The fault, dear Brutus...

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves” observes Cassius in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and I would add “in our evolution.”
We humans in the course of our evolution acquired a brain that could abstract from its experiences and thereby create the ability to analyze and relate enmities that did not exist to our senses. Initially we did this in religion and worshiped our abstractions. Eventually, with science, we used this capacity to develop a profound prediction-capable use of abstractions, especially in mathematics. While all this was going on in or brains our emotions remained at their pre-intelligent level. Our emotions, e.g. fear, sex, distrust of the unfamiliar, etc., which functioned as our primal instruments of response, e.g. fight or flight, remained the same. We became an organism with a powerful, curious brain which began to develop understandings of the real world and develop a technology to extract from that natural world what we needed and desired. We have evolved so powerful a technology that we can destroy ourselves. We are now an organism that is bifurcated between a highly innovative, powerful, comprehending brain AND an emotional apparatus little different form that of our earliest ancestors. Our emotions, as decision makers, remain as potent as they did in early man. The result is that our brains have produced the capacity to destroy ourselves and our emotions are as capable of doing that as they were when men used spears and swords. I suggest that this fault line between the emotions and the intellect is the fundamental and perhaps irreducible source of our current dilemma. While our political and economic institutions are obviously in need of massive reform the major problem is the fault that lies within us.

Let me cite just a few random evidences of this fundamental human dichotomy by way of indicating its pervasiveness.

• People were appalled by the introduction of the machine gun into World War I. They saw it rightly as the introduction of the factory system into the slaughter of humans.
• We now routinely justify the killing of innocent children as collateral damage. A primary goal of the combatants in World War II was the destruction of human beings in order to weaken the will to fight. Infants and children, not soldiers, became the enemy because the brain’s technology made it possible.
• In the face of declining oil resources the United States produced the largest automobiles in its history, appealing thereby to dominance and safety at the expense of others.
• Amusement constitutes over 30% of the gross domestic product o the Unfired States. Human emotions have become the dominant consideration in promoting human consumption otherwise known as advertisement.
In each of these the brain’s technology produced the products the emotions desired. When our technology, powerful as it is, is placed at the service of our emotions, we know we are in trouble, especially when we are aware of the impending “Perfect Storm” of global warming, peak oil and the tyranny of corporations. Human emotions, which constitute the core of our values and patriotic and religious belief, simply are. They have no mechanism for adjudicating the values of other emotions. It takes the intellect to do that. As such the emotions are essentially arbitrary and they put an immense amount of human energy at the service of such arbitrariness. Additionally, because of this arbitrariness they are largely indifferent to, or even gleeful at, the results of the carnage they produce..
Knowing that emotion was the major decision maker long before we became humans and knowing that our brains are relative newcomers on the evolutionary scene and knowing that our brains are far more powerful in understanding and manipulating the natural world, the promotion of the intellect to the position of primary decider is, in my judgment, the single most important and difficult task we human’s face if we are to survive the ominous complexities of our immediate future.

Robert Newhard