The Ghost in the Machine (46 page)

 

 

In the course of the last twenty years, field observations on the life
of monkey societies in the wild have led to a complete reversal of our
previous ideas about the mentality of our primate ancestors. The earlier
studies -- such as Solly Zuckerman's in the late 1920s -- were based on
the behaviour of monkeys confined in the unnatural, crowded conditions of
the zoo. These studies yielded important psychological results, in the
sense in which studies of human behaviour in prisons and concentration
camps do: they reveal the picture of a neurotic society labouring under
abnormal stresses, whose members are bored and irritable, constantly
bickering and fighting, obsessed by sex, and exposed to the rule of
tyrannical, sometimes murderous, leaders. On the strength of this picture,
one could only wonder how monkey societies in the wild survived at all.

 

 

But since the Second World War a new generation of field observers,
whose patient studies often extended over many years, has completely
and dramatically reversed the picture. W.M.S. Russell has summed up the
result as follows:

 

. . . After the Second World War the field study of monkeys and apes
suddenly mushroomed. The reports of the field observers are virtually
unanimous. Carpenter . . . reported that fighting is rare in wild
gibbons and apparently absent in wild howler monkeys. Washburn
and Devore saw signs of internal violence in only one in seven of
their bands of wild East African baboons; and no fighting at all
between bands. Southwick took over the study of wild howlers in
the fifties, and never saw one fight, within or between bands. Jay
gives a similar report on wild langur bands, and Imanishi on wild
Japanese monkeys. Goodall saw little evidence of fighting in wild
chimpanzees, nor Hall in wild bands of the very baboon species that
Zuckerman had studied in the zoo. And Emlen and Schaller saw not
the slightest trace of aggression within wild gorilla bands; and
relations between bands were so friendly that, when two bands met,
they might bed down together for the night, and individuals could
come visiting for as long as they liked.
These unanimous reports are even more impressive than they first
appear, for many of the observers were expecting the reverse. The
early zoo findings had made such a deep impression that at first each
field worker assumed that his or her species must be unusual. . . .
We can now see that they were wrong: all monkey and ape species are
peaceful in the wild. . . . A healthy wild primate society shows
no trace of serious fighting, either within or between bands. It
is now undeniable that primates can live without any violence at
all. . . . Putting together the field and zoo reports, we now know
that aggressiveness is not an innate feature of individuals, appearing
in some primate species and not in others. All primate species are
peaceful in some conditions and violent in others. Violence is a
property of societies exposed to stress. . . . [6]

 

What conclusions are we to draw from this picture of primate behaviour?

 

 

First, that primates (and all other mammals) in the wild show a complete
absence of Freud's destructive instinct. In the normal baboon or rhesus
monkey society, the self-assertive tendencies of the individual are
counter-balanced by its integrative ties with family, leader and clan.
Aggression makes its appearance only when tensions of one kind or another
upset the balance.

 

 

All this is entirely in keeping with the conclusions we arrived at
in earlier chapters. But it provides us with only a few limited and
somewhat trivial clues to the origins of the human predicament. That
stresses caused by shortage of food, overcrowding of territory,
natural catastrophes, and so on, upset the social equilibrium and
produce pathological behaviour -- agreed. So do the zoo-like conditions
in prisons, the enforced idleness of unemployment, the boredom of the
welfare state. This is the kind of stuff social psychologists like to
emphasise over and again in their discussions of the perils of modern life
in the crowded megalopolis -- and they are, of course, quite right. But
these are modern phenomena which have little relevance to the core of the
problem: the emergence of the unique, murderous, delusional streak in our
prehistoric ancestors. They did not suffer from overcrowding, there was no
shortage of territory, they did not lead an urban existence; in a word, we
cannot lay the blame on stresses of the type to which captive monkeys, or
the citizens of contemporary New York, are subjected. To become hypnotised
by the specific pathology of the twentieth century narrows one's vision
and blinds one to the much older, much more fundamental problem of
the chronic savagery of human civilisations, ancient and modern. We
are so pre-occupied with the social ravages done to the occupants of
contemporary Negro ghettoes in America, that we quite forget the horrors
of African history when Negroes were free -- or the horrors of European
or Asian history. To lay the blame for man's pathological condition on
the environment means to beg the question. Climatic changes and other
environmental pressures are, of course, an immensely powerful factor
in biological evolution and human history; but most wars, civil wars,
and human holocausts were motivated by other reasons.

 

 

Where else, then, shall we look for the causes of the Fall -- that
is to say, for the unique characteristic of our species to practise
intra-specific homicide, individually or in groups?

 

 

 

The Harmless Hunter

 

 

It has occasionally been suggested that the Fall occurred when our
ancestors turned from a vegetarian to a carnivorous diet. Both zoologists
and anthropologists have a conclusive answer to this suggestion. The
zoologist will point out that hunting the prey which belongs to a
different species is a biological drive strictly separate from aggression
against con-specifics. To quote Konrad Lorenz:

 

The motivation of the hunter is basically different from that of the
fighter. The buffalo which the lion fells provokes his aggression
as little as the appetising turkey which I have just seen hanging
in the larder provokes mine. The differences in these inner drives
can clearly be seen in the expressive movemenu of the animal: a
dog about to catch a hunted rabbit has the same kind of excitedly
happy expression as he has when he greets his master or awaits some
longed-for treat. From many excellent photographs it can be seen
that the lion, in the dramatic movement before he springs, is in
no way angry. Growling, laying the ears back, and other well-known
expression movements of fighting behaviour are seen in predatory
animals only when they are very afraid of a wildly resisting prey,
and even then the expressions are only suggested. [7]

 

The Russells arrive at the same conclusion: 'There is certainly
no evidence from mammalian behaviour that social aggression is more
prevalent or intense among carnivores than among herbivores.' And as for
humans: 'There is certainly no evidence that social violence has been
more prevalent or intense in carnivorous hunting than in vegetarian
agricultural societies. Hunting people have sometimes been extremely
war-like; but no human group has produced more peaceful communities than
some of the Eskimos, who have been carnivorous hunters, presumably,
since the Old Stone Age.' [8] The Samurai, on the other hand, were
strict vegetarians; and so were the Hindu mobs in India which massacred
their Moslem brethren whenever given a chance. It was not the eating of
reindeer-steaks which caused the Fall.

 

 

Lorenz, whom I have just quoted, has a more sophisticated theory.
The following extract (compressed) conveys the gist of it:

 

The inhibitious controlling aggression in various social animals,
preventing it from injuring or killing fellow members of the species,
are most important and consequently most highly differentiated
in those animals which are capable of killing living creatures of
about their own size. A raven can peck out the eye of another with
one thrust of its beak, a wolf can rip the jugular vein of another
with a single bite. There would be no more ravens and no more wolves
if reliable inhibitions did not prevent such actions. Neither a
dove nor a hare nor even a chimpanzee is able to kill its own kind
with a single peck or bite. Since there rarely is, in Nature, the
possibility of such an animal seriously injuring one of its own kind,
there is no selection pressure at work to breed inhibitions against
killing. One can only deplore the fact that man has definitely not
got a carnivorous mentality! All his trouble arises from his being a
basically harmless, omnivorous creature, lacking in natural weapons
with which to kill big prey, and, therefore, also devoid of the
built-in safety devices which prevent 'professional' carnivores from
abusing their killing power to destroy fellow-members of their own
species. No selection pressure arose in the prehistory of mankind to
breed inhibitory mechanisms preventing the killing of con-specifics
until, all of a sudden, the invention of artificial weapons upset the
equilibrium of killing potential and social inhibitions. When it did,
man's position was very nearly that of a dove which, by some unnatural
trick of Nature, has suddenly acquired the beak of a raven. Whatever
his innate norms of social behaviour may have been, they were bound
to be thrown out of gear by the invention of weapons. [9]

 

One could pick various holes in this argument, as the critics of
Lorenz' book (myself included [10]) have done, and nevertheless concede
that it contains an element of truth. Without losing ourselves in
technicalities, we can reformulate Lorenz' argument by saying that,
from the very beginning of the manufacture of weapons, man's instinct
and intellect fill out of step. The invention of weapons and tools was
an intellectual creation, the combined achievement of brain and hand --
of the marvellous powers of the neocortex to co-ordinate the manipulative
skill of the fingers with the perceptions of the perfected eye, and both
with memory and planning. But the use to which the weapons were put,
was dependent on the motivational drives, on instinct and emotion --
on the old brain. The old brain was lacking in the necessary equipment,
the inhibitory mechanisms, to deal with man's newly acquired powers;
while the new brain had insufficient control over his emotions. What
Lorenz' argument boils down to is once more:
inadequate co-ordination
between the all too rapidly grown modern, and the ancient structures of
the nervous system
.

 

 

However, the awareness of power, which the wielding of spear and
bow lends to the hunter, need not necessarily increase aggressivity
towards his fellows; it may, as the example of the Eskimos and other
hunting communities show, even have the opposite effect. In so far
as the purely self-assertive tendencies of individuals are concerned,
there is no obvious reason why primitive man should not have learned to
come to terms with the added power that weapons gave him, by developing
moral responsibilities -- a super-ego as effective in its way as the
instinct-taboos against the killing of con-specifics in other hunting
animals. And, to judge by the anthropological evidence, such taboos
did indeed develop -- but they only prevented aggression against the
individual's own tribe or social group. To other members of the species
the taboo did not apply.
It was not individual aggression which got
out of hand, but devotion to the narrow social group with which the
individual identified himself to the hostile exclusion of all other
groups.
It is the process we have discussed before: the integrative
tendency, manifested in primitive forms of identification, serving as
a vehicle for the aggressive self-assertiveness of the social holon.

 

 

To put it in a different way: to man,
intra-specific differences have
become more vital than intra-specific affinities
; and the inhibitions
which in other animals prevent intra-specific killing, work only within
the group. In the rat it is the smell which decides who is friend
or foe. In man, there is a terrifyingly wide range of criteria, from
territorial possession through ethnic, cultural, religious, ideological
differences, which decide who stinks and who does not.

 

 

 

The Curse of Language

 

 

There are other factors which contributed to the tragedy. The first is the
enormous range of intra-specific differences between human individuals,
races and cultures; a diversity without parallel among other species. In
Huxley's list of man's biological 'uniquenesses', this wide range of
variety in physical appearance and mental attributes actually occupies
the first place. How it arose does not concern us here; Huxley has
some interesting things to say on the subject in the essay from which I
have quoted. What matters in our context is that these differences and
contrasts were a powerful factor of mutual repellence between groups;
with the result that
the disruptiue forces haue alwaws dominated the
forces of cohesion in the species as a whole
. To quote Lorenz once more:

 

It is no daring speculation to assume that the first human beings who
really represented our own species, those of Cro Magnon, had roughly
the same instincts and natural inclinations as we have ourselves. Nor
is it illegitimate to assume that the structure of their societies
and their tribal warfare was roughly the same as can still be found
in certain tribes of Papuans and in central New Guinea. Every one of
their tiny settlements is permanently at war with the neighbouring
villages; their relationship is described by Margaret Mead as one
of mild reciprocal head-hunting, 'mild' meaning that there are no
organised raids for the purpose of removing the treasured heads of
neighbouring warriors, but only the occasional taking of the heads
of women and children encountered in the woods. [11]