The Human Zoo: A Zoologist's Study of the Urban Animal

by Desmond Morris

  The university student phase usually lasts for three years, which is a long time, as initiation ceremonies go. For some, it is too long. The isolation from parental assistance and the comforting social environment of the home, coupled with the looming demands of the examination ordeal, often proves too stressful for the young initiate. At British universities roughly twenty per cent of the undergraduates seek psychiatric assistance at some time during their three-year course of study. For some, the situation becomes unbearable and suicides are unusually frequent, the university rate being three to six times higher than the national average for the same age group. At Oxford and Cambridge universities, the suicide rate is seven to ten times higher.

  Clearly the educational ordeals I have been describing have little to do with the business of encouraging and expanding childhood playfulness, inventiveness and creativity. Like the primitive tribal initiation ceremonies, they have instead to do with the indoctrination of super-tribal identity. As such they play an important cohesive role, but the development of the creative intellect is another matter altogether.

  One of the excuses given for the ritual ordeals of modern education is that they provide the only way of ensuring that the students will absorb the huge mass of facts now available. It is true that detailed knowledge and specialist skills are necessary today, before an adult can even begin to be confidently inventive. Also, the examination ceremonies prevent cheating. Furthermore, it could be claimed that students should deliberately be subjected to stress to test their stamina. The challenges of adult life are also stressful, and if a student cracks up under the strain of educational ordeals, then he probably was not equipped to withstand the post-educational pressures either. These arguments are plausible, and yet one still senses the crushing of creative potentials under the heavy boot of educational ritual procedures. It is undeniable that the present system is a considerable advance over earlier educational methods, and that for those who survive the ordeals there is a great deal of exploratory nourishment to be gained. Our super-tribes today contain more successful childlike adults than ever before. Yet despite this, in many spheres there still exists an oppressive atmosphere of emotional resistance to radically new, inventive ideas. Dominant individuals encourage minor inventiveness in the form of new variations on old themes, but resist major inventiveness that leads to entirely new themes.

  To give an example: it is astonishing the way we go on and on trying to improve something as primitive as the engine used in present-day motor vehicles. There is a strong chance that by the twenty-first century it will have become as obsolete as the horse and cart is today. That this is only a strong chance and not a complete certainty is due entirely to the fact that at this moment all the best brains in the profession are busily absorbed by the minor inventive problems of how to achieve minute improvements in the performance of the existing machinery, rather than searching for something entirely new.

  This tendency towards short-sightedness in adult exploratory behaviour is a measure of the insecurity of a peaceful society. Perhaps, as we move farther into the atomic age, we shall reach such peaks of super-tribal security, or hit such depths of super-tribal panic, that we shall become increasingly exploratory, inventive and creative.

  It will not be an easy struggle, however, and recent events at universities all over the world bear this out. The improved educational systems have already been so effective that many students are no longer prepared to accept without question the authority of their elders. The community was not ready for this and has been taken by surprise. The result is that when groups of students indulge in noisy protest, society is outraged. The educational authorities are horrified. The ingratitude of it all! What has gone wrong?

  If we are ruthlessly honest with ourselves, the answer is not hard to find. It is contained in the official doctrines of these same educational authorities. As they face the upheaval, they must contemplate the uncomfortable fact that they have brought it on themselves. They literally asked for it. ‘Think for yourselves,’ they said, ‘be resourceful, be active, be inventive.’ Contradicting themselves in the same breath, they added: ‘But do it on our terms, in our way, and above all abide by our rituals.’

  It should be obvious, even to a senile authority, that the more the first message is obeyed, the more the second will be ignored. Unfortunately the human animal is remarkably good at blinding itself to the obvious if it happens to be particularly unappealing, and it is this self-blinding process that has caused so many of the present difficulties.

  When they called for increased resourcefulness and inventiveness, the authorities did not anticipate the magnitude of the response that was to follow, and it quickly got out of control. They did not seem to realize that they were encouraging something which already had a strong biological backing. They mistakenly treated resourcefulness and a sense of creative responsibility as properties alien to the young brain, when in fact they were hidden there all the time, only waiting to burst out if they got the chance.

  The old-fashioned educational systems, as I have already pointed out, had done their best to suppress these properties, demanding a much greater obedience to the established rules of the elders. They had rigorously imposed parrot-fashion learning of rigid dogmas. Inventiveness had been forced to fight its own battles, pushing its way to the surface only in exceptional, isolated individuals. When it did manage to break through, however, its value to society was indisputable, and this led eventually to the present-day movement on the part of the establishment actively to encourage it. Approaching the matter rationally, they saw inventiveness and creativity as immense aids to greater social progress. At the same time, the deeply ingrained urge of these super-tribal authorities to retain their vice-like grip on the social order still persisted, making them oppose the very trend which they were now officially supporting. They entrenched ever more firmly, moulding society into a shape that was guaranteed to resist the new waves of inventiveness that they themselves had unleashed. A collision was inevitable.

  The initial response of the establishment, as the mood of experimentation grew, was one of tolerant amusement. Cautiously viewing the younger generation’s increasingly daring assaults on the accepted traditions of the arts, literature, music, entertainment and social custom, they kept their distance. Their tolerance collapsed, however, as this trend spread into the more threatening areas of politics and international affairs.

  As isolated, eccentric thinkers grew into a massive, querulous crowd, the establishment switched hurriedly to its most primitive form of response—attack. The young intellectual, instead of being patted tolerantly on the head, found himself struck on the skull by a police baton. The lively brains that society had so carefully nurtured were soon suffering not from strain but from concussion.

  The moral for the authorities is clear: do not give creative liberties unless you expect people to take them. The young human animal is not a stupid, idle creature that has to be driven to creativity; it is a fundamentally creative being that in the past has been made to appear idle by the suppressive influences exerted on it from above. The establishment’s reply is that dissenting students are bent, not on positive innovation, but on negative disruption. Against this, however, it can be argued that these two processes are very closely related and that the former only degenerates into the latter when it finds itself blocked.

  The secret is to provide a social environment capable of absorbing as much inventiveness and novelty as it sets out to encourage in the first place. As the super-tribes are constantly swelling in size and the human zoo is becoming ever more cramped and crowded, this requires careful and imaginative planning, Above all, it calls for considerably more insight into the biological demands of the human species, on the part of politicians, administrators and city planners, than has been evident in the recent past.

  The more closely one looks at the situation, the more alarming it becomes. Well-meaning reformers and organizers busily work towards what they consider to be imp
roved living conditions, never for one moment doubting the validity of what they are doing. Who, after all, can deny the value of providing more houses, more flats, more cars, more hospitals, more schools and more food? If perhaps there is a degree of sameness about all these bright new commodities, this cannot be helped. The human population is growing so fast that there is not enough time or space to do it any better. The snag is that while, on the one hand, all those new schools are bursting with pupils, inventiveness at the ready, dead set to change things, the other new developments are conspiring to render startling new innovations more and more impossible. In their ever-expanding and highly regimented monotony, these developments unavoidably favour widespread indulgence in the more trivial solutions to the Stimulus Struggle. If we are not careful, the human zoo will become increasingly like a Victorian menagerie, with tiny cages full of twitching, pacing captives.

  Some science-fiction writers take the pessimistic view. When depicting the future, they portray it as an existence in which human individuals are subjected to a suffocating degree of increased uniformity, as if new developments have brought further invention almost to a standstill. Everyone wears drab tunics and automation dominates the environment. If new inventions do occur, they only serve to squeeze the trap tighter around the human brain.

  It could be argued that this picture merely reflects the paucity of the writers’ imaginations, but there is more to it than that. To some extent they are simply exaggerating the trend that can already be detected in present-day conditions. They are responding to the relentless growth of what has been called the ‘planner’s prison’. The trouble is that as new developments in medicine, hygiene, housing and food-production make it possible to cram more and more people efficiently into a given space, the creative elements in society become more and more side-tracked into problems of quantity rather than quality. Precedence is given to those inventions that permit further increases in repetitive mediocrity. Efficient homogeneity takes precedence over stimulating heterogeneity.

  As one rebel planner pointed out, a straight path between two buildings may be the most efficient (and the cheapest) solution, but that does not mean that it is the best path from the point of view of satisfying human needs. The human animal requires a spatial territory in which to live that possesses unique features, surprises, visual oddities, landmarks and architectural idiosyncrasies. Without them it can have little meaning. A neatly symmetrical, geometric pattern may be useful for holding up a roof, or for facilitating the pre-fabrication of mass-produced housing-units, but when such patterning is applied at the landscape level, it is going against the nature of the human animal. Why else is it so much fun to wander down a twisting country lane? Why else do children prefer to play on rubbish dumps or in derelict buildings, rather than on their immaculate, sterile, geometrically arranged playgrounds?

  The current architectural trend towards austere design-simplicity can easily get out of hand and be used as an excuse for lack of imagination. Minimal aesthetic statements are only exciting as contrasts to other, more complex statements. When they come to dominate the scene, the results can be extremely damaging. Modem architecture has been heading this way for some time, strongly encouraged by the human zoo planners. Huge tower blocks of repetitive, uniform apartments have proliferated in many cities as a response to the housing demands of the swelling super-tribal populations. The excuse has been slum clearance, but the results have all too often been the creation of the superslums of the immediate future. In a sense they are worse than nothing because, since they falsely give the impression of progress, they create complacency and deaden the chance of a genuine advance.

  The more enlightened animal zoos have been getting rid of their old monkey houses. The zoo directors saw what was happening to the inmates, and realized that putting more hygienic tiles on the walls and improving the drainage was no real solution. The directors of human zoos, faced with mushrooming populations, have not been so far-sighted. The outcome of their experiments in high-density uniformity are now being assessed in the juvenile courts and psychiatrists’ consulting rooms. On some housing estates it has even been recommended that prospective tenants of upper-storey apartments should undergo psychiatric examination before taking up residence, to ascertain whether, in the psychiatrist’s opinion, they will be able to stand the strain of their brave new way of life.

  This fact alone should provide sufficient warning to the planners, revealing to them clearly the enormity of the folly they are committing, but as yet there is little sign that they are heeding such warnings. When confronted with the shortcomings of their endeavours, they reply that they have no alternative; there are more and more people and they have to be housed. But somehow alternatives must be found. The whole nature of city-complexes must be re-examined. The harassed citizens of the human zoo must in some way be given back the ‘village-community’ feeling of social identity. A genuine village, seen from the air, looks like an organic growth, not a piece of slide-rule geometry, a point which most planners seem studiously to ignore. They fail to appreciate the basic demands of human territorial behaviour.

  Houses and streets are not primarily for looking at, like set pieces, but for moving about in. The architectural environment should make its impact second by second and minute by minute as we travel along our territorial tracks, the pattern changing subtly with each new line of vision. As we turn a comer, or open a door, the last thing our navigational sense wants to be faced with is a spatial configuration that drearily duplicates the one we have just left. All too frequently, however, this is precisely what happens, the architectural planner having loomed over his drawing-board like a bomber-pilot sighting a target, rather than attempting to project himself down as a small mobile object travelling around inside the environment.

  These problems of repetitive monotony and uniformity do, of course, permeate almost all aspects of modern living. With the ever increasing complexity of the human zoo environment, the dangers of intensified social regimentation are mounting daily. While organizers struggle to encase human behaviour in a more and more rigid framework, other trends work in the opposite direction. As we have seen, the steadily improving education of the young and the growing affluence of their elders both lead to a demand for more and more stimulation, adventure, excitement and experimentation. If the modern world fails to permit these trends, then tomorrow’s super-tribesmen will fight hard to change that world. They will have the training and the time and the exploratory energy to do so, and somehow they will manage it. If they feel themselves trapped in a planner’s prison they will stage a prison riot. If the environment does not permit creative innovations, they will smash it in order to be able to start again. This is one of the greatest dilemmas our societies face. To resolve it is our formidable task for the future.

  Unfortunately we tend to forget that we are animals with certain specific weaknesses and certain specific strengths. We think of ourselves as blank sheets on which anything can be written. We are not. We come into the world with a set of basic instructions and we ignore or disobey them at our peril.

  The politicians, the administrators and the other super-tribal leaders are good social mathematicians, but this is not enough. In what promises to be the ever more crowded world of the future, they must become good biologists as well, because somewhere in all that mass of wires, cables, plastics, concrete, bricks, metal and glass which they control, there is an animal, a human animal, a primitive tribal hunter, masquerading as a civilized, super-tribal citizen and desperately struggling to match his ancient inherited qualities with his extraordinary new situation. If he is given the chance he may yet contrive to turn his human zoo into a magnificent human game-park. If he is not, it may proliferate into a gigantic lunatic asylum, like one of the hideously cramped animal menageries of the last century.

  For us, the super-tribesmen of the twentieth century, it will be interesting to see what happens. For our children, however, it will be more than merely interesting. By the tim
e they are in charge of the situation, the human species will no doubt be facing problems of such magnitude that it will be a matter of living or dying.

  Appendix: Literature

  It is impossible to list all the many works that have been of assistance in writing The Human Zoo. I have therefore included only those which have either been important in providing information on a specific point, or are of particular interest for further reading. They are arranged below on a chapter-by-chapter and topic-by-topic basis. From the names and dates given, it is possible to trace the full reference in the bibliography that follows.

  Chapter one: tribes and super-tribes

  Home range of prehistoric man: Washburn and DeVore, 1961.

  Prehistoric man: Boule and Vallois, 1957. Clark and Piggott, 1965. Read, 1925. Tax, 1960. Washburn, 1961.

  Faming origins: Cole, 1959. Piggott, 1965. Zeuner, 1964.

  Urban origins: Piggott, 1966, 1965. Smailes, 1953.

  Mourning dress: Crawley, 1931.

  Chapter two: status and super-status

  Behaviour of baboons: Hall and Devore, 1965.

  Dominance patterns: Caine, 1961.

  Status seekers: Packard, 1959.

  Mimicry: Wickler, 1968.

  Suicide: Berelson and Steiner, 1964. Stengel, 1964. Woddis, 1957.

  Re-direction of aggression: Bastock, Morris and Moynihan, 1953.

  Cruelty to animals: Jennison, 1937. Turner, 1964.

  Chapter three: sex and super-sex

  Sexual behaviour: Beach, 1965. Ford and Beach, 1951. Hediger, 1964.

  Kinsey et al, 1948, 1953. Morris, 1956, 1964, 1966 and 1967.

  Masturbation: Kinsey et al., 1948.

  Religious ecstasy: Bataille, 1962.

  Boredom: Berlyne, 1960.