VIEWING WHAT PASSES FOR “GREAT” ART RECENTLY, I was reminded of Sturgeon’s Law: “90 percent of everything is crap.”    This got me thinking about another pet theory of mine:

90 percent of the human race is non-sapient.

Sapience is more than just self-awareness.  Chimpanzees are self-aware.  Sapience has to do with rationality and deep introspection.  It has to do with flashes of creative insight that allows one to make deeper sense of reality.

Now, nearly everyone has a flash of insight now and again, some paradigm shift that changes the way he or she looks at the world.  Some folks have these flashes of insight on a fairly regular basis.  However, only a small fraction of the population is continuously “turned on” in the insight department.  These are the truly creative folks who churn out the books, artwork, and inventions the rest of us use (the non-creative masses also turn out these items; see my reference to Sturgeon’s Law, above); found innovative companies; or become world leaders.

Sapience is not something most people come by naturally.  It is a learned skill, just as reading and writing are learned skills.  It used to be taught in school, usually as a byproduct of other subjects such as geometry or world literature.  Nowadays government schools turn out people barely able to function in a technological society, let alone able to ponder the deeper nature of things.

It is easy to just cruise along on autopilot, subconsciously processing various sensory stimuli and making superficial choices.  And honestly, that’s really all a person needs to get by on a day-to-day basis.  I should know.  I find myself doing it more often than not.  But all critters pretty much manage to get by on a day-to-day basis, and that makes your average person not much more special than a clever animal.

Sapience requires effort.  It requires that you take a problem apart and consider it in light of all available information.  It requires you to consider the consequences, both long- and short-term of any actions required to solve it.  It often requires a spark of creativity in the solution, and more often in the framing of the problem — if you can’t ask the question correctly, you’ll never get the correct answer.

For some reason all this effort is beyond most people — and they’re not even aware of it.  Politicians love a non-sapient public.  It is far easier to control folks who can’t think for themselves than it is to control folks who will question your every move.  Religious leaders also love a non-sapient public.  Having folks question the basis for certain dogma might cut into an otherwise profitable revenue stream.

No one likes to be thought of as merely a clever beast, however, even those for whom the label is most appropriate.

For instance, our anti-science friends claim to approach such topics as evolution from a thoughtful position.   However their resorting to the same tired, mindless pabulum that has been refuted a thousand times in a thousand discussion fora belies their claims. 

It is an effort to wade through the literally millions of pages of research from the past 150 years that have formed the basis of the modern theory of evolution.  It is even too much effort to peruse a few dozen journal articles specifically written for the layman on the subject (besides, they just know those journals are written by commies).  It is far easier to go to a creationist web page and copy the canned arguments found therein and regurgitate them later in a debate, completely unaware those arguments had been addressed years or even decades before.

It’s just too much mental effort to take a few minutes out and Google the claim about to be made to determine just what science has to say about it (and, for the really brave of heart, there is Scholar Google…).  Heck, TalkOrigins is a great resource in that they reference everything they publish so the truly curious can then use Scholar Google to double check.

But just having the facts in hand does not make one sapient.  It is in the mental arrangement of those facts in relation to myriads of other facts that requires effort — it is in seeing the forest for the trees, and understanding both that one achieves sapience. 

But then, that’s just too much effort…