There’s some controversy about whether or not great apes can ask questions. They can certainly ask for food, for example, just as your household pet can ask to go outside. But your household pet can’t learn sign language and have conversations with humans. In particular, gorillas and chimpanzees are not known for asking ‘why’ questions. For example, they don’t ask why a banana is yellow or smells the way it does. They might recognize sadness and make a sign for it, but they won’t ask why you’re sad. And they’re good at learning things, like how to use a stick to gather ants, and they can transmit knowledge this way to create unique cultures within their population. But they don’t seem to inquire about why ants live where they live or if there are better ways to collect them.
Some people say great apes are incapable of asking questions, but many researchers think that’s an overstatement. Either way, this lack of inquisitiveness is a notable feature of how great apes and humans communicate with each other. One theory is that the apes simply don’t think the answers are available. Either they don’t have a conception of some other being having knowledge they don’t possess, or more likely, in my opinion, they don’t expect complex answers because they can’t voice complex speech. In this theory, you can teach them your language, but that doesn’t mean they’ll suddenly expect that language to have the power to answer deep questions. They have evolved to communicate with sounds, gestures and actions, and this is also how they teach each other. It works well enough for their purposes and so they haven’t had enough natural selection pressure to improve their ability to communicate by sign or speech.
By contrast, in humans, the youngest toddlers are wired to ask ‘why’ questions. Most parents eventually are humbled by this. Try concisely explaining why the socket in the wall can make a light turn on. But even among humans, there’s a vast difference between the inquisitive powers of the average person and those of the people who figured out genetics and evolution, calculus and physics, plate tectonics, and climate change. Most humans can only understand these things in the most rudimentary way, as if they were an ape learning the sign for blue eyes or mountain or storm. Other humans can learn all these sciences in perfect detail, but could never have come up with them on their own.
The truth is, we’ve reached the point where humans can launch a probe from Earth and have it slingshot around the moon and land on a dime on Mars. But when I say humans can do this, that doesn’t mean I can do it, or you, or probably anyone you know or have ever known. If you put us in a Time Machine back to the Middle Ages, we wouldn’t be able to tell people how to launch satellites or even gather and forge the materials needed to make bicycles, let alone space probes.
We all carry computer phones, but we could never make one without someone smarter telling us what to do. Our limitations aren’t due just to a disinclination to ask the right questions. We know on some level that we’re not capable of understanding the answers. And, in any case, we don’t need to know why the wall socket can make a light turn on or how to create a computer chip in order to scroll on our phones in a lighted room. It’s a variation of what every parent of almost every math student has heard at some point: “Why do I have to learn this when I’ll never use it in real life?”
So, we happily go about our modern lives with our modern tools and toys with the conceit that we’re part of the club that made these things possible. Generally, though, we’re not. At best, we maybe worked on assembling these toys after being trained by others. Some humans are capable of amazing intellectual accomplishments that lead to astonishing technological developments, but it’s a vanishingly small percentage.
The tiny group of humans that made modern life possible are probably not the best natural leaders. They might not have the best sense of right and wrong. And I would never recommend that we form a society led by scientific and mathematical geniuses. But I do think that natural leaders should employ uncommonly smart people to help them understand things and to assist them in solving problems.
That’s why we should want trained scientists and mathematicians, if not necessarily unique geniuses, to warn us about bad weather and its causes, to study viruses and how they are transmitted, to examine crop yields, to monitor complex financial systems, and all down the line. And when they tell us things, all things being equal we ought to believe them. We shouldn’t resent them because they’re smarter or because we don’t like the implications of what they’re telling us, But, really, we’d prefer simpler explanations that we can understand and explain to our children.
And there’s plenty that the common ordinary human can explain to their children very well. This doesn’t include electricity, the Rocky Mountains, greenhouse gases or how humans and apes diverged genetically, but it does include most of what a person needs to grow, survive and thrive. Regular people are often far better than “intellectuals” at understanding how things work, whether it’s a carburetor or a nail gun. Whether you call this common sense, practical knowledge or something else, it’s important and valuable. And when it comes time to build that space probe, you’re going to want a bunch of people whose main skill is fixing things.
I’m not saying that we should assign different worths to different intellectual capabilities, but we ought to have people in roles where they’re best suited to be productive and make good decisions. We don’t necessarily want an astrophysicist fixing our car and we definitely don’t want a car mechanic doing surgery. We normally know this, but when it comes to politics, it has broken down.
It’s fine to have two political parties battle it out over different values and ideas, but both sides should be roughly equally informed by expert advice. Our state and federal governments should be staffed by people who are exceptionally good at figuring out big, complex problems. We need this for our national defense, obviously, but also for almost everything else. We don’t want to live through global pandemics overseen by bureaucrats who can’t understand the science. We can’t mitigate the effects of global climate change if we don’t have people who understand how it works.
Of late, the problem has been the leaders of the Republican Party simply don’t listen to these experts. Instead, they tell the American people that they shouldn’t be trusted. But the next step, which is now coming, is to start removing these experts’ influence entirely. Party hacks will oversee them and they’ll be fired. Their budgets will be slashed. Their findings will go unpublished.
And this will mean that people who are hardly better prepared than apes will be in charge of public health, of environmental science and protection, of our food supply and developing our weapons systems. They won’t ask questions because they won’t understand the answers, don’t like the answers, and are part of a movement invested in sidelining these kinds of answers.
We can see now that educational attainment is one of the best predictors of partisan preference. The more educated you are, the less likely you are to support the Republicans. This is one of the most unhealthy developments in America’s political culture. And it’s largely explained by failures of the political elite who could have benefitted from some more down home practical knowledge and common sense when making decisions about invading Iraq, permitting credit default swaps, and allowing the monopolization of the American economy. There’s a difference between the elite political class and the elite scientific class that is supposed to underpin their decisions. And if the success of Trumpism is attributable to the failings of the former, the latter are going to be next victims.
We don’t know for sure why apes are disinclined to ask questions, but we can be sure it’s partly because they don’t feel like they need the answers. When humans govern humans under that assumption, the results will be disastrous. We won’t be even be fully human anymore.
