I was having a conversation with a friend once when the subject turned to contemporary politics. My friend was bemoaning the “fact” that “backward-thinking” individuals tend to be against certain egalitarian ideas because they are unintelligent. What stuck out to me most about this claim was not her assertion that certain people are against things like welfare, racial equality, or social justice, but that these people oppose these things because they simply aren’t as smart as you or me.
I think she was wrong, and I believe the flaw in her reasoning was a conflation of intelligence and compassion. The assumptions implicit in her claim were that 1) people who don’t back progressive causes lack compassion and 2) people who lack compassion lack intelligence. I’m going to focus on dissecting the second assumption, because I find it more interesting, and perhaps (unintentionally) more prophetic.
It should go without saying that intelligence and compassion are not mutually exclusive. The late Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was, to put it lightly, a better example of each than you would be likely to run into on the street.
There is, however, a great counterpoint to the idea that intelligence and compassion go hand-in-hand, and it takes the form of World War II. (At least, I assume we’re thinking of the same one.) Needless to say, my use of the term “great” refers strictly to the magnitude of the example, and not to any sort of wonderfulness a madman might ascribe to it. And while it may be cliché to invoke the name of a certain party in discourse, I happen to believe that clichés can be justified. To that end, let me remind you of what the Nazis were, and of what they were not.
The members of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei were not a particularly compassionate bunch – a claim that I hope will go uncontested by anyone who sees the inhumanity (or, perhaps, excessive humanity) of loading entire populations onto trains bound for death camps. But the Nazi higher-ups were not unintelligent. In fact, they were so lacking in unintelligence that the postwar United States casually stole a few of their no doubt culpable scientists, presumably promising to spare them if they pinkie swore not to use their considerable brainpower to kill anyone the US government didn’t tell them to kill.
Was it ethical to grant jobs and citizenship to individuals who wouldn’t have been out of place at Nuremberg? Maybe…if you wanted to get to the moon before the Soviet Union. Now, all of this is merely a roundabout way of saying that the Nazis were racist, anti-Semitic, inhumane bastards of the highest order. But they were racist, anti-Semitic, inhumane bastards who could build rockets and came closer to conquering every country in Europe than any group led by an art school reject had any business being.
The question, then, becomes whether we as a society are leaning more towards compassion or its opposite. I personally believe that we are on a very direct path to an uncompassionate society, even as the breadth of our scientific knowledge grows ever greater, and the call for “social justice” among my generation louder and louder.
I believe this because there exists at the shallow core of my generation’s worldview an untenable contradiction: we reject more and more the idea that there is a transcendent moral order to the universe – that some things are right, and others wrong, some actions good, and others evil – even as we grow angrier and angrier with worldviews and lifestyles we see as beneath us.
Every year we believe less and less in deities and more in more in sciences. We put more and more faith into what we can “prove” and less and less into what we can’t. But the most important questions of our universe – who we are, how we should treat each other, and why – cannot be addressed empirically. Science is very good at showing us what we can do, but it is utterly incapable of showing us what we should do. As we lose faith in the idea that some important truths cannot be proven, or even falsified, we approximate more and more closely the first titular protagonist of popular Adult Swim show Rick and Morty. Someday, we will be a race of perfect genius and perfect sociopathy: capable of great scientific feats, but either discarding the notions of right and wrong (and, indeed, compassion) or considering ourselves above them.
Kind of reminds me of the Nazis.
