He was previously editor in chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist. But they just gaze at each other in silence, unable to answer that question: What a piece of work is man.Īndreas Kluth is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. So I sit and look at them, the poet and the slabs, the light and the dark, the apex and the nadir. There are plenty of places to sit - benches on the park side, the concrete blocks on the other. This is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Directly across the street, 2,711 slabs of concrete stretch over an area that also covers the remains of Hitler's bunker. On one edge of it stands a monument to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, one of the most enlightened minds in the history of Germany and the world. In central Berlin, near our office, there's a park. But let me tell you where I sometimes go to reflect on all this. So should I sing a paean to humanity, or a dirge? I never know. In a nutshell, it comes down to a cocktail of egocentrism, narcissism and arrogance that overpowers everything else - or what the ancient Greeks called hubris. Even science has explored why and how smart people can be so foolish. Iyengar, a yogi, once said that intelligence, like money, is a good servant but a bad master. One day, we may become the only creatures simultaneously foolish enough to destroy our own planet and genius enough to colonize another. We capture the energy of photosynthesis that was buried millions of years ago in the fossils under our feet - and forget that we're thereby polluting our home. We figure out that E=mc2, then spend the rest of eternity trying to find ways not to blow ourselves up with that knowledge. We develop antibiotics that kill the bacteria that harm us - and then overdo it so much that we breed even stronger microbes that will one day be our nemesis. We are a species that contrives the most sophisticated logistics and supply chains conceivable - and then uses them to literally sell bottled farts. How else could Thomas Jefferson have written that all men are created equal - and endowed with the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness - even as one of his slaves, Robert Hemings, was tending to his every need. Scott Fitzgerald put it, to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. Perhaps that's what ultimately defines our species - neither wisdom nor folly, but the ability, as F. Simultaneously, the followers of QAnon are spreading drivel about Bill Gates wanting to inject us all with microchips. Heroes like Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci, the founders of BioNTech SE, are giving us mRNA vaccines to fight the pandemic. Simultaneously, the likes of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Joseph Stalin had their thugs roaming the streets like hounds of hell.Īnother couple of centuries back, Isaac Newton was disseminating his insights into the workings of our world just as the good Puritans of Salem were hanging 14 women and five men for witchcraft. Almost a century ago, Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr were also debating the unimaginably vast (general relativity) and the unfathomably small (quantum mechanics), and also glimpsing divinity as today's scientists now do at CERN or NASA. That's just the way it always has been and will be, you say. It's wit without humanity - and becomes the accomplice of evil. He's wielding it to keep them down, and to turn neighboring countries into failed states, lest their prosperity and freedom should ever inspire Russians to demand the same. But he's using this might not to make his country and its people thrive. He's a KGB-trained master at manipulating other people and messing with their minds in order to gain and keep power. There's no question people like Putin are intelligent. But I could name others, now and in the past. I'm thinking of Russian President Vladimir Putin, of course, as he menaces Ukraine. Even as some people devote their ingenuity to fathoming the universe, others are deploying theirs to oppress their compatriots and threaten other nations with war, death and suffering. A better name for us would be homo stultum, foolish man. It's that we do have reason, faculty, even hints of divinity - and yet no wisdom to speak of. No, it's not just, as Hamlet realized, that this amazing piece of work - humankind - amounts to a quintessence of dust. And now our exaltation screeches to a halt.
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