Religion . . . blah, blah, blah! Politics . . . blah, blah, blah! We are always one wrong abstract thought too late in shutting up. Without fail, our coreligionists or our political pals feel the needle of the one unorthodox abstraction in an otherwise flawless soliloquy. Predictably, they will feel ever so slightly less social toward us. Imagine the antisocial feeling if our audience didn’t particularly like us to begin with.

There is an inverse bell-curve relationship between success as a social animal and yammering and cynicism . . . yammering up, social value down, cynicism up. Is it any wonder, then, that natural selection was so hesitant in committing Homo sapiens to the big brain, language thing?  It was an evolutionary experiment in creating the ultimate social creature that has, for the most part, failed. Even money says the last-minute language mutation makes dinosaurs out of us all.

I’ll also wager many readers are thinking at this point that it is only through dialogue with those whom we disagree that we will ever learn to live harmoniously as a species. While I agree there is a certain number of Homo sapiens (you may be one) genetically predisposed for such temperate give and take, the critical mass of humanity is predisposed otherwise. It is not the talking but the walking in another’s shoes that is needed. And yet, there is only room for one person’s foot at a time in any given shoe.

But there is no denying that we crave the company of other sapiens. Evolution has made it difficult to resist. And if kept at a certain level that precludes irritating opinions or inflexible beliefs or bigoted assumptions we get along swimmingly. Unfortunately for the longevity of our species, our abstractions are our obstructions and our gob hole is a permanent aperture.

So the survival advantage of cynicism is that it allows us to enjoy the sine qua non of being a member of a social species—namely, being social—by never expecting more than we are likely to get and by never being disappointed when we get what we expect. This lowering of the bar tends to make us a more tolerant, dare I say, a friendlier bunch of sapiens.

Cynicism is only one of evolution’s strategies for survival as a social species. There are others we can exploit. Mostly, though, we just need to stop talking so damn much.

Biography: Robert Weitzel is a freelance writer whose essays appear in The Capital Times in Madison, WI. He has been published in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Skeptic Magazine, and Freethought Today.  He can be contacted at: rweitz@tds.net 

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