The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee

by Jared Diamond

  As for the reactions of the killers, those killers whose ethical code distinguishes between ‘us’ and ‘them’ may be able to feel pride, but those reared under a universal ethical code may share the numbing of their victims, exacerbated by the guilt of perpetration. Hundreds of thousands of Americans who fought in Vietnam suffered this numbing. Even the descendants of practitioners of genocide – descendants who have no individual responsibility – may feel a collective guilt, the mirror image of the collective labelling of victims that defines genocide. To reduce the pain of guilt, the descendants often rewrite history; witness the response of modern Americans, or that of Ms Cobern and many other modern Australians.

  We can now begin to understand better the lack of reaction of third parties to genocide. Genocide inflicts crippling and lasting psychological damage on the victims and killers who experience it first-hand. But it also may leave deep scars on those who hear about it only second-hand, such as the children of Auschwitz survivors, or the psychotherapists who treat the survivors and Vietnam veterans. Therapists who have trained professionally to be able to listen to human misery often cannot bear to hear the sickening recollections of those involved in genocide. If paid professionals cannot stand it, who can blame the lay public for refusing to listen?

  Consider the reactions of Robert Jay Lifton, an American psychiatrist who had already had much experience with survivors of extreme situations before he interviewed survivors of the Hiroshima A-bomb:

  … now, instead of dealing with ‘the atomic bomb problem’, I was confronted with the brutal details of actual experiences of human beings who sat before me. I found that the completion of each of these early interviews left me profoundly shocked and emotionally spent. But very soon – within a few days, in fact – I noticed that my reactions were changing. I was listening to descriptions of the same horrors, but their effect upon me had lessened. The experience was an unforgettable demonstration of the ‘psychic closing off’ we shall see to be characteristic of all aspects of atomic bomb exposure… .

  *

  What genocidal acts can we expect from Homo sapiens in the future? There are plenty of obvious reasons for pessimism. The world abounds with trouble spots that seem ripe for genocide: South Africa, Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka, New Caledonia, and the Middle East, to name just a few. Totalitarian governments bent on genocide seem unstoppable. Modern weaponry permits one to kill ever larger numbers of victims, to be a killer while wearing a coat and tie, and even to effect a universal genocide of the human race.

  At the same time, I see grounds for cautious optimism that the future need not be as murderous as the past. In many countries today, people of different races or religions or ethnic groups live together, with varying degrees of social justice but at least without open mass murder – for instance, Switzerland, Belgium, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, even the post-Ishi USA. Some attempts at genocide have been successfully interrupted, reduced, or prevented by the efforts or anticipated reactions of third parties. Even the Nazi extermination of Jews, which we view as the most efficient and unstoppable of genocides, was thwarted in Denmark, Bulgaria, and every other occupied state where the head of the dominant church publicly denounced deportation of Jews before or as soon as it began. A further hopeful sign is that modern travel, television, and photography enable us to see other people living 10,000 miles away as human, like us. Much as we damn twentieth-century technology, it is blurring the distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ that makes genocide possible. While genocide was considered socially acceptable or even admirable in the pre-first-contact world, the modern spread of international culture and knowledge of distant peoples have been making it increasingly hard to justify.

  Still, the risk of genocide will be with us as long as we cannot bear to understand it, and as long as we delude ourselves with the belief that only rare perverts could commit it. Granted, it is hard not to go numb while reading about genocide. It is hard to imagine how we, and other nice ordinary people that we know, could bring ourselves to look helpless people in the face while killing them. I came closest to being able to imagine it when a friend whom I had long known told me of a genocidal massacre at which he had been a killer.

  Kariniga is a gentle Tudawhe tribesman who worked with me in New Guinea. We shared life-threatening situations, fears, and triumphs, and I like and admire him. One evening after I had known Kariniga for five years, he told me of an episode from his youth. There had been a long history of conflict between the Tudawhes and a neighbouring village of Daribi tribesmen. Tudawhes and Daribis seem quite similar to me, but Kariniga had come to view Daribis as inexpressibly vile. In a series of ambushes the Daribis finally succeeded in picking off many Tudawhes, including Kariniga’s father, until the surviving Tudawhes became desperate. All the remaining Tudawhe men surrounded the Daribi village at night and set fire to the huts at dawn. As the sleepy Daribis stumbled down the steps of their burning huts, they were speared. Some Daribis succeeded in escaping to hide in the forest, where Tudawhes tracked down and killed most of them during the following weeks. The establishment of Australian government control ended the hunt before Kariniga could catch his father’s killer.

  Since that evening, I have often found myself shuddering as I recalled details of it – the glow in Kariniga’s eyes as he told me of the dawn massacre; those intensely satisfying moments when he finally drove his spear into some of his people’s murderers; and his tears of rage and frustration at the escape of his father’s killer, whom he still hoped to kill some day with poison. That evening, I thought I understood how at least one nice person had brought himself to kill. The potential for genocide that circumstances thrust on Kariniga lies within all of us. As the growth of world population sharpens conflicts between and within societies, humans will have more urge to kill each other, and more effective weapons with which to do it. To listen to first-person accounts of genocide is unbearably painful. But if we continue to turn away and to not understand it, when will it be our own turn to become the killers, or the victims?

  Appendix

  INDIAN POLICIES OF SOME FAMOUS AMERICANS

  PRESIDENT GEORGE WASHINGTON. ‘The immediate objectives are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements. It will be essential to ruin their crops in the ground and prevent their planting more.’

  BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. ‘If it be the Design of Providence to Extirpate these Savages in order to make room for Cultivators of the Earth, it seems not improbable that Rum may be the appointed means.’

  PRESIDENT THOMAS JEFFERSON. ‘This unfortunate race, whom we had been taking so much pains to save and to civilize, have by their unexpected desertion and ferocious barbarities justified extermination and now await our decision on their fate.’

  PRESIDENT JOHN QUINCY ADAMS. ‘What is the right of the huntsman to the forest of a thousand miles over which he has accidentally ranged in quest of prey?’

  PRESIDENT JAMES MONROE. ‘The hunter or savage state requires a greater extent of territory to sustain it, than is compatible with the progress and just claims of civilized life … and must yield to it.’

  PRESIDENT ANDREW JACKSON. ‘They have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement which are essential to any favorable change in their condition. Established in the midst of another and a superior race, and without appreciating the causes of their inferiority or seeking to control them, they must necessarily yield to the force of circumstances and ere long disappear.’

  CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN MARSHALL. ‘The tribes of Indians inhabiting the country were savages, whose occupation was war, and whose subsistence was drawn from the forest… . That law which regulates, and ought to regulate in general, the relations between the conqueror and conquered was incapable of application to a people under such circumstances. Discovery [of America by Europeans] gave an exclusive right to extinguish the Indian title of occupancy, either by purchase or by conquest.’

  PRESIDENT WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON. ‘I
s one of the fairest portions of the globe to remain in a state of nature, the haunt of a few wretched savages, when it seems destined by the Creator to give support to a large population and to be the seat of civilization?’

  PRESIDENT THEODORE ROOSEVELT. ‘The settler and pioneer have at bottom had justice on their side; this great continent could not have been kept as nothing but a game preserve for squalid savages.’

  GENERAL PHILIP SHERIDAN. ‘The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.’

  PART FIVE

  REVERSING OUR PROGRESS OVERNIGHT

  OUR SPECIES IS now at the pinnacle of its numbers, its geographic extent, its power, and the fraction of the Earth’s productivity that it commands. That is the good news. The bad news is that we are also in the process of reversing all that progress much more rapidly than we created it. Our power threatens our own existence. We do not know whether we shall suddenly blow ourselves up before we would otherwise expire in a slow stew caused by global warming, pollution, habitat destruction, more mouths to feed, less food to feed those mouths, and extermination of other species that form our resource base. Are these dangers really new ones that arose since the Industrial Revolution, as widely assumed?

  It is a common belief that species in a state of nature live in balance with each other and with their environment. Predators do not exterminate their prey, nor do herbivores overgraze their plants. According to this view, humans are the unique misfit. If this were true, Nature would hold no lessons for us.

  There is something to this view, insofar as species do not go extinct under natural conditions as rapidly as we are exterminating them now, except under rare circumstances. Such a rare event was the mass fatality sixty-five million years ago, possibly due to an asteroidal impact, that finished the dinosaurs. Since evolutionary multiplications of species are very slow, natural extinctions obviously must also be slow, otherwise we would have been left with no species long ago. Expressed alternatively, the vulnerable species get eliminated quickly, and what we see persisting in Nature are the robust combinations of species.

  That broad conclusion still leaves us with many instructive examples of species exterminating other species. Almost all known cases prove to combine two elements. Firstly, the cases involve species reaching environments where they did not occur before, and where they encounter prey populations that are naive about the threat of those invading predators. By the time that the ecological dust settles and a new equilibrium is reached, some of the new-found prey may have been exterminated. Secondly, the perpetrators of such exterminations prove to be so-called switching predators, which are not specialized to eat only a single prey species but can feed on many different ones. Although the predator exterminates some prey, it survives by switching to others.

  Such exterminations often occur when humans intentionally or accidentally transfer a species from one part of the globe to another. Rats, cats, goats, pigs, ants, and even snakes are among these transferred killers. For instance, during the Second World War a tree snake native to the Solomon Islands was accidentally transported on ships or planes to the previously snake-free Pacific island of Guam. This predator has already exterminated or brought to the brink of extinction most of Guam’s native forest bird species, which had had no opportunity to evolve behavioural defences against snakes. Yet the snake is in no danger itself despite having virtually eliminated its bird prey, because it can switch to bats, rats, lizards, and other victims. As another example, cats and foxes introduced into Australia by humans have been eating their way through Australia’s small native marsupials and rats without endangering themselves, because there remain abundant rabbits and other prey species on which to feed.

  We humans furnish the prime example of a switching predator. We eat everything from snails and seaweed to whales, mushrooms, and strawberries. We can overharvest some species to the point of extinction, and then just switch to other food. A wave of extinctions has ensued every time that humans have reached a previously unoccupied part of the globe. The dodo, whose name has become synonymous with extinction, formerly lived on the island of Mauritius, half of whose land and freshwater bird species became extinct following the island’s discovery in 1507. Dodos in particular were big, edible, flightless, and easily caught by hungry sailors. Hawaiian bird species similarly died out en masse following Hawaii’s discovery by Polynesians 1,500 years ago, as did America’s large mammal species after ancestral Indians arrived 11,000 years ago. Extinction waves have also accompanied major improvements of hunting technology in lands long occupied by humans. For example, wild populations of the Arabian oryx, a beautiful antelope of the Near East, survived one million years of human hunting, only to succumb to high-powered rifles in 1972.

  Thus, there are numerous animal precedents for our propensity to exterminate individual prey species but to sustain ourselves by switching to others. Is there any precedent for an animal population destroying its entire resource base and eating its way into extinction? This outcome is uncommon, because animal numbers are regulated by many factors that tend automatically to lower birth rates or increase death rates when the animal is numerous, and vice versa when it is rare. For example, mortality due to external factors like predators, diseases, parasites, and starvation tends to increase at high population densities. Responses of the animal itself to high densities also contribute, such as infanticide, postponed breeding, and increased aggression. These responses and external factors generally reduce the animal’s population and relieve its pressure on its resources before they can be exhausted.

  Nevertheless, some animal populations actually have eaten themselves into extinction. One example involves the progeny of twenty-nine reindeer that were introduced in 1944 to St Matthew Island in the Bering Sea. By 1957 they had multiplied nearly fifty-fold to 1,350, by the year 1963 another four-fold to 6,000. But reindeer depend for food on slow-growing lichens, which on St Matthew had no chance to recover from reindeer grazing, since the animals had nowhere to migrate. When a harsh winter struck in 1963–64, all the animals except forty-one females and one sterile male starved to death, leaving a doomed population on an island littered with thousands of skeletons. A similar example was the introduction of rabbits to Lisianski Island west of Hawaii in the first decade of this century. Within a decade the rabbits had eaten themselves into oblivion by consuming every plant on the island except two morning glories and a tobacco patch.

  These and other similar examples of ecological suicide all involve populations that suddenly became free of the usual factors regulating their numbers. Rabbits and reindeer are normally subject to predators, and reindeer on continents use migration as a safety valve to leave an area and allow its vegetation to recover. But Lisianski and St Matthew Islands lacked predators, and emigration was impossible, so that the animals bred and ate unchecked.

  On reflection, it is clear that the entire human species has been equally successful in recently escaping from the former controls on our numbers. We eliminated predation on ourselves long ago; twentieth-century medicine has greatly reduced our mortality from infectious disease; and some of our leading behavioural techniques of population control, such as infanticide, chronic war, and sexual abstinence, have become socially unacceptable. Our population is now doubling about every thirty-five years. Granted, that is not as fast as the St Matthew reindeer, and Island Earth is bigger than St Matthew Island, and some of our resources are more elastic than lichens (though other resources, like oil, are less elastic). Yet the qualitative conclusion remains the same: no population can grow indefinitely.

  Thus, our present ecological predicament has familiar animal precursors. Like many switching predators, we exterminate some prey species when we colonize a new environment or acquire new destructive power. Like some animal populations that suddenly escaped their former limits on growth, we risk destroying ourselves by destroying our resource base. What about the view that we were in a state of relative ecological equilibrium until the Industrial Revolution, and that only sin
ce then have we begun seriously to exterminate species and overexploit our environment? That Rousseau-esque fantasy will be taken up in the three chapters of Part Five.

  Chapter Seventeen examines the widespread belief in a former Golden Age, when we supposedly lived as noble savages practising a conservation ethic and in harmony with Nature. In reality, mass extinctions have coincided with each major extension of human lebensraum during the last ten thousand years and possibly much longer. Our direct responsibility for the extinctions is clearest in the case of the most recent expansions, where the evidence is still fresh – Europeans’ expansion over the globe since 1492, and the earlier colonization of oceanic islands by Polynesians and the Malagasy. Older expansions such as the first human occupation of the Americas and Australia were also accompanied by mass extinctions, though the trail of evidence has had much more time to fade and so conclusions about cause and effect are necessarily weaker.

  It is not just the case that the Golden Age was blackened by mass extinctions. While no large human population has eaten itself out of existence, some populations on small islands have done so, and many large populations have damaged their resources to the point of economic collapse. The clearest examples come from isolated cultures, such as the collapses of Easter Island and Anasazi civilizations. But environmental factors also drove the major shifts in Western civilization, including the successive collapses of the Middle Eastern, then Greek, then Roman hegemonies. Self-destructive abuse of our environment, far from being a modern invention, has long been a prime mover of human history.