Primatologist Jane Goodall once remarked about the human race, “Here we are, arguably the most intelligent being that’s ever walked planet Earth, with this extraordinary brain … and yet we’re destroying the only home we have.”
Meanwhile, an old friend of mine recently asked, “What desperation drove people to vote for a maniac such as (President Donald) Trump?”
Both Goodall and my friend are confounded by the same thing, the unfulfilled expectation of rationality from humankind. How can a species whose intellect has uncovered the most intricate workings of Nature, explored the depths of the cosmos and harnessed the physical universe to serve humanity continue to carelessly careen toward self-destruction?
How can smart beings behave so stupidly?
While the defining attribute of the human species is its magnificent brain, ontogeny does not always repeat phylogeny. Many individual members of the species, maybe even most, are dullards — essentially two-legged herd animals content to follow the beasts in front of them while paying little heed to where that leads.
And, while one needs not have the intellectual horsepower of an Albert Einstein to be a sapient being, intelligence has to be exercised, otherwise there isn’t intelligence. Acquiring knowledge, objective examination, applied logic and prudent skepticism are essential exercises for intelligence.
Blinkered devotion to ideology, while convenient for indolent intellects, is not intelligence. It is prone to garbage-in-garbage-out thinking and avoids the effort of actually exercising the brain above its limbic level.
People motivated by fear and anger are more easily persuaded with bombast, bromides and bunkum. They want relief from their anxiety and remedy for their grievances. All aspiring leaders need do is tell such people what they want to hear. Those who do that most convincingly can often win leadership positions.
Trump was the more skillful snake oil salesman in the 2016 presidential election cycle and so, with the indispensable assistance of the Electoral College, he won.
He recognized and spoke to the desperation of many Americans. That desperation that drove them to vote for him derived from the economic and cultural shifts that over the past several decades have negatively affected or threatened the social and economic status, security and expectations of large segments of American society.
“Make America Great Again” was the perfect, if not an original, campaign slogan to rally those disaffected Americans. It alluded to a mythical past — the “good old days” — when everybody knew their place in society, affluence was broadly attainable and economic disparity was not as glaring.
It was a time when the nation was united in patriotic pride over its ascendance as the world’s most powerful nation, and when all “good Americans” worshiped the same god and dutifully stood for the national anthem. A time when tobacco was not dangerous but marijuana was. A time when environmental pollution was ignored for the sake of economic expansion, marriage was only for heterosexuals and abortions were mostly prohibited.
As they always do, times change — but many minds do not.
To a great extent, the resistance to the realities of change answers my friend’s question about how someone like Trump could be elected president. It was the hope that a Trump presidency would bring back that mythical past — a hope as pathetically improbable as expecting that the Ghost Dance and a White Buffalo would bring back the good old days for the American Indians.
America is now at one of those critical inflection points that punctuates the history of all great nations, when what people believe and who they choose as, or allow to be, leaders determines the arc of history for good or bad.
The conundrum confronting America at this point, and maybe its greatest threat, is the tendency for so many Americans to embrace a simplistic political dichotomy that limits all possibilities and ideas to canned left versus right belief systems and divides them into two mutually antagonistic political tribes.
American politics has degenerated into a pugnacious partisan contest between an increasingly unprincipled, entrenched duopoly less concerned with the nation’s general welfare than with gaining and retaining power for the party and its clients — the various forces of greed and of grievance.
Bitter partisan intransigence had reduced Congress into an ineffectual rabble so focused on denigrating and diminishing the other party that nothing positive gets accomplished. Caught up in its partisan paroxysms, Congress seems unconcerned that it has surrendered much of its constitutional power to the executive branch.
Presidents now increasingly “rule” by fiat. Without the consent of Congress, a president can effectively commit the nation to war, make and break international commitments, invoke trade tariffs, redirect public funds, impose or repeal regulations, and increasingly ignore procedural norms and legal restrictions.
Goodall might well agree that now more than ever in human history we need rational, intelligent, ethical leadership around the world, and especially in America, which despite its current dysfunctional political conditions and tarnished status is still the world’s bell cow.
The globally vital importance of exceptionally virtuous, rational and intelligent American leadership is clearly confirmed by the lack of it in Trump’s peculiar presidency.
Americans not intellectually disabled by partisan politics and ideological idiocy need to step up now and put exceptionally good people in positions of leadership, and restore our fraying constitutional republic.
— Randy Alcorn is a Santa Barbara political observer. Contact him at randyaalcorn@gmail.com, or click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.