Every language is full of expressions linking human and animal behavior. In English we have idioms such as puppy love, the lion's share, horse sense, getting someone's dander up, a dog-eat-dog world, and taking someone under one's wing. Similarly, many of science's best ideas about human behavior derive from the study of animals. Either consciously or unconsciously we see ourselves through the prism of the larger nature of which we are part. But we also abuse nature by projecting our views onto it, after which we extract them again, circularly proving whatever view we hold. If studies in animal behavior teach us anything, it is that there are no simple lessons. Behavior that may look unselfish on one level may be self-serving at another. Given this multilayered reality, we should be particularly wary of catchy metaphors. Metaphors have the power to either instill or undermine confidence in our species' moral capacities, and they may do so rightly or wrongly. Debate about these issues is so essential to our self-image that it goes back several millennia in both the East and the West.
"I put for a generall inclination of all mankind, a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death."
Thomas Hobbes, 1651
ew people realize that Abraham Maslow, one of the first modern psychologists to explore human ambition, was greatly inspired by monkeys. He was struck by the cocky, confident air of the top monkey, and the slinking cowardice, as he called it, of individuals near the bottom of the hierarchy. Maslow also saw that high status pays off in terms of access to resources. In 1936, he postulated a drive for dominance, while rejecting the idea that those who are dominated are truly "submissive." In his mind, the latter term implies that subordinates give up any hope of besting their superiors, which he felt they never do.222
Turning his attention to human behavior, Maslow observed in some people the same self-confident attitude that he had seen in his monkeys. After proposing some now-forgotten labels for this attitude, such as "dominance-feeling" and "ego-level," in 1940 he hit on the concept of "selfesteem." This blend of self-evaluation and self-love struck a chord in American culture, and the term remains immensely popular. Feeling good about oneself has become a goal in and of itself, sometimes quite disconnected from actual ability or merit.
But biologists seeking an explanation for the pervasiveness of social inequality -found in chickens, wolves, horses, primates, and a host of other animals that live in groups-obviously want to know more than just how it feels to be on top. Self-esteem as a goal has absolutely no meaning in a harsh world of survival. What is in it for those who achieve it? If high-status males are sexually more successful than other males, either because they can lay claim to more females or because they are more attractive, they are at an advantage in the evolutionary race. If they are able to beget more offspring, genetic traits that helped them get to this point are passed on to the next generation. Animals do not think in terms of progeny, but they do act in ways that help spread their genes. Some people would agree with Thomas Hobbes that the human male has inherited the same tendency and follows it just as blindly. In modern society, we have no lack of political scandals to remind us of the age-old connection between power and sex.
For females, the number of males they mate with has little effect on reproductive success, so sex and power are separate issues. Having high rank does pay off for females in terms of food and protection of their offspring, but not in terms of attractiveness. In our own species, it appears that male sex appeal is greatly enhanced by a high position, whereas female sex appeal is not. A prominent French politician once compared power to pastry, saying that she liked it while knowing it wasn't good for her.
Maslow's interest in ambition and its potential benefits seems just as relevant today-to all primates. Indeed, I have always felt a certain bond with Maslow, partly because I share his belief in the existence of a drive for dominance, and partly because I have worked for years at the little Vilas Park Zoo, in Madison, Wisconsin, where he conducted his primatological studies in the 1930s as the very first graduate student of Harry Harlow. When people talk about self-esteem, therefore, the first image that flashes through my mind is the dignified selfassurance of Mr. Spickles, the old boss of the troop of rhesus monkeys that I knew so well. Spickles was a fully self-actualized kind of guy, never the slightest bit intimidated by even the most vigorous younger males. He had seen all of them grow up and had played with them, but he had also punished them for youthful transgressions.
Perhaps as a result, these males were psychologically inhibited in Spickles' presence, even though he had lost his physical vigor along with most of his teeth. In the wild, an old leader has to deal with strange males entering his troop, who of course have fewer scruples about challenging him. But even then, it is not always just a matter of which male is the strongest or fastest, because the collective support of the females may keep a male in the saddle well beyond his prime. They often prefer a familiar, predictable leader over a younger, aggressive upstart.223
The possibility of an individual being dominant yet dependent on others, as a male sometimes depends on a coalition of females, does not seem to have crossed Maslow's mind. He thought mainly in terms of individual differences and personality types. Because he saw dominance as a sign of inherent, biological superiority, he felt that in a good society the elite should be given the opportunity to realize their potential. They should be protected against the malice of the nongifted, who inevitably have trouble accepting their miserable positions. He thus forgot that dominance is a social phenomenon that resides in relationships, not individuals. Alone on an island, the biggest boss is no boss at all. Individual abilities do play a role in achieving high status, but the abilities involved are often distinctly social, such as diplomacy and a talent for building lasting partnerships.
Dallas Cullen, a business professor at the University of Alberta, recently examined the history of Maslow's ideas, which remain extremely influential in the management community. She concluded that Maslow did not look carefully enough at the role of social context in the monkeys that he studied:
He overestimated the autonomy of the dominant individual, and instead saw this individual as able to function independently and separately from others in the social setting. Concurrently, he underestimated the extent to which the dominant individual needed to pay attention to social links with others and use interpersonal skills in order to develop and maintain those links.224
For better or worse, our self-perception is never animal-free. Sometimes the animal derivations of an idea are hard to trace, as with Maslow's hierarchy of needs, yet most of the time it is rather obvious how much our understanding of learning and conditioning, parental care, sex and hormones, aggression, and so on, are steeped in the realization that we are animals with animal tendencies. Even if authors stress how different our species is, such as when they say that culture is what makes us human, they are still using animals as referents. There is no escape: human behavior is always placed in this larger context of other behaving organisms.
Inequality is a case in point. Ever since the discovery of the pecking order, we realize that we are barely unusual as a hierarchical species.225 At the same time we may be uncomfortable with the comparison, as it lends a ring of inevitability to tendencies that we dislike in ourselves. I speak here as a baby boomer, who questioned authority at every turn. We challenged the bureaucrats and intellectual mandarins of the academy, expressing our defiance with long hair and extravagant clothes. It is interesting to reflect on this now that my own generation has come to power, showing remarkably little aversion to wielding it. It must be that, viewed from above, the system looks different, and far more acceptable!
Arnhem Revisited
The social side of the drive for dominance, called politics, depends on jockeying for position by seeking support, respect, and popularity. Chimpanzee males spend so much of their time and energy struggling for dominance that they come across as power-hungry Machiavellians. After six years of chronicling the social dram
as in the world's largest chimpanzee colony, at the Arnhem Zoo in the Netherlands, I summarized their schmoozing and scheming in my 1982 book Chimpanzee Politics. Since then, field studies on chimpanzees have confirmed the political nature of these apes.226
Of the numerous primates that I have come to know in my life, the ones encountered while I was still a student still occupy the softest spots in my memory banks. Even though I now live across the Atlantic, I visit my native country regularly and stop by the zoo whenever I can. I am still recognized by the older generation. Mama, who must be close to fifty, unerringly picks out my face from amongst hundreds of visitors, and moves her arthritic bones to the moat to greet me with pantgrunts. But Gorilla is perhaps the happiest of all. Ever since I taught her how to bottle-feed an adoptive daughter, twenty years ago, we have enjoyed a close bond. Without this intervention she might never have raised any young. Both Mama and Gorilla now have grandchildren, and this younger generation looks at me as a stranger who, astonishingly, acts as if he belongs. The colony includes approximately thirty apes, and remains the largest and most successful of its kind.
Then there are the males, the big guys, who strut around with their hair standing up, occasionally castigating one of their underlings. They eerily remind me in manner and voice of the males I knew, but that is because they are their sons. In captivity, male chimpanzees live ten years less than females on average, and the difference may even be greater in the wild. Male lives are full of stress and tension, not to mention the physical risks when they fight one another or make spectacular escapes, jumping from tree to tree. None of my original male players is still around.
The only way to describe the events in Arnhem, I felt, was to bring out the chimpanzee personalities, and pay attention to actual events, as an unfolding soap opera, rather than abstractions and theories. In science, however, items that cannot be statistically evaluated and graphed run the risk of being tossed aside as mere anecdotes. True, it is hard to generalize from single events, but does this justify the contempt in which they are being held? Consider a human example: Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein describe, in The Final Days, President Nixon's reaction to his loss of power:
Between sobs, Nixon was plaintive.... How had a simple burglary ... done all this? ... Nixon got down on his knees.... [He] leaned over and struck his fist on the carpet, crying, "What have I done? What has happened?""'
Nixon is the only person in U.S. history to resign the Presidency, so this account can't be much more than an anecdote. Yet does that fact make the story less significant? I must admit to a great weakness for rare and peculiar events. The chimpanzees that I studied had tantrums just like Nixon's (minus the words) under similarly stressful conditions. When Yeroen, the oldest male at Arnhem, was in danger of losing his top rank to another male, he would in the middle of a confrontation suddenly drop out of a tree like a rotten apple and writhe and squirm on the ground, screaming pitifully, waiting to be comforted by the rest of the group.
The expression "being weaned from power" is particularly apt, because Yemen's relapse into childlike behavior was the same as that of a juvenile being weaned from its mother's milk. Despite its noisy protests, the juvenile keeps an eye on mom for any signs that she might change her mind. Similarly, Yeroen always noted who approached him during his tantrums. If the group around him was big and powerful enough, and especially if it included Mama, he would gain instant courage. With his supporters in tow, he would rekindle the confrontation that he had been losing. Clearly, Yeroen's tantrums were yet another example of deft social manipulation.
Nikkie's Ghost
Since those days, many interesting developments have occurred in Arnhem. Some of these were gruesome, such as the killing and castration of one of our males by two rivals. This incident fundamentally changed my perception of the need for compromise among chimpanzees: its absence can have horrible consequences. And it is not only in captivity that these things happen. Twelve years later, a male in Gombe National Park received very much the same treatment from his own group mates. He would probably have succumbed to the ensuing infections had it not been for veterinary intervention. 228
After I ended my work at Arnhem, Otto Adang, the researcher who succeeded me, found even more evidence for power politics among the chimpanzees there, including shifting alliances and the importance of social support for the contenders. Two males-Yeroen, the former leader, and Dandyhad banded together to oust Nikkie as the alpha male. Their alliance drove Nikkie to a desperate attempt to escape. Unfortunately, he drowned trying to make it across the moat that surrounds the chimpanzees' island at the zoo. The news papers dubbed his death a suicide, but it seemed more likely a panic attack with a fatal outcome.
With Nikkie's death, the closeness between Yeroen and Dandy evaporated. Rivalry, predictably, took its place.229 About a year later, in 1985, Adang decided to show the chimpanzees a movie, The Family of Chimps, a documentary filmed at Arnhem when Nikkie was still alive and in charge. With the apes ensconced in their winter hall, Adang wanted to gauge their responses to two-dimensional images, which he projected onto a wall. It remains unclear whether the apes recognized the actors, until a life-sized Nikkie appeared. At that point Dandy immediately ran screaming to Yeroen, jumping literally in the old male's lap! Yeroen, too, had an uncertain grin on his face. Nikkie's mysterious resurrection had temporarily restored their old pact.
Opportunism is a major part of chimpanzee politics, and most of us would not hesitate to use the same term for its human counterpart. The booing and shouting between ideological factions, and the occasional hair-pulling and throwing in the parliaments of emerging democracies, hint at a history of our political systems that is incompletely captured in the lofty terms that historians and political scientists reserve for it.
If we follow Harold Laswell's classical definition of politics as a social process determining "who gets what, when, and how," there can be little doubt that chimpanzees engage in it. Since in both humans and their closest relatives the process involves bluff, alliances, and divide-and-rule tactics, a com mon terminology is warranted. The title of my book drove this point home. Not all scholars were comfortable with this, of course. But Newt Gingrich, then the U.S. Speaker of the House, recognized the animal parallels when he put the Arnhem saga on the recommended reading list for freshmen representatives, in 1994. Reading about chimpanzee power plays may help politicians recognize elementary political strategies that they themselves probably apply unconsciously. Moreover, they will learn that despite the constant jockeying for position there is a certain internal logic, even morality, to the emerging social system. Success is not just a matter of wiping out the opposition. In the wild, male chimpanzees depend on one another for hunting and territorial defense: compromise and reconciliation are as much part of political skills as fighting ability.
Power by Another Name
What has always fascinated me about chimpanzee societyand, by extension, human society as well-is the impossibility of stability. Primatologists tend to speak of "social organization" as if social life revolves around a fixed structure, the backbone of the group. But the structure is more like a river, always there but never the same. Whenever one believes that events have settled down and is prepared to declare the end of history, or some such silly concept, one usually can detect undercurrents of change. A young male is growing up and beginning to make waves. An old chap is starting to tire of lengthy charging displays, and his rivals are taking notice. Some females are building large families, which grow into influential cliques.
Each time I visit Arnhem, the caretakers and students need to fill me in, as though I have missed several episodes of Big Brother, the popular real-life television drama: "Chimp A now is leaning toward chimp B, who is reluctant to grab power because he was beaten up by chimp C. But once his wounds have healed, the females will help him get even, because they like him a lot more than they like C." There is constant movement, along with a perpetual laying of little bricks of power on
top of each other until the existing order has become ripe for yet another challenge.
In humans, we cloak these tendencies in all sorts of euphemisms. Studying status inequalities in a society with a strong egalitarian bent, Mauk Mulder, a Dutch social psychologist, spoke of the taboo surrounding the term "power." Corporate managers would tell the investigators that they enjoyed responsibility, prestige, and authority, but no, power was really not what they were after. They did recognize the lust for power in others, but they themselves only wanted to put their personal capacities as adviser and leader at the service of their organization. 230
Similarly, no political candidate will publicly admit to getting a kick out of power. Politicians want us to believe that it is for us and for their nation that they sacrifice their private lives. And even when anthropologists draw direct parallels between human and primate dominance relations, they avoid the Pword, such as when Jerome Barkow concluded in 1975 that
[w]ith the development of a sense of self, our ancestors' tendency to seek high social rank would have been transformed. Having a self means that self-evaluation is possible. The social dominance imperative would have taken the form of an imperative to evaluate the self as higher in rank than others. To evaluate the self as higher than others is to maintain self-esteem.231
Hence, early humans, like the Dutch managers, were seeking, not power over others, but rather some sort of pride in themselves. This is a strange thought, because what good does pride do? Only if there are serious payoffs associated with it can we explain the amount of energy put into its pursuit. Psychological explanations in terms of self-esteem all falter at this point: self-esteem has no value unless it varies in proportion to the esteem received from others and the privileges derived from it. In other words, self-esteem cannot be that important unless it is socially constructed.
The Ape And The Sushi Master Reflections Of A Primatologist Page 23