EXTRA! EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT IT! HUMANS ARE DECLARED TO BE THE MOST UNINTELLIGENT SPECIES!
“In the wake of the 2016 presidential election, humans are no longer considered to be at the top of the pyramid in terms of intellect. As the new President makes his speech on the dangers . . .”
I’m not going to lie. If I was reading a newspaper (yes, there are folks who still read those) and I saw that article, I would totally raise my eyebrows and think, “What idiot wrote this garbage?” Because it’s absolutely, positively, without-a-doubt absurd to believe that humans aren’t the most intelligent species on the planet. We have logic and reason and wisdom, right? We’re smart. That’s what my mother always told me. “You’re smart, Mallory Hope. Don’t you ever doubt that.”
But, let’s be real here, are humans really that intelligent?
According to science, we are intellectually advanced in comparison to dogs, cats, fish, etc. Philosophy claims that because humans have reason, we are automatically superior to other species in terms of intellect. Religion states that we are made in the likeness of God, and I’m preeetttyyyyyy sure that God is really stinkin’ smart.
But if we’re supposed to be so intelligent, why are humans so backwards? Why are we so prone to folly? Why do we say one thing but mean another. Why do we claim to value life, but we go out and we murder. We boast about love but the divorce rate is over fifty percent. We praise God in church on Sunday, but we disregard Him the other six days of the week.
In Great Books, we’ve been reading some of Ficino’s letters. In letters 20 and 21, Ficino writes to two of his buddies about the folly and misery of men. He starts off letter 20 with this: “You have seen painted in my academy a sphere of the world; on one side Democritus laughing, and other other Heraclitus weeping. Why is Democritus laughing? Why does Heraclitus weep? Because the mass of mankind is a monstrous, mad, and miserable animal.”
And Ficino ain’t wrong.
We’re kind of a pathetic bunch, if you think about it. We pray to God for good things, but we never pray to make good use of what He does give us (32). I remember when I was younger that I used to pray to God that He would grant me the ability to sing well because I honestly sound like a dying whale. But I never gave thought to the things that He did bless me with. I always wanted more and more, and that’s true of all of humanity.
One of my favorite lines from letter 20 is this: “What more, my friends? The magistrates forbid murder, and allow instruments for killing men to be made everywhere. They desire an excellent crop of men, yet they do not take sufficient care of the seedling, that is the child” (33). We want so many things in life, but we don’t take the necessary actions to achieve those things. “The man who believes he will find one thing in its opposite is mad and miserable” (34).
It’s like we’re in a constant battle between body and soul, between the sense and reason (Ficino 33). We know that something is wrong. We know that procrastinating writing a paper until the last minute is idiotic. We know that lack of sleep is terrible for the body. But we ignore our reason and screw ourselves in the process. At least I know I do …
“Why is it that we strive to be masters of others, when we are not masters of ourselves? Why in our zeal for mastery do we fall daily into slavery” (34)? Ficino poses these questions in letter 21. We try so hard to put ourselves above each other. We believe that we can control another person when we don’t even have control of ourselves, of our temptations, of our desires. It’s madness, and we don’t even see it.
Humans are pretty dumb, if you think about it. So what do we have to do to save ourselves from sinking deeper and deeper into the lake of folly? Ficino says the answer is this one page 35: “Oh what a miserable creature is man, except he sometime rise up above the man, I mean commit himself to God, and love God for the sake of God and everything else for His sake. That is the sole answer to these problems and the end of all ills.”