by Huss, John
There are threats that the other great ape species living today could become extinct too, as many other animal species have, not because of natural conditions, but because human expansion has literally been a harbinger of death. It’s time to consider how to remake human civilization into a harbinger of life, a question that animates a number of the movies in the series, but is especially highlighted in the conclusion of the last of the original series, Battle for the Planet of the Apes. There the Lawgiver, speaking to the integrated class of young human and ape children, says, “But as I look at Apes and Humans living together in friendship, harmony and at peace, at least we wait with hope for the future.” Yet the camera turns to the statue of Caesar, “Our Founder,” which sheds a tear as the movie closes, perhaps suggesting what we know will be a degeneration into race hatred and hostility between apes and humans, the “same old, same old” of civilizational hubris, culminating in the destruction of the Earth from the Alpha Omega bomb.
Despite the ubiquitous cruelty between apes and humans in the series, there are numerous moments when the primate touch empathically bridges the interspecies gulf: Zira putting her hand on Taylor’s in her office after she discovers he can write, or Taylor’s kissing her on the lips near the end of Planet of the Apes, and her return kiss to fellow scientist, the human Dr. Lewis Dixon, in Escape from the Planet of the Apes. But perhaps the best example is found in circus owner Armando’s warm sympathy for Cornelius and Zira and his subsequent raising, as we discover in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, of their son Milo, later named Caesar, who will later lead the rebellion of the apes. Armando was devoted to Saint Francis, “who loved all animals,” and practices that devotion by risking his life, and ultimately losing it, on behalf of his adopted Caesar and the promise of life he holds.
The empathic bonding between ape and man found in the relations of these characters in Planet of the Apes may seem overly “sentimental” to some. In many ways it is, though I think “idealized” is a better term. But it also does strangely break through the human-centered portrayal of apes in the series to show unexpected possibilities to overcome dehumanization. Certain deep sentiments, such as the capacities for empathy, for mothering, for dreaming and playing, that we share with other primates and even with non-primate mammals, may turn out to be the mightiest weapon against the destructive tendencies of the unrestrained mechanization of life today, whose imagined catastrophic consequences are pictured in the Planet of the Apes movies. They are among our oldest primate and mammal capacities, yet crucial for our most newly acquired, characteristically human capacities, such as the self, speech, and rational reasoning, to function optimally and not pathologically.
Though we may think ourselves modern, we retain Pleistocene bodies, as ecological philosopher Paul Shepard put it, and Pleistocene needs, bodied into being over our longer two million year evolution. What Shepard termed “the sacred game,” the dramatic interplay of predator and prey, reminds us of that older evolutionary story, wherein degenerate monkey emerges into being wide-eyed in wonder at circumambient life, a child of the earth foraging for edible, sensible, thinkable, and sustainable wisdom.
Consider what happened to that ape that became human in the past two million years, thanks to the community of mature, instinctive life to which it attuned itself. What is two million years in the long term view of evolution? What if we could redirect our science, technology, and civilization today away from its idealization and worship of the machine and inflated projections of the human, and toward an idea that the further creation and pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty involves a re-attunement to all-surrounding life, not isolation from it?
A creature aware that its destiny is tied to its origins, and that it must, perhaps for the first time, come to terms with itself as a degenerate monkey requiring self-controlling, sustainable limits to its civilization at all levels of institutions and beliefs, toward the purpose of a sustainable, proliferating planet of life? A new civilization capable of relating to the earth not as something put here for humans, but as something marvelous out of which humans were bodied forth to serve?
We might just find a creature in two million years quite different from the futures envisioned in Planet of the Apes, which remain trapped in the constrictive frame of “history.” We might find a planet where biodiversity is itself regarded as a great teacher, a planet teeming with immense varieties of life, revered and enhanced by a somewhat recognizable, but transformed life form. We might find the planet of the regenerate monkeys.
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About the Authors
KRISTIN ANDREWS is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Cognitive Science Program at York University, in Toronto. She is the author of Do Apes Read Minds? Toward a New Folk Psychology (2012) and has done extensive research into the minds of dolphins, human children, and orangutans, including investigations of the pantomime behavior of orangutans and Charlton Heston.
JON
AS-SÉBASTIEN BEAUDRY is a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford, where he served as a treasurer for the Oxford Animal Ethics Society. His work and research focus on the rights of women, poor and indigenous people, and the mentally disabled. He has worked at the Supreme Court of Canada, the Canadian Human Rights Commission, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the International Court of Justice and the Ape City Tribunal.
ANDREW BRENNAN is chair of philosophy and pro vice-chancellor for graduate research at La Trobe University in Melbourne. He and Norva Lo have collaborated on a range of books and papers on environmental philosophy, forgiveness, and the puzzle of whether humans can aspire to any kind of simian dignity.
JASON DAVIS works at Macquarie University in Sydney. He has written chapters for several books in Open Court’s Popular Culture and Philosophy Series, including Dexter and Philosophy: Mind over Spatter, Anime and Philosophy: Wide Eyed Wonder, and Manga and Philosophy: Fullmetal Metaphysician. When he fails to complete tests, it’s because he loathes bananas.
DON FALLIS is Professor of Information Resources and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona. He has written articles on lying and deception, including “What is Lying?” in the Journal of Philosophy and “The Most Terrific Liar You Ever Saw in Your Life” in The Catcher in the Rye and Philosophy: A Book for Bastards, Morons, and Madmen. In 1991, he was a PhD student in philosophy at the University of California, Irvine, where the Conquest of the Planet of the Apes occurred. But for the life of him, he can’t remember a mob of angry apes trying to burn down the campus.
LESLIE DALE FELDMAN is Professor of Political Science at Hofstra University and author of Spaceships and Politics: The Political Theory of Rod Serling (2010). Her parents are great science fiction fans, and her former babysitter always said, when Planet of the Apes was on TV, “Les, the Apes are on!”
