The Human Zoo

by Desmond Morris

  Thoughtful white Americans struggle desperately to overcome their prejudice, but the cruel indoctrinations of childhood are difficult to forget. A new kind of prejudice creeps in, an insidious one of over-compensation. Guilt produces an over-friendliness, an over-helpfulness that creates a relationship as false as the one it replaces. It still fails to treat Negroes as individuals. It still persists in looking at them as members of an out-group. The flaw was neatly pin-pointed by an American Negro entertainer who, on being over-enthusiastically applauded by a white audience, chided them by pointing out that they would feel rather foolish if he turned out to be a white man who had blackened his face.

  Until human sub-species stop treating other human subspecies as if their physical differences denoted some kind of mental difference, and until they stop reacting to skin colour as if it were being deliberately worn as the badge of a hostile out-group, there will be pointless and wasteful bloodshed. I am not arguing that there can be a world-wide brotherhood of men. That is a naive utopian dream. Man is a tribal animal and the great super-tribes will always be in competition with one another. In well organized societies these struggles will take the form of healthy, stimulating competition and the aggressive rituals of commercial trading and sport, helping to prevent communities from becoming stagnant and repetitive. The natural aggressiveness of men will not become excessive. It will take the acceptable form of self-assertion. Only when the pressures become too great will it boil over into violence.

  At either level of aggression — the assertive or the violent — the ordinary (non-racial) in-groups and out-groups will face one another on their own terms. The individuals concerned will not be there by accident. But the situation is entirely different for the individual who, because of the colour of his skin, finds himself accidentally, permanently and inevitably trapped into a particular group. He cannot decide to enter a sub-species group, or leave it. Yet he is treated exactly as though he has become a member of a club, or joined an army. The only hope for the future, as I have said, is that the world-wide mixing up of the originally geographically distinct sub-species, which has been increasingly taking place, will lead to a greater and greater blending of characteristics until the strikingly visible differences have vanished. In the meantime the perpetual need for out-groups on to which in-group aggression can be vented will continue to confuse the issue and will continue to cast alien sub-species in unwarranted roles. Our irrational emotions fail to make the proper distinctions; only the imposition of our rational, logical intellects will help us.

  I have selected the example of the American Negro dilemma because it is particularly relevant at the present moment. There is, unhappily, nothing unusual about it. The same pattern has been repeated all over the globe, ever since the human animal became really mobile. Even where there have been no sub-specific differences to fan the flames and keep them alight, extraordinary irrationalities have been widespread. The key error of assuming that a member of another group must possess certain special inherited character traits typical of his group, is constantly arising. If he wears a different uniform, speaks a different language, or follows a different religion, it is illogically assumed that he also has a biologically different personality. Germans are said to be laboriously, obsessively methodical, Italians to be excitedly emotional, Americans to be expansive and extrovert, British to be stiff and retiring, Chinese to be devious and inscrutable, Spaniards to be haughty and proud, Swedes to be bland and mild, French to be querulous and argumentative, and so on.

  Even as superficial assessments of acquired national characters these generalizations are gross over-simplifications, but they are taken much further: for many people they are accepted as inborn traits of the out-groups concerned. It is really believed that in some way the ‘breeds’ have come to differ, that there has been some genetical change; but this is nothing more than the illogical wishful thinking of the ingrouping tendency. Confucius put it very well, over two thousand years ago, when he said: ‘Men’s natures are alike; it is their habits that carry them far apart.’ But habits, being mere cultural traditions, can be changed so easily, and the in-grouping urge hopes for something more permanent, more basic, to set ‘them’ apart from ‘us’. Being an ingenious species, if we cannot find such differences, we do not hesitate to invent them. With astonishing aplomb, we airily overlook the fact that nearly all the nations I have mentioned above are complex mixtures of a whole collection of earlier groupings, repeatedly cross-bred and re-fused. But logic has no place here.

  The whole human species has a wide range of basic behaviour patterns in common. The fundamental similarities between any one man and any other man are enormous. One of these, paradoxically, is the tendency to form distinct in-groups and to feel that you are somehow different, really deep-down different, from members of other groups.

  This feeling is so strong that the view I have expressed in this chapter is not a popular one. The biological evidence, however, is overwhelming and the sooner it is appreciated, the more tolerant we can hope to become in our intergroup dealings.

  Another of our biological characteristics, as I have already stressed, is our inventiveness. It is inevitable that we shall be constantly trying out new ways of expressing ourselves, and that these new ways will differ from group to group and from epoch to epoch. But these are superficial properties, easily gained and easily lost. They can come and go in a generation, whereas it takes hundreds of thousands of years to evolve a new species like ours and to build its basic biological features. Civilization is only ten thousand years old. We are fundamentally the same animals as our hunting ancestors. We all stemmed from that stock, all of us, regardless of our nationality. We all carry the same basic genetic properties. We are all naked apes beneath the wild variety of our adopted costumes. It is as well for us to remember this when we start playing our in-grouping games and when, under the tremendous pressures of super-tribal living, they begin to get out of hand and we find ourselves about to shed the blood of people who, beneath the surface, are exactly like ourselves.

  Having said this, I am nevertheless left with an uneasy feeling. The reason is not hard to find. On the one hand I have pointed out that the in-grouping urge is illogical and irrational; on the other hand I have emphasized that conditions are so ripe for inter-group strife that our only hope is to apply rational, intelligent control. In urging the rational control of the deeply irrational, it could be argued that I am being unduly optimistic. It is not perhaps asking too much that rational processes should be brought to bear as an aid to the problem, but on the present evidence it does seem to be beyond hope that they alone will solve it. One only has to observe the most intellectual of protestors beating policemen over the heads with placards reading ‘Stop this violence’, or listen to the most brilliant of politicians supporting war ‘to ensure peace’, to realize that rational restraint in such matters is an elusive quality. Something else is needed. In some way we must tackle, at the roots, those conditions I referred to that are ripening us so effectively for inter-group violence.

  I have already discussed these conditions, but it will help to summarize them briefly. They are:

  The development of fixed human territories.

  The swelling of tribes into over-crowded supertribes.

  The invention of weapons that kill at a distance.

  The removal of leaders from the front line of battle.

  The creation of a specialized class of professional killers.

  The growth of technological inequalities between the groups.

  The increase of frustrated status aggression within the groups.

  The demands of the inter-group status rivalries of the leaders.

  The loss of social identity within the super-tribes.

  The exploitation of the co-operative urge to aid friends under attack.

  The one condition I have deliberately omitted from this list is the development of differing ideologies. As a zoologist, viewing man as an animal, I find it hard to tak
e such differences seriously in the present context. If one assesses the inter-group situation in terms of actual behaviour, rather than verbalized theorizing, differences in ideology fade into insignificance alongside the more basic conditions. They are merely the excuses, desperately sought for to provide reasons high-sounding enough to justify the destruction of thousands of human lives.

  Examining the list of the ten more realistic factors it is difficult to see where one can begin to seek improvement in the situation. Taken together, they appear to offer an absolutely cast-iron guarantee that man will for ever be at war with man.

  Remembering that I have described the present state as being that of a human zoo, perhaps there is something we can glean from looking inside the cages of an animal zoo. I have already made the point that wild animals in their natural environment do not habitually slaughter large numbers of their own kind; but what of the caged specimens? Are there massacres in the monkey house, lynchings in the lion house, pitched battles in the bird house? The answer, with obvious qualifications, is in the affirmative. The status struggles between established members of overcrowded groups of zoo animals are bad enough, but, as every zoo-man knows, the situation is even worse when one tries to introduce newcomers to such a group. There is a great danger that the strangers will be jointly set upon and relentlessly persecuted. They are treated as invading members of a hostile out-group. There is little they can do to stem the onslaught. If they huddle unobtrusively in a corner, rather than flaunt themselves in the middle of the cage, they are nevertheless hounded out and attacked.

  This does not happen in all instances; where it is most prevalent, the species involved are usually those suffering from the most unnatural degree of spatial cramping. If the established cage owners have more than enough room, they may attack the newcomers initially and drive them away from the favoured spots, but they will not continue to persecute them with undue violence. The strangers are eventually permitted to take up residence in some other part of the enclosure. If the space is too small this stabilization of the relationship can never develop, and bloodshed inevitably ensues.

  It is possible to demonstrate this experimentally. Sticklebacks are small fish that hold territories in the breeding season. The male builds a nest in the water-weeds and defends the area around it against other males of the species. Being solitary in this case, a single male represents the ‘in-group’ and each of his territory-owning rivals represents an ‘out-group’. Under natural conditions, in a river or stream, each male has enough room, so that hostile encounters with rivals are restricted largely to threats and counter-threats. Prolonged battles are rare. If two males are encouraged to build nests, one at either end of a long aquarium tank, then, as in nature, they meet and threaten one another at a roughly mid-tank boundary line. Nothing more violent occurs. However, if the water-weeds in which they have nested have been experimentally planted in small, movable pots, it is possible for the experimenter to shift these pots closer together and artificially cramp the territories. As the pots are gradually brought nearer to one another, the two territory-owners intensify their threat displays. Eventually the system of ritualized threat and counter-threat breaks down, and serious fighting erupts. The males endlessly bite and tear at one another’s fins, their nest-building duties forgotten, their world suddenly a riot of violence and savagery. The moment that their nest-pots are drawn apart again, however, peace returns and the battleground subsides once more into an arena for harmless, ritualized threat displays.

  The lesson is obvious enough: when the small human tribes of early man became swollen into super-tribal proportions, we were, in effect, performing the stickleback experiment on ourselves, with much the same result. If the human zoo is to learn from the animal zoo, then, it is this second condition to which we should pay particular attention.

  Viewed with the brutally objective eye of the animal ecologist, the violent behaviour of an over-populated species is an adaptive self-limiting mechanism. It could be described as being cruel to the individual in order to be kind to the species. Each type of animal has its own particular population ‘ceiling’. If the numbers rise above this level, some sort of lethal activity intervenes and the numbers sink again. It is worth considering human violence in this light for a moment.

  It may sound cold-blooded to express it in this way, but it is almost as if, ever since we first started to become overcrowded as a species, we have been frantically searching for a means to correct this situation and to reduce our numbers to a more suitable biological level. This has not been restricted merely to undertaking bulk slaughter in the form of wars, riots, revolts and rebellions. Our resourcefulness has known no bounds. In the past we have introduced a whole galaxy of self-limiting factors. Primitive societies, when they first began to experience over-crowding, employed practices such as infanticide, human sacrifice, mutilation, head-hunting, cannibalism, and all kinds of elaborate sexual taboos. These were not, of course, deliberately planned systems of population control, but they helped to control the population nevertheless. They failed, however, to put a complete brake on the steady increase in human numbers.

  As technologies advanced, the individual human life became more strongly protected and these earlier practices were gradually suppressed. At the same time, disease, drought and starvation came under heavy attack. As the populations began to soar, new self-limiting devices appeared on the scene. When the old sexual taboos vanished, strange new sexual philosophies emerged that had the effect of reducing group fecundity; neuroses and psychoses proliferated, interfering with successful breeding; certain sexual practices increased, such as contraception, masturbation, oral and anal intercourse, homosexuality, fetishism and bestiality, which provided sexual consummation without the chance of fertilization. Slavery, imprisonment, castration and voluntary celibacy also played their part.

  In addition we terminated individual lives by widespread abortion, murder, the execution of criminals, assassination, suicide, duelling and the deliberate pursuit of dangerous and potentially lethal sports and pastimes.

  All these measures have served to eliminate large numbers of human beings from our over-crowded populations, either by the prevention of fertilization, or by extermination. Assembled together in this way they make a formidable list. Yet in the last analysis they have proved, even in combination with mass warfare and rebellion, to be hopelessly ineffectual. The human species has survived them all and has persisted in over-breeding at an ever increasing rate.

  For years there has been a stubborn resistance to interpreting these trends as indications that something is biologically wrong with our population level. We have repeatedly refused to read them as danger signals, warning us that we are heading for a major evolutionary disaster. Everything possible has been done to outlaw these practices and to protect the breeding and living rights of all human individuals. Then, as the groups of human animals have swollen to increasingly unmanageable proportions, we have applied our ingenuity to advancing technologies that help to make these unnatural social conditions bearable.

  As each day passes (adding, as it does so, another 150,000 to the world population), the struggle becomes more difficult. If present attitudes persist, it will soon become impossible. Something will eventually arrive to reduce our population level, no matter what we do. Perhaps it will be heightened mental instability leading to reckless utilization of weapons of uncontrollable power. Perhaps it will be mounting chemical pollution, or wildfire diseases of plague intensity. We have a choice: either we can leave matters to chance, or we can attempt to influence the situation. If we take the former course, then there is a very real danger that, when a major population-control factor does break through our defences and start to operate, it will be like the bursting of a dam and will carry away our whole civilization. If we take the latter course, we may be able to avert this disaster; but how do we set about selecting our method of control?

  The idea of enforcing any particular anti-breeding or anti-living devi
ce is unacceptable to our fundamentally co-operative nature. The only alternative is to encourage voluntary controls. We could, of course, promote and glamourize increasingly dangerous sports and pastimes. We might popularize suicide (‘Why wait for disease?—Die now, painlessly!’), or perhaps create a sophisticated new celibacy cult (‘purity for kicks’). Advertising agencies throughout the world might be employed to pour out persuasive propaganda extolling the virtues of instant dying.

  Even if we took such extraordinary (and biologically wasteful) steps, it is doubtful if they would lead to a significant level of population control. The method more generally favoured today is advanced contraception, with the added secondary measure of legalized abortion in the case of unwanted pregnancies. The argument favouring contraception, as I pointed out in an earlier chapter, is that preventing life is better than curing it. If something has to die, it is better that it should be human eggs and sperm, rather than thinking, feeling human beings, cared for and caring, who have already become an integral and interdependent part of society. If the argument of repugnant waste is applied to contraceived eggs and sperm, it can be pointed out that nature is already remarkably wasteful where these products are concerned, the human female being capable of producing around four hundred eggs during her lifetime, and the adult male literally millions of sperm every day.