Why "rationality" doesn't work

Excerpted from Transcompetition, by Harvey Robbins & Michael Finley, McGraw-Hill/Business Week Books, 1998

(c) by Harvey Robbins & Michael Finley

The myth most people subscribe to is that early man was an unspeakable brute, an Alley Oopish warrior who killed for pleasure, ate the hearts of his enemies, clubbed women and dragged them back to his snuggery. If you want to call someone you work with mean and uncouth, you could do worse than Neanderthal.

But the first "people" were nothing like that. Buried under mountains of dust in an outcropping on the Serengeti Plains of northern Tanzania is a place called Olduvai Gorge. It's famous because this is where anthropologists Louis, Mary and Richard Leakey discovered fossils, and later, tools, belonging to human or hominid beings who lived here across a span of almost 3 million years.

The hominid creature that had this little brain traveled in a band. As such it rated high on the connectedness scale of that day. Still, its social life was meager. The day was consumed with moving, searching for food, and being on the lookout for boars, lions, other predators, plus other animals and situations that could do it harm. It had no tools, it ran with its knuckles on the ground, and the only sounds it could make were yips and grunts, like the geladas. It could learn, but it had no way of passing knowledge on to its offspring. When it died, what little knowledge it had amassed died with it.

The animal/human was probably a skilled collaborator, grooming its mate and offspring, sharing food, and helping defend the group against enemies. Prehistoric people were "competitive" only in the sense of having to scratch to survive.

But the little animal had star quality, because every hundred thousand years or so, its descendants changed a bit, and broadened their scope. Eventually the little fellow would chair General Motors, but for now it settled for a more erect posture and slightly larger brain pan.

The little fellow

Picturing what people acted like then is a challenge. At the far end we (or they, if you don't feel like claiming them as relatives) were simply animals, perhaps a little brighter than dogs. Hominid brains were like other animal brains: a fist-sized lump of goo useful for running the body, feeling things, and a minuscule amount of learning.

Embedded in this little brain was an organ called the amygdala. Every brain has one. It is the body's danger detection system, and it is unsubtle in the extreme: all it can do is signal to the body whether it should go ballistic or not. When an animal encounters something it does not understand, an unknown, its amygdala sounds an alarm that galvanizes the entire nervous system and forces the animal to make a choice between fighting and fleeing.

In the course of an ordinary day in the wild, the amygdala may go off a hundred times -- many times more than ours go off. The animal's choice, when the alarm sounds, is unrigorous: fight or flight. Very little actual choosing or thinking is involved. For a million years and more, the amygdala and the binary habits it engendered ruled.

But inside the skull, something was happening to the little brain.

[insert brain growth data here]

After a while, it was not just getting bigger, but it was changing in its very nature. By the dawn of history -- a few short thousands of years ago -- it was creating clever new parts for itself that were actually inventing themselves. Brains making brains.

Growing around the old primitive brain was a curly mantle called the neocortex. This new human brain had the cognitive powers that humans most prize -- reason, detachment, and language.

According to anthropologist Julian Jaynes, this new brain first attained what we consider modern consciousness about 5,000 years ago. Where prehistoric man (as well as some scattered aboriginal cultures today) was tribal and collaborative in orientation, the renaissance human had the tools to become self-conscious, individualistic, and personally competitive. From gentle beginnings, we evolved into mean.

Because the human being had language, it could communicate in wonderful and subtle ways, efficiently passing on information to others in real time. Eventually people would acquire the skill of literacy, and knowledge could be passed on to succeeding generations via written documents.

The 5,000 years that followed the development of consciousness and competition are like an eyeblink of human history. Yet in this short time we have evolved almost as an act of will. The neocortex allows people dominion over time. Animals can have ideas, and ideas can live long after the individual animal perished, through stored knowledge.

To the amygdala and the neocortex the current age added data technology that allows us to amass and share immense amounts of information instantaneously, planetwide if we wish. This technological explosion (tech) has been accompanied by a global political revolution, in which everyday people expect to be included in decision-making, and to be personally fulfilled (touch) by the world available to them.

People in this new age treasure their rights and exult in their power as consumers. They have examined and partially broken with the competitive isms -- individualism, nationalism, imperialism, racism, sexism, Social Darwinism -- that had limited them during the age drawing to a close. In their place we expect to see philosophies adapted and practices implemented that are less brutal, less destructive and less habitual in character.

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