Imagine yourselves standing with a banana in your hand. A hungry monkey stands in front of you. Acting on his instincts he runs towards you, jumps up and grabs the banana from your hand. A hungry human being, on the other hand is expected to politely ask you whether you can spare the banana to him and the chances are that you will spare the banana to him. This form of rationality, control in our actions, judgement, discretion, etc is what separates us from the animals. Our brain has a well developed region called the frontal cortex which is the seat of this rationality. Animals on the other hand have an “animal brain” and a poorly developed frontal cortex and this is why rationality is second place to instinct in animals. Of course, we too have an animal side of our brain which gives us our instincts. The instinctive reaction of a mother to throw herself in the line of danger to protect her child is one example of the instinctive reaction of a human being. I believe there is no need to point out more examples of what separates us from them, I am sure most of us know.
What I am about to say now has no grounds or validation in neuro sciences but these are just my own thoughts. “Thought” is something possibly unique to human beings, at least in the extreme form we see in our daily lives. A human being’s behavior in general is a sum total of a rational part and also an animal part. We exhibit rational thinking but at the same time we have instincts of survival built into us. But let us talk about thoughts. It seems to me that thoughts too come with more survival instinct attached to them than pure rationality. It seems the both the human and the animal part of our brains contribute into making a thought! Let me narrate an incident which can serve as an example.
I was once involved in a nice discussion online, one of the very few sensible online discussions and the topic was regarding spirituality honing great leaders. A particularly enthusiastic proponent of spirituality laid down her views stating that spirituality inevitably inculcates very strong leadership qualities in a man including his determination, his ever present desire to drive the society forward and so on. I expressed a more practical view wherein I said that while I agreed that a spiritually disciplined person can indeed give us the ideal leader, the kind of leader we need in times of despair, can he even come in power? I expressed a concern that the leaders are selected by the majority of us and if as a collection of individuals, we are not “spiritual”, can we be wise enough to recognise the strong leadership a spiritual man brings to the table and put him in power? Think about it, even today we tend to vote for a leader based on whether he belongs to our caste, group or religion. Consider the example of the former leader of Andhra Pradesh, who ensured that government servants did not come late and did not leave early, I can be pretty sure that none of the government servants voted for him in the second round. A spiritual leader is bound to make an open declaration of the importance of discipline, hard work and for us those very ideas might be scary! We may not even elect him. Thus, my point was a more practical one – spirituality can indeed give us the right kind of leader but will he even be elected to power?
I received in a few moments, a reply from this particularly enthusiastic lady saying that it was not wise of me to doubt the ability of spiritual discipline to produce great leaders and started giving me examples of major driving forces in our national history and how they were all guided by spirituality. I was stunned for a moment because I had made it amply clear that I had no doubts about that myself but I only worried whether, we the non-spiritual people would even allow a spiritual force to be elected! I was forced to ask the question “why”! Why did this lady ignore a clear sentence in my post and reply to me as if this sentence just did not exist?
One of the answers that came to my mind was as follows. Humans, it seems, develop an instinct to protect their thoughts! They have an ideology and for some reason, human beings seem to identify that ideology as an indispensable and a defining element of their existence. If some line of reasoning should even hint at this ideology being wrong, humans are up in arms about protecting it, even if the ideology is plain wrong! This same instinctive protection of one’s ideology sometimes makes one over-cautiously interpret a non offending statement as offending. In this case, the brain of the lady seemed to have chosen to read the words “spiritual”, “leaders”, “unable to get elected”, “not in power”, etc and extrapolate them to “Spiritual leaders don’t have power!” and instinctively hammer me saying, “Spirituality can produce powerful leaders. Don’t you know the great leaders ….” What else could be the explanation? I wish I could say, “Maybe her English is not so good!” but no, her English was as crisp and clean as it could be!
The number of debates I find myself involved in have become lesser and lesser. The reason is simple. The above incidents are not isolated but common place. You agree with someone whole heartedly but express a related concern and it is misconstrued as a disagreement. Emotions flare, wrong choice of words is exercised and the debate becomes an argument which can offer nothing constructive to anyone involved in it. Perhaps some sadists may derive pleasure from it but for the sensible man who wants to patiently learn from mistakes has to leave to find other pastures where he may hone his intellect.
I used to be involved in a lot of debates with a specific group of people but at no point do I remember that we had a fall out, that emotions had gotten the better of us and we lost track of the eventual point. Somewhere deep down inside we each had come to terms with the limits of the human intellect and began to appreciate the ever presence of uncertainty in our knowledge. This acknowledgement of uncertainty allowed us to disagree, it convinced us that disagreements and calm debating would allow us to reduce this uncertainty, take us forward. Somewhere we realised that our ideologies may define us, characterize us but that there were uncertainties in them and progress was all about self correcting our ideologies.
To me, at least, it does seem there indeed are human thoughts and animal thoughts, the latter being a product of some not-so-easy to understand instinct to fight for the preservation of a personal ideology usually coming at the cost of stagnation in intellectual development.