This Intelligence Thing

"This intelligence thing might not work out, you know." The book group I was saying this to must have assumed I meant the silly attempt of the current government to blame the WMD issue on "bad intelligence." But by intelligence I meant the self-aware brain functions we pretentiously call intelligence. After all, I observed, intelligence hasn't existed on this planet for all that long. Everyone just assumes that we humans are the "intelligent" species (an arguable assumption, I know, but you know what I mean), but there are plenty of species that have been getting along perfectly well without this dubious gift of intelligence. And they've been at it for a much longer time than us. They could do so even if we use our cleverness to make nuclear devices and wipe ourselves out. Species so simple they could survive a nuclear winter. Like cockroaches, for instance.

One of the points I made was that, if you looked at the age of the universe as one year (with the big bang on January 1 and the present as midnight on New Year's Eve, as Carl Sagan did, see the link above), then the dinosaurs get a week and human history gets about 5 minutes. Arguably, those pea-sized dinosaur brains may have done better by their host species than all our grey matter is doing for us.

These observations were greeted with admirable tolerance, and normal conversation soon resumed.

I'm back!

When I need a break from my regular work, I find myself checking here to see if these Blogger people have deleted this blog for inactivity. They haven't, so I'm making an entry for no good reason.

Pragmatic Progressive

While I like to consider my personal values to be primarily independent of politics, I sometimes identify with the values of compassion, equality, and idealism that I think of as civilized but others may dismiss as "Liberal". After all, the real dangers of such an identity are evident in the more common adjectives that often accompany that word. Adjectives like "fuzzy-thinking" or "unrealistic".

It is my hope that the phrase "pragmatic progressive" will remind me to hold on to the idealism and compassion implied by the "progressive" label, but be willing to examine things like unintended consequences (thus the "pragmatic" modifier).

Another phrase that sounded nice, at first, was "compassionate conservative". I suspect the idea behind that coinage was to combat the reservation most Americans still had about conservatives: the image of the corrupt, insensitive, selfish establishment figure who ruthlessly exploits whatever resources are available for personal gain. That moniker has served its purpose, that is to say that some folk were willing to believe that a political figure could be both compassionate and conservative. But the people aspiring to that moniker, by their seeming insistence on being corrupt, insensitive, selfish establishment types, have devalued it and put it in danger of becoming a symbol of hypocrisy.

Actually, most Americans could be considered "pragmatic progressives". I think that's what I'll try to be.