by Huss, John
There’s clearly a difference between deceiving someone and merely withholding information from someone. As Dr. Milo explains to Zira (after she unwisely reveals her ability to speak to Dr. Dixon), “There is a time for truth, and a time, not for lies, but for silence.” And it looks like real apes can only intentionally withhold information in order to keep others in the dark about something. Unlike General Thade, they cannot intend others to acquire false beliefs. And so, real apes may not be sneaky enough to be people.1
________
1 I would like to thank Kristin Andrews, Tony Doyle, John Huss, James Mahon, Kay Mathiesen, Bill Taylor, and Dan Zelinski for helpful suggestions on this chapter.
II
Ape Science
4
Science’s Crazy Dogma
BERNARD E. ROLLIN WITH JOHN HUSS
In 1968, the year that Planet of the Apes was released, I was insufferable. Halfway through my doctorate in philosophy at Columbia University, with a couple of trivial publications gracing my resume, and a Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh behind me, I was so cool and aloof that I appreciated virtually nothing. If movies were not grainy and incomprehensible, I sneered at them. As for Planet of the Apes, I regretted spending a dollar to see it, advised anyone who would listen not to see it, and dismissed it as incoherent, pretentious, hokey, pseudo-intellectual Hollywood drivel.
Yet today, after working on the ethics of scientific research—especially animal research—for more than thirty-five years, and then viewing the movie again, I find it to be an astute, telling, and devastating depiction and critique of what I have called “scientific ideology” or the “common sense” of science. Few movies better illustrate the ubiquitous psychological effects of absurd ideology than Planet of the Apes.
Nazi Ideology
It’s easy to underestimate the power of ideology to be a source of great evil. Consider the Holocaust: The German government estimates that it took at least fifty thousand full-time workers to carry out the Holocaust smoothly. Is it possible to believe, asks historian Daniel Goldhagen, that there were in fact fifty thousand psychopaths roaming around in Germany waiting to be tapped for such killing?
Not likely, says Goldhagen. So how can we explain such plainly immoral acts as panels of physicians judging that thousands of physically and mentally “defective” children had lives “not worth living” and thereby authorizing their death by lethal injection? Similarly, Goldhagen writes about auxiliary policemen from Germany who were brought to the Eastern front to kill women, children, and “undesirables”—Jews, Gypsies, and many others. Not only were those unwilling to do so not punished, they were rewarded and sent home. Nonetheless, most of them served voluntarily and eagerly.
Goldhagen and others have explained this unexpected behavior by appeal to ideological conditioning. For example, Robert Jay Lifton has demonstrated that German doctors were trained not only in the treatment of individual human beings, but also in removing “pathogens” from the body politic—mentally and physically “defective” people who consumed resources but contributed nothing to society. Similarly, Goldhagen recounts long-standing German ideology that characterizes “outsiders” like the Jews as parasites. Ideologies create predictable, unreflective, automatic, and thoughtless responses to difficult questions. They allow us to act without thinking, and eclipse common sense, common decency, and even basic logic (witness Catholic ideology declaring that something can be both three and one at the same time). It is characteristic of ideology that once we’ve been trained to embrace it, it seems obvious and unquestionable to us.
Dr. Zaius, Minister of Science and Chief Defender of the Faith
In the 1968 movie, the reigning ideology is the superiority of apes to any and all other life forms. There are scenes where Taylor tries to communicate with his captors, at first through gestures, and eventually using words. He protests, “I can speak. . . . I can talk, can’t you see?” Still, the apes reject these self-verifying utterances with formulaic responses: “He keeps pretending he can talk.” “He has a gift for mimicry.” “Human see, human do.”
These responses violate both facts and logic. In frustration, Taylor declares “You are a scientist—don’t you believe your own eyes?” Indeed, the very fact the apes are able to converse with Taylor shows conclusively that he is communicating. Were he simply engaging in “mimicry” or “pretending” there could be no flow and give and take of argument—Taylor’s responses would not be appropriate, nor could the apes answer him in kind. In short, despite the fact that their dialogue with Taylor belies the content of their own argument, the apes hold fast to their claims, a classic ideological strategy.
Indeed, this is precisely the strategy employed by scientific ideology to dismiss both empirical and conceptual evidence of animal thought and animal communication. Some propositions are so deeply embedded in the background beliefs of scientists that they become almost irrefutable. They are held, dogmatically, in the face of all evidence and argument to the contrary. When science hardens into ideology in this way the result is a near-religion known as “scientism.” When you’re in the grip of a scientistic worldview, “facts” that are evident to both sense experience and common sense are ruled out as irrelevant.
Perhaps surprisingly, in the character of Zaius, science and religion are conflated. Zaius is both Minister of Science and Chief Defender of the Faith, and his reaction to Taylor’s behavior is consonant with that dual role. As Taylor rightly remarks, “Are they afraid of me? I can’t hurt them . . . but I threaten them somehow. Threaten their faith in simian superiority. They have to kill me.” Faith and science converge in contemporary science’s unwillingness to consider the morality of harming and killing animals for the sake of advancing scientific knowledge. The failure of science to acknowledge the obvious fact that non-human animals can be hurt and harmed and the correlative failure to apply ethical categories to patently hurtful animal use is very much a matter of scientific faith, not reason, and thus looks very much like religiously based dogma, rather than rational ethics.
Scientific Ideology
Ideologies operate in many different areas—religious, political, sociological, economic, ethnic. So it’s not surprising that a scientific ideology has emerged. After all, science has been the dominant way of knowing about the world in Western societies since the Renaissance. In order to fully explain how Planet of the Apes is relevant to contemporary ideologically-based moral abuses, I have to summarize what I have studied and taught for nearly forty years. I call it scientific ideology or the common sense of science. It is to scientific life what common sense is to daily life.
Ask a typical working scientist what separates science from religion, speculative metaphysics, or shamanistic worldviews. Most would immediately say that science tests all claims through observation and experiment. This aspect of scientific ideology dates to Sir Isaac Newton, who proclaimed that he did not “feign hypotheses” (“hypotheses non fingo”) but operated directly from experience. The fact that Newton in fact did use such non-observable (and therefore hypothetical) notions as gravity, action at a distance, and absolute space and time did not stop him from explicitly ruling out hypotheses. Members of the Royal Society, arguably the first association of scientists, apparently took him literally, gathered data for their ‘commonplace books’, and fully expected major scientific breakthroughs to emerge. For the most part, those breakthroughs never came.
Defending Science against Nonsense
The insistence on experience as the bedrock for science continues from Newton to the twentieth century, where it led to logical positivism, a movement that was designed to eliminate from science anything that could not be verified by the senses. At its most extreme, it aimed to reduce all of science to a set of general truths logically derivable from observations. Anything not based on sensory experience or logic was to be cast aside as meaningless. A classic example can be found in Einstein’s rejection of Newton’s concepts of absolute space an
d time, on the grounds that such talk was untestable.
But the logical positivist program was only partly eliminative, of course. Logical positivism’s “positive” program was to encourage the formulation of views in such a way that their predictions could be tested by experience. In a sense, this requirement may very well have bequeathed us the Planet of the Apes franchise. On January 14th, 1972, when astronauts Taylor, Landon, Dodge, and Stewart took flight aboard the Icarus, their mission was to test the Hasslein Curve theory of Dr. Otto Hasslein, which predicted that over the course of eighteen months (ship time) that the crew would spend in flight, most of it in suspended animation, they would be propelled over two thousand years forward in Earth time, a prediction that was confirmed as the ship’s clock reads November 25th, 3978 at the time it crashes.
Although logical positivism took many forms, the message to scientists and their students (like me), was that proper science shouldn’t allow unverifiable statements. This left scientists free to dismiss religious claims, metaphysical claims, or other speculative assertions not merely as false, and irrelevant to science, but also as meaningless. Only what could be verified (or falsified) empirically was meaningful. A looser requirement was that a claim should be verifiable in principle. “In principle” meant “someday,” given technological progress.
So although the statement “In the distant future, Earth will be ruled by an advanced simian society” could not in fact be verified or falsified in 1972, it was still meaningful, since we could see how it could be verified, for example by building rocket ships and sending astronauts deep into outer space and back at near light speed. Such a statement is totally unlike the statement “There are intelligent beings in Heaven,” because, however our technology is perfected, we don’t even know what it would be like to visit Heaven, since it is not a physical place. Thus, according to the logical positivist, it’s a meaningless statement.
Is Science Value-Free?
What does all this have to do with ethics? Quite a bit, it turns out. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who greatly influenced the logical positivists, remarked in a public lecture around 1930, that if you take an inventory of all the facts in the universe, you will not find it a fact that killing is wrong. In other words, ethics is not part of the furniture of the scientific universe. You can’t, in principle, test the proposition that “Killing is wrong.” It can neither be verified nor falsified. So, according to Wittgenstein, ethical judgments are empirically and scientifically meaningless. It’s a short leap of logic to the conclusion that ethics lies outside the scope of science, along with all judgments regarding values. The slogan that I learned in my science courses in the 1960s, and which is still being taught in too many places, is that “Science is value-free.”
The denial of the relevance of ethics to science was taught both explicitly and implicitly. One could find it stated in science textbooks. For example, in the late 1980s when I was researching a book on animal pain, I looked at basic biology texts, two of which a colleague and I had used, ironically enough, in an honors biology course we team-taught for twenty-five years attempting to combine biology and its philosophical and ethical aspects. The widely used Keeton and Gould textbook, in what one of my colleagues calls the “throat-clearing introduction,” loudly declares that “Science cannot make value judgments . . . cannot make moral judgments.” In the same vein, Mader, in her popular biology text, asserted that “Science does not make ethical or moral decisions.” The standard line affirms that science at most provides society with facts relevant to making moral decisions, but never makes such decisions itself.
So according to the logical positivists, moral discussion is empirically meaningless. But that is not the whole story. Positivists felt compelled to explain why intelligent people continued to make moral judgments and continued to argue about them. Their explanation goes like this. When people say things like “killing is wrong,” which seem to be statements about reality, they are in fact describing nothing. Rather, they are “emoting,” expressing their own revulsion at killing. “Killing is wrong” really expresses “Killing, yuk!” And when we seem to debate killing, we are not really arguing about ethics (which we can’t do any more than you and I can debate whether we like or don’t like the Tim Burton remake), but rather disputing each other’s facts. For example, a so-called debate over the morality of capital punishment is my expressing revulsion at capital punishment while you express approval. What we can debate are factual questions such as whether or not capital punishment serves as a deterrent against murder.
It’s therefore not surprising that when scientists were drawn into social discussions of ethical issues they were every bit as emotional as their untutored opponents. According to positivist ideology these issues are nothing but emotional; therefore, the notion of rational ethics is an oxymoron, and he who generates the most effective emotional response “wins.”
So in the 1970s and 1980s debate over the morality of animal research, most scientists either totally ignored the issue, or countered criticisms with emotional appeals to the health of children. For example, in one film entitled “Will I Be All Right, Doctor?” (the question asked by a frightened child), made by defenders of unrestricted research, the response was “Yes, if they leave us alone to do what we want with animals.” So unabashedly mawkish was the film, that when it was aired at a national meeting of laboratory animal veterinarians, whom you’d expect to be about the most sympathetic audience you could find, one veterinarian exclaimed that he was “ashamed to be associated with a film that is pitched lower than the worst anti-vivisectionist clap-trap!”
Other ads placed by the research community affirmed that ninety percent of the animals used in research were mice and rats, animals “people kill in their kitchens anyway.” Sometimes questions raised about animal use, as once occurred in a science editorial, elicited the reply that “Animal use is not an ethical question—it is a scientific necessity,” as if it cannot be, and is not, both.
Stop Thinking You Can Think!
Denying the relevance of values in general and ethics in particular to science has blinded scientists to issues of major concern to society. But that’s not all. There is another major component of scientific ideology that harmonizes perfectly with the value-free dictum. That was the claim that science can’t legitimately talk about consciousness or subjective experiences—since they are unobservable—which led to a question about their existence—even pain! (John Watson, the founder of Behaviorism came close to saying that we don’t have thoughts, we only think we do!)
As you can imagine, agnosticism about animal pain quickly devolved into atheism. During the 1970s and 1980s, two veterinarians, an attorney, and I conceptualized, drafted, and ultimately persuaded Congress to pass two pieces of 1985 federal legislation assuring some minimal concern on the part of researchers for the welfare of laboratory animals. In the course of my discussions with Congress, I was asked why a law regulating animal research was needed. I replied that the scientific community did not use analgesics (painkillers) for animals used in the most painful experiments. Congress replied that the research community claimed it did use painkillers very liberally, and it was my job to prove they did not.
After much thought, I approached a friend who was a librarian at the Library of Congress, and asked him to do a literature search on analgesics for laboratory animals. That search revealed no articles. I then asked him to expand the search to analgesics for animals. The search found two papers, one of which affirmed that there should be papers! Fortunately, this strategy plainly indicated the need for legislation.
The Psychologist’s Dilemma
Here’s a personal anecdote strangely reminiscent of the sort of “logic” employed by Dr. Zaius when he denies to Taylor’s face that Taylor is capable of thought. In 1982, I was invited to give the prestigious C.W. Hume lecture on animal welfare at the University of London. I was also asked by the organizers to comment on a paper dealing with pain in dogs. The speake
r was a prominent British pain physiologist who dwelt at length on how different the electrochemical activity in the cerebral cortex of dogs during the administration of painful stimuli was from that of people. He concluded that dogs did not feel pain in any sense humans could relate to. My response was uncharacteristically brief. I pointed out that he was a prominent pain researcher who did pain research on dogs and extrapolated the results to people. He agreed. I then pointed out that either his speech or his life’s work was false, since, of course, if dogs don’t feel pain, they can’t model human pain!
In further illustration of this twisted logic, consider what’s known as the “psychologist’s dilemma.” If animals do not, as scientific ideology suggests, experience fear, loneliness, boredom, anxiety, or similar emotions, what’s the point of studying these states in “animal models?” And if they do experience them in a way that is analogous to the way we do, how can it possibly be moral to create those states in them? This is an excellent example, as it shows plainly the way in which denying the existence of the animal mind works hand-in-hand with denying the relevance of ethics to science.
Recall Taylor’s plaintive lament to Zaius—“Don’t you believe your own eyes?” The ability of ideology to blind us even to patent sense experience has a long history. For example, when Galileo was accused of heresy, in part because he denied the Moon was perfect, and he implored the bishops to see for themselves by looking through his telescope, they refused to look. The reason is that they already “knew” the Moon was perfect. And if someone had made them look, we can imagine the answer—“Galileo has built an instrument that distorts the perfect moon and makes it look flawed.”
