Review : Nietzsche The Narwhal

Justin Gregg is cursed with having two first names. This is the only explanation I can come up with for why his book is so damn awful.

If Nietzsche Were A Narwhal sounded like a fun read in the bookshop. Ostensibly trying to contrast the minds of animals and humans, with a mixture of humour and philosophical commentary, it certainly seemed like this would be potentially very much A Book For Me. Flicking through it I was a bit concerned by the apparent lack of description of anything animal-related, but I decided to give it a go on the basis of the cover recommendations, the blurb, and most importantly the cheerfully low price.

"You can read this in one sitting", says one of the review quotes. This much at least is true : it's extremely readable and often genuinely (and deliberately) very amusing. However the review quote continues to say that you'll want to invite Justin over to discuss his "brilliant mind".

Err, no. Like hell. This man needs help, not praise. I'm quite serious : he is so openly hypocritical, so aware that he's taking actions that he knows are morally wrong, so full of self-loathing for the entire human species, that by the end I felt real pity for the poor chap. He needs to see a therapist, pronto. 

I went through quite the little roller-coaster when reading the book, beginning with bemusement at this charming but strange book, moving onto annoyance that it was a rambling and highly unintelligent mess, and ending with actually being genuinely quite worried for the mental health of the author. Oh, I've read many a book I've hated (and this is one of them) but most of the time I'm happy to attribute that to the author being stupid or malevolent, or both. I don't think I can do that in this case, though I'd like to. I really do think he needs help first, chastisement second (though he does also need this, and I'm not going to hold back from calling out the stupid here). Perhaps if he were in a better emotional state he'd be able to formulate more sensible conclusions.

Nothing about this book makes me take it seriously enough to write it up in anything like the level of detail I'd normally aim for. To an extent, I'm not the proper audience for this at all. There's very little here that I hadn't heard a dozen times already : it's all pop psychology and animal behaviour studies that are very interesting when you first hear them, but anything beyond the major headlines was sparse indeed. And I'm trying hard not to judge it on that basis. After all, there's absolutely nothing wrong with learning things for the first time.

(Incidentally, there's very little about animals in this book and next to nothing about Nietzsche. A very large fraction is given over to incidental anecdotes which are described in really excessive narrative detail before he finally draws out the main point he wants to make.)

Far worse, though, is that Gregg's conclusions are superficial in the extreme and rampantly agenda-driven. What that agenda is takes a good long while to become apparent. Much of the book is rambling commentary without apparent direction. But by the end, it's clear. His claim is that humans have an exceptional kind of intelligence among the animal world, but not in a good way : it's exceptional in bestowing us a unique kind of stupidity, one which will doubtless see us wipe ourselves out before too long. We have a special sort of reasoning but we're an absolutely shitty species. Animals are happier than us, have better morality, intelligence is of no value, and we should either just all kill ourselves and be done with it or go back to living in the trees.

It feels like what you'd get if you scraped together the worst bits of Rutger Bregman and Stephen Pinker and melded them into an unholy abomination. It's rife with rotten-cherry-picking. Conclusions are superficial and stated with absolute and unarguable conviction, presenting the most trite and obvious implications as thought they were some sort of revelation. Of alternate hypotheses appear there none. The words, "WANKER !" and "self-righteous arse" feature prominently in my notes, along with "seriously weird man" (that one crops up twice), "polemic", "evo-psych silliness*", "convoluted in the extreme" and "total B.S.".

* For a very good, very through examination of why evolutionary psychology is nothing but pseudoscience, see this video.

I've already set out my own idea about human nature at some length here. In extreme brevity : individuals are driven by some innate tendencies, but societies are shaped largely by culture; thus, some societies are shitty and some are good, with neither reflecting anything much fundamental about us as a species. So I need not spend much time refuting Gregg's central point. The whole thing is very much like Erasmus' Praise of Folly but without any of the irony.

Look, I really hate this book. In fact I despise it; its blend of self-righteous self-loathing is contemptible ("I am more holy than thou because I hate myself more !"). I'm giving it 1/10 for content as its morality is at least well-intentioned; Gregg isn't actually evil, just very, very stupid. But even that isn't his fault. I think he's been broken by doomscrolling, of hearing nothing but warnings of doom day after day after day, to the point where he literally can't function rationally any more. Somewhere inside, I suspect, is a commendably warm-hearted and respectably intelligent individual, but one who's likely been broken – broken good and hard – by an excess of compassion fatigue and the toxicity of perpetual ideological activism. So my final rating is actually going to be 4/10. It's nonsense, but it's readable nonsense, and the poor guy desperately needs a hug.

The Good

Does Gregg have any good points ? Yeah, a few. He gives a couple of good proposed definitions which I think are useful in a largely unqualified sense, with any caveats just being tinkering around the edges. First off, language :

Animal communication involves signals that convey information about a small set of subjects, whereas human language can convey information about any subject at all. There is something limitless about the human mind that allows for a capacity for limitless subject-discussion.

I don't know if animals have language using something equivalent to grammar and syntax. I certainly don't know the range of subjects about which they communicate with each other. But this does feel like a good definition of language as opposed to mere communication, at least.

The second is lying :

A method for intentionally transmitting false information to another creature with the express purpose of making that creature believe something that is not true to manipulate its behaviour. 

Two key points. First is that with lying we want people to actually alter their beliefs, which has long-term consequences that can extend far beyond our short-term goals. Someone who genuinely believes something will, as a rule, continue to act in accordance with that belief so long as they hold it, mitigating factors notwithstanding (as I'll get back to). This is different to deception more broadly. For example, camouflage doesn't change your belief about the world, it instead hides information rather than altering it*. Secondly, as Gregg elaborates, lying involves a knowledge of theory of mind, that we understand how we each reason and alter the information we convey to exploit this.

* Well, sort of. Camouflage seeks to maintain your default false belief that there's nothing there. It doesn't alter your existing state of mind.

As with many of his points, Gregg goes on to shoot himself in the foot. Each time he tries to (quite earnestly) define some potentially unique attribute of human intelligence, he finds at least a few very credible counter-examples, e.g. some animals having excellent evidence for a theory of mind. He tries his best to mitigate them, but there's a much simpler solution to all this : humans are simply not exceptional in any qualitative sense. Granted, not all animals might possess all of the kinds of faculties of reason that we do ("animal" intelligence is anyway just too broad a category for a meaningful comparison; we are animals, after all, so this is not a sensible distinction). But of faculties which are truly uniquely human, there are few if any convincing examples. 

It all seems far easier to me to say that the differences are only quantitative, not qualitative. I think that we can easily describe the differences between human and animal reasoning by quantity alone : we can perhaps think more abstractly, count to greater numbers, anticipate behaviours in more complex situations and with greater speed. After all, quantitative differences can have qualitative effects. Performance capabilities can depend on critical thresholds, as anyone trying to run a computer program which runs extremely fast until it runs out of memory will attest to. There's just no need to posit that human and animal intelligence must be different at some more fundamental level.

This is much like his idea that you can't be more or less conscious : you either are or you aren't. Rubbish ! Someone in a dream is thinking, to be sure, but consciousness here becomes extremely murky. From direct personal experience I can state unequivocally that it absolutely is possible for self-awareness in dreams to lie on a spectrum. That Gregg is aphantasic and objects to being called "less conscious" is a silly argument because this is such a minor difference as to be meaningless : if, on the other hand, you were only ever conscious of, say, tables, we could hardly say that your awareness was the same of everyone else's. The point is that aphantasia has surprisingly limited effects, and that in lacking this part of inner awareness, Gregg is less conscious than everyone else, but not to any degree which anyone should worry about. You don't lose any rights just because you've got no visual imagination, that'd be silly.

The Less Good

He makes two other valuable points but heavily overstates their importance. He tends to do this at lot, as a rule; when something catches his attention, he forgets absolutely everything else (this is a sort of Utopian fallacy in which solving one problem is often claimed to make magical improvements in all aspects of life). He says that we often tend to predict but not feel the future, and it's feelings rather than facts which drive us to act. This is a reasonable point, and may go some way to explaining why we don't always make sensible long-term decisions. But it can hardly be the whole story : sometimes we just don't know the long-term outcomes, sometimes money and corruption are involved, sometimes we do make good decisions. 

Gregg somewhat reminds me of the Pakleds of Star Trek, often heavily overreaching himself. He earnestly wants to be more intelligent than he actually is and wants to be more moral than he's capable of being. It's like he's trapped in an existential moral hell of his own making. For example, I've long been baffled by fans of Greta Thunderbird* but Gregg has me positively worried. Praising this notable weirdo as having some kind of moral superpower because she's scared shitless the whole time ? Fuck off ! This is stupid. It's not healthy to feel things which aren't actually happening to you, at least not constantly – this is incredibly damaging. It's toxicity cloaked as moral righteousness, not real virtue. Yes of course you should worry about the future, and what's happening right now in various parts of the world... but to actually feel it ? To vicariously experience the suffering of the imagined unborn and unknown billions ? That's a good thing, is it ?

* Go on, tell me that isn't a better name.

Ahh, mate, honestly, I feel sorry for you – that's not healthy. Not healthy at all. I just couldn't live like that, I'd go mad. As I rather suspect Gregg already has. Gregg mate, listen up : you don't have to feel the moral pain of the whole world. Not everything is your personal fault. It's okay to enjoy a trip the zoo with your kids in a nice car every once in a while. Nobody expects you to personally and single-handedly solve all the systemic ills of the world, it's okay to slip up from time to time. Not for the first time do I find myself wondering if this kind of attitude is an after-effect of America's Puritan hangover.

The second good-but-overstated point is that we could have made a better world than the one we have. In context, he's talking about how we make truly weird moral choices in which all kinds of incredibly arbitrary situations are deemed immoral despite lack of any direct consequences. This is fair, but honestly, some places are better places than others in which to live. Given the staggering complexity of human reasoning, the miracle is that we've managed to do as well as we have.

The Bad

I'm going to rattle through some of his stupider points very quickly as this post is already longer than I'd like. In brief :

• He dismisses animals as having the same emotional range as humans, saying they can't possibly experience things like nostalgia or ennui without any justification. Exactly how would you judge if a tiger or a buffalo was feeling nostalgic, pray tell ?
• In other moments of Utopian-like myopia, he insists that bed bugs are becoming some kind of indestructible plague that will surely kill us all (or make us all unpleasantly itchy, I guess). This simply isn't a thing. 
• Elsewhere he insists that there must have been a first moment of true death awareness, which would have been so debilitating that the first poor child to truly realise their own mortality would likely have become a useless gibbering wreck. Exactly how this was avoided isn't clearly stated; it seems obvious enough to me that while everyone has preoccupations with death from time to time, hardly anyone suffers from this constantly, and there's no reason to think the first person to experience "death wisdom" would've done so either (if there even was such a singular moment, which I seriously doubt). Other things happen which demand our immediate attention, and our brains simply refuse to stay on any one topic, or experience any one emotion, for any great length of time.
• He insists animals have a simpler and better morality than humans. In the very next chapter, without so much of a hint of self-awareness, he describes how bees commit annual genocide to eliminate their surplus population. This is dangerously close to Bond supervillain territory. SNAP OUT OF IT, GREG ! (This is a great shame too, because a discussion on how animals reinforce / chastise each other's behaviour in the context of morality would have been really interesting ! And much, much worse than I think Gregg's heavily rose-tinted view would ever permit)
• He quotes a study claiming a 9.5% chance of human extinction within a century as not only credible, but treats that 9.5% as though it were closer to 99.5.%. We're doomed. We've created a host of problems we have no idea how to solve, technology always makes things worse... in spite of the fact that we clearly do and it doesn't. Dumbass.
• Radio signals from aliens won't be a sign that they're intelligent, for some reason. FFS. 
• You aren't winning the game of life against Gregg's chickens. They're much happier than you and you should be extremely jealous. Nietzsche, by like token, would have been better off as a narwhal.

The Ugly 

Finally, the hypocrisy. This is where I felt most sorry for Gregg.  He goes off on one about how lawns are destroying the world (they're not) but doesn't bother to, say, buy an electric lawnmower, introduce more wild flowers, or reduce the frequency of mowing. He knows he should be a vegetarian, buy an electric car, and all that stuff, but isn't and doesn't, despite being conscious of the consequences. And this is... weird, where I can only think to advise him to seek help. If you know what you're doing is wrong, but you keep doing it, if you have a daughter and don't want to see her grow up in a world you believe will be so nightmarish but do nothing at all to stop it... what exactly is wrong with you ? Do you not really believe what you profess to believe ? Are you suffering from severe, debilitating compassion fatigue such that you feel incapable of taking any action ?

Before I read the original essay on the Tragedy of the Commons, which is abjectly and shockingly racist, I thought it meant something quite simple. I thought it meant that individuals would tend to act in their own interest without too much concern for the group. Since each single action would have negligible consequence, and since we consider the effects first and foremost as they relate to ourselves immediately, we tend to neglect that collective effects can be huge. We panic-buy toilet paper because we need it, ignoring the fact that if we all acted together we'd all have an ample supply. Or as here, we don't take actions because the difference they make individually is negligible, which ignores the fact that if everyone switched to renewable energy and sustainable farming techniques the overall effect would be huge.

Perhaps Gregg is suffering from this kind of thinking. It feels to me that he's trapped in a paradoxical hell. And I think the only way forward is incremental. You can take action, you don't have to take all possible actions all at once. Start with something simple and build from there : do one thing, make it habit, and then do another thing, and repeat. Remember that there are environmental success stories as well as failures. Otherwise, this perpetual self-loathing is never going to achieve a damn thing except becoming a dangerous self-fulfilling prophecy. 

I know, I know : many people (indeed most) who are putting our dire apocalyptic warnings do so with the best of intentions of encouraging action. But we're way past that point, and into the territory where people like Gregg are so angst-ridden that they just don't bother. Fear is now so rife that it's cowing people into inaction through sheer nihilistic dread, while simultaneously others are steeped in impervious denial. Surely, it's time to dial back the fear (perfectly well-founded though it is) and put our more positive messages instead. We can and must change our ways, but putting us in constant fear for our lives isn't helping. Fear is a powerful short-term motivator, but what climate science tells us is that we have to act on the long-term. And for that, we need not a message of fear, but of hope – even if we have to tell some porkie-pies to get people to act, surely getting them to act, not changing what they believe, is what really matters.