Conversation On The Claim Of Superior Intelligence
By Basil Fernando -January 22, 2014
Basil Fernando
Today, I would like to discuss a few more matters with you, matters that we cannot any longer discuss amongst human beings. As you may know, we human beings claim that we are a superior species to yours, as well as to many other species; in fact, to all other species. The reason we give is that we have a superior intelligence. This claim of superior intelligence is taken for granted as an absolutely right assertion. However, I want to illustrate to you why this is not such an easily acceptable proposition.
The same capacity for intelligence is often used to develop notions which are absolutely silly, and we have throughout our history acted on many things in very many silly ways. We have acted with so much silliness that we have been damaging our own species as a whole and of course, in many instances, many specific individuals from our species have been brought to destruction due to our own silliness.
We have also shown the capacity to turn even the better achievements of our intelligence to silly uses. The method we have often resorted to is to make a pretext of using a good idea and then developing many silly ideas out of it, and then, for all practical purposes, acting on the basis of the silly ideas, virtually ignoring their better origins.
Since I am talking about something that you may find confounding, I can try to illustrate it with a few examples. Let me begin with an example close to home, from Asia itself.
We know that India developed an early civilization, known as the Harappan civilization. Historians have more or less agreed that this existed from around 2500 B.C. to about 1700 B.C. Following this period there emerged another civilization, usually called the Vedic civilization. Many written texts were developed there and those writings gave rise to various stories, poems, hymns and the like. That was the great aspect of that civilization, developing our use of our faculties of intelligence.
But what did we do with it? Very soon we used these great achievements to create extraordinarily silly and damaging ideas, one of which was the caste system of India, which has done so much damage to everybody living in India, particularly to those who became the dominated people or the people who were brought to submission. Those people were called the low caste, and later that developed into outcastes, also called Untouchables.
Later periods, nearing the 20th century, brought movements and struggles by these people, and now these people call themselves Dalits – people who are fighting against oppression.
