Den Beste has a discursive (is that a pleonasm?) essay up on ‘hive minds’ and their relation to the Internet.
He points out the role of language in human intelligence, but flatly misses, I think, the key point.
The ability to freeze and store knowledge – first in the form of ballads like the Illiad or Ramayana, then in the form of accounting records (Hammurabi’s tablets), then in the form of written work is itself a huge part of both collective and individual human intelligence, and has been for millennia.Try a thought-experiment. Imagine a human infant somehow raised apart from society and all human works – a wild child. Before that person has been brought into contact with a society, are they fully human?
Part of what makes us human is the fact that each of us stands on the shoulders of giants, to borrow Newton’s phrase. That’s true not only in science and engineering, as Den Beste points out, but in all aspects of human activity – in fact human activity is largely based on taking from and adding to that larger fabric of frozen knowledge.
We live in a hive mind, and each of us internalizes much of it. If you want to see what it looks like, walk into a good library and look around.
That fact is a part of why we address cultures as a whole – why I believe it is the Palestinian culture rather than a few individuals that must be restrained.
It is also why I think that there is hope; because I know that the wild children that have been found managed to become at least somewhat accultured, and that dark and bloody cultures have in the past become docile.