by Mike Bendzela
I have mourned the fact my entire life that we, as a species, no longer have tails. —Robert Sapolsky
It’s too bad the most basic fact of our existence is overlooked, ignored, even denied, and railing against this state of affairs is largely pointless. I’m talking about our essential animal nature, written in our genes and imbued in our gray matter. I’ve scribbled on the topic before, working against a tide of careless language that swamps public discourse with confusion, particularly in politics. As a writer who is hardly a scientist, I sometimes resort to using the fable and the parable over the essay form for illustrative purposes, as I’m a better storyteller and analogy fabricator than an expository writer. I like these forms as they are instructive as well as entertaining.
As I’m a mere lay observer, my knowledge comes by way of books and lectures from writers whose knowledge exceeds my own by orders of magnitude. We all know the names: Darwin and Wallace themselves; Dawkins, Dennett, Gould, Sapolsky, Mr. Braterman of this very website, and so on. I’ve taken every evolution course I can find at the University where I am an adjunct instructor of writing, sections in both the Biology and Anthropology departments. I was privileged to be admitted into all of the courses taught by Harvard PhD Professor Kenneth Weber (1943-2023), some of which I audited, others I took for grades. I was flattered when he told the class that I, a university employee, was not an undergraduate biology student but an evolution “enthusiast.” Yes, that’s the right term for it. I am enthusiastic about what Darwin called “descent with modification.” This idea should be the centerpiece of all our lives, the same way evolutionary theory is the centerpiece of all the life sciences.
But if gifted writers and teachers such as those mentioned cannot make a dent in the consciousness of the American public, who am I to think I can?
There is no shortage of addled public commentary to keep me in a state of perpetual despair about the prospect of evolutionary thinking ever penetrating into the heart of American culture. The “universal acid” effect of “Darwin’s dangerous idea,” as expressed by Daniel Dennett, has found an impervious container in the American psyche. All you have to do is listen to what people say to know this is true. Yet in spite of the walls of intractable ignorance in this culture, it’s a problem that, like an itch, I cannot keep my fingers off of.
I follow a program I have my students use in my writing classes: Pay attention to language use in everyday life and write observations about it in a journal, including pet peeves. One peeve of mine is the casual dismissal of other humans whose behavior one finds objectionable as “animals”; it makes me wail and gnash my teeth. A recent example poured from the top mouth of the US political establishment: When asked why he would consider bombing civilian infrastructure in Iran, which is clearly a war crime, President Donald J. Trump responded,
“Because they killed 45,000 people in the last month, more than that. It could be as much as 60. They killed protesters. They’re animals. And we have to stop them [emphasis mine].”
We know what he means by calling them animals: The Iranians are not humans like us life-loving Americans, and on this level he’s obviously and hideously wrong. On the literal level, though, he’s correct, but only in the most banal, unremarkable way imaginable. Of course Iranians are animals! If they’re not animals, then what are they? Vegetables, or minerals? Fungi, perhaps? Trump’s defenders may argue, even more stupidly, that he was referring specifically to the Iranian regime when he called them animals, not the Iranian people (the very people, presumably, he would be bombing). But all of them are animals, in toto, just as we Americans are all animals. If we truly took the Darwinian paradigm seriously such talk would be laughed out of the room.
People may roll their eyes and say that I’m being a pedantic pain-in-the-ass, but screw them. I consider such lazy use of language first-order evidence that, on the issue of our nature, our brains misfire catastrophically, even after well over 150 years of accumulating evidence that we are just another metazoan. And not only that, Trump’s careless quip misses the most important point: Even if we grant his spurious claim that the Iranian government “killed as much as 60” thousand protesters, it does not follow that this is the result of their being animals: Only human beings systematically kill their own kind en masse, quite unlike any other members of the animal kingdom.
I sometimes wonder if natural selection isn’t itself partially responsible for this inability of our brains to accept the dead obvious. Could there be something innate about such intellectual intransigence? I composed a fable to try to capture this startling form of blindness in our species. I called it “Flounder’s Eye”:
The Atlantic herring lived shrewdly in schools and indeed never left them. They wavered above their flatfish neighbor, the flounder, and informed him of their newest lesson:
“It seems hard to believe, but we are one and the same. Your kind once swam upright like us and had eyes on the right as well as the left side of the head.”
Gazing up at these herring, the flounder quipped, “Right and left are myths. The world has two directions—fore and aft—as anyone with eyes can see.”
Evolution bestows upon us no native insight into our makeup.
*
A few months prior to calling the Iranians animals, the Leader of the Free World posted a video featuring a former LOTFW and his wife with their smiling faces affixed to cartoon bodies of hairy anthropoids, likely chimpanzees or gorillas, it’s hard to say with a stupid cartoon. Most of the outraged comments about the incident used variations of the vacuous statement “Trump has depicted the Obamas as apes” to criticize the LOTFW. Now, we understand that LOTFW’s intent was to dehumanize the Obamas by depicting them as a species other than Homo sapiens, but our phylogenetically-illiterate commentariat did not help matters by referring to the offense as “depicted as apes” instead of the more accurate “depicted as chimps or gorillas.”
People depicted as apes; imagine that! Next we’ll have squirrels depicted as rodents, cats depicted as carnivores, oaks depicted as trees! The nerve.
One rightly wants to oppose the LOTFW who dehumanizes others, but one should go about it the right way. Which is why I was exasperated to see Representative Al Green holding up a hand-lettered sign reading, BLACK PEOPLE AREN’T APES! in the House chamber soon after Trump’s egregious posting. Rep. Green was escorted out of the chamber by Trumpian thugs for this affront to decorum (whereas depicting the Obamas as gorillas is just fine, apparently). I’ve said it before: The use of such language “is not only not right, it’s not even wrong,” as the quotation attributed to physicist Wolfgang Pauli puts it. Must we keep doing this?
As much as I share Mr. Green’s sentiments, I have some news for him (you know what it is): The Obamas are surely apes, as surely as I am an ape, that is, member of the subfamily Homininae, the great apes, but in America no one cares about such phylogenetic niceties. If basic biological descriptors can be used casually as insults, there is no hope of the general public adopting a Darwinian perspective.
I’ve given up waiting for my fellow citizens to wake up to the wonder that we are all one species, part of a larger family of distant cousins that includes orangutans, gorillas, and chimpanzees. I’ve given up wishing for a world in which people simply cock their heads to the side and look at you as if you had a hole in your head when you call them “animals” or “apes.”
I’ve tried to address this failure in a fable called “The Savage”:
It wasn’t bad enough that the landowner had clapped members of the neighboring tribe into the yoke; he pitted them against one another in contests of endurance until they collapsed into heaps at the end of the day. Then he had them sing songs of praise to him, tunes he had written himself, and prance about in their bonds like work horses. They were paid for their entertainments with the very fodder they had been enslaved to grow.
One of the landowner’s sons marveled at this arrangement.
“How can you stand to witness let alone celebrate the suffering you cause?”
“They are but apes,” his father said. “They don’t feel as we do.”
Savagery commences from ignorance of our own animal nature.
Charles Darwin as a young man was aware of the distinction between biological terms like “animal” or “ape” and the more accurate term “savage” to describe brutal, violent people, and he deployed the critical term when appropriate. Most notoriously, while he was aboard the Beagle as it circumnavigated the world, Darwin got to see realities of the African slave trade that he thought were “so revolting” they would never be believed by those back at home. In a moment of brilliance, he described those who dehumanized Africans as “the polished savages of England.” Now that’s incisive language for you.
*
It’s one thing to hear biological terminology bandied about in the deplorable rhetoric of politicians, quite another when it issues from those who seem more above the fray. At the onset of the current war in the Middle East, I recoiled from mainstream, corporate pabulum masquerading as news and began seeking out interviews online with experts, historians, economists, and retired military commanders. I learned about people that many of those reading here probably already know about: Jeffrey Sachs, Douglas Macgregor, John Mearsheimer, and others. Imagine a similar luminary speaking in tones that directly reflect the savagery illustrated in the above fable. It would be shocking. And it really happened.
The conversation I heard went like this: A retired colonel and great humanitarian excoriates the Secretary of (Indefensible) War of the United States for the “unconscionable” mixing of religion and politics in the military. This colonel goes on to articulate very well the “intractable” nature of the conflict between Israel and Iran, with each side thinking equally that it needs to “eliminate” the other for being an existential threat. (He concludes, “I wish it weren’t such a dismal picture.”) The only difference in this particular case is that “Iran was unjustifiably attacked, and Israel is the attacker.” So far so good. But then:
. . . IDF, Mossad, the leadership thereof, Ben-Givr, Smotrich, these people are animals. I would not say that about the Iranian leadership. So my wish is that the animals lose and the humans win.
This is a chilling and disappointing moment in an otherwise devastating critique of the war, and even the interviewer, Nima R. Alkhorshid, looks a bit discombobulated at this comment.
Whatever you think of current Israeli policy (and to me it looks absolutely appalling), it is never, ever helpful to talk like this, not just because it misuses biological terminology but because it clearly attempts to dehumanize the human. Which is stupid, because only humans practice warfare like this.
Again: Only humans practice warfare like this.
And they do it because they are human, not because they are animals.
War crimes, genocide, pogroms, mass murder. These are activities particular to the Homo lineage, the source of all tragedy and pathos.
The thought should devastate us. Eliminationist thinking is a trap any and all humans fall into, being social apes embedded in an intractably troubled history, whether we like it or not.
As W. H. Auden put it in “September 1, 1939”:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
I conclude with a final parable, “Poet Ape”:
Amid the hominins arose a poet, a gregarious young female, a compiler of words. Her mother was the tribe’s lead gatherer and herbalist, one who knew the secret haunts of plants that others did not know.
The girl had recently studied the tongue of the hairy woods folk. She recited her inventory of words to her mother as they foraged together. “Like us, they call their babies ‘kids,’ their ancestors ‘souls’ and their husbands ‘bucks’.”
“Then they stole it from us,” her mother concluded, uprooting a fat bulb, then giving thanks with a perfunctory prayer.
“But they even chant their thanks for food, just as you do.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, child. That would mean we were kin with the woods folk, and everyone knows those flesh-eaters are animals.”
Note
Fables and parables come from the collection Metazoan Variations: Evolutionary Fables and Other Emblematic Tales. Ellicott City, MD: UnCollected Press, 2020.
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