A Preface to Lunch - 1/21/10

Have you ever looked around the dining hall and started thinking derogatory thoughts about how people are disgusting animals?

Admit it. Or if you haven’t, try it. See that dude over there by the window? Yeah, the one eating a banana and scratching himself. Don’t pretend he doesn’t look like the son of T.S. Eliot and the Rosie O’Donnell gorilla from “Tarzan” — and he also sort of looks like he’s been poisoned by nuclear radiation, doesn’t he?

Gross. Well, I’ve got great news for both you and the radioactive lesbian poet ape: Rejoice, for dinosaurs can make you a hell of a lot happier and boatloads less critical.

Today, I bring you the Dinosaur Theory. Not just because I love dinosaurs, and they are the coolest, and not just because I love theories, but because this can change the way you see the world — or at least make time at the dining hall more fun.

The Dinosaur Theory, postulated by G. Frieden, whose father has an M.D., is this: instead of looking at people as, well, people, just think of every person you see as being a dinosaur. This may seem a little silly — and it is — but it works. Instead of analyzing the physical strengths and weaknesses of those around you, holding them up to the scrutiny of what you’ve come to believe is attractive, just look up from this paper and see nothing but dinosaurs.

That bald dude — dinosaur. That chick who might be a dude — dinosaur. Voilá, you are freed of the compulsion to judge people in terms of attractiveness. They’re all just dinos. Now, I know what you’re thinking — that’s not a theory! Well, the theory part of it is this: If you look at other people as dinosaurs, theoretically the world will become wonderful. Test it out. Haven’t you always wanted to watch a dinosaur eat those grossly delicious Oreo Cheesecake cupcakey things? Here’s your chance!

At the risk of seeming like Jerry Springer during his Final Thought — when he tries to translate his show’s fubar lunacy into some sort of weirdly simple take-home message for children or the mentally challenged — I’d like to point out that this Dinosaur Theory shows us two interesting things about our traditional mental schemas:

1. We really love people when they’re dinosaurs.

2. We’re overly critical. It’s not our fault really — we were taught to be this way, with all of our grade school teachers stressing “critical thinking skills.” The problem is, it’s hard to turn off the thinking when you leave the classroom unless you have incredible compartmentalization skills, which are not taught in school and are also easily confused by critical thinkers with dumbness or naiveté. That being said, we’re often not critical enough, mainly in terms of the general assumptions we make about the world, which we then are too lazy to question.

In going about my day-to-day life, I tend to assume that since we are children of the Age of Enlightenment, we are somehow more intelligent than the lovable-but-bumbling humans of the past who, try as they might, had it all wrong. Under scrutiny, it turns out that this thinking is misguided, like when people read this column and expect real opinions instead of comic philosophical musings at the intellectual level of a stoned eighth grader watching Pokémon re-runs.

We don’t know as much as we think we do, personally and collectively. Irrelevant things are still mistaken for “important evidence” all the time. Case in point, vis-à-vis dinosaurs: In 1999, National Geographic announced the discovery of the “archaeoraptor,” the missing evolutionary link between dinosaurs and birds. Unfortunately, it turned out that some Chinese guy had just thrown together a fossilized chicken and a lizard tail before claiming that he found the fossil buried in 125 million year-old rocks.

Also, as recently as 1920, a relatively large faction of the scientific community believed that the stegosaurus had possessed two brains: one in its head and one in its butt. Unfortunately, this idea was too cool to be accepted, and today it is thought that the cavity in the tail of the stegosaurus was used to store glycogen. But really, who knows? I, for one, am excited as hell for the day when the President of the United Society of Science has to call a press conference to admit that his/her esteemed colleagues “really dropped the ball on that whole evolution thing,” and “we’d like to officially announce we have no idea.”

As human beings, we like to think there are things that we “know,” but every once in a while, it’s nice look around you and see your fellow human beings as dinosaurs. Go ahead, do it. Hopefully you’ll be overjoyed. And maybe you’ll begin to wonder if knowing is as wonderful as it seems.