I am a Homo sapien and a cynic by nature. I can no more change one than the other. And while there is nothing mutually inclusive about this pairing, the latter is meaningless without the former. Regardless (or because), I find lowering the bar on my fellow sapiens cathartic. It is also less disappointing.
Ninety-nine percent of our evolution as a social species has taken place in the absence of language. If there was any abstract thinking going on in the early days, besides what was necessary to survive from sunrise to sunset, there was no way to be nauseating about it or to contradict someone else’s abstract thoughts. Basically, there was no way to really piss anyone off. All we had to do to coexist peacefully was keep our mitts off the other guy’s significant other(s).
It was only when our pet abstractions found a voice that all the trouble with our fellow sapiens started. It must have been about this time that the heretofore-latent genes for cynicism were recognized for their survival value by the “genius” of natural selection. This is how I came to be.
The lesson to be learned from a backward glance at our evolutionary descent from pre-lingual to post-loquacious is that when we open our mouths we cease to be truly social animals and cynicism begins its inexorable creep.
Consider wolves, another social animal. They communicate with each other about food and danger and hunting and sex. And certainly there is a bit of jockeying for positions of power within the pack. But they are incapable of muddling things up by communicating more than is absolutely necessary to maintain the cohesion and survival of the pack or a position in it. They can’t, for instance, gloat if they happen to be the alpha male or female. They just are, end of story. Likewise, they can’t harangue or proselytize or lie or bore. This inability leaves any social animal feeling well disposed toward its neighbor. Cynicism has no survival value in such a congenial atmosphere.
Why then do we Homo sapiens—busting at the corpus callosum with all sorts of abstractions—open our mouths, knowing darn well it will automatically alienate at least fifty percent of our species? Why . . . because we can, and because we can’t stop ourselves. Because we think the edification of our species hinges on the latest blast from the bullhorn-of-a-gob-hole under our nose.
Religion . . . blah, blah, blah! Politics . . . blah, blah, blah! We are always one wrong abstract thought too late in shutting up. Without fail, our coreligionists or our political pals feel the needle of the one unorthodox abstraction in an otherwise flawless soliloquy. Predictably, they will feel ever so slightly less social toward us. Imagine the antisocial feeling if our audience didn’t particularly like us to begin with.
There is an inverse bell-curve relationship between success as a social animal and yammering and cynicism . . . yammering up, social value down, cynicism up. Is it any wonder, then, that natural selection was so hesitant in committing Homo sapiens to the big brain, language thing? It was an evolutionary experiment in creating the ultimate social creature that has, for the most part, failed. Even money says the last-minute language mutation makes dinosaurs out of us all.
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