I had a singularly unimpressive day today. It's not that nothing happened or I didn't do anything, but just that the events of the day were so spectacularly pedestrian. It's on days like these that I'm grateful for my mediocre intellect - if I had any greater sheer weight of boredom would squash me flat. I can sympathise with poor Marvin from Hitchhikers, moaner that he is - if I had "a brain the size of a planet" I'd get chronically depressed too. Many 'progressionists' look forward eagerly to the time when Man will make a quantum leap forward in intelligence, but what I always wonder is this: what would we do with it? Not what could we do, anyone with two wits to rub together can speculate on that. Would we (as the utopians have predicted) use our powers for the betterment of all, the beautification of the planet and the exploration of new realms? Or would we become dissolute, malcontented and cruel? In one of Arthur C. Clarkes more chilling short stories, a human from the far future, who is little but a giant intellect in a shrivelled body, reaches back into the past to our time and takes posession of a mans mind - playing the part of a psychological leech who lives by illicitly taking from others. Is that our 'quantum leap' future?
We really don't seem to know how to treat knowledge sensibly. It is worshipped as a god by the intellectual upper class and disdained as "largely unnecessary" by the plebians. There was one philosopher however that struck a mature balance - he dedicated entire chapters to the necessity and prudence of aquiring wisdom and knowledge, but in one of his most memorable warnings he said For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief.
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