Harmony and Conflict in the Living World - Alexander F. Skutch [93]
Already some four thousand years ago, the craving for power, wealth, and luxuryand the social injustice and inequality resulting from that cravingbrought on in Egypt an attitude of tedium
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and disgust that Breasted (1933) called "the earliest disillusionment." It had become evident that the chief obstacle to human welfare was not the hostility or parsimony of nature, nor yet the deficiency of human intelligence, but inability to free this intelligence from domination by those special appetites and passions in ministering to which it had so long been exercised and sharpened, so that it might be devoted unreservedly to the welfare of the whole person and of the great living community to which we belong. The two most pressing problems that we have faced are to control our environment and to control ourselves. It is in the second of these tasks that we have most conspicuously failed. To this failure we owe the greater part of our sorrows, and even a long interval of relative stagnation in our effort to make the best use of the resources that nature provides for us.
Aberrations of Dawning Intelligence in Other Animals
We have no reason to suppose that some unfortunate quirk of the human mind is responsible for all the tragic misuses of its dawning intelligence that we have noticed. On the contrary, we have grounds for believing that such aberrations are inseparable from the growth of intelligence, and that any animal that developed intellectual capacity of the same order as that in humans would pass through a corresponding stage and exhibit its alarming symptoms.
Monkeys and apes are notoriously destructive. If the Chimpanzees studied by W. Köhler could lay hands on anything breakable, they could not rest until they had reduced it to parts that resisted further disintegration. However, he suggested that it was only the great apes' superior strength that enabled them to outdo human children in destructive analysis. These Chimpanzees delighted in thrusting a pointed stick against the legs or body of any unsuspecting person or animal that came near. They enticed chickens up to the bars of their enclosure by offering food, then, withdrawing the proferred morsel, they jabbed the poor birds with sticks or pieces of wire. They would also poke and tap a lizard,
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perhaps more out of curiosity and excitement than cruelty, until it succumbed. The misbehavior of Köhler's Chimpanzees might be attributed to the boredom of captivity; but the free Chimpanzees that Jane van Lawick-Goodall (1971) studied in Tanzania were hardly less destructive, breaking and tearing tents, furniture, clothing, and bedding. The cleverer of these apes learned to open all the fastenings that their human friends devised for the boxes that held coveted bananas. The captive white-faced Cebus Monkey that Thomas Belt (1888) kept in Nicaragua enticed ducklings within reach by displaying bread, then caught them and killed them by a bite in the breast. Similar behavior by humans at a certain stage of mental development is too well known to require comment.
It might be supposed that this similarity of the behavior of monkeys and apes to that of rude people and unguided children is merely an expression of tendencies widespread in primates but not shared by other branches of the animal kingdom. However, corresponding aberrations of nascent intelligence are seen in other vertebrates; if the abuses are less flagrant, it may be because the animals lack organs that lend themselves to destructive activities so well as does the primate hand. The most intelligent horse I ever had, whose ability to open gate fastenings of all sorts was no less amazing