Nascent Wisdom—Part 2

One more example of emergent intelligence in social insects is the honeybee. Although any single bee is pretty simple-minded, the colony is very smart in finding food sources, looking for a new home, or dividing up the colony to follow a new queen. The key to bees’ smartness appears to be how they resolve differences of “opinion.” Bees have an intelligent way of sorting through the conflicting ideas and finding the wisest solution for the hive. They do this by entertaining a diverse set of views (no secretive, smoke-filled, back-room cliques allowed), giving equal voice to all alternatives, and efficiently narrowing down the options.

There’s yet another social animal that has demonstrated its intelligence when gathered in large groups: Homo sapiens. That statement may appear to violate the experience of many of us: people in crowds do pretty stupid things, but wait a minute. Yes, human group-think has often been very dumb and caused incredible harm, but there’s another side to the story. James Surowiecki (an insightful financial columnist for the New Yorker) wrote a book, The Wisdom of Crowds. What he showed is that a human crowd—when they followed a bee-like process—will make choices that are far more intelligent than any one person could make; even the most experienced and brightest expert among them. People can ferret out solutions to tough problems, if they do like the bees: seek diverse opinions (avoid closed-minded in-group mentality, like in the Bush administration did), act in a decentralized manner (no dictators or bosses), and employ a fair and balanced decision-making process.

Maybe what gets in the way of our acting more intelligently is that we humans tend to think too much. Our big brain can get in the way. Rather than instinctively interact democratically with each other, we double-think the process and allow a few individuals to sway us with their oratory, charisma, and power. We hand off our autonomy to the expert or to the big man. We abdicate our responsibility to participate in a democratic process, allowing specialists to take over, or let the bully dominate. We permit somebody else to do the job for us.

So we so-called highly-conscious humans can take some counsel from our “stupid,” simple-minded fellow creatures. Let’s follow their lead: Cooperate with each other and act smart. Our decisions can be unwholesome when we (1) abdicate authority to the experts, (2) we choose hierarchy over equality, (3) we follow ingrown group-think ideology, or (4) when we refuse to cooperate with one another. In fact, that kind of stupidity is fouling our earthly nest, rather than sustaining it.