- Man had emerged from the anthropoid background for one
reason only: because he was a killer. Long ago, perhaps many
millions of years ago, a line of killer apes branched off from the non-
aggressive primate background. For reasons of environmental necessity,
the line adopted the predatory way. For reasons of predatory necessity
the line advanced. We learned to stand erect in the first place as a
necessity of the hunting life. We learned to run in our pursuit of game
across the yellowing African savannah. Our hands freed for the mauling
and the hauling, we had no further use for a snout; and so it retreated.
And lacking fighting teeth or claws, we took recourse by necessity to
the weapon.
A rock, a stick, a heavy bone-to our ancestral killer ape it meant the
margin of survival. But the use of the weapon meant new and multiplying
demands on the nervous system for the co-ordination of muscle and touch
and sight. And so at last came the enlarged brain; so at last came man.
(29)
- ...the predatory transition [from ape to man] and the
weapons fixation explained for Raymond Dart man's bloody
history, his eternal aggression, his irrational, self-destroying
inexorable pursuit of death for death's sake. (31)
- Three fundamental drives, for territory, for status and
for organized society became evident in the primates, those
creatures closest to ourselves. And behind all three looms the vague
outline of a fourth force, deep-set, unaccountable, and perhaps
unprovable: a mysterious need for order.... Food, sex, family,
survival, property, sovereignty, rank, society-order, perhaps, itself-
all or some must be reckoned as interplaying needs forming the
personality and influencing the conduct of any animal that lives. (118)
- Human behaviour in its broad patterns cannot with any assurance be
attributed to causes lying within the human experience.
To conclude that human obsession with the acquisition of social status
and material possessions is unrelated to the animal instincts for
dominance and territory would be to press notions of special creation to
the breaking point. To conclude that the loyalties or animosities of
tribes or nations are other than the human expression of the profound
territorial instinct would be to push reason over the cliff. (147)
- The contemporary revolution in the natural sciences points
inexorably to the proposition that man's soul is not unique. Man's
nature, like his body, is the product of evolution. (153)
- Any animal with a capacity for learning must in part be a product of
his environment. Any animal with a capacity for hunger must in part be
dominated by economic motives. But to believe that the fascination with
war and weapons, or the imagined accomplishment of a perfect crime, or
unyielding temptation to lord it over somebody or everlasting drives to
acquire someone else's wealth; to believe that such as these find their
source in human society and may be exorcised forever by environmental
manipulation is to make of a man a most modest blackboard on which any
other may write his name. (159)
- ...that remarkable killer, Australopithecus africanus, the last
animal before man...our last direct ancestor in the animal
world.... Man is a predator with an instinct to kill and a
genetic cultural affinity for the weapon. (166)
- If the contest exists between individuals only, then qualities of
mercy and altruism will contribute nothing to a competitor's fortune.
But if the contest is between societies, then the member of a successful
society must develop two sets of emotional responses: the many facets of
friendship and co-operation reserved for members of his own society
["amity"], and the many facets of hostility and enmity for members of
the opposing society. (169)
- Human warfare comes about only when the defensive instinct of a
determined territorial proprietor is challenged by the predatory
compulsions of an equally determined territorial neighbour.
...the territorial drive brings about the conditions-not the motives-
that give rise to war: the separation of men into groups, the alliance
of men and territory, and the latent capacity for the enmity code to
dominate the most civilized man in his relation to a hostile neighbour.
But it is the other side of the territorial coin that may provide the
foundations for a philosophical revolution. It is the hidden, unread,
animal cipher stamped on the metal of our nature that may resolve the
dilemma of a [Herbert] Spencer, the doubts of a [Charles] Darwin, or the
despairs of contemporary man. The command to love is as deeply
buried in our nature as the command to hate. (173)
- One recollected the ease with which Adolf Hitler had brought about
in a generation of German youth his education for death. Had he in
truth induced a learned response? Or had he simply released an
instinct? Which was the genetic cultural affinity that like a desert
river could vanish for season after season, then in a flick of a
thunderstorm come ripping and raging out of the inscrutable earth? Was
it man's adoration of books and bridges? Or his adoration of things
that go bang? (203)
- The human being in the most fundamental aspects of his soul and
body is nature's last if temporary work on the subject of the armed
predator. And human history must be read in these terms....
Weapons preceded man. Whether man is in fact a biological
invention evolved to suit the purposes of the weapon must be
a matter of future debate. (312)
- Other forces of enormous power, all similarly derived from the
animal world, play their instinctual roles in the drama of human
conduct. We have investigated a few of them: the drive to acquire
private property; social groupings based on the defense of a territory
held in common; the commandment to gain and hold individual dominance
within such a society; the contest between males for superior territory
or superior status; sexual choice exercised by the female in terms of
the male's acquistion of property or status; the hostility of
territorial neighbours, whether individual or group; and the dual code
of behaviour, prevailing in the members of a group, demanding amity for
the social partner and enmity for individuals outside the territorial
bond. All these are human instincts derived from ancient animal
patterns. But to them must now be added those particular attributes of
the hominid ["man-like"] line: the way of the predator, and the
dependence upon weapons. (312-313)
- Man is a predator whose natural instinct is to kill with
a weapon. (316)
- The primate has instincts demanding the maintenance and defense of
territories; and attitude of perpetual hostility for the territorial
neighbour; the formation of social bands as the principal means of
survival for a physically vulnerable creature; an attitude of amity and
loyalty for the social partner; and varying but universal systems of
dominance to insure the efficiency of his social instrument and to
promote the natural selection of the more fit from the less. Upon this
deeply-buried, complex, primate instinctual bundle were added the
necessities and the opportunities of the hunting life. (316)
- The hunting primate was free. He was free of the forest prison;
wherever game roamed the world was his. His hands were freed from the
earth or the bough; erect carriage opened new and unguessed
opportunities for manual answers to ancient quadruped problems. His
daily life was free from the eternal munching; the capacity to digest
high-calorie food meant a life more diverse than one endless meal-time.
And his wits were freed. Behind him lay the forest orthodoxies. Ahead
of him lay freedom of choice and invention as a new imperative if a
revolutionary creature were to meet the unpredictable challenges of a
revolutionary way of life. Freedom-as the human being means freedom-was
the first gift of the predatory way. (317)
- No man can regard the way of war as good. It has simply
been our way. No man can evaluate the eternal contest of weapons as
anything but the sheerest waste and the sheerest folly. It has been
simply our only means of final arbitration. Any man can suggest
reasonable alternatives to the judgement of arms. But we are not
creatures of reason except in our own eyes.
...the superior weapon, throughout the history of the species, has
been the central human dream...deprived of the dream, deprived of
the dynamics, deprived of the contest [for superior weapons], and
deprived of the issue [of a weapons' contest], Homo sapiens stands on a
darkened threshold through which species rarely return. (325)
- Society flatters itself in thinking that it has rejected the
[juvenile] delinquent; the delinquent has rejected society. And in the
shadowed byways of his world so consummately free, this ingenious,
normal adolescent human creature has created a way of life in perfect
image of his animal needs. (333)
- We and our greater philosophers must grant, I believe, that the
masters of a universal society [i.e., "One World" government] with the
aid of a captive science might just possibly succeed in producing, over
a long period, a lasting answer to the problem of our animal nature: a
universal human slave inherently obedient to other people's reason.
(338)
- We are a transitional species, without doubt. We are a
pioneer creature testing the potentialities of the enlarged brain. . . .
And if we do not behave too badly, then we shall pass on the
power of thought, one day, to a descendant species who may
count it a part of their animal endowment. They, not we, can
found kingdoms on its strength. (338)
- And a horrid self-doubt may overcome us: of what use is mind, and
civilization, if in the end our animal endowment must determine our
radiant fate? But our instincts are not that simple. And intelligence
can discover allies. (339)
- I assert first the paradox that our predatory animal origin
represents for mankind its last best hope . . . we were born of risen
apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And
so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and
our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be
worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful
acres, however frequently they may be converted into battlefields; our
dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is
not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. (347-48)
- My second assertion, flying farther into the speculative sky, is
that civilization is a normal evolutionary development in our kind, and
a product of natural selection.... It rests on the most ancient of
animal laws, that commanding order [?], and acts as a necessary
inhibition and sublimation of predatory energies that would otherwise
long ago have destroyed our species.... Civilization is a
compensatory consequence of our killing imperative; the one
could not exist without the other. (348)
- My third assertion, far less speculative, is that conscience as a
guiding force in the human drama is one of such small reliability that
it assumes very nearly the role of villain. Conscience has evolved
directly from the amity-enmity complex of our primate past. But unlike
civilization it has acted as no force to inhibit the predatory instinct.
It has instead been the conqueror's chief ally. And if mankind survives
the contemporary predicament, it will be in spite of, not because of,
the parochial powers of our animal conscience. (349)
The limitation of conscience lies in its territorial nature....
Conscience organizes hatred as it organizes love. (349)
My conscience is totally amoral. I shall delude myself that it directs
me to act in the interests of human good, and well it may. But with
equal force it will direct me to act in the interests of human evil, if
such evil is in the interests of my society. (350)
Society in its ancient wisdom does not appeal to my conscience through
reason, for my conscience being of animal inheritance will respond with
a minimum of force. And so conscience in human society becomes an
essentially anti-rational power. (351)
- Far antedating the predatory urge in our animal nature, far more
deeply buried than conscience or territory or society lies that shadowy,
mysterious, undefinable command of the kind, the instinct for order.
And so, when a predatory species came rapidly to evolve its inherent
talent for disorder, natural selection favoured as a factor in human
survival the equally rapid evolvement of that sublimating, inhibiting,
super-territorial, institution which we call loosely, civilization.
It is a jerry-built structure, and a more unattractive edifice could
scarcely be imagined. Its greyness is appalling. Its walls are cracked
and eggshell thin. Its foundations are shallow, its antiquity slight.
No bands boom, no flags fly, no glamorous symbols invoke our nostalgic
hearts. Yet however humiliating the path may be, man beset by anarchy,
banditry, chaos and extinction must at last resort turn to that chamber
of horrors, human enlightenment. For he has nowhere else to turn. (352-
53)