever than Wise 1/5/23
It is pretty clear that our ancient ancestors (4 million years ago) were barely surviving. They were not strong, fast, or agile. They had no claws, horns or teeth as weapons. Apparently, their main survival technique was climbing a tree too small for a predator to follow. The only reason they seemed to have lasted as long as they did was that the demise of the dinosaurs had left a massive hole in the population of predators.
How did they survive at all? They had to make up for their lack of physiological tools with cleverness. They had to experiment a lot and adapt very quickly. The cost of that practice was a high mortality rate. They needed some other advantages to avoid extinction. One was their long development period. Children were around their mothers long enough to learn from them. This was the beginning of traditions: a conscious parallel to the much slower evolution by genetic inheritance. For humanoids, the first mother experience was not optional. If mothers did not raise their children they had no successors and their genes died out. The long development vulnerability of mammals was a powerful gift for survival.
As mothers passed on what they had learned from their mothers and what they had learned for themselves, they lessened the need for cleverness. At this stage, cleverness was an unnecessary risk and those inclined to pursue it did not have a lot of progeny. The longer children were dependent on their mothers, the less they needed to be clever. They needed to be intelligent to learn quickly and they needed to persist in practicing what they learned. At this turning point in human evolution, the balance between innovation and consistency shifted strongly back toward consistency and tendencies to innovate were bred out of our ancestors.
The first mother experience established the behavior of cooperation with their children. In a shift similar to the mother hanging around with her brood rather than laying eggs and leaving, a male who hung around after impregnating a female had a much better chance of having progeny who would live long enough to reproduce and preserve his genes. The experience of cooperating with mother rather than universal competition also opened the way to sustained cooperation between the two adults and the first society was born. The presence of another adult raising the children provided a second source of successful life experiences for the children to adopt. This also improved survivability of genes.
This whole essential process of passing on successful life experience from one generation to the next had a massive impact on survivability. It also fixed attention on past experience. Innovations were rare but could be added to species behavior as individuals learned from observing each other as they had learned from observing their parents. Education was a life long pursuit even then.
Where family traditions were an important guide to family survival, the basic commitment in the Family stage society was from one individual to another. In the Tribe stage, traditions took on a much more central role as member of the tribe identified more with their commitment to traditions than they did to each other as individuals. Commitment became conditional in the Tribe stage while it was unconditional in the Family stage. The balance between the two in the Tribe stage and later was sustained by the family experience in childhood followed by the tribe experience as adults.
By the end of the Tribe stage, survival was no long a preoccupation as the power of coordinated group behavior and the blending of many streams of family traditions forged a society that dominated their environment. The devotion to tradition did limit innovation although it still existed as our ancestors moved from stone to metal tools.
In the Nation stage there was a massive shift away from tradition toward innovation. Without the limits of tradition and the editing of survival, human cleverness burst forth in the spectacle of technology. Apprenticeships served to extend childhood training in duration and specialization. This would later evolve into general education.
With a society building layer upon layer of successful experiments and innovations, the leverage of technology extended human cleverness to a dangerous degree. We are still basically instinctive beings once we scrape off all the rationalizing and posturing. In spite of the ever increasing impact of our activities, we mostly stick to “let's keep going to see how bad it gets.” That instinct supported consistency and survival for our ancient ancestors by limiting innovation. Today, our explosive innovation has few if any limits and the leverages of our technology and our population have taken us into the very real realm where self-extinction is not only possible but probably if we do not take responsibility for the consequences of our actions. We are still acting out our prehistoric patterns of “keep going until it kills us” and “try it to see what happens”. A failure without technology and without a vast population meant that individual would perish along with their genes. Failure to anticipate consequences in our current scale of technology and population can result in the end of civilization, extinction of our species and even the extinction of life on earth.
We have to don the mantle of responsibility, no matter how unfamiliar it is. We have to emerge into adulthood before our random acts of innovation end us all.
Cleverness has to do with innovation. Wisdom has to do with anticipating consequences.
Humanity's cleverness has far outstripped our wisdom. Wisdom is based on past experiences. Our tumult of innovation is constantly taking us into situations that have never been seen before, where consequences are beyond our grasp. Wisdom and intellect were bred out of us during the tradition stages of our social evolution. We can't afford to wait for instincts to evolve. We need use technology to harness innovation. Humans are logical and rational if all else fails. By then it will be too late. Computers are only logical and rational. We have to put major resources and respect into computer simulations while we wait for humanity to become enlightened. We already use computer simulations, with all their limits, to guide us when we accept that guidance. We can evolve computers much, much more quickly than we can evolve humanity.
Rationality and logic are not infallible by any means. Critical failures in the definition, variables and interactions can easily provide unrealistic results. However, we can always modify simulations and run them again without having to shop for a new planet. Strict objective analysis avoids the infinite opportunities for corruption in subjective analysis.
We have to acknowledge that we are all still monkeys wearing clothes so we can protect ourselves from self-inflicted oblivion.