Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [31]
So how is this relevant to the question of changing existing hierarchical cultures? Witness the surprising transformation the researchers stumbled upon while following one specific Anubis troop that scientists named “Forest Troop.”
In the early 1980s, this troop started spending the night in some trees about half a mile from a tourist lodge with a large, tempting garbage dump. Another Anubis troop, dubbed “Garbage Dump Troop” by the researchers, had already taken control of it and were sleeping in the overlooking trees. In the early mornings, the most aggressive, asocial Forest Troop males—those particularly uninterested in the early morning male-female grooming ritual—would challenge the Garbage Dump males and raid their place. The food never ran out in the dump, but one day in 1983, Garbage Dump Troop’s luck did run out when some of the baboons ate tuberculosis-infected meat. Tuberculosis is extremely fatal to baboons; by 1986 the entire Garbage Dump Troop was dead. What’s more, Forest Troop’s most aggressive baboons—nearly half of all the males in the troop—also died. And here’s where the story gets really interesting.
Two things changed right away in Forest Troop. First, the surviving male baboons found themselves with two females apiece. Moreover, the males who remained were the least aggressive ones, which meant there was less aggression from dominating males over lower ranking ones, more tolerance to occasional reversals of hierarchy, less hitting of innocent female bystanders, and finally, more intersexual grooming. There were even several cases of male-to-male grooming—unheard of among other Anubis in the wild. Hence, males and females alike had it better in the new, accidentally improved Forest Troop. But more changes followed.
The biggest beneficiaries of the new Forest Troop ways were newcomers. As mentioned before, male baboons transfer to other troops when they reach puberty. And when they enter a new troop, they are “nobodies”—low-ranking targets of the dominant males and ignored by the local females. But the new Forest Troop was different. In ordinary troops, a newcomer had to wait an average of sixty days before the first female presented herself sexually to him and two weeks more before she started grooming him—yes, in that order. In the new Forest Troop, newcomers typically waited only eighteen days to enjoy sex and a mere two additional days to be groomed. In sum, newcomers were quickly inundated by female attention. But even more amazing is that this friendly way of life continued long after the original batch of “sensitive” males had gone. By the early 1990s, none of the original males remained in the new Forest Troop, but their legacy continued, as it has to this day. The old hierarchical society had irrevocably changed into an egalitarian one. And it all happened because the oppressive top males were taken out of the picture, allowing the remaining baboons to shape a more egalitarian culture.
This shift from dominating and aggressive to egalitarian and relaxed is not unique in primate research. Another study showed that violent rhesus macaques, once removed for five months from their despotic hierarchical societies to live with the egalitarian stump-tailed macaques, came back and maintained a totally changed, relaxed, and nonviolent behavior once reintroduced to their fellow rhesus macaques.10 Here, too, it was the absence of oppression by a dominating few that led to a lasting transformation of their behavior.
MONKEY DO, HUMAN DO
If a monkey can durably change his behavior when taken out of an oppressive system, we reckon people can do it at least as well. But moreover, the primate experiments illuminate the causal mechanism behind this change.
In the case of the Forest Troop baboons, the disappearance of the most aggressive members relaxed the others—primarily females, in the Forest Troop—who