On Instinct and Intelligence

Today I went hiking. About halfway up the trail I had a moment. It happens a lot when I hike. I turn my head and see something out of the corner of my eye—a swathe of snow dotted by small yellow leaves, for example. And when I stop for a closer look, it hits me. I wouldn’t describe these moments as happy, though I certainly feel a sense of elation when they happen, and I wouldn’t describe them as sad, either, though “lacking sadness” is just as inaccurate. Neither do I feel any fear at these moments, yet my mortality is in the fullest sense palpable. No doubt I’m talking about experiences of a spiritual nature, but I’m not going to assign that label without first divesting the word spiritual of all its New Age and religious connotations.

In the Western World when we say something is spiritual we mean that it’s transcendent—in other words, that it’s divorced from nature and from the body. This isn’t what I’m talking about. And I’m not talking about the New Age sense of being at one with the universe, either. When, and if, I use the word spiritual, I mean that I feel the full weight of existence. I feel empty yet full of longing, alone yet surrounded by company, sensual yet free of desire. There isn’t any transcendence and there isn’t any joining—just the intensity and grace of being alive at that moment. What’s more, these moments are accessible at any time. That’s something I’ve come to realize. The reason they’re accessible is that there’s nothing transcendent about them at all. They’re natural. They only seem resplendent and unfamiliar because our current way of life forbids us from indulging in them.

In fact, I’m sure this is why the word spiritual has the connotations that it does. By calling something spiritual we essentially define it as an abstraction. In retrospect the experience is co-opted as a gift from God or from his angels and made to seem supernatural. Spirituality then becomes a euphemism to cover up a basic truth about ourselves—that we’re animals. We haven’t been trained in this culture to deal with the natural world and so we’re afraid of it. Consequently, the epiphanies we might have while hiking are either labeled and explained away as transcendent religious phenomena or avoided altogether. I think Freud was onto something when he talked about artistic sublimation, only I don’t think it explains artistic fecundity, I think it explains religious ecstasy. Because natural feeling has been made practically taboo in today’s world, we project it onto the other. We make it socially acceptable, that is, by relating it to an accepted religious or new age concept. We turn nature into culture. In turn, the experience is murdered, thus the violence civilization does to the environment is also done to ourselves and our experiences.

Consider the smugness with which people proclaim our superiority over the animals. The assumption is that our superiority has already been proven, so it hardly needs stating (just as the supremacy of whites over blacks and men over women was once proven). Anyone who challenges that assumption must have a few screws loose and hasn’t yet learned the proper uses of rational thought. After all, we are the top predators—at the top of the food chain. What is there to argue? But in the animal kingdom hierarchies aren’t as clear cut as we’d like them to be. In a symbiotic world made of finite resources it doesn’t make sense to talk about who is and who isn’t the top dog. Competition doesn’t drive evolution, adaptation and cooperation does (I’ll leave it to John Livingston and K.C. Cole to make my point on that matter). Conquest might help you to survive, at least in the short term, but it won’t make you any happier. It’s like a marriage: if you deliberately deny your partner’s happiness then you’ll deny your own happiness as well, provided you stay together and can’t seek fulfillment elsewhere. No matter how dutifully your physical and material needs are tended to, if your partner is reduced to a slave, he/she won’t be able to give you what you really want—a creative and genuine and stimulating relationship. If our only concern is to subdue and control the outer world, then we won’t have genuinely ‘spiritual’ moments within that relationship. Life will be dull. And unfortunately (for the environment, that is), in our relationship with nature, divorce isn’t an option. And neither is murder, though that seems to be the course we’ve chosen.

But of course human beings are smarter than the rest of the animal kingdom, right? And again, this goes without saying. There isn’t any reason to question it. But what evidence is there that instinct is inferior to conscious thought? And that’s what we mean when we say that we’re smarter; we mean that we’re more conscious—that we consciously regulate more of our natural functions than the other animals do. Not only that, but we have more conscious control of the natural world in general. Consequently, we’re better problem solvers. And we have more power. The last point, I readily admit to. But to say that we’re smarter because we’re more conscious doesn’t make much sense to me. Our instincts perform almost flawlessly when not interfered with. In sports we train to let our instincts take over—to “let our bodies do what they know how to do”. And more than that, natural instincts don’t deter the functioning of the rest of the environment the way our conscious minds can. When the instincts of the Salmon compel it to swim upstream to spawn, it not only benefits the Salmon species, it benefits an entire ecosystem—from the predatory mammals and the aquatic invertebrates and fish who feed on the Salmon to the fauna that benefits from the marine nutrients pushed upstream by the Salmon migration. It would take an awfully clever person to figure out how to provide all that benefit through conscious processes. So why waste the effort? Isn’t the ‘smart’ choice to defer to our instincts? If power increased our chances at survival then it might make sense to take conscious control of our environment, but power doesn’t mean anything in a mutually beneficial relationship. If deer could learn to overcome their predators, it might make them more secure and more powerful, but it would also lead to their extinction. Predictably, the herd would outgrow its food source—get older, more disease-ridden, more feeble—and they, along with their predators, would eventually die off. Isn’t that the fate of our own species if we continue with our current consumption-based way of life?

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Anyone who chooses to can learn how to regulate her heartbeat, and there are times when you might want to—if you’re in a pressurized athletic competition, for example (i.e. an artificial environment). But would you want to take full conscious control of your heartbeat twenty four/seven? Or how about your breathing? It seems to me that instinct does a pretty good job of handling those functions, and by allowing my instincts to do their jobs I become more liberated. If I had to focus on maintaining my breath and heartbeat, I wouldn’t have much time for anything else. Life wouldn’t be very interesting, either—maybe even less interesting than a life spent in pursuit of money and fame and conquest. And if you value freedom and diverse experience, why would you, if you’re so God damn smart, decide to give it up to become more ‘conscious’? Why would you give up a hunter/gatherer lifestyle in which you could meet all your basic needs with less than four hours of work per day for a lifestyle of forty plus hour work weeks and endless commutes and less healthy diets? Is it a sign of intelligence that we deliberately make our lives more dull and stressful?

Whenever I bring this up to a civilization apologist, I inevitably hear about the satisfactions of hard work (the Work Ethic) and how boring life would be if we just sat around wildling arrowheads all day. And they’re right. Domesticated people like us would get bored. But we’re bored because we’re not very good company. It’s like I tell my writing students when they complain that writing is a boring subject: Writing isn’t boring. YOU ARE! If writing is simply a recording of your own thoughts, then being bored by writing must mean you don’t have any interest in your mind’s own processes. You might have a boring teacher, a boring instruction book, or a boring topic, but writing isn’t boring—not unless the writer makes it so. In spite of our TVs and our sporting contests, our excessive work habits and constant barrage of stimuli, we can’t escape our boredom. That’s not because life is boring, it’s because we’re boring. We’re boring because we’re disconnected from real experience, real emotion, and real relationships. We’re bored because we can’t revert to our instincts, because in the artificial world we’ve created for ourselves our instincts won’t work. We’re bored because even when we have real experiences we have to domesticate them. We have to label them as abstractions and as otherworldly; that way, our true wild selves won’t run us over and exile us from society. To preserve our society we have to kill our natural selves and the rest of the natural world with us. Otherwise, we risk becoming alienated from our incredibly intelligent and civilized human companions. But we can’t maintain human companionship while destroying the natural environment which makes association possible in the first place. In other words, we can’t deny our animal nature and preserve humanity. If we’re serious about connecting to our fellow human beings, then isn’t it also time we got serious about questioning, and maybe even giving up, some of our precious human intelligence?


"Incapable of enjoying the moment, the male needs something to look forward to, and money provides him with an eternal, never-ending goal: Just think of what you could do with 80 trillion dollars -- invest it! And in three years time you'd have 300 trillion dollars!!!"- Valerie Solanas

"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words."- Philip K. Dick