Big brains – the main problem of modern humanity
Kurt Vonnegut looks with sadness at the current state of humanity in the late 20th century. And he knows the reason for his sadness – people’s big brains. It is from the hypertrophied brain of people that make all the evils happen. If the result of this was only cultural, it would have been not so fatal. But big brains are responsible for all modern evil - for wars, hunger, dirty politics, self-assertion at the expense of others, suicide, deceptions and so on. Vonnegut frankly does not understand the meaning of human evolution. Human development through brain development leads to disastrous consequences, because a large brain only confuses and deceives the will of a person. It would be much better to develop in a natural way, turning into fishermen, whose uncontrolled growth would be limited to human hunters. Actually, this happens after a million years - humanity reaches a lifestyle when its mind does not threaten any more. In Galapagos, Vonnegut paints a picture of people’s future, and the way in which they evolve backward, and to his opinion it is the best alternative that might happen to people.
Nature knows all the answers
Vonnegut seems to disarm militant-minded modern people in the novel. People invent computers and bombs, and Vonnegut refuses to see this sense of technological progress as an achievement. On the contrary, he offers the contemporaries the plot of simplification. The writer's philosophy is partly natural and close to life; in Galapagos he talks a lot about Darwin and his observations, and both agrees with the concept of evolution and nevertheless disagrees with its course concerning humanity. Everything should be easier, as the writer says. There is no need for false multi-thinking, no need for inventions, no need even to live long - since all this is harmful for nature. It is necessary to find harmony and order and turn to the experience of animals. It is harmful to take care of children for a long time, it is harmful to fear death - it is much better to understand the law of nature and to obey it. So in any case, so the narrator Leon Trout thinks, and Vonnegut, as it seems, largely agrees with him. Leon Trout's tone when it comes to the future is, in any case, very optimistic.
Absurd of cultural achievements
In the novel's essence lies a plot of the paradoxical revival of humanity after a world catastrophe. What exactly this catastrophe is the author does not say directly, but what is known for sure is that it will be an anthropogenic one. This revival is alternative of that described in the Bible, where Adam (captain Adolf von Kleist), Eva (six girls of konko-bono tribe), God (Mary Hepburn) and Devil (human’s brain) exist and interact. The role of the Devil is given to human’s brains as brain size, presumably, is the biggest evil ever created. Here ab important role is played by “Mandarax” (a fictional voice translator created by Zenji Hiroguchi – a Japanese computer genius). “Mandarax” is also able to provide quotations from literature and history, but these quotes become senseless and absurd. This “wonder-machine”, which also is the symbol of technological progress, expresses all the meaninglessness of people’s culture, which is helpless in the natural environment.
