New book by Justin Gregg, If Nietzsche were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity has reminiscence of Yuval Harari's writings but it looks niche and funny.
Good review here:
“If Nietzsche had been born a narwhal,” Gregg writes, “the world might never have had to endure the horrors of the Second World War or the Holocaust.” Say what? This seems to be a sterling example of what Gregg calls our species-specific penchant for “unexpected ludicrousness.”
Such rhetorical contortions are probably the consequence of what he derides as our obsession with causal inference. Nonhuman animals get by just fine on “learned associations.” They link actions with results, without having to understand why something is happening. Humans, though, are “why specialists.” We need to look for causal connections — leading to some incredible achievements but also to some bizarre practices. Gregg points to the old medieval remedy of rubbing a rooster’s keister on a snakebite wound.
Gregg studies animal behavior and is an expert in dolphin communication. He shows how human cognition is extraordinarily complex, allowing us to paint pictures and write symphonies. We can share ideas with one another so that we don’t have to rely only on gut instinct or direct experience in order to learn.
But this compulsion to learn can be superfluous, he says. We accumulate what the philosopher Ruth Garrett Millikan calls “dead facts” — knowledge about the world that is useless for daily living, like the distance to the moon, or what happened in the latest episode of “Succession.” Our collections of dead facts, Gregg writes, “help us to imagine an infinite number of solutions to whatever problems we encounter — for good or ill.”
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Leave it to a human to ask a question about justice, which has nothing to say about natural selection, or what Gregg calls “the great arbiter of usefulness.” Humans can agitate for change and even revolution because they can imagine a reality that doesn’t exist.
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