Justin Gregg

This book posits an interesting idea, that human intellect is actually a maladaptation, and the simple instincts of other animals are superior to human thinking. It's difficult not to agree, but in reality, anyone who picks up this book is likely to know who Nietzsche was, and what a narwhal is, and will almost certainly be at least somewhat prone to value education and intellect...though there has been a strange movement in recent decades for the most educated among us to disparage education more than even the right wingers worried about 'liberal indoctrination'.

You might wonder what all this has to do with Nietzsche, or with narwhals. They are only tangential, sort of a way to get a great title, I suspect, though the author did lead off with a discussion of Nietzsche, and how his intellect ultimately led to his final breakdown, because he saw things too clearly. He proposes Nietzsche would have been happier if he had been a narwhal, without the extraordinary brain power. Perhaps, but there are a few assumptions in his book that one has to swallow whole to accept the thesis, chief among them that the highest goal of life is, or should be, happiness. This isn't easy for some of us to swallow, and we don't see it in most animals, anyway. I am reasonably sure I would not call my cats happy, though much of the time they are contented, but those are two different things. And dismissing the creative output of the human mind as irrelevant might be true on a grand, large scale, but it isn't really true in the here and now; which is actually part of his point. Of course, another assumption that needs to be swallowed whole is that the outcomes (negative ones, like climate change) of the human intellect are inevitable, flowing from the very fact of a brain that is able to contemplate its own existence. Since I don't accept either of these premises, there are holes in his argument, though overall I find much to agree with.

It would help if he would learn how to write. I am fine with using sentence fragments from time to time for emphasis, or in conversation, since people talk that way, but in EVERY paragraph? Excessive. It makes reading difficult and unpleasant when you have to keep searching for a noun to form the subject of the sentence; eventually you realize it was in the previous sentence, but by then you have to reread the sentence because the fragment doesn't make a lot of sense without it. This annoying habit cost the book a half star.… (mer)