Pathfinders: Bodging the Badger Debate (2012)

The Pathfinders Column from the November 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bodging the Badger Debate
Whatever is all this fuss about badgers and the government’s badger cull in aid of? As if there aren’t bigger things to worry about. Socialists are not often accused of being sentimental animal-lovers, but don’t the anti-cull lobby have a point? Scientific surveys have shown that badger culls reduce TB in cattle herds by around 25 percent in the infected area, but increase TB by 25 percent outside the infected area due to the ‘perturbation’ effect of badger refugees running away in all directions from the shotguns. The 2007 survey concluded that closer monitoring of cattle would achieve more than badger culling, so what’s the point of the cull, apart from giving the huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ brigade something fun to do now that they can’t chase foxes and hang peasants?

Some commentators argue that the farmers are exaggerating the problem anyway, since there is no danger to humans thanks to the milk pasteurising process, and there have been virtually no proper studies of the actual cost of bovine TB to the livestock industry. Badgers, after all, are a protected species. You can’t just bang away at them with a twelve bore for no reason.

If for the sake of argument we presupposed a meat and dairy industry in socialism on the same scale as now, which is a rather large and shaky assumption, this is a good example of a hot topic socialists might be having. Naturally we would hope and expect the culling question to be settled by the science, rather than sentiment. We needn’t worry that the ground was being muddied by covert class antagonisms between country squire and townie prole, or about quasi-legal questions of who exactly ‘owns’ a wild animal, whether it is all of us in some abstract way, or the private owner of the specific tract of land upon which the animal resides.

The problem arises when the science is inconclusive. A more recent survey, for example, confirms the ‘perturbation’ effect, but notes that the spread of TB outside the target area is actually quite short-lived. The ideal solution would be to vaccinate the cattle but no such vaccine yet exists. There is a vaccine for badgers, but the problem is catching the buggers and then being able to tell which ones are vaccinated and which ones aren’t, since they both present the same antibodies.

Evidence from New Zealand shows persuasively that culling works. It reduced incidence of TB by up to 83 percent, and significantly, when it was suspended due to lack of money, the incidence shot right back up again. But they were culling possums, not badgers, and the behaviour patterns of infected possums were shown to contribute to their effectiveness as a disease vector. In short, just because it works in New Zealand with possums doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll work in Britain with badgers.

The culls in New Zealand were also helped apparently by the fact that the possum is not an iconic animal immortalised in some Kiwi version of Wind in the Willows, but actually a pest that nobody likes. Many pro-cullers have pointed out that nobody would be making a fuss about these culls if it were a question of rats rather than badgers, and that this sort of ‘fluffy bunny’ thinking is what is really behind the ‘scientific’ objections. However, they themselves don’t care to point out that if badger culling works because badgers are the main TB vector in some areas, then deer culling should also be done because deer are the main vectors in others. Nobody wants a Save Our Bambi media storm on their hands. Even in America, home of the deer hunter, they shy away from deer culls for this reason, instead surreptitiously making hunting licences cheaper and hoping the weekend NRA nuts will do the job for them. Meanwhile, it’s a wonder that the Berkshire Hunt hasn’t trumpeted the fact that foxes can also be carriers.

Press articles on the subject argue that the science won’t persuade anyone because it’s a moral issue, which if true is unfortunate since most objectors are meat and dairy consumers and therefore somewhat morally compromised in this area. Other moral questions such as abortion are similarly not clarified by scientific considerations. In socialism, if there are such debates, we can only say that where the science is unable to make a conclusive case, the decision will have to be taken with a show of hands, whether they are fluffy bunnies’ hands or not.

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The dark side of the coin

Such is the alienating world of commodity relations that many people in rich countries don’t seem to care much about other human beings, for all that they can be reduced to blubbering sentimental wrecks over whales, badgers or trees. Well, if human solidarity doesn’t motivate them, perhaps this will. A new report reveals that up to 90 percent of tropical deforestation is not conducted by governments or licensed commercial corporations, but by the mafia. Organised crime, it turns out, controls up to 30 percent of the global timber trade (New Scientist, 6 October).

It’s surprisingly rarely that socialists are asked ‘what we would do about the mafia’. This is largely because the reality of organised crime does not impinge very much on the public consciousness, for all its petty, Daily Mail obsessions with muggers and benefit frauds. Organised criminals operate outside the state regulatory apparatus, or inside states with no regulatory apparatus. They are responsible for global slavery, which the naive imagine was long ago abolished. They are responsible for counterfeit medicines which form up to 50 percent of the African market. They are responsible for wholesale and reckless fly-tipping of toxic poisons into landfill, paid for by construction and manufacturing companies who find it cheaper not to ask questions. They slaughter protected species for the tables of exclusive restaurants, engage in organ trade for rich invalids, kidnap children for wealthy childless couples, and incidentally, bulldoze rainforests.

If capitalism can be represented by a silver coin held up to the light, then it has a shiny side that we all see, and a dark side that we don’t. Inevitably we all tend to talk about the shiny side, with its democratic institutions and ethical concepts, its science and culture, carelessly forgetting that this is only half the story. What happens on the dark side is obscure, largely unreported, the stuff of Hollywood myth and legend. To look on this dark side is in a sense to look into our history, to see the truly ugly nature of the profit-motive at work, without any mitigating factors.

Technically speaking, organised crime is capitalism’s problem, not ours. It couldn’t exist if we abolished private property, any more than bank robbers could exist without banks. But while it does exist, we should remember that it is there, in the dark, a major player in world economies, as anti-human and anti-worker as they come, capitalism’s ghostly and demonic twin.

Paddy Shannon

The Myth of Man as a Killer (1969)

From the June 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Of all the vulgar modes of escaping from the consideration of the effect of social and moral influence on the human mind, the most vulgar is that of attributing the diversities of conduct and character to inherent natural differences.

John Stuart Mill

Mankind today has greater wealth and knowledge than at any other time in history. Yet today mankind seems more cruel, more aimless, more insane than ever before. It appears to many observed that man has the chance of an earthly paradise, but has chosen an earthly hell. If an individual must be mad to commit suicide, then perhaps the human species as a whole must be mad, for it is quite possible that humanity will exterminate itself.

How baffling this situation appears to so many well-meaning people! They look around and scratch their puzzled heads—if only they could discover the cause of all this lunacy! One of these sincere and disturbed individuals is Konrad Lorenz. However, he actually has managed to find the cause, or so he supposes.

Gazing at all the wars and other atrocities in human society, it occurred to Mr Lorenz that "we are all so accustomed to these phenomena that most of us fail to realise how abjectly stupid and undesirable the historical mass behaviour of humanity actually is.” He began to ponder why "reasonable beings behave so unreasonably.” Lorenz happens to be one of the leading experts on the behaviour of animals. It didn't take him long to decide that the reasons some animals fight each other were basically the same as the reasons some human animals fight each other. Of course he realised that a simple theory like that wouldn't do at all, because non-human animals never display anything on the scale of wars and massacres. So an ingenious twist was added.

With most varieties of birds and animals, fights sometimes occur between members of the same species. But if these fights became too vicious or too frequent, they would be very bad for the species as a whole, which would soon become extinct. So as these animals have evolved, natural selection has bred into them inhibitions. For instance, if two alsatians are fighting, one of them has only to stand in a certain submissive posture, and the other dog will automatically stop attacking. These inhibitions are adapted to the killing ability of the species. An animal which can very easily kill with one bite or blow will usually have strong inhibitions against doing so. If an animal can’t kill quickly, or if his intended victim can get away easily, there will be no need for inhibitions. But if the living conditions of these species are altered, so that they can easily kill their fellows, they will do so without hesitation or remorse. And Lorenz emotionally describes how a dove (the symbol of peace!) will slowly and cruelly torture another dove to death, when they are in captivity.

Applying this to man, Lorenz says that men find it comparatively difficult to kill each other with their bare hands, but as soon as they invent weapons—clubs, spears, atom bombs—their killing ability is vastly increased. Their innate inhibitions against killing, however, remain slight. So they are liable to go around slaughtering each other in a big way.

Having thought up this modem Just-so story, Lorenz leapt into print with his book On Aggression, which has had a huge sale in the German and English-speaking worlds. In this volume he gleefully expands his theory to explain nearly everything about human society, taking in his stride juvenile delinquency, space flight, Kantian moral philosophy, sport, the generation gap, and so forth. Some of it is not exactly new ("The romantic veneration of national values . . . can do nothing but damage.” “We should love all our human brothers indiscriminately.”) But underneath it all is Lorenz’s space-age version of original sin.

Meanwhile someone else was having the same worries. This was Mr Robert Ardrey, who in the 30s was involved with writing plays about social problems. In those days he attributed suffering and poverty to economic and social causes. But how innocent that was! Since then we have had the ‘affluent society’ which has given everyone marvellous economic and social environments, yet the same old problems remain. Perhaps Ardrey's affluence has increased a bit more than most people’s. After all, there is a tendency for those who have moved up in the world to imagine that the world has moved with them, And Ardrey did get the backing of a wealthy capitalist foundation to write his book The Territorial Imperative. This is how he sees the problem:

  How could we know that in the end there would come a changed environment and a prosperity such as no man had ever seen? And that such an age of affluence and material security would witness a level and degree of juvenile delinquency that did not exist in the depression years; racial conflict and bitterness that we had never known; and a crime rate beyond our most monstrous imaginings . . . A changed environment demonstrated that our environmentalist conclusions were inadequate.

. . .  Or perhaps, that a television set and a car aren’t the only requisites of a healthy environment. But to continue with Ardrey’s life story: when he heard of the bombing of Pearl Harbour:

  I ached with my love for my country, I ached with horror at the Japanese deception, I ached with sickness for the American loss I had encountered, slam-bang, for the first time in my experience, the territorial release.

So Ardrey concluded that not only his own reaction, but the actual entry of America into the war, were caused by instincts. He pooh-poohs the suggestion that he had been indoctrinated with patriotic values by pointing out that there were a lot of cynics, sceptics and leftists about in America during his childhood, and he doesn’t remember taking patriotism very seriously.

Although Ardrey is not a scientist, he, like Lorenz, is constantly at pains to state that his opinions are in keeping with the latest scientific findings. His two books, African Genesis and Territorial Imperative, are best-sellers, and together with Lorenz’s propaganda, other popular works like The Naked Ape, and most of all the novel Lord of the Flies, give many folk the impression that the view of man as inherently aggressive and possessive is well substantiated, whereas in fact it is the wildest fantasy, a superstition totally lacking in evidence and utterly rejected by all scientists specialising in this field.

Ashley Montagu has put together an anthology of articles, Man And Aggression (Oxford University Press) mostly written by leading scientists who have been appalled at the epidemic of falsehoods spread by Lorenz and Ardrey. This volume shows, not only how the reasoning of these two writers is mistaken, but also how, time after time, they have simply got their facts wrong. We can recommend any worker bothered by the fairy tales of Human Nature, Killer Instincts, or Territorial Drives, to read Montague’s book. As Montagu makes clear, man has no instincts. Man’s behaviour is learned behaviour, and varies immensely with different upbringing and living conditions.

Most of the Lorenz/Ardrey arguments are developed by assuming that what is true for some animals and birds is true for man. But arguments drawn from birds are strictly for the birds. Furthermore, man’s closest relatives, the primate apes, are especially unaggressive:

  Primates are not usually belligerent unless provoked, and the more carefully they are observed the more remarkably revealing do their unquarrelsomeness and co-operativeness become' . . . if, as is evident, man’s nearer collateral relatives are wanting in anything resembling an inborn territorial drive, it is highly improbable that any form of man was ever characterised by such a drive.

And J. H. Crook adds:

  Perhaps the most striking feature of those nonhuman primates the behaviour of which is most relevant to man is precisely their lack of easily defined territorial behaviour.

In view of the indisputable fact that man’s closest living relatives are notable for their lack of aggression and territory, it would seem that all the arguments in the world about coral fish and greylag goslings must fail to prove that man is naturally a killer or a nationalist.

One of the strange things about Ardrey and Lorenz is that, with their theories of innate depravity, they try to present themselves as courageous seekers after truth, ready to spurn comfortable illusions and face the harsh reality that men are naturally nasty! But the reverse is the case.

The great majority of people today believe in a greedy, lazy and warlike 'human nature'. This is a popular myth which discourages investigation of the real, social causes of man’s inhumanity to man. That man cannot help himself, that he is born cruel and selfish, is just what most people want to be told. This myth enables them to accept without question their most cherished institutions of property and patriotism as 'natural'.

Born and brought up in a specific society, we learn the values of that society just as we learn the laws of nature, and we confuse the two, supposing that private ownership, or governments, or romantic love, are eternal and instinctive, when they are really artificial and indoctrinated. Yet while Ardrey and Lorenz tell the world what the world dearly wants to hear, they pose as bold overthrowers of customary ideas. And the dust jacket of Ardrey’s second book proclaims that he, "threatens even more forcefully some of our most precious assumptions. Mr. Ardrey’s conclusions ... will undoubtedly raise an even greater storm.” Reading that, you will hardly guess that most of his reader- ship are having their most precious assumptions confirmed, and that most of the 'storm' raised by Ardrey’s books has come from scientists who know something about the subjects he dabbles in.

The importance of all this to socialists is clear. We want to remove capitalism—the cause of wars, poverty, nationalism, and exploitation, and of the frustrations which provoke much aggressive behaviour. The lie of innate depravity is a weapon in the hands of the capitalist class: it prevents criticism of capitalism, since there is supposed to be no possible alternative. Ardrey’s theories are the direct offspring of the Christian bogey of original sin. He betrays this quite clearly when he assumes that those who disagree with him think that man is innately ‘good’. Of course, innate goodness is just as much a myth as innate wickedness. Ardrey has consciously set out to rehabilitate the discredited concept of original sin, just as Golding did when he produced Lord of the Flies.

Even the contributors to Montagu’s book, who are no Socialists, have tumbled to the political implications of the Ardrey/Lorenz thesis. K. E. Boulding comments:

 A line of argument like that of Ardrey’s, therefore, seems to legitimate our present morality, in regarding the threat system as dominant at all costs, by reference to our biological ancestors. If the names of both antiquity and of science can be drawn upon to legitimate our behaviour, the moral uneasiness about napalm and the massacre of the innocent in Vietnam may be assuaged.

And Ralph Holloway says of Ardrey’s work:

  In short, this book is an apology and rationalisation for Imperialism, Pax Americana, Laissez-Faire, Social Darwinism, and that greatest of all evolutionary developments, Capitalism.

While Montague concludes:

  What, in fact, such writers do, in addition to perpetrating their wholly erroneous interpretation of human nature, is to divert attention from the real sources of man’s aggression and destructiveness, namely; the many false and contradictory values by which, in an overcrowded, highly competitive world, he so disoperatively attempts to live. It is not man’s nature, but his nurture, in such a world, that requires our attention.

Socialists can only regret that Montagu’s book (at 42s) is unlikely to reach the same massive working-class market open to the capitalist apologetics of Ardrey, Lorenz, Desmond Morris, and William Golding. It is a drop in the ocean compared with the intense brainwashing with ideas of innate depravity which workers receive an the time.

Steele.

Letter: Who’s right about human nature? (1993)

Letter to the Editors from the January 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

  The article on human nature we published last August has provoked a critical response from one of our readers. We publish below a long extract from his lengthy letter, together with our reply.

Your article "Is Human Nature a Barrier to Socialism?” (August Socialist Standard) requires comment.

Following a somewhat sloppy overview of the history of evolutionary theory you decide on an onslaught on your defined “social darwinism” and suggest that "painstaking work in the field” by Schaller, Goodall and Fossey “has shown unequivocally that these animals [chimps, gorillas, orang-outangs) do not fundamentally possess any of the characteristics of aggression . . .  that have been attributed to them”.

One can only assume that the comrades who produced this statement have read very little of the author they cite. The fullest account is surely that of Jane Goodall in her The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behaviour (1986). In her chapter on Territoriality. she reports (from many sources, including your George Schaller) that territorial behaviour is widespread in the animal kingdom while in the higher (primate) species it often adopts a frightening and vicious form. Interestingly, the form of the behaviour is determined by, among other things, the size of the territory and the size of the group occupying it. If the territory is small, the boundaries are visited daily and intruders are frightened off—using the ritual behaviour explored so competently by Konrad Lorenz.

If the territory is large, boundaries are less well monitored but the hierarchy within the group is much more rigidly enforced—(again evidence of the findings of Lorenz vis-à-vis the “functions” of social groups). Typically gibbons occupy “smaller” territories, baboons “larger” ones. The early work on the nature of territorial aggression was that of Robert Ardrey who argued that mans most immediate ancestors were apparently non-aggressive apes resembling chimpanzees or gorillas.

He suggested the move to aggressiveness was brought about by environmental factors—he noted the likely effect of increasing aridity in Africa in the relevant time period and the consequent development of carnivorous habits in proto-humanids. Armed with weapons and searching for limited protein resources supplied by animals of the plain, men soon began to compete, formed territories.

Are the chimpanzees of today territorial? Ask Jane Goodall—and she replies strongly in the affirmative. Intruders from the occupied territories are aggressively expelled. boundaries are visited frequently and monitored, boundaries last for a number of years. The manner of the expulsion is determined by the size of groups, however, rather than the locality. If groups are equally balanced there will be auditory displays, ritualized aggressive displays and both sides will retreat. But if one party is considerably smaller, it will simply turn and run.

Among the chimpanzees the sense of group identity is strong; they clearly differentiate between “them” and “us”. Infants and females within the group are protected—those belonging to another group are frequently killed. Non-group members arc not only attacked but the style of the attack may differ from that used in squabbles within the community. Victims (from other groups) are treated more as though they were prey animals—they are “de-chimpized”.

Chimpanzees differ from most other species in that interlopers are not simply chased away but are assaulted and typically left to die. Moreover they do not just attack interlopers but frequently make aggressive raids into the very heart of the "opposing" camp's territory where adult males, and to a lesser extent, females, are killed. Jane Goodall has documented for the National Geographic the total extermination of a "tribe” of chimps in this manner.

The conclusion that Jane Goodall has drawn from her research is rather different from the implications of your article:

  theirs is a form of territoriality that has shifted away from the relatively peaceful, ritualized maintenance of territory typical for many non-human animals, towards a more aggressive type of behaviour, in the chimpanzee, territoriality functions not only to repel intruders from the home range, but sometimes to injure or eliminate them: not only to defend the existing home range and its resources. but to enlarge it opportunistically at the expense of weaker neighbours; not only to protect the female resources of a community, but to actively and aggressively recruit new sexual partners from neighbouring social groups, (p. 528).

She continues by reporting favourably the views of her colleagues who have agreed that “the early practice of warfare would have put considerable selective pressure in the development of intelligence and of increasingly sophisticated co-operation among group members” and further that "the powerful pressure that warfare almost certainly exerted in the development of the human brain . . . if early humanid males were inherently disposed to find aggression attractive, particularly aggression directed against neighbours, this trait would have provided a biological basis for the cultural training of warriors". She speculates on the theme of evolutionary development.

Of course the work of Goodall. Lorenz and Ardrey and the others you refer to should not be seen as hostile to the development of socialist consciouness per se.

We cannot understand ourselves as a species if we do not appreciate our origins from the animal kingdom. We are the product of our history (nature) and of our environment (nurture). We differ from other species in that we have become “self-conscious". In Hegelian terms we are "nature" becoming conscious of itself. It is only by understanding that we are inseparable from our history and our environment that we can even hope to change the world— and, of course, in changing the world we change ourselves.

Bob Potter 

Hove, East Sussex

Reply

We did not say that the anthropoid apes never behaved in an aggressive way. What we said was what you quote: “that these animals do not fundamentally possess any of the characteristics of aggressiveness and the rest that have been attributed to them”. By “fundamentally” we meant something built-in to their genetic structure that compelled them to act aggressively on all occasions. Jane Goodall certainly recorded aggressive behaviour by chimpanzees but that is not the point at issue which is whether or not this behaviour is inherent. Even you concede that it is a function of size of territory.

Goodall was one of a number of researchers whose work helped dispel the myth, perpetuated by such films as King Kong, that the anthropoid apes were ferocious and dangerous wild beasts. Her later Ardrey-like speculations on the significance of the territorial behaviour of chimpanzees for human behaviour cannot detract from this.

The naturalists of the later part of the 19th century regarded the Great Apes of the pongid line, gorillas, chimpanzees and orang utans, as by nature ferocious aggressive animals. No objective research on how these animals actually behaved was undertaken before about 1960. When it was, the research workers found that the stereotype held by the Victorians of nature red in tooth and claw was completely erroneous.

Instead they all found that these animals' behaviour was very much like the behaviour of human beings, generally pacific and co-operative but also aggressive under certain circumstances. The real difference between human beings and the Great Apes is that the behaviour of human beings is mostly learned behaviour. In other words, human beings can invent new behaviour. The anthropoid apes can't do this very much so that their behaviour remains more or less constant.

The Naked Ape School of Human Nature revived a completely erroneous concept of how modern anthropoid apes behaved, one of violence, and claimed that we humans descended from them differing only in being relatively hairless. when in fact the human line in evolution moved away about 9-12 million years ago in the shape of Ramapithecus.

In any event, conclusions about human behaviour cannot be drawn from animal behaviour. This was the major mistake of the Ardrey group. They attempted to extrapolate from the animal kingdom, particularly from the behaviour patterns of the modern anthropoid apes (but also of greylag geese) and apply them to human beings. But findings which may be authentic for apes and geese do not thereby apply to homo sapiens. Attempts to do this by Ardrey, Lorenz, Morris and Storr have been shown to be completely erroneous by many of the foremost anthropologists of the day.

Taking into account that our critic has insinuated that we have not read very much of the relevant research work, we suggest he would do well to broaden his own horizon in this field by reading some of the following Orang Utan, Orphans of the Forest by Monica Borner with Bernard Stone house. Naked Ape or Homo Sapiens? by John Lewis and Bernard Towers, Man and Aggression, edited by Ashley Montagu, The Nature of Human Aggression by Ashley Montagu, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness by Erich Fromm, Evolution in Action by Julian Huxley, and Prehistoric Man by Vratislav Mazak (to name a small number of many).

Editors

Voice From The Back: Minimum wage, ‘living’ wage or a world without? (2015)

The  Voice From The Back column from the June 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Minimum wage, ‘living’ wage or a world without?

In Congress, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Washington, and Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Virginia, have introduced the Raise the Wage Act, which would increase the federal minimum wage $1 an hour starting in 2016 to $12 by 2020, and thereafter base increases on the growth of the federal median wage. ‘No one who works hard in a full-time job should have to live in poverty,’ Murray said in introducing the legislation (Herald Net, 1 May). No more crumbs! Not even a slice of cake! Workers should demand what is rightfully ours: the whole bakery.

Earning a wage is a prison occupation

One in three full-time employees in some of the world’s largest economies say maintaining a healthy work-life balance has become more difficult in the last five years…’It’s really important in a sustainable 24-7 global marketplace to be able to offer people the ability to ebb and flow to make life work while they’re working so hard,’ says Karyn Twaronite, an Ernst & Young partner and global diversity and inclusiveness officer. ‘The workday is vast. There really aren’t start and end times, and it does have a significant overlap into everyone’s personal life in a significant way. You no longer can leave your work behind at the end of the day’ (US News, 5 May). 9 til 5? More like 24/7, except for the unemployed 1 percent! Socialists, like Marx, by contrast, claim that in a communist society there would be more leisure time, more time for education and that everyone would participate in the running of society. It’s time to break free.

Rage against the machine

Abulkasim Al-Jaberi was arrested at a demonstration against Zwarte Piet for shouting ‘fuck the king, fuck the queen and fuck the monarchy.’… The action taken against him has caused anger on Twitter and vandalism to the Royal Palace. He is being prosecuted for lèse-majesté, a crime which specifically refers to offences against the dignity of the monarch, for which the maximum sentence is five years in prison (Independent, 7 May). Socialists don’t want a Republic: we call not just for the removal of royalty, rather of all parasites. So, in the words of the radical poet Shelley:

Let us hasten that glorious day
When man on man no more shall prey
When prophets priests and kings
Are numbered with forgotten things
Deification of a dictator

‘Over the past five years I’ve often watched documentary films about Stalin, about that time on television and learnt more about him,’ the 29-year-old told AFP. ‘And now I don’t have any negative feelings towards him. He had good intentions’ (Yahoo! News, 5 May). This comes as no surprise to socialists: after all, the class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production. In Stalin’s case, the process started long ago. Here is one example, part of a poem which was published in Pravda on 28 August, 1936:

O Great Stalin, O Leader of the Peoples,
Thou who didst give birth to man,
Thou who didst make fertile the earth,
Thou who dost rejuvenate the Centuries,
Thou who givest blossom to the spring . . .

Drapetomania

There is a long history of science being used to support the status quo. Russian psychiatrists famously aided Stalin by diagnosing dissidents as insane. In 1850s America a Dr. Cartwright identified a condition that caused black slaves to flee plantations. More recently, a report written by six health professionals and human rights activists claims that the American Psychological Association secretly worked with the George W. Bush administration to justify a post-9/11 torture policy (Time, 30 April).

They won, you lost

‘The question is: who is this country going to be run for?’ Mr Axelrod said. ‘Cameron is absolutely right about the question. But it is not a question of whether the country is going to be run for Scotland. It is a question of whether the country is going to be run for the wealthy and powerful interests, who have thrived and prospered under Tory policies while everyday working people have struggled just to keep up’ (Independent, 2 May). Labour, Liberal, Tory – same old boring story. The Greens, SNP, UKIP etc., are part of it too.

Only woolly sheep need leaders

Muriquis (or woolly spider monkeys) from south-eastern Brazil live in large social groups and yet there are no leaders. Males do not boss other males or females and there is no dominance hierarchy – a truly egalitarian society. They are very peaceful primates. Males will even wait in line for their opportunity to mate with a receptive female (Independent, 6 May).

From the horse’s mouth

David Cameron’s former chief strategist has launched a stinging attack on the ‘insular ruling class’ threatening Britain’s democracy. Steve Hilton said too many of those at the heart of government go to the same dinner parties and send their children to the same schools. He said the UK’s political system is now in ‘crisis’ because the same type of people stay in charge whatever the outcome of the elections.

In what will be seen as a criticism of the ‘chumocracy’ of his former boss, Mr Hilton warned: ‘Our democracies are increasingly captured by a ruling class that seeks to perpetuate its privileges.

‘Regardless of who’s in office, the same people are in power. It is a democracy in name only, operating on behalf of a tiny elite no matter the electoral outcome’ (Daily Mail, 17 May).

Monkey Dramas (2018)

Hamadryas Baboons on Monkey Hill.

The Pathfinders Column from the November 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

People sometimes ask ‘who will do the dirty work in socialism?’, but socialism is not likely to have any work that’s as dirty as some of the jobs people currently do in capitalism. War is an obvious example. One dirty job is a very recent phenomenon and it does involve going down drains into filth, but in a strictly virtual sense. Facebook employs around 7,500 content moderators who are charged with the task of reviewing uploaded content which has been flagged as ‘unsuitable’ either by the automated software itself or by human users. This content includes images and footage so unpleasant that moderators are screened for ‘resilience’ and offered free in-work psychology counselling, though in the earlier days of MySpace the counselling was limited to trainers advising ‘It’s ok to walk out, it’s ok to cry. Just don’t throw up on my floor’. What impression such work must give of the human race hardly requires much imagination: ‘I didn’t shake anyone’s hand for three years. I’d seen what people do and how disgusting they are. I didn’t want to touch anyone. I was disgusted by humanity’ (‘An online decency moderator’s advice: Blur your eyes’, BBC News, 14 October).

Perhaps inevitably, social media companies have come in for criticism for not doing enough for their moderators’ mental health, and one former employee is suing Facebook after developing post-traumatic stress disorder due to exposure to a constant stream of imagery involving ‘child sexual abuse, torture, bestiality and beheadings’ (‘Facebook moderator sues over ‘beheading stress’, BBC News, 25 September).

Socialists are opposed to censorship, however there aren’t many of us who would be willing to put ourselves or our kids through what these moderators have had to see. While we argue that there is no such thing as an ‘evil human nature’, we can’t pretend like blind Pollyannas that humans are paragons of adorable fluffiness. Human history says otherwise, again and again. Some humans are just vile, and no special pleading can mitigate that vileness.

For some, the events of the Second World War and the Holocaust are enough to make them give up on the idea of socialism. Not many people, apart from some literalist Christians, still believe in original sin, but there is a common suspicion that in most cases it wouldn’t take much to turn the mildest-mannered bank clerk into a serial killer. Perhaps we’re all potentially monsters, held in check only by the coercive power of the state and the (in the UK anyway) relative unavailability of automatic weapons.

Believers in this secular form of original sin are wont to cite two famous psychology experiments which seem to show scientifically that anyone can be turned into a monster with alarming ease – the 1960s Milgram ‘torture’ experiment and the 1971 Stanford prison experiment.

But as has been noted previously in this column (October 2014), these two experiments were anything but rigorous and scientific, and the headline conclusions which made them famous were not supported by the actual test results. In the Milgram experiment, where subjects were told to electrocute a ‘victim’ whenever they got a question wrong, up to 50 percent refused to comply. Of those who did comply, some wept openly as they pressed the button to deliver the shock. Subsequent interviews revealed that these subjects were badgered by the experimenter who told them that science and the good of humanity depended on their compliance. Rather than being vindictive monsters, the subjects were cowed by the authority of the experimenter and Yale University’s credentials, and by the well-attested human inclination to conform to perceived norms. Others said they were convinced the Yale experiment was a fake to begin with, on the plausible grounds that an Ivy League university was not going to squander its reputation by torturing people.

Gina Perry, the researcher who exposed this appalling pseudo-scientific stunt back in 2012, has followed up with a study of the Zimbardo prison experiment, pointing out that not only did two thirds of the ‘guards’ refuse to torture the ‘prisoners’ as requested (!), but that those who obeyed the instruction felt obliged to do so because they were being paid and told how to behave. Many of the ‘guards’ subsequently said they felt angry that they had been duped and manipulated (New Scientist, 13 October).

The enduring fame of these two dodgy experiments undoubtedly owes everything to the fact that people love hearing about how bad humans are, and this is a crucial part of the ideology of the rich who rule over us. Without rulers to dispense justice and punishment, we are reliably assured through every medium from the Daily Mail to murder dramas, we will certainly descend to barbarism and then extinction.

At one time this notion of ‘scientific’ original sin extended to primates too. London Zoo in 1932 witnessed a phenomenon which became known as The Massacre at Monkey Hill and caused global headlines. A new open-air baboon enclosure was the scene of an astonishing seven-year bloodbath and started a trend in anthropology based on the notion of the ‘killer ape’. In fact the Monkey Hill debacle was due to human ignorance. Staff packed 94 harem-loving male baboons into a space which, in the wild, would have accommodated only one, and then accidentally included six females. The violence that ensued was so bad that staff could not enter the enclosure to remove the bodies. So infatuated did lab researchers and wider society become with this violent ‘killer ape’ stereotype that it was decades before pioneering young field researchers like Jane Goodall were able to overturn it with the simple observation that primates including baboons do not behave this way in the wild. As a recent 2016 article puts it, ‘trying to generalise about primate behaviour based on Monkey Hill would be like trying to learn about human nature by watching a prison riot’ (LINK).

The ‘human nature’ argument is one of the most enduring pieces of propaganda ever levelled at socialists, and it remains popular because in some masochistic way people want to believe the worst of themselves. But it plays directly into the hands of our self-appointed and self-serving rulers. In reality there is nothing in human nature that predisposes us to violence, or against socialism, and the vast majority of workers are nothing like the anti-human caricature that the capitalist media promotes through its shlock-horror reporting and its endless obsession with those TV murder dramas.

Paddy Shannon

Man: Ape in Wolf’s Clothing? (1969)

Book Reviews from the September 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Naked Ape, by Desmond Morris. (Corgi, 5s.)
Violence, Monkeys and Man, by Claire and W. M. S. Russell. (Macmillan, 63s.)
Man and Monkey, by Leonard Williams. (Panther, 8s. 6d.)

Perhaps the most famous of scientific frauds was the fake Piltdown Skull of 1910, a “missing link” fabricated by a person unknown. That anonymous joker put together an ape’s jaw with a human skull. Desmond Morris has grafted the most ignorant fairy tales about human society onto a body of basically sound ideas about human biological evolution. The Naked Ape is a barefaced hoax.

As a gimmick, Morris pretends to describe the human animal just as it would be pictured by a zoologist if it were a newly-discovered species. “Naked ape” is a clinical term (like “black-footed squirrel”) which is supposed to denote men’s most noticeable characteristics: their lack of fur. But evidently, Morris has become a rich man because to millions of his readers, nudity is a novelty. It should be obvious that the most important thing about human animals is not that they are naked, but that they are clothed. In other words, they produce what they consume; they turn the artificial into the necessary, and (like Morris) sometimes confuse it with the natural.

His book is a hymn of praise to modern capitalism. All the current practices, preoccupations, superstitions, myths and manners are, according to Morris, highly admirable. Furthermore, they are natural because they stem from man’s past as a wolf-like, monogamous, predatory killer. Frequently this approach becomes so manifestly silly that we are tempted to suspect the author of perpetrating a spoof, a sarcastic attack on the ludicrous legends of human nature:

One of the essential features of the hunt is that it is a tremendous gamble and so it is not surprising that gambling, in the many stylised forms it takes today, should have such a strong appeal for us.

We can safely wager that not one of the fish-eyed zombies who stand for hours in front of a fruit machine has yet thought of defending his addiction with the excuse that it stems from the bloodthirsty excitement of his prehistoric past. Derision is the only intelligent response to this sort of foolishness, yet Morris seems to be serious. Anyone with a smattering of education knows that societies have changed historically, and that customs vary geographically. But according to Morris, only capitalist man is truly human:

The earlier anthropologists rushed of to all kinds of unlikely corners of the world in order to unravel the basic truth about our nature, scattering to remote cultural backwaters so atypical and unsuccessful that they are nearly extinct.  They then returned with startling facts about the bizarre mating customs, strange kinship systems, or weird ritual procedures of these tribes, and used this material as though it were of central importance to the behaviour of our species as a whole. The work done by these investigators was, of course, extremely interesting and most valuable in showing what can happen when a group of naked apes become sidetracked into a cultural blind alley. It revealed just how far from the normal our behaviour patterns can stray without a complete social collapse. What it did not tell us was anything about the typical behaviour of typical naked apes. This can only be done by examining the common behaviour patterns that are shared by all the ordinary, successful members of the major cultures – the mainstream specimens who together represent the vast majority.  Biologically this is the only sound approach.

In other words, don’t talk to me about filthy savages. Of course, biology has nothing to do with it. There is no evidence that different cultures are due to different biological endowments, and plenty of conclusive evidence against this. People from “all kinds of unlikely corners of the world” have been educated to be perfectly competent under advanced capitalism. Sometimes, even, the more backward the better: as in many parts of Africa, where people from stateless societies (such as the Ibo) have caught on to capitalist values much quicker than people from near-feudal societies at a more advanced stage of social evolution. For that matter, it is common knowledge that the peoples in the most advanced societies today (the Anglo-Saxons, Japanese, Russians, etc.) were for thousands of years scattered in “remote cultural backwaters” while highly successful empires sprouted in what are now wretched deserts. Morris would be very contemptuous about the “bizarre mating customs, strange kinship systems, or weird ritual procedures” of his European ancestors of 2000 years ago.

Tightly blinkered

Not that he is a racist. His point is that “the characteristics that the earlier anthropologists studied in these tribes may well be the very features that have interfered with the progress of the groups concerned”. But to say this is to gloss over the weak point in his argument. If the development of civilisation has been social and not biological, then why stop the clock at one point in time and say that this particular stage of society corresponds to an inborn pattern? Is it not clear, instead, that man is capable of a very wide range of cultural behaviour, and that the modern set of conventions in marriage and politics is just one of many, all equally compatible with any of man’s inborn characteristics?

Not to Morris. He constantly refers to his society as “mainstream”, “healthy”, “go-ahead”, “natural”, and “typical”. His reasons for this judgement are mainly two: that capitalism has the biggest population, and that “the naked ape is essentially an exploratory species.” Morris is thus a typical example of an individual tightly blinkered by the capitalist system, inside which he has been brought up. It never occurs to him that his own value judgement in placing a massive population and an exploratory drive above all other considerations is itself a result of social conditioning.  It would seem to him extremely “bizarre”, “strange”, “weird”, and “typical” to judge a society by (for instance) whether its population is happy, or whether its exploratory drives are harnessed to the satisfaction of human needs. He cannot avoid recognising the danger of capitalist war:

We are, to put it mildly, in a mess, and there is a strong chance that we shall have exterminated ourselves by the end of the century.

And, as one whose mind is open to every myth and delusion in popular circulation, Morris believes that there is a danger of world “overpopulation”, so it might seem surprising that he should consider a large population the primary badge of success.  But he has an answer for this:

It looks very much as though, during the next century or so, we are going to have to change our sexual ways at last.  But if we do, it will not be because they failed, but because they succeeded too well.

Therefore, although the 20th-century predator is a marvelous piece of work (Morris claims his approach isn’t a moral one, but his strong approval shines through every page), the writer can have it both ways. We are a tremendous success because of our animal nature; our colossal failure is due to our animal nature. He has further room for manoeuvre in man’s twofold origin: that of a vegetarian primate which descended from the trees and became a hunter. Anything which cannot be “explained” by man’s predatory nature can of course be quietly slotted into his primate nature. Morris’s strategy is to assume that all modern man’s behaviour is caused by his “nature”, then to look into the current theories of man’s evolutionary origins for the most plausible tie-ups with his present-day activities. Naturally they can easily be found, and this approach then becomes circular, “proving” itself. Since Morris is quite good on biology, his obvious expertise in this field seems to give his elfin portrayal of society some authority. It is a widespread superstition that an expert in one field carries some weight in all fields, and Dr. Morris has exploited this to the full. Latter-day Original Sin merchant Robert Ardrey was overjoyed to find some apparently scientific support for his utterly discredited “Man the Killer” fantasies, and commented on The Naked Ape: “This spectacular book by a master scientist is what every naked ape has been waiting for.”

Dislike of facts

Actually Morris is more than just a specialist who imagines the universe is part of his speciality. He, along with Ardrey and Lorenz, is part of a very definite “backlash” against social science. The problem is that modern sociology and social anthropology, even though sponsored by the capitalist state, have proved up to the hilt what socialists have long insisted: that man’s most sacred institutions are not the product of his nature, but of his changing social environment. There is a very powerful and widespread dislike of this well-substantiated (and rather elementary) fact, which manifests itself in a strong appetite for the output of anyone who can undertake to “prove” the opposite.  Anthony Storr wrote in the Sunday Times recently:

"One quite certain principle of sociology is that very little, if any, human behaviour is inherited”. This extraordinary statement must arise from the idea that man is perfectible by altering his social institutions: a delusion to which only very old-fashioned Communists can now subscribe. We know very little about the fundamental patterns of human behaviour, but we know enough to be sure that man is not infinitely adaptable, and that we neglect biological factors at our peril.

This passage bristles with interesting details: Storr’s coy recognition of the apologetic political function his views serve, the meaningless but ominous-sounding “neglect biological factors at our peril”, the casual admission that “very little” is known about the subject of his heated denunciation, the unjustified use of the alarm-word “extraordinary”, and amid this wordy dust-storm, the one definite statement: that man is not “infinitely adaptable”, which no-one ever suggested.

Actions learned

At the risk of labouring the obvious, let us point out that all of man’s behaviour results from a combination of environmental and genetic factors; that man is the most adaptable of all animals all his deliberate actions are learned; that historically and geographically societies have varied very greatly in their systems of marriage, leadership (if any), property, religion (if any), and status, and that these diversities are not due to genetic differences; that to call any of these systems innate is exactly as ridiculous as to say that the grammar of the English language is innate.

The very fact that the whole human species has spent a very brief period of time (a few centuries) in Morris’s “mainstream”, while it spent the vast majority of its career (many tens of thousands of years) much closer to his “remote cultural backwaters”, should dispel any notion that capitalism’s conventions are inborn. But on one point we agree with Morris. Capitalism is the most advanced system the world has ever seen. For our part, however, this not a moral judgement.  On the contrary, capitalism appeared upon the scene drenched in blood from head to foot; it sent its hideous scourges, Jesus and VD, into all “remote cultural backwaters”, as the advance guard of murder, pillage, and profit. Under capitalism, genocide has become commonplace; misery the very air we breathe.

But when we say that capitalism is the most advanced social system, we mean that its potential for satisfying human needs is greater than that of any previous order.  Capitalism is still a tremendously dynamic society, a society of unparalleled achievement, but of unparalleled waste and destruction also. Only Socialism can put the “exploratory urge” of capitalism to the service of human happiness.

The Naked Ape does contain some well-established facts, and some reasonable speculations (though even the zoological data cannot be entirely relied upon. Some of Morris’s sweeping generalisations about sex in non-human primates are falsified by Leonard Williams’ observations of woolly monkeys). Furthermore, even in 1969, many workers still have a religious, sentimental view of man, refusing to believe that everything about human beings can be explained scientifically. The book may therefore do a good job here, in stripping away mystery and confusion.

Monkey myths

The Russells' volume explains itself at the outset:

First, we have tried to show that violence is not the result of an innate propensity to aggression irrespective of conditions, but a response to stress in societies. Second, we suggest that violence is part of a complex of responses evolved to achieve drastic reduction of a population that is in danger of outgrowing its resources.

Here we have the familiar Malthusian view of human violence, linked up with observations of the behaviour of overcrowded captive monkeys. The main error is the confusion of overpopulation with overcrowding. In the world today there is plenty of overcrowding but no overpopulation: the general trend is the depopulation of some areas, together with the cramming of large masses of people into gigantic cities. There is plenty of room in the world.

Overcrowding does place terrible strains on workers, leading to outbursts of violence, but these must be seen in association with all the other oppressive features of life inside capitalism.

Interesting is the summary of research into monkey violence. In 1932 Zuckerman published The Social Life of Monkeys and Apes, based on observations of baboons in Regent’s Park:

The notion of violent aggressiveness as an inherent quality of monkeys (or at least of baboons) was impressed upon a generation of scientists. By the fifties, when the crime returns from the affluent societies began to hit the headlines. the apparent results of Zuckerman’s work may well have influenced a wider public, and helped to bring about the resurgence of the unconditional view of aggression. Alike in monkeys and man, it seemed, the improvement of living conditions is no guarantee against violence; aggressiveness is human nature, monkey nature, a fact of nature in the most fundamental sense.

Only in recent years have researchers begun to study apes and monkeys in the wild, though they have done so with their heads full of prevailing capitalist myths about “human nature” and hence “monkey nature”. These scientists have been astonished at the peaceable behaviour of wild monkeys, and at first tried to write it off as exceptional or “unusual”, but they have finally had to face the unpalatable fact that healthy monkeys and apes in the wild hardly ever fight.

The author’s conclusion is that “all monkeys are peaceful in some conditions, and violently aggressive in others. Violence is a property of mammalian societies exposed to stress.” They apply this to human beings, and refute the theory (held by Morris) that man’s nature has been predominantly moulded bya wolf-like hunting experience. For by far the greater part of the evolution of man’s ancestors, after they came down from the trees, it would be truer to term them “scavengers” rather than “hunters”. In any case, adaptation to a hunting life would not necessarily make any creatures more aggressive within their own society,

Man and Monkey is a strange book: an idiosyncratic account of the author’s relations with woolly monkeys, combined with a theory of history and society which is a mish-mash of undigested bits of Hegel, Freud, Nietzsche, Lorenz and, yes, Marx. Here we see again the naked ape syndrome, of mixing up half-baked, gossipy opinions with hard facts, in the hope that the latter will add some conviction to the former. A couple of samples: “We are all agreed that the fate of humanity depends on whether the strength of morality can cope with the instinctive drives of man.”  “History shows that aggressive races possessed more initiative and energy than their passive neighbours.” Williams generally does reach opposite conclusions to those of Morris: he finds modern life profoundly unnatural.

One very clear conclusion from both Violence, Monkeys and Man and Man and Monkey is the horribly cruel treatment of our cousins the apes and monkeys, both in zoos and in the pet trade, in the interests of profit.

Steele.

Scenes Deleted From The Jungle Book (2016)

The Pathfinders Column from the November 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

Did you know that cheetahs can't roar scarily like lions, they mostly purr prettily like kittens? Or that they are generally good-natured and easy to tame, unlike other big cats? You probably know that the cubs are incredibly cutesy-cute. What you probably don't know is that these reasons, taken together, are helping to drive the fastest animal on Earth to its extinction.

Why? Because as well has having to deal with low birth rates in the wild due to shrinking habitat combined with around 70 percent cub mortality thanks to lions and hyenas, the cheetah has to face a rather less natural form of predation. Humans want them as pets. But not pets to look after properly, of course. Trophy pets, costing up to $10,000 each on the black market, to dress up in stupid outfits so that their rich, narcissistic owners can impress their shallow and supercilious friends.  So poachers box up whole litters of wild cubs in packing crates, bundle them onto trucks and then container ships, and then lift out whatever has survived at the other end from the heap of starved and dehydrated corpses (BBC Online, 23 September: http://tiny.cc/s7b2fy). Most of the 15 percent of furry little cuties which survive transit rarely make it past their first year as pets anyway because their rich owners have no clue or care about diet or exercise, and are entirely unconcerned about keeping an animal indoors which normally has a 500 square mile backyard to run around in. And if by a miracle they do survive this domestic incarceration, they get too big to feed and the adoring owners promptly dump them in back alleys to starve.

To see who these pet owners are, here's a sample of the Daily Mail in all its fawning glory, gushing over a pair of South African owners and without a single word of criticism (actually, here's a link instead: http://tiny.cc/o0b2fy - we don't want to make Socialist Standard readers feel sick by inserting Daily Mail text here). Here is the same paper simpering over Mr Ultra-Rich Humaid AlBuQaish ('it is not entirely clear what AlBuQaish does for a living') as he flaunts for his 850,000 Instagram followers his menagerie including a lion, a cheetah, a tiger, several chimps and some marmosets, together with an unidentified woman in a bikini and a Ferrari (Link.).

It's one thing, you might argue, to farm animals for their meat, though many would question whether even this is necessary. As humans we are inevitably going to put humans first, and socialists are no different. If animal testing of important medicines is deemed necessary, we are not going to argue that it should not be done, because that would unconscionably put the welfare of animals above that of humans. Indeed there is something rather peculiar about humans and their double-standards towards animals, on the one hand billing and cooing over chicks or lambs or bunny rabbits and then eating them in pies, or keeping pet moggies out of a 'love for animals' while overlooking the massacre of wildlife these same moggies cause on a daily basis. It's estimated, for example, that domestic cats kill around 14 billion small mammals and birds every year in the USA, while in Australia there is serious talk of imposing cat curfews and outdoor enclosed 'catios' to keep the destruction to within sustainable limits (New Scientist, 8 October).

Even so, it is surely beyond any reasonable person to defend the wholesale slaughter of African large animals for the ivory or bushmeat trade, or the exotic pet business, especially when this is a trade indulged in largely by and for the amusement of the rich alone. It's not as if we can really blame the individual poachers either. Faced with poverty themselves, what else are they going to do? And can you even blame individual states, if it comes to that? Swaziland caused a huge row recently at the Conference on International Trade in Endangered Species by arguing that, in order to finance anti-poaching measures, they needed to sell off some of their stock of rhino horn (New Scientist, 1 October). Rhino horn is hugely valuable in Asian markets for quack remedies, and as rhinos approach total extinction in the wild Asian buyers are keen to stock up in advance, thus driving the price further up. The naysayers are adamant that a legitimate market in rhino horn, however limited, will be a disaster for rhinos. They're probably right too. When a limited sale of stockpiled elephant tusks was restarted in 1997, elephant poaching went stratospheric.

Cynics talk about capitalism as 'the law of the jungle' but in fact it's much more vicious and destructive than any law of the jungle, for animals as well as humans. It's a mindless profit-machine, without care or conscience, that like some giant combine harvester rages across the world shredding everything in its path, whether human, animal or natural resource. Where it makes wealth, the rich use it as their plaything. Where it makes a desert, they call it good business practice.

But the rich ought to beware, because one of these days the overwhelming majority of helpless and enslaved workers are going to discover something very important. Whether they are mostly concerned for themselves or their fellows, or else for whales or cheetahs or the environment, or for ideas of justice and human dignity or their children's ultimate welfare, workers are going to discover that they have something uniquely in common, which is that they don't need to be slaves and that they are not helpless at all. And then, just like so those humiliated pets, dressed up in stupid clothes with stupid names in the service of an even greater stupidity, they are going to discover that they have claws too.

Paddy Shannon