PREVIEW of post to full subscribers: If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity

Evolution values love because we value love, even if the universe has no real use for it. “Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil,” wrote Nietzsche.

This is a book about the problem of intelligence, and whether it’s a good or a bad thing.

Substack readers are actively involved in learning and development. They are drawn to in-depth analysis, commentary, and long-form content. They would appreciate the points made by author Justin Gregg.

This is opposed to MAGA readers, who can often follow road signs.

Justin Gregg is a bestselling author, scientist, and performer helping audiences rethink intelligence, empathy, and creativity, who lives in rural Nova Scotia. He studies social cognition in dolphins, which is where the narwhale reference comes in. The absurdity of a narwhal experiencing an existential crisis is the key to understanding everything that is wrong about human thinking.

Gregg takes us back 150 years, when the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche believed that animals stumble through life unaware of what they are doing or why they are doing it. What’s worse, he believed that they lack the intelligence to experience pleasure or suffering as deeply as us humans.

Why should we care and what relevance does this have to our lives?

We are so pressed against the window of our rushing train today that we have lost sight of some things worth living for: speculation about the role and feelings of the animals that share our world is certainly one of them. The thought that their lack of higher intelligence is an advantage, would seem absurd.

But perhaps you own a pet…and you would swear that your cat or dog shares your world in a thinking, empathetic way. I am sure that you have looked into their eyes and wondered WHAT they are thinking.

Justin Gregg goes one step further; he speculates that our much-prized “intelligence” is not as great an asset in life as we might suppose.

To make his case, he enlists the speculations of Nietzsche, because finding meaning in suffering was Nietzsche’s whole shtick. He got pleasure from torturing himself about suffering.

Nietzsche both wished he was as stupid as a cow so he wouldn’t have to contemplate existence, and at the same time pitied cows for being so stupid that they couldn’t contemplate existence.

His mental state – dementia - continued to decline even as his philosophical output skyrocketed. In 1888, Nietzsche rented a small apartment in the middle of Turin from his friend Davide Fino. Despite being in the throes of a mental health crisis, he wrote three books that year. One night, Fino looked through Nietzsche’s keyhole to find the man “shouting. jumping. and dancing around the room. stark naked.”

He was a creative genius. but clearly not a well man.

Perhaps fittingly it was an encounter with a horse that caused Nietzsche to suffer a final mental breakdown from which he never recovered.

When he saw a coachman whipping his horse, overcome, Nietzsche burst into tears, threw his arms around the animal’s neck. and collapsed in the street. Fino. who was working at a nearby newspaper kiosk, found him there and guided him back to his apartment. The poor philosopher remained in a catatonic state for a few days before being whisked off to a mental asylum in Basel. Switzerland. He never again regained his mental faculties.

Was Nietzsche too smart for his own good? If we look at intelligence from an evolutionary perspective, there’s every reason to believe that complex thought, in all its forms throughout the animal kingdom, is often a liability. If there’s one lesson we can learn from the tortured life of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, it’s that thinking too hard about things isn’t necessarily doing anyone any favors.

What if Nietzsche had been a simpler animal incapable of thinking so deeply about the nature of existence. like a narwhal, one of Gregg’s favorite marine mammals? The absurdity of a narwhal experiencing an existential crisis is the key to understanding everything that is wrong about human thinking, and everything that is right about animal thinking. For narwhals to suffer a Nietzsche-like psychotic break, they would need to have a sophisticated level of awareness of their own existence.

BTW, Nietzsche’s sister, Elisabeth. arrived at the asylum to look after him. She was a far-right German nationalist. Elisabeth had great success in portraying her brother as the intellectual forefather of the National Socialist movement. By the time Elisabeth died in 1935. she was so popular with the Nazi regime that even Adolf Hitler attended her funeral.

But Nietzsche despised anti-Semitism and would probably have hated Nazis. He advised people to “eject the anti-Semitic ranters from the country.” He was no fan of violence. He certainly rejected the kind of state-sponsored violence that jingoistic political movements like the Nazis employed. He recognized that humans have the capacity to both rationalize genocide and the technological competence to carry it out.

In this regard. humans are nothing like narwhals. Narwhals do not build gas chambers.

What if we quiet down that voice shouting about the exceptionalism of our species and instead listen to the stories that other species are telling us ?

Supposedly less brainy animals — like cows. horses. and narwhals — then seem like geniuses. The animal kingdom suddenly explodes with beautiful, simple minds that have found elegant solutions to life.

In 2012 the British Sunday newspaper The Observer held a contest between three teams: a group of schoolchildren, three professional investment managers, and a house cat named Orlando.

Orlando “picked” his stocks by dropping a toy mouse onto a grid with numbers corresponding to stocks he could buy. After one year of investing, the kids had lost money, with £4,840 left in their account. The fund managers had £5,176. Orlando beat them all with £5,542.

When it comes to picking winning stocks, it’s all a big crapshoot.

Humans are the “why” specialists. It is one of a handful of cognitive traits that separates our thinking style from other animals. But does asking “why” give us a biological advantage?

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