And How The Crocodile Ate The Elephant-Original Oratory

And How the Crocodile Ate the Elephant
Original Oratory by Cindy Choi (Se Yeon)

In the high and far-off times, the elephant had no trunk. He had only a blackish, bulgy nose, as big as a boot, which he could wriggle about from side to side. There was one elephant – an elephant child – full of insatiable curiosity and asked ever so many questions. As he went around asking the most insolent questions, all his aunts and uncles punished him by spanking him hard. Then one morning, the elephant asked a fine, new question, one he had never asked before. He asked, “What does the Crocodile have for dinner?” All his aunts and uncles spanked him for a long, long time without stopping, but the elephant child refused to give up. He said, “My father
has spanked me, my mother has spanked me, and all my aunts and uncles have spanked me, but I still want to know what the Crocodile has for dinner!” And the Kolokolo Bird said, “Go to the banks of the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River and find out.” And so the elephant child went to find the Crocodile. When he finally met the Crocodile, the Crocodile bade him come close, and when he did, bit him hard on the nose, saying, “I think today I will eat an elephant child!” You see, the Crocodile had elephant children for dinner. Perhaps Kipling’s story doesn’t delineate such a high and far-off time, as we would like. The very society that we live in today threatens to stamp out the curiosity of the world’s elephant children. Our Internet generation refuses to stimulate our curiosity and intellect but instead seeks to envelop ourselves in the ease and plainness of anti-intellectualism, adapting as our own the values displaying an alarmingly perverted set of priorities. For our age is one where movie stars and pop singers are idolized while intellectuals are condemned, one where ostentatious displays are worshipped but logic and reason are execrated. Ours is an age where the saying “ignorance is bliss” is accepted as a general axiom. The extent to which anti-intellectualism has pervaded our society becomes clear when glimpsing upon modern-day jargon. For the educationally inquisitive and serious, the language we speak has only deprecatory terms like “geek”, “nerd”, or “loser”. According to the New Oxford English Dictionary, a nerd is a foolish or contemptible person who lacks social skills and is boringly studious whereas a geek is a carnival performer who performs wild or disgusting acts. The fact that being an intellectual is the equivalent of being foolish, contemptible, and boring reveals a lot about the status of intellectuals in the society that we live in. Good grades may still be important for the students of our generation, but even Leonid Freidman, a professor at the prestigious Harvard University, confesses that “there is but a minority of the undergraduates for whom pursuing knowledge is the top priority” during their years at the university. The uncomfortable truth is that we, as a race, are not only becoming increasingly anti-intellectual but also becoming dumber as suggested by the scientific process of evolution. Despite the fact that tremendous technological developments have been made since the beginning of the 21st century, the intensification of human reliance on technological tools, decline in the number of births, and reduction in environmental pressure in regards to the survival of mankind have all contributed towards the growth of brainlessness in the human population. According to a study by Dr.
Gerald Crabtree, professor of pathology and developmental biology at the Stanford University, the human race, especially the Western population, has lost an average of about 14 IQ points since the Victorian Era. Dr. Nijenhuis, the co-author of Dr. Crabtree’s study, has gathered results from 14 intelligence studies between 1884 and 2004 that calculated the participants’ visual reaction time and discovered that the reaction time increased tremendously from an average of 194 milliseconds in the late 19th century to 275 milliseconds in 2004. As reaction time reflects a person’s mental processing speed, it is widely considered to be a fairly accurate indication of general intelligence. Dr. Crabtree attributes the lowering of human intelligence to environmental factors, commenting: “The reduction in human intelligence would have begun at the time that genetic selection became more relaxed, as our ancestors began to live in more supportive high density societies and had access to a steady supply of food. Both of these might have resulted from the invention of agriculture about 5,000 to 12,000 years ago." As humans moved away from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and established agricultural settlements, men came to face less life-or-death situations, causing decrease in the level of mental stimulation and eventually lower
intelligence. Dropping of human intelligence can also be explained by a phenomenon called dysgenic mating. Researchers have found that IQ and reproduction rate seems to have been negatively correlated since the mid-1800s. This means that people, especially women, with higher intelligence usually tend to have fewer babies. There are about 2000 to 5000 genes that control human intelligence, and, according to research done by Stanford University, it is estimated that humanity has lived through “at least 2 mutations harmful to these intellect-determining genes” over the last 3000 years. In addition to these mutations, the lack of offspring with more intelligent genes has caused a general trend of decreasing intelligence. And with such trends in existence, the human race has opted for anti-intellectualism because it not only helped them to dispel their feeling of inferiority but also allowed the change of values – from one of education and development to one of sensual pleasure.
We have moved away from our drive to understand and discover the unknowns of our world and are settling ever more comfortably into the reassuring hands of our own creations. When Copernicus hypothesized that the Earth was revolving around the sun, when Einstein presented his theories of relativity, and when Darwin uncovered the secrets of biological evolution, they were driven by a desire to compile a more comprehensive view of the world that we live in. This curiosity and zeal – the insatiable questioning of the elephant child – are what we must return
to. In her autobiography, Zora Neale Hurston writes, “Grown people know that they do not always know the why of things, and even if they think they know, they do not know where and how they got the proof. Hence the irritation they show when children keep on demanding to know if a thing is so and how the grown folks got the proof of it… So, if telling their questioning young to run off and play does not suffice for an answer, a good swat on the child’s bottom is held to be proof positive for anything from spelling ‘Constantinople’ to why the sea is salt.” And this is what we are doing to our elephant children. What we should do instead, however, is to recognize that we, in fact, do not know, and re-engage ourselves in the stimulus that has brought us so far in the years that have passed. We must allow ourselves to re-identify with the elephant children of our childhood and prove that after all, it is fine to ask why.