Rick's May Tirade
Uniquely Human, Uniquely Clueless
Ask five anthropologists what makes our species unique among the
life-forms that lurk upon this twirling globe, and you'll get at
least five different answers -- possibly as many as eight or nine.
We alone enjoy the faculty of speech, one well-credentialed
scholar will tell you. We're the only tool-makers, another will
insist. We're uniquely capable of exploiting our fellow-creatures.
We're conceptual beings, fond of signs and symbols. We create art
and architecture. We celebrate, we mourn. We mate for the sheer
enjoyment of mating.
I'm not convinced.
I'll grant you that all of the above are human traits (although
the last tool I made personally was a shovel in eighth-grade metal
shop, and only because the teacher forced us). But nobody -- not
even a team of bearded social scientists brandishing Harvard
diplomas -- will persuade me that the aforementioned traits are
EXCLUSIVELY ours.
Speech? Monkeys and hyenas are as glib in their own way as TV
game-show hosts. Several bird species have been known to use
primitive tools, if not a jigsaw or a ball-peen hammer. As for the
rest: cats have been exploiting humans for ages; gorillas appear to
appreciate symbols more than your average high school English
student; chimps, when given the opportunity with a brush, have
proven themselves masters of abstract expressionism; dogs celebrate
and mourn with the best of us; lions mate for hours at a time --
they seem to realize there's more to the game than making babies,
although they haven't gone as far as to enhance their experience
with silk negligees or scented bubble-baths.
If you really want to know what makes our special brand of
primate unique among all the denizens of our planet, pull up a
chair. Here's what I think, and see if you agree: we're the only
creatures capable of bungling our lives.
Humans are the idiot-savants of the animal kingdom. We're born
with astoundingly acute faculties in some areas -- such as the
ability to invent light bulbs or solve quadratic equations -- yet
we're alarmingly clueless about basic issues like finding our way
through life.
Does a porcupine worry about how he comes across to other
porcupines? Do beagles need to attend self-esteem workshops? You'll
never find a rabbit confessing to millions of other rabbits that he
slept with a squirrel. No moose has ever had its navel pierced.
You'll search in vain for the penguin that made a bad career move.
When was the last time a squid lost a fortune in penny stocks or an
armadillo entered a drug rehabilitation clinic?
You have to give them credit: these creatures make us look like
rejects from The Jerry Springer Show. No other species is so gifted
as ours, yet none is so depressingly prone to self-induced failure
and disaster.
Granted, underachievers come in all shapes and sizes -- furry,
feathered, scaled and shelled. But our animal friends usually fail
as a consequence of overmatched genes or bad luck with the local
predators. Aside from the occasional roadkill, the critters don't
bungle their lives the way we do; their defeats aren't
self-orchestrated.
Take walruses. While the bulkiest male invariably wins himself a
harem of walrettes, the also-rans have to eke out a hardscrabble
existence on cold northern seascapes. But at least they can't be
accused of making foolish choices; they had their turn in the arena,
and they simply couldn't unseat the champ. They don't waste the rest
of their lives in futile fantasizing. (Oh, for just five minutes
with that babe on the ledge over there -- would you look at those
flippers!) They either try again later or learn to accept their lot.
Pigs can't help their predicament, either; given the fact that
they're destined to become future wieners and cold cuts, they
comport themselves admirably. They spend their allotted spans
rolling in mud, devouring their smorgasbords of garbage and napping
in the dappled sunlight. Did you ever notice the contented smiles on
their meaty faces?
Even a barnacle makes the right choices. It attaches itself
securely to the hull of a ship or the bottom of a wharf, where it
can peacefully gobble plankton well into its retirement years.
To bungle is uniquely human. Because we're born helpless and
ignorant, we're forced to spend an inordinate percentage of our
formative years filling our empty heads with knowledge. But what
kind of knowledge do we fill them with? How to survive long bleak
periods of loneliness and desperation? How to avoid the pitfalls of
pleasing others? How to snatch a modicum of happiness from a life of
drudgery?
No, our heads are crammed full of logarithms and French verb
conjugations. Not that there would be anything wrong with that -- if
only our teachers also taught us how to LIVE. We have to find out
for ourselves, and invariably we make choices that impair us for
life, like deciding to major in history.
When was the last time a duck ever did anything that foolish?
Here's the complete archive of Rick Bayan's immortal tirades for your reading pleasure:
December 2002 — Hello, I Must Be Going
November 2002 — A Raving Moderate
August 2002 — Is Western Civilization Worth Saving?
July 2002 — To Scam or Be Scammed
June 2002 — I Read the News Today, Oh Boy
May 2002 — Speechophobia
April 2002 — Fanatics on Parade
March 2002 — The Prestige Gap: A Lament
February 2002 — On Becoming a Dullard
January 2002 — Art for Slackers
December 2001 — An Unsolicited Christmas Card
November 2001 — A Tale of Two Tribes
October 2001 — On the Fallen Towers
August 2001 — Why Do We Bother?
June 2001 — Notes from a Doomed Planet
May 2001 — The Museum of Discarded Names
April 2001 — Indecision
March 2001 — A Slight Case of Insanity
February 2001 — Letter to a Conscientious Critic
January 2001 — The Cynic's Inaugural Address
December 2000 — The 50th Tirade
November 2000 — Travel Advisory
October 2000 — Beyond Work
September 2000 — More Work
August 2000 — Work
July 2000 — The Doves' Nest
June 2000 — Great Affectations
May 2000 — Tale of a Virtual Village
April 2000 — The World Is My Obstacle Course
March 2000 — A Living Heck
February 2000 — On the Treachery
of Time
January 2000 — A Letter to the
Future
December 99 — Rare Bird
November 99 — Not Just Another
Obscure Ethnic Group
October 99 — Extinction Reconsidered
September 99 — Good Life, Bad
Life, Better Life
August 99 — Household Relics:
An Elegy
July 99 — A Meditation on Profanity
June 99 — In Praise of Sloth
May 99 — A Bug's Death
April 99 — Obligations!
March 99 — The Courage to Be Ordinary
February 99 — A Grave Story
January 99 — What's Left for
Men?
December 98 — On the Uses of
Friends
November 98 — A Cynic's Thanksgiving
October 98 — Grand Illusions
September 98 — Filth
August 98 — Will the Real God
Please Stand Up?
July 98 — Adventures in Downsizing
June 98 — Lady Longevity
May 98 — Uniquely Human, Uniquely
Clueless
April 98 — The Mathematics of Excess
March 98 — Humbuggery
February 98 — Love and the Single
Cynic
January 98 — By the Sweat of
Your Brow
December 97 — Is Suffering Unfashionable?
November 97 — The Tao of Housekeeping
October 97 — The Sensory Deprivation
Blues
September 97 — Down with Natural
Selection!
August 97 — Noise
July 97 — On Eating Our Fellow Creatures
June 97 — Trouble in Book-Land
May 97 — Interview with an Unemployable
Man
April 97 — The Cynic's Dream
March 97 — Inequalities
February 97 — Flesh and Mortality
January 97 — How to Be a Success
December 96 — Why I Can't Hate
Christmas
November 96 — How I Became a Cynic
