Planet of the Apes and Philosophy

by Huss, John

  Essence of Apeness

  Species have typical anatomical traits. There is, however, a bit of a myth that, before Darwin, people thought species had essences which were invariant for all organisms within them. Since this myth was put forward in the late 1950s and early 1960s, it’s become the orthodox view that species do not have essences, and therefore don’t have natures. We can understand why people might think this: the Holocaust left everybody reeling at the implications of human groups being thought to have innate natures; each race or ethnic group or class could then be evaluated against others and some considered to be worth more or less morally.

  In all the Planet of the Apes movies, early and recent, each species of ape has a special nature. Gorillas are warlike and aggressive; chimps are scheming and inquisitive; orangutans are clever and subtle. Humans, when not “devolved” are a bit selfish (according to the Sacred Scrolls and especially well exemplified in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes), and in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the humans are nasty and selfish.

  This is not a new problem. It goes back at least to Plato, who argued in his Republic that some types of people are just the best (philosopher kings, who have gold souls), some are good but not the best (the auxiliary warriors, with silver souls) and some are the least (the majority, who have iron or bronze souls). Assertions of innate natures often lead to discrimination and even genocide; scientists became most concerned about this after World War II and effectively put a ban on the notion.

  But recently many scientists are claiming that race, and therefore innate natures, are real; they point out the obvious geographical variation between populations. Medical personnel need to know the ancestry of African descendants to know how to treat some diseases, for example. And some insist on immediately transferring this to behaviors: some groups (or genders, or sexual orientations) have typical behaviors, usually deemed lacking in value compared to the “best” kinds. Everything from IQ to promiscuity has been asserted to be a “nature,” justifying all kinds of power relations between groups. No wonder scientists and theoreticians object to “natures” talk. It can be seriously dangerous. But is it false?

  The idea that whole species have natures is equally scary. It suggests biological or genetic determinism, that each of us is forced to behave in a certain fashion because of our genes or something. So if we’re to criticize and check the claim that reason forces us to be moral, or that Caesar would not be so pro-social as a human, we need first to clear up the notion of a species (especially a human) nature. And simply because it has unpleasant or unwanted consequences does not mean the notion is, in fact, false. That is a logical fallacy, one of the oldest.

  Nature and Nurture Work Together

  What having a nature does not mean, if we are informed by modern biology, is that we must act in a single determined fashion. We hear loose talk by journalists and occasionally by public intellectuals of the “gene for” this or that—homosexuality, religious belief, violence, rape, or alcoholism. No geneticist would ever make such a claim. Instead they would carefully qualify the claim: this gene has some role in modulating that behavior. Think of it like the claim that a certain player in a team sport had a role in winning the game. The team wins the game; the player is maybe crucial but is not the only reason they won. Moreover, even if that player is consistent, the rest of the team can lose the game next week.

  Having a certain gene changes overall likelihoods, but it doesn’t make certain outcomes necessary. Behaviors, like everything else biological, are distributed over a statistical curve in a population. If most organisms do something, like running at a certain speed, some will do it less and some do it more, and this will form a curve (not necessarily a bell curve, but some kind of curve). This distributed aspect of populations means that any statements about the nature of a species have to allow for variations from the mean and the mode.

  So, when we say that chimpanzees show a certain behavior, we must expect there will be some chimps who vary from the “norm.” It was once pointed out to me that if roughly five percent of people are “developmentally delayed,” then if the distribution is normal there will be about the same number of “gifted,” and that degree of difference from the mode (that is, from the most common type of person in the population) causes just as many disadvantages. It follows that a single Caesar is possible, but that it is unlikely he would do well in a population of ordinary chimps, however smart they were.

  We cannot predict an individual’s behaviors, and yet we can say with some degree of certainty how “typical” members of a species behave. This is as true of human beings as it is of chimps: the keepers at the ape facility in the movie are shown as selfish, aggressive, status-seeking primates, in contrast to Caesar, who is shown as pro-social and moral. That there can be humans like that is indubitable; that they would likely be that way is at best a scriptwriter’s conceit. In fact, the primatologists I have met and discussed things with tend to empathize closely with their charges, and treat them as well as they can. The dramatic impact of the movie’s villains is in the mismatch with our default human expectations: a contemptible villain is as important to a good story as a valiant hero.

  The issue here is what we can predict about a species by observing behaviors and whether these behaviors are somehow natural. It’s as much a problem with humans as with other organisms. It’s not even entirely clear that behaviors can be traits. Are they inherited? Are they cultural or even convergent between species? What, exactly, does it mean for a behavior to be “natural”? Rather than saying that behaving in X fashion is inherited by ordinary members of a species or population, it is far more consistent with our knowledge of genetics, developmental biology, and evolution to say instead that the disposition to behave in X fashion is inherited. Dispositions are philosophyspeak for some cause that will generate an effect in the right conditions. Our genes don’t form human beings in hard vacuums, nor in the absence of the right nutrients, which is why pregnant women take folic acid supplements to prevent spina bifida. This is also true for behaviors.

  Consider so-called “feral” children, who do not learn to speak by the age of five. They never learn to speak in grammatically complicated sentences, no matter how much they’re taught. We know that the developing nervous system needs the right stimuli at the right time before a “normal” behavior like speech can develop. Nova, Taylor’s love interest, is an example of just such a feral child. She never learned language when her speech centers were developing, so likely never will, no matter how tenderly Taylor tutors her. Still, we can say that rats, monkeys, and humans have species-typical behaviors that ordinary members will develop if they are given the right rearing.

  Therefore, the question of a distinction between nature and nurture so beloved of popular writers and journalists is ruled out of court from the start: it has to be and can only be both biological and environmental inheritances that cause organisms to behave in certain ways. And if the environmental and social resources are there, the disposition to behave in X fashion will develop.

  A Chimp Like No Other

  In the case of Caesar, we should be able to predict that intelligent chimps will act like their less-intelligent brethren depending on circumstances. However, Caesar had another arrow in his quiver apart from intelligence. He was scaffolded in his moral development by being reared in a family. The term “scaffold” to refer to cultural learning and mental development is due to the philosopher Kim Sterelny, who notes that it makes learning more stable and effective. Human scaffolding of one another in development is crucial to normal development, as in language learning. But humans also scaffold other animals, such as dogs, and in this case Caesar. Would Caesar have been so moral if not raised in that way?

  Rise of the Planet of the Apes is ambivalent about this. In one sense Caesar is shown learning morality from his “family,” to which he then applies his intelligence in what philosophers call “a wide reflective equilibrium”—an attempt to make all the principles and v
alues he holds consistent. He asks his adoptive father, Will Rodman if he is a pet because he has a collar and a chain like a dog. Rodman recoils from the idea, and yet he has indeed been treating Caesar that way. Together, Will and Caesar work through the moral issues. They scaffold each other’s moral development. So we can’t say that Caesar would have been moral without this scaffolding.

  But then consider the gorilla, Buck, who learns immediately from Caesar’s example and ultimately sacrifices himself for all the apes once he, too, has been made intelligent. Buck was not scaffolded by years of enculturation, yet as a rational agent he immediately adopts the Categorical Imperative and defends the weaker apes from being killed. Well, there is no convincing answer to this in the film. Perhaps the next installment in the reboot will resolve the inconsistency, or even expound on it for even greater dramatic effect. Regardless, Caesar clearly shows us the cultural scaffolding necessary for moral development.

  Defer . . . Defer . . .

  We’ve been looking at the differences between human beings and apes, and the ways we should expect each species to behave. What do all apes have that is common in the moral realm?

  When faced with a dominant chimp, other chimps lower themselves and do not stare. To do so is to make a challenge that might be met with violence. The same occurs with gorillas (the thing to do when faced with a charging silverback is to lower your head and crouch). Same goes for many troop primates such as baboons, macaques, and rhesus monkeys, although it’s not always the dominant male that runs the troop or determines social rank; some species, like bonobos, are matriarchal. The same thing will occur if an artificial troop of apes or monkeys is put together in a zoo enclosure. Put a group of school-aged children in a playground and they will sort themselves into such a hierarchy, as well. This deference is what all primates spontaneously do when confronted with dominant individuals.

  One thing that we see in Rise of the Planet of the Apes is the keepers at the ape facility behaving just like apes, but apes without empathy. And empathy is pretty much a universal trait among apes, including humans, in the right circumstances. The son of the head keeper, Dodge, treats subordinates with violence and cruelty. This is not typical ape behavior, with one caveat. Apes tend not to treat their own troop members this way—if a dominance competition is over, as we see in the movie, the rest is relatively amiable, although just as with humans there can be bad-tempered and even domestically violent apes. However, apes that encounter members of other troops, or which are challenged by a competitor for alpha status, can behave this way. Dodge may see the apes as competitors, so he treats them cruelly.

  Is Dodge’s behavior typical human behavior? Obviously not. Despite Hobbes’s claim that “life in a state of nature” would be “nasty, poor, solitary, brutish and short,” anthropologists observe that, except in cases of intertribal warfare, and often even then, humans are not typically violent, and as Stephen Pinker has recently argued, modern humans are even less violent than their ancestors, although this is most likely a cultural, not a biological, shift. In times and societies of plenty, violence is no longer a profitable activity, so we are inclined not to behave that way. This also seems to be true of chimps, as noted before. So despite the message of the film that humans lack empathy and apes are the true moralists, in fact all apes, including humans, are generally not too bad to be around except in extreme circumstances, usually involving competition between groups.

  Deference, empathy, social ranks, dominance competition: that’s a hefty list of common behaviors among primates. No wonder we make and consume movies about apes to better understand our own human nature!

  Everywhere I Look, I See Myself

  Taking Caesar as an exemplar, we come to realize that morality is not Kantian alone. A moral primate needs to have not only reason, but also the social dispositions that make morality possible; and even then, morality needs to be scaffolded by socialization and enculturation. Had Caesar never had this upbringing, he may have turned out to be more like General Thade in the 2001 movie.

  Just as in the early movies of the 1970s and the first movie of the current reboot, humans are seen as the pinnacle of evolution, in a pigeonhole to which other species will evolve, as humans devolve and lose their dominance through their own mistakes. The filmmakers assume this moral superiority, then invert it to illustrate and illuminate our folly. Thinking about the surprisingly complex philosophical conundrums presented in the Planet of the Apes movies not only enhances our enjoyment of the cinematic experience; it helps us understand ourselves better.

  VII

  Ape Cinema

  15

  Serkis Act

  JOHN HUSS

  There’s a guy in a spandex suit covered with polka dots. He’s got some high-tech gizmo strapped to his head. He approaches a window and presses his face against it. His eyes bulge. His cheeks puff in and out. He pounds his half-open fists against the glass, and emits anguished, non-verbal vocalizations. Now that’s what I call acting.

  A key frame animator sits before a bank of high-powered computers, channeling performance-capture data through a computer simulation program. It produces a life-like digital image of a chimp with eyes bulging, half-open fists pounding against the window, cheeks puffing in and out. “Hey,” says his boss, “can you make them a little puffier?” He emits anguished, non-verbal vocalizations. Now that’s what I call animation.

  Should actor Andy Serkis have even been eligible to be nominated for an Oscar for his role as Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes? The answer lies somewhere in between these two scenes. It’s easy to track down the raw and finished footage on YouTube to make the comparison yourself. Despite a campaign by Twentieth Century Fox and an impassioned blog post by James Franco, once the votes were tallied, Serkis wasn’t nominated. But why? Could it be the fierceness of the competition? The nominees for Best Actor in a Supporting Role were: Kenneth Branagh in My Week with Marilyn, Jonah Hill in Moneyball, Nick Nolte in Warrior, Christopher Plummer in Beginners, and Max von Sydow in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (Plummer won).

  Perhaps in the eyes of the Academy, given such a strong field, Serkis’s performance was simply not Oscar-worthy. Maybe so. But I suspect that at the heart of the (perceived) snub is a performance capture quandary: the status of the art of acting in an age of digital production.

  What Is Acting?

  Suppose we try to decide what Serkis deserves by defining what acting is, and seeing whether the chimp performance we see on screen fits the bill. This seems reasonable. And philosophers have been asking “What is X?” questions for centuries. My favorite example is Socrates stumping his friend Euthyphro with the question “What is piety?” Eventually Euthyphro simply walks away crestfallen—probably emitting anguished vocalizations.

  Euthyphro was onto something. Twentieth-century philosophy has taught us that we should be suspicious of “What is X?” questions. Just because our language allows us to ask them doesn’t mean there’s a meaningful answer. Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Austrian philosopher, insisted that there are no genuine philosophical problems, only confusions brought about by the questions our language allows us to ask. He felt really passionate about this point, too, going so far as to shake a fireplace poker at fellow philosopher Sir Karl Popper when Popper disagreed with him!

  The problem with posing “What is X?” questions is that unless we’re careful about it, they lead us to seek some essential definition, a set of conditions that X, and only X, must meet to qualify. For some purposes, this may be fine. In geometry, we want a definition of “triangle” that picks out all and only triangles. Real life is more complicated, and when we go all out in the pursuit of some exact criterion for acting that can be applied to the Serkis case, the real problem slips away from us. We can easily end up defining performance capture as acting or not, right off the bat, before even delving into the matter. The whole point is that with performance capture technology and computer generated imagery (CGI), the definition of acting (movi
e acting anyway) is in flux. You’re not going to solve a problem of definitional flux by simply asserting a definition.

  The Truth, Twenty-Four Frames a Second

  Once you compare the raw and the finished footage of the tearful goodbye scene from Rise of the Planet of the Apes, you may be surprised to find that even in the raw footage, Serkis’s performance as Caesar is quite believable, and it’s easy to see why the studio and his co-star were moved to lobby the Academy on his behalf. Alternatively, you may be surprised to find that Serkis’s performance bears only a remote resemblance to that of the Caesar we see on screen, that the artistry and the emotional connection lie not with the performance, but with what the animators have done with “the data.”

  I don’t have an ape in this race, but obviously many people in the industry do. Blog comments to the posted footage indicate clearly that different people can look at the same footage and see very different things. People who work in animation look at the final clip and see all the marks of key frame animation, a process in which images are created frame by frame either manually or, more often, through the use of a computer program that interpolates some of the frames in between those created by the animator. The relevant question for them seems to be how much of the motion capture data was used to create the final cut. In this particular clip, apparently only data from Serkis’s spine was directly used, with the rest of his movements serving as a reference for the animator (in this case Jeffrey Engel of the New Zealand visual effects studio Weta Digital).