Well Trained

A person commented about a previous blog where I mentioned being spoiled by the high level of education in Huntsville. The person asked me if that was really such a good thing. Good question.

I assume that specialized training has improved the human condition, generally speaking. But am I making an incorrect assumption?

I look at my brain as an example and feel my body for reactions to my well-trained brain. How much of what I am is due to excess education? Is my body in worse shape because of what I've learned?

I don't know. That's all I can say.

The public debate about global warming tells me we humans aren't sure how much education is good for us. We use belief and intuition as substitutes for dry, rational thinking, all of which is based on some type of education, whether institutionalized or self-taught.

I went to lunch with a friend who told me about an ongoing discussion concerning the number of trees in North America. According to his source (a celebrity radio personality, from what I gathered), there are more trees in the United States than there ever have been before. I had not heard about the debate surrounding forestation or deforestation of America. I had certainly read about the deforestation of rain forests and wondered if the radio talk show host was substituting one fact for another, in the appearance of rationality; i.e., a tree planted in the U.S. will offset a tree cut down in the Amazon, and thus make the process carbon-neutral.

I don't have the facts to argue the point about carbon neutrality. Instead, I stood in the forest behind my house yesterday, where all the trees are less than 70 years old, and told myself, "You know, Rick, someone or something has deforested this hill in the past 100 years. In the past 20 or 30 years someone cut down all the large cedar trees and removed the large trunks, leaving the small trunks and limbs behind. I can still see remnants of a forest road where someone used to drive through here, which someone probably used to cut down all or many of the trees. However, the largest trees all show signs of burning. Are they lightning-damaged or did maybe a forest fire wiped out the local ecosystem, instead?" The hill is typical of a lot of North American forests, young yet replenished with new plant and animal growth. Whatever was here before, I don't know and it doesn't matter because we can't go back in time. The same can be said about Central American jungles, the hills of Thailand and even parts of the Amazon.

My research tells me we humans have reshaped the surface of dry land many times over, which coincided with the collapse of local civilizations (pushed over the edge by our resource deplenishment and/or in connection with natural disasters). So now I know I am educated about human history and human trends/tendencies. Does that make my life any better or worse? Depends on how much I want to invest emotions, flooding my bloodstream with hormones and adrenaline, while thinking about current human activity in relation to our ignorance or knowledge of history.

You see, I'm just this hairy bipedal primate sitting here, trained to use a box to perform the equivalent of writing strokes in the sand, wiping ochre on cave walls or making marks in slabs of wet mud. I don't really know anything except what I've been told to know. I have no innate understanding of the universe. I feel the warm sun, smell the scents of spring and hear the sounds of birds. Everything else is just this stuff in my head and/or exhibited by my body. I can't say I even know what's in front of my face because my thought process was set almost before I knew how to think. I look out the window and think "tree, commonly called redbud, classified as Cercis canadensis, sprouting new leaves and seedpods after recently blooming," not "non-threatening, possibly edible or sheltering fellow living thingy." I have no insights. I only have observation and response techniques given to me by fellow humans.

While other fellow primates want to jump up and down, either figuratively or literally, and shout at each other about [changing or not changing] our behaviors because the world [is or is not] becoming uninhabitable due to [our contribution or natural changes] to the world climate, I sit here and wonder why I don't have a good response to some of my tribal mates' invitations to join them in their shouting match. Is it because of my education? Am I lacking some natural emotional attachment to thoughts?

Again, I don't know. I see reports that the Arctic ice cap and mountainous glaciers are melting but I haven't personally observed the melting process. I do see that local weather extremes are setting high and low temperature records. I enjoy biodiversity but never wandered "virgin" land, and probably never will, where humans have made no settlements in either prehistoric or recorded history so does it really matter to me if primeval wetlands are drained and ancient forests cut down for more human expansion?

I am a domesticated animal, trained to put more mental skills to work than physical ones. My mental faculties tell me, when I put rhetoric and entertainment aside, that the Earth is probably getting warmer, regardless of the cause. I have a good chance of living another 40 or 50 years, if I want to consume tiny, expensive, pharmaceutical meals throughout the day as I get older. All that really matters to me is finding a way to live comfortably in that span of time, with whomever I wish to spend that time. If the Earth gets too hot to sustain over seven billion humans and geoengineering doesn't cool the Earth (or causes some other unexpected ill effect), do I care if the human population will double in the next 20 or 30 years to 14 billion anyway and lead to the permanent collapse of the world economy? Not really. Or at least that's what my education has taught me.

You tell me whether being highly educated is a good thing. If you do, maybe I'll learn something. If you don't, maybe I'll finally figure something out for myself.