The intellectual leap wasn’t seamless. People stopped having the instinct for water, sleep, and even sex after a while. Today, we have to learn instincts all anew. Nurture overcame nature. Maturity nowadays takes a lot of teaching and even conditioning at the beginning, till we adapt to our physical condition. In a sense, we’re not born anymore, but simply trapped in a physical container for a lifespan. Our minds want to grow out of our bodies, but they can’t, since our physicality lags behind our spirituality.
This phenomenon is evident from the origin of our species. We, humans, are unique in our helplessness at the moment of birth. It takes a human at least eighteen years to develop all their cognitive abilities in your time, while it takes us at least thirty years in our era. If this is any consolation to you: we’re weaker and dumber than you at birth, in the evolutive sense. Our generation couldn’t survive your era, the same as yours would be totally unadapted to ours and would suffer a lot, as you saw in the case of Valentin. Your kids seek food and empathy from others, which implies shelter. They would cry when they are hungry and smile in front of someone familiar. Our kids don’t have those instincts. They’re basically self-absorbed creatures, which don’t encourage our sympathy at all. Were it not for our intellects, which order us to take care of our egotistic children for the betterment of society, parenthood would not be taken upon by any person in our era. Our kids would be classified as autistic, according to your current definition. That actually means we would be classified as autistic too, since this is a condition, not an illness that can be cured. We just think of ourselves as more intellectual, and less emotional than you. Of course there are conditions in human character: Some people are smarter than others, some are of female of male persuasion. What I mean to say is that character is a spectrum, so we avoid talking about conditions, except for cases in which there is a danger to the status quo of society, such as the case of regression. Even the so-called sociopaths from your era were nothing more than humans without the moral instinct. Today, we know better than trusting our instincts to dictate our morality. If you analyzed our cognitive development, specially in the childhood period, you’d find out that our character is even more drastic that that of a sociopath. We’re born nihilists with no moral assumptions, and we are guided by ethical rules which we embrace through reason. Mind you, we live in a fully liberal society, as you might have learned before. We could freely choose to embrace, let’s say, your moral values, and we’d still live a fully free life, only deprived of some privileges, and this not as a chastisement but as a mere preventive measure, to avoid the disruption of the status quo.
Chaos is good for art but very pernicious to society, so we minimize it by isolating it. That’s why most of good artist live a sequestered life or are even at the margin of the law. They chose to pay fines or even resign from some of the privileges of the laymen to enjoy the pleasure of inspiration and creation. Some of them consume restricted substances or explore unethical behavior to stare into the abysses of humanity. They simply lose some prerogatives, just like a snake sheds its skin because it has outgrown it. There’s no end to the marvels our brains and yours can apprehend and recreate. We use the same tools, only that you’re still blundering with yours while we’ve achieved some craftsmanship which has allowed us to shape the world to our benefit, but furthermore, to observe in owe and respect the infinite potential of nature.
***
One Comment