I watched the gorilla's eyes again, wise and knowing eyes, and wondered about this business of trying to teach apes language. Our language. Why? There are many members of our own species who live in and with the forest and know it and understand it. We don't listen to them. What is there to suggest we would listen to anything an ape could tell us? Or that it would be able to tell us of its life in a language that hasn't been born of that life? I thought, maybe it is not that they have yet to gain a language, it is that we have lost one.
-Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See
Douglas Adams and his insights are truly impressive, all the more impressive when you think of the fact that he hid them within delightful comedy science fiction stories. Something he revisits frequently is the insufficiency of our current point of view. We mistake our limited little view of the world for the objective truth and act as though we are infallible as a result. We have catalogued the system errors in our thinking, our seeing, our perceiving, our deciding, and still we pretend that somehow THIS TIME, we've got it right.
We are going to be wrong. Let us have the grace and dignity to protect ourselves and our world from our current mistakes and our future inevitable mistakes. Let us have the humility to build adaptability into our decisions, so that future children can correct the mistakes we did not expect to make a little easier than our parents have made it for us.
We are not an endangered species ourselves yet, but this is not for lack of trying.
-Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See
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