But not nearly as smart as we, because of the occasional Socrates, Shakespeare, Mozart, or Einstein, think.

Consider: There are presently billions of us, more people alive than have ever lived. And how many Socrateses, Shakespeares, etc. have we produced lately, say, in the last fifty years, huh?

Given our numbers, the last half century should have been apoppin’ with new super-minds.

Oh, to be sure, there’s been cleverness galore, from moonshots to "Cats" to iPhones to Pintos. But minds that change everything? Narry a one.

Doesn’t that warrant a bit of thinking-about? There are so many of us now, and there were so few of us then, so few of us in the 6th century BCE when out popped Socrates here and Buddha there and Lao-Tze way over there. A little later there were still very few of us and yet around 1600 here came Shakespeare, and Cervantes, and Newton.

Naturally, like every era, we think we’re the cat’s pajamas. But what if the cat prefers to sleep au naturel?

We, the present-day six billion, give great surface.

We do pajamas really well: sleek cars, sleek buildings, sleek digital images, sleek digital sound, sleek interfaces of all kinds. We carry around our sleek iPods filled with sleek reproductions of, well, it’s probably best for those heavily invested in this surface playground not to think too much about um pardon the expression content.

Brilliant, brilliant surface-makers and surface-dwellers, afoot on the cleverly smoothed-over, formerly bumpy shoulders of the giants who came before where we play and preen, play and preen. But do little to add to humanity’s reachable height.

Makes you wonder.

I mean, Mozart and Beethoven were alive at the same time. Shakespeare and Caravaggio were alive at the same time. And who’ve we had in the last half century?

Smart? Yes, we are, but more rarely really smart than we care to think about.

Add to this problem of extreme underpopulation at the upppermost reaches of the old intelligence curve the little problem of our continuing belligerence.

We also don’t like to think about the evidence of our continuing massive urge to violence. Ask a hundred denizens of the 21st century how many people we killed in the 20th century. How many will even come within an order of magnitude of the right answer? (Truth is, even those who study such things waffle, but everybody’s in agreement that it was somewhere between 100 and 200 million—and of course there’s the unanswerable question about how many new Mozarts or Einsteins there were in that pile of corpses.)

In sum, a clear-eyed assessment of us: rarely really smart, often really dumb and massively violent. A view that can lead only to despair… and withal hope.

The truth is, we ain’t seen nothin yet.

Some hardy few way out on the fringe keep trying hard. Either to see something "new". Or, harder, still, nothing, literally nothing (viz. the Hsin Hsin Ming). While we here in the Big Muddy that is the center where what happens is All That Matters keep on doing arabesques surface-wise, molding new configurations of Big Mud into great must-have gew-gaws without which Modern Life is simply inconceivable.

Two highly symptomatic problems:

One, we’re not sleeping any better than we did, say, 10,000 years ago.

Two, we’re not dying any better than we did, say, 10,000 years ago.

Furthermore, the two big questions, whence and whither, remain unanswered, yea, untouched except by the must elementary, kindergartenish thrice-told playpen stories.

The case can be made that, between the appearances of great minds, we only mark time, as we, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, are doing now, and have been doing for some time.

It’s not mind at the end of its tether but rather mind at the end of a tether, the present tether. Marching in place we rather dumbly (and blindly) await the next cutter(s)-of-tether who will spring us free to romp in newer fields of morning glory.