Cues to Reading

MAN IS A GORILLA WITH A GUN Reflections on a Best Seller

AFRICAN GENESIS. By Robert Ardrey. New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1963. 380 pp. $1.95 (paperback).

"Extrapolation," say the dictionaries, "is the method of finding by calcula-

. tion, based on the known terms of a series, other terms, whether preceding or following." The method belongs to mathematics and works efficiently when dealing with number and quantity. When it is transferred to the realm of quality and of organic life, more still to that of history and of culture, it tends to lose its precisely exact scientific quality and becomes a venture in creativity, or, at any rate, an exercise of fantasy. "Imagination" now takes the place of "calculation," and there can be no doubt that the scientist who seeks to learn the origin of man from a fossilized remnant of a skull that might have belonged to a man or to a baboon, must be blessed with a creative imagination as well as a scientifically exact intelligence. I sup- pose that when Robert Ardrey, a play- wright rather than a professional scien- tist, subtitles his book "A personal investigation into the animal origins and nature of man" he is serving notice that he intends to extrapolate with unre- strained imaginative abandon. At any rate, this is what he does!

There is of course a good basis of scientific evidence in African Genesis. The recent discoveries of paleontology in Africa, especially the most notable,

those of Leakey at Olduvai in Tan- ganyka, give very convincing indications that the origin of man was in Africa not in Asia. But the most significant element in the new discoveries is the apparent use of tools and weapons by anthropoid apes. It is not true, as Ardrey seems to think, that these discoveries were totally unknown to everyone be- fore his book appeared to dispel the shrouds of obscurantism with which jealous and less inspired scientists at- tempted to conceal them. But no mat- ter. The cloak and dagger atmosphere is apparently an essential part of this "personal" extrapolation which is nothing if not melodramatic. As a mat- ter of fact, one could be grateful to Mr. Ardrey for giving us some precise information about these new discov- eries, if the information were not buried in autobiographical reminiscence, pun- gent anecdote and pages of philosophi- cal improvisation.

Basing himself on the possibility that there were, in Africa, eight-hundred thousand years ago, tool-and-weapon- using anthropoids, Mr. Ardrey delivers a very aggressive homily in atheistic evolutionism. He attacks not only the traditional Christian world-view but also, much more radically, the world- views of Marx, Freud, Darwin and prac-

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tically everyone else you can think of. One theory of man after another is tossed out the window with glorious enthusiasm: and all because some ape seems to have picked up the leg-bone of an antelope and used it to crack the skull of one of his fellows. This is all we need in order to entirely reconstruct all social philosophy, all history, all anthro- pology, all psychology, all economics. For Mr. Ardrey, this one monumental act of violence explains everything.

Homo sapiens (including modern man) is the direct "legitimate" descend- ent of a transitional, carnivorous, erect- walking and weapon-using anthropoid. Because this ape was no ordinary mild- mannered vegetarian ape, but a ruthless "killer ape," man emerged. Man is, according to Ardrey, the chid not only of the ape but of the weapon. It was "the weapon that fathered man." The consequence follows immediately. Man is by his very nature an inventor and user of weapons. The essence of human nature is therefore not so much ration- ality as trigger-happiness, or at least club-happiness. Even sex is set aside as a secondary, relatively meaningless urge compared with man's essential drive to beat up anything and anyone that threatens to invade his "territory." Yes, "territory" is very important here, crucially important. Man is not really interested in woman, in love, in the warmth of satisfied yearning (as Freud may have thought). Man is not so deeply engaged in making a living that his very existence is shaped and domi- nated by the system of production (according to Marxian dogma). Man

is an ape that goes berserk when he thinks he is running out of lebensraum, and I must admit that Mr. Ardrey7s description of two rival teams of howl- ing monkeys trying to jam each others' broadcasts is very suggestive of modern political life.

The chief contention of Robert Ardrey's high-powered social message is that any philosophy, religious or otherwise, which takes an optimistic view of man, regards him as basically rational and progressive, and postulates that he can better himself by improving his social system, is a "romantic illu- sion." It is absurd, says Mr. Ardrey, to hope that man can some day reach the point where he will settle his differ- ences over "territory" by means of arbi- tration rather than by bombs. It is fortunate that some members of the human race are still capable of thinking otherwise (for instance Pope John XXIII in his Encyclical Pacem in Terris).

Quite apart from religious faith and Christian hope, it seems to me that Mr. Ardrey7s thesis negates any real value there may be in evolutionism. After all, the theory of natural selection postu- lates that a species is able to survive by progressive adaptation to new and more difficult conditions. We armed gorillas have now reached a rather crucial point in our evolutionary development in which, it would seem that if we cannot get beyond the stage where we were a million years ago, in other words, if we cannot settle our problems by reason instead of with clubs, we are soon going to be as extinct as any dinosaur. The

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amusing thing about all this is that we are a species that has been given the choice of survival or non-survival. We have very large skulls and, presuming there are still proportionate brains in- side of them, it is up to us to make use of them for something besides inventing ways to blow ourselves up.

And that is what one regrets about a book like this. The author has a great deal of imagination and yet not quite enough. He is totally and slavishly com- mitted to a philosophy of iron-bound determinism which is dominated by one inexorable obsession: that ape with the club. 'Because" man descended in a direct line from an ape with a club, then he is predetermined to be a killer, he is before all else a killer, and it is folly to even consider him being any- thing else. Mr. Ardrey confesses hi- self to be firmly convinced of "man's pristine depravity." Thus he is com- mitted to a world-view in which vio- lence, barbarism, murder, and every form of unpleasantness are bound to prevail. One is prompted to reflect that this is where you end up when you lose your grasp on the real import of the higher religions. No man can really ex- ist completely without religion. If he gets rid of a good one, he will uncon- sciously exchange it for a bad one. If he is impatient of "myth" in higher religion then he will end up fabricating a myth of his own, and organizing his own crude fantasies into another home- made "system" which pleases him bet- ter - perhaps with unfortunate conse- quences.

Now Mr. Audrey's exploits in myth-

making are not hard to observe. They are evident on every page of his book. To take just one example: on page twenty-one, he wants to give a brief description of Lake Victoria, as the spot near which man came into existence. There are innumerable ways in which one could describe Lake Victoria. Out of several hundred possible qualifiers Mr. Ardrey, characteristically, selects the following: "A hundred miles to the east spreads sprawling and enormous the cynically smiling face of Lake Vic- toria, poisonous with disease, crawling with crocodiles, the probable focus of our earliest human experience." I sub- mit that people who read books like this need a little elementary training in semantics, in the interests of their basic mental and spiritual hygiene. Such a sentence (and there are hundreds like it in the book), has one function above all others: it bludgeons the reader into emotional submission, and subjects him to a crude impression of violence and evil, so that his intelligence raises no objections to the author's thesis. The author pressures the reader into an emotional acceptance of man's pristine depravity by suggesting that the very place where man came into being was itself sinister and depraved.

This kind of thinking is all too com- mon in the twentieth century. I t abounded in the Europe of Mussolini, of Hitler, of Goebbels. The Second World War was the direct consequence of this kind of high-powered emotional conditioning. The Nazi dogma of race, blood and land, developed an ideology of war and conquest out of just this

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kind of emotionally loaded anthro- pology. Everyone is aware that Hitler's "thought" was, in part, simply a crudely misunderstood mish-mash of popular evolutionism.

Nothing can better dispose us for a third world war than the conviction that we are doomed to fight anyway, that our enemies are all well-armed gorillas too, and the only smart thing to do is to let them have it before they ambush us. In the chaotic atmosphere of a nation torn by race riots, deafened by the stridency of hate groups and of fanatics, it is un- derstandable that readers may derive a

kind of comfort from this mythology - made to order for readers of Ayn Rand. They will do so all the more readily because there is an unquestionably im- portant basis of scientific data mixed in with the theatrical rhetoric and ser- monizing of African Genesis. One can only repeat, by way of conclusion, that this is an age in which every man owes it to himself to get at least a nodding acquaintance with that technique of interpretation called semantics. One of the best and most readable authors. in this field at the moment is S. I. Hay- akawa. You should get to know him.

By Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton is a Monk in the Monastery at Trappist, Kentucky. His many writings have been of permanent interest in the history of religious expe- riences. Perhaps the best known of his books are The Seven Storey Mountain and No Man Is An Island. He has published three volumes of poetry, Thirty Poems, The Man in The Divided Sea, and Figures for an Apocalype. He received the Catholic Press Association Award for poetry in 1948.

"Whoever fails to understand the great investigator can never know what science really is."

An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine

- By Claude Bernard

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SCIENCE: The Glorious Entertainment. By Jacques Barzun. New York: Harper & Row, 1964. 322 pp. $6.00.

The title of this work suggests a study of the development of science. Actually the purpose of the author, an avowed non-scientist, is to discuss the dehabili- tation of the evolution of ideas, arts, and social form and feelings resulting since 1750. This has largely proceeded from the fact that mechanical ingenuity has conquered science. As a result "our towering civilization is in fact an abyss of degrading misery," man is miserable, and hope is absurd.

This is not an easy book to read. Barzun acknowledges "Readers expect precision or they withhold their assent," but his own writing is prolix and the reader's attention is continually inter- rupted by the need to scan the inter- minable footnotes. It is prevaded by non sequitors, such as blaming science for the failings of its conqueror; it is some times offensive: "to makz a pair of glass buckets whirl at a great rate on a machine and, having filled them with excreta, hope that an unfriendly virus will isolate itself;" some times florid: culture is likened to "an enormous pumpkin, hard to penetrate, full of un- charted hollows and recesses for cul- tural critics to get lost in, and stuffed with seeds of uncertain content and destiny;" some times unjustifiably an- thropomorphic: "artificial power began its war on man," artifacts display "hos- tility to the human hand" (although the author criticizes Jevons for "falling into anthropometric error" when writing of machines) ; often self-contradictory:

science "is a triumph of mind, a master- piece" but "the ideas and feelings and above all the habits which science gen- erates" are objectionable; some times naive: "Washington in 1774 was not willful, stupid, greedy, or afraid; he simply preferred independence and was 'a problem' to the British. . . How could behavioral science have helped - and on which side?"; and frequently con- fuses description with cause: statistical data "crushes these fragments of men into a sort of pressed ball, the soul surrenders to the principle of techne itself; the mind accepts as fitting what I have elsewhere called 'statistical liv- ing."' On occasion Barzun seems to bias the argument to his own advantage: his criticisms of those who say man is an animal make no mention that they commonly describe him as a rational animal, which implies that a new level emerges on the evolutionary scale.

His proposed remedies for all this misery are equally far from precise. They consist of criticizing science in the same way that we do the humanities. "To analyze, abstract, and objectify is the carrying out of a single, imperialistic mode of thought;" man must "feel him- self at once a moral being and a natural philosopher." One wonders whether Barzun himself believes what he writes. This reviewer was raised in a farming community in the days of the horse and buggy and is now living in a remote fishing village. He can testify from per- sonal experience that moral beings and

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natural philosophers are conspicuous by their absence in environments char- acterized by sunrise to sunset toil and conversations restricted to weather- crops-fishing. Philosophizing requires leisure, and leisure implies a substrata of slaves, servants, or machines to do the routine work.

Obviously this is not the best of all possible worlds, but there is much to be said for being alive at a time when the

enlisted Marine can get in his own automobile and substitute the pleasures of New York or Los Angeles for the petty annoyances of military life. It is not difficult to criticize this or any other age, but we have a right to require the critic to make forthright and practical suggestions for improving the situation. This Barzun has conspicuously failed to do.

By Philip J. Rasch

Dr. Rasch is presently Head of the Physiology Division at the Naval Medical Field Research Laboratory at Camp Leyeune, North Carolina. He worked formerly as the research director of the Osteopathic Hospital in Los Angeles.

"Those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact . . . Almost every great step (in the history of science) has been made by the 'anticipation of nature,' that is, by the invention of hypotheses which, though verifiable, often had very little foundation to start with."

- T. H. Huxley

". . . words turn and twist the understanding . . . even definitions cannot cure this evil . . . since the definitions themselves consist of words. . . ."

- Francis Bacon