Harmony and Conflict in the Living World - Alexander F. Skutch [94]
The bower-birds of Australia and New Guinea differ from all other birds in building for their courtship rites elaborate structures adorned with flowers, fruits, shells, and other colorful ornaments. Even if allowance be made for the encomiums that admirers have bestowed on their intelligence and aesthetic sense, these are undoubtedly of an order exceptional among birds. It is recorded of the Satin Bower-bird of eastern Australia that males in full blue plumage deliberately tear apart the bowers of their neighbors during temporary absences of the latter, scattering the sticks and carrying off the bright ornaments to their own bowers (Marshall 1954). Although many birds, both colonial and solitary, steal pieces
Page 189
Satin Bower-bird, Ptilonorhynchus violaceus, at his bower with ornaments
displayed on platform in front
from unguarded nests of other pairs of the same or different species, the motive in these cases is not the destruction of the neighbor's nest but the acquisition of materials for building their own. The exceptionally gifted bower-birds of this and other species are, as far as I know, the only birds that wantonly destroy the property
Page 190
of others of their kind, in an act that brings no immediate advantage to themselves but may disadvantage competitors for visiting females.
Captive Satin Bower-birds, deprived of the blue objects they so avidly collect for the adornment of their bowers, have sometimes killed smaller occupants of the aviary with blue in their plumage, then carried the corpses to their display stage. This, too, is very humanlike behavior; the satisfaction of an aesthetic urge, perhaps of no high order, has too often driven humans to acts of violence and destruction, of which with growing insight they become ashamed. One example of this is the vast and nefarious trade in plumage for women's hats that flourished until early in the twentieth century In whatever kind of animal it arises, intelligence appears to pass through a stage in which it can be temporarily captured by some single motive or appetite, in the service of which it acts as though oblivious to all wider considerations. Often, at the bidding of one narrow motive, it will do things contrary to some other motive that it will soon obey.
Contemplating the many disorders to which nascent intelligence is subject and the vast amount of harm it has done, we are sometimes inclined to agree with Cicero (1951) that "it would have been better if the immortal gods had not bestowed upon us any reasoning faculty at all than that they should have bestowed it with such mischievous results." Only when its turbulent childhood passes into a strong and competent maturity will intelligence outgrow its atomism and become integrated in the service of harmonization, the central determinant of the beings in which it arises.
Intellectual Maturity and Vital Integrity
One confronted with the problem of liberating people from the domination of violent and disruptive passions and making them whole might suppose that this could be accomplished by giving them rules of conduct enforced by some external authority. This has been tried since early times, when the tribal mores were believed to have been established by a god who would punish the least
Page 191
infringement of the ordinances. But the constant angry jeremiads of the Hebrew prophets make it clear that even rules supposedly given by the one omnipotent maker and ruler of the world failed to restrain the wayward impulses of a headstrong people. Neither promises of eternal bliss nor threats of endless torments have sufficed to make humans good. All the vigilance of the law, all the force of public opinion, all the penalties that society can devise, fail to restrain men and women from excesses and to restore to them that vital