The second category of appeasement signals operate as remotivating devices. The subordinate animal sends out signals that stimulate a non-aggressive response and, as this wells up inside the attacker, his urge to fight is suppressed and subdued by it. This is done in one of three main ways. A particularly widespread re-motivator is the adoption of juvenile food-begging postures. The weaker individual crouches and begs from the dominant one in the infantile posture characteristic of the particular species – a device especially favoured by females when they are being attacked by males. It is often so effective that the male responds by regurgitating some food to the female, who then completes the food-begging ritual by swallowing it. Now in a thoroughly paternal, protective mood, the male loses his aggression and the pair calm down together. This is the basis of courtship feeding in many species, especially with birds, where the early stages of pair-formation involve a great deal of aggression on the part of the male. Another re-motivating activity is the adoption of a female sexual posture by the weaker animal. Regardless of its sex, or its sexual condition, it may suddenly assume the female rump-presentation posture. When it displays towards the attacker in this way, it stimulates a sexual response which damps down the mood of aggression. In such situations, a dominant male or female will mount and pseudo-copulate with either a submissive male or a submissive female.
A third form of re-motivation involves the arousal of the mood to groom or be groomed. A great deal of social or mutual grooming goes on in the animal world and it is strongly associated with the calmer, more peaceful moments of community life. The weaker animal may either invite the winner to groom it, or may make signals requesting permission to perform the grooming itself. Monkeys make great use of this device and have a special facial gesture to go with it, consisting of rapidly smacking the lips together – a modified, ritualized version of part of the normal grooming ceremony. When one monkey grooms another it repeatedly pops fragments of skin and other detritus into its mouth, smacking its lips as it does so. By exaggerating the smacking movements and speeding them up, it signals its readiness to perform this duty and frequently manages in this way to suppress the aggression of the attacker and persuade it to relax and allow itself to be groomed. After a while the dominant individual is so lulled by this procedure that the weakling can slip away unharmed.
These, then, are the ceremonies and devices by which animals order their aggressive involvements. The phrase ‘nature red in tooth and claw’ was originally intended to refer to the brutal prey-killing activities of the carnivores, but it has been applied incorrectly in general terms to the whole subject of animal fighting. Nothing could be further from the truth. If a species is to survive, it simply cannot afford to go around slaughtering its own kind. Intra-specific aggression has to be inhibited and controlled, and the more powerful and savage the prey-killing weapons of a particular species are, the stronger must be the inhibitions about using them to settle disputes with rivals. This is the ‘law of the jungle’ where territorial and hierarchy disagreements are concerned. Those species that failed to obey this law have long since become extinct.
How do we, as a species, measure up to this situation? What is our own special repertoire of threatening and appeasing signals? What are our fighting methods, and how do we control them?
Aggressive arousal produces in us all the same physiological upheavals and muscular tensions and agitations that were described in the general animal context. Like other species, we also show a variety of displacement activities. In some respects we are not as well equipped as other species to develop these basic responses into powerful signals. We cannot intimidate our opponents, for example, by erecting our body hair. We still do it in moments of great shock (‘My hair stood on end’), but as a signal it is of little use. In other respects we can do much better. Our very nakedness, which prevents us from bristling effectively, gives us the chance to send powerful flushing and paling signals. We can go ‘white with rage’, ‘red with anger’, or ‘pale with fear’. It is the white colour we have to watch for here: this spells activity. If it is combined with other actions that signal attack, then it is a vital danger signal. If it is combined with other actions that signal fear, then it is a panic signal. It is caused, you will recall, by the activation of the sympathetic nervous system, the ‘go’ system, and it is not to be treated lightly. The reddening, on the other hand, is less worrying: it is caused by the frantic counter-balancing attempts of the parasympathetic system, and indicates that the ‘go’ system is already being undermined. The angry, red-faced opponent who faces you is far less likely to attack than the white-faced, tight-lipped one. Red-face’s conflict is such that he is all bottled up and inhibited, but white-face is still ready for action. Neither can be trifled with, but white-face is much more likely to spring in to the attack unless he is immediately appeased or counter-threatened even more strongly.
In a similar vein, rapid deep breathing is a danger signal, but it has already become less of a threat when it develops into irregular snorts and gurgles. The same relationship exists between the dry mouth of incipient attack and the slobbering mouth of the more intensely inhibited assault. Urination, defecation and fainting usually arrive a little later on the scene, following in the wake of the massive shock-wave that accompanies moments of immense tension.
When the urge to attack and escape are both strongly activated simultaneously, we exhibit a number of characteristic intention movements and ambivalent posturings. The most familiar of these is the raising of a clenched fist – a gesture that has become ritualized in two ways. It is performed at some distance from the opponent, at a point where it is too far away to be carried through into a blow. Thus its function is no longer mechanical; instead it has become a visual signal. (With the arm bent and held sideways it has now become the defiant formalized gesture of communist regimes.) It has become further ritualized by the addition of back-and-forth striking movements of the forearm. Fist-shaking of this kind is again visual rather than mechanical in its impact. We perform rhythmically repeated ‘blows’ with the fist, but still at a safe distance.
While doing this, the whole body may make short approach-intention movements, actions which repeatedly check themselves from going too far. The feet may be stamped forcibly and loudly and the fist brought down and thumped on any near-by object. This last action is an example of something seen frequently in other animals, where it is referred to as a redirection activity. What happens is that, because the object (the opponent) stimulating the attack is too frightening to be directly assaulted, the aggressive movements are released, but have to be re-directed towards some other, less intimidating object, such as a harmless bystander (we have all suffered from this at one time or another), or even an inanimate object. If the latter is used it may be viciously pulverized or destroyed. When a wife smashes a vase to the floor, it is, of course, really her husband’s head that lies there broken into small pieces. It is interesting that chimpanzees and gorillas frequently perform their own versions of this display, when they tear up, smash, and throw around branches and vegetation. Again, it has a powerful visual impact.
A specialized and important accompaniment to all these aggressive displays is the making of threatening facial expressions. These, along with our verbalized vocal signals, provide our most precise method of communicating our exact aggressive mood. Although our smiling face, discussed in an earlier chapter, is unique to our species, our aggressive faces, expressive though they may be, are much the same as those of all the other higher primates. (We can tell a fierce monkey or a scared monkey at a glance, but we have to learn the friendly monkey face.) The rules are quite simple: the more the urge to attack dominates the urge to flee, the more the face pulls itself forwards. When the reverse is the case and fear gets the upper hand, then all the facial details are pulled back. In the attack face, the eyebrows are brought forward in a frown, the forehead is smooth, the mouth-corners are held forward, and the lips make a tight, pursed line. As fear comes to
dominate the mood, a scared-threat face appears. The eyebrows are raised, the forehead wrinkles, the mouth-corners are pulled back and the lips part, exposing the teeth. This face often accompanies other gestures that appear to be very aggressive, and such things as forehead-wrinkling and teeth-baring are sometimes thought of as ‘fierce’ signals because of this. But in fact they are fear signs, the face providing an early-warning signal that fear is very much present, despite the persistence of intimidating gestures by the rest of the body. It is still, of course, a threatening face and cannot be treated smugly. If full fear were being expressed, the face-pulling would be abandoned and the opponent would be retreating.
All this face-making we share with the monkeys, a fact that is worth remembering if ever you come face to face with a large baboon, but there are other faces that we have invented culturally, such as sticking out the tongue, puffing out the cheeks, thumbing the nose, and exaggeratedly screwing up the features, that add considerably to our threat repertoire. Most cultures have also added a variety of threatening or insulting gestures employing the rest of the body. Aggressive intention movements (‘hopping mad’) have been elaborated into violent war-dances of many different and highly stylized kinds. The function here has become communal arousal and synchronization of strong aggressive feelings, rather than direct visual display to the enemy.
Because, with the cultural development of lethal artificial weapons, we have become such a potentially dangerous species, it is not surprising to find that we have an extraordinarily wide range of appeasement signals. We share with the other primates the basic submissive response of crouching and screaming. In addition we have formalized a whole variety of subordinating displays. Crouching itself has become extended into grovelling and prostrating. Minor intensities of it are expressed in the form of kneeling, bowing and curtsying. The key signal here is the lowering of the body in relation to the dominant individual. When threatening, we puff ourselves up to our greatest height, making our bodies as tall and as large as possible. Submissive behaviour must therefore take the opposite course and bring the body down as far as possible. Instead of doing this in a random way, we have stylized it at a number of characteristic, fixed stages, each with its own special signal meaning. The act of saluting is interesting in this context, because it shows how far from the original gesture formalization can carry our cultural signs. At first sight a military salute looks like an aggressive movement. It is similar to the signal version of raising-an-arm-to-strike-a-blow. The vital difference is that the hand is not clenched and it points towards the cap or hat. It is, of course, a stylized modification of the act of removing the hat, which itself was originally part of the procedure of lowering the height of the body.
The distillation of the bowing movement from the original, crude, primate crouch is also interesting. The key feature here is the lowering of the eyes. A direct stare is typical of the most out-and-out aggression. It is part of the fiercest facial expressions and accompanies all the most belligerent gestures. (This is why the children’s game of ‘stare you out’ is so difficult to perform and why the simple curiosity staring of a young child – ‘It’s rude to stare’ – is so condemned.) No matter how reduced in extent the bow becomes by social custom, it always retains the face-lowering element. Male members of a royal court, for example, who, through constant repetition, have modified their bowing reactions, still lower the face, but instead of bending from the waist they now bow stiffly from the neck, lowering only the head region.
On less formal occasions the anti-stare response is given by simple looking-away movements, or a ‘shifty-eyed’ expression. Only a truly aggressive individual can fix you in the eye for any length of time. During ordinary face-to-face conversations we typically look away from our companions when we are talking, then glance back at them at the end of each sentence, or ‘paragraph’, to check their response to what we have said. A professional lecturer takes some time to train himself to look directly at the members of his audience, instead of over their heads, down at his rostrum, or out towards the side or back of the hall. Even though he is in such a dominant position, there are so many of them, all staring (from the safety of their seats) at him, that he experiences a basic and initially uncontrollable fear of them. Only after a great deal of practice can he overcome this. The simple, aggressive, physical act of being stared at by a large group of people is also the cause of the fluttering ‘butterflies’ in the actor’s stomach before he makes his entrance on to the stage. He has all his intellectual worries about the qualities of his performance and its reception, of course, but the massed threat-stare is an additional and more fundamental hazard for him. (This is again a case of the curiosity stare being confused at an unconscious level with the threat-stare.) The wearing of spectacles and sunglasses makes the face appear more aggressive because it artificially and accidentally enlarges the pattern of the stare. If we are looked at by someone wearing glasses, we are being given a super-stare. Mild-mannered individuals tend to select thin-rimmed or rimless spectacles (probably without realizing why they do so), because this enables them to see better with the minimum of stare exaggeration. In this way they avoid arousing counter-aggression.
A more intense form of anti-stare is covering the eyes with the hands, or burying the face in the crook of the elbow. The simple act of closing the eyes also cuts off the stare, and it is intriguing that certain individuals compulsively and repeatedly shut their eyes briefly whilst facing and talking to strangers. It is as though their normal blinking responses have become lengthened into extended eye-masking moments. The response vanishes when they are conversing with close friends in a situation where they feel at ease. Whether they are trying to shut off the ‘threatening’ presence of the stranger, or whether they are attempting to reduce their staring rate, or both, is not always clear.
Because of their powerful intimidating affect, many species have evolved staring eye-spots as self-defence mechanisms. Many moths have a pair of startling eye-markings on their wings. These lie concealed until the creatures are attacked by predators. The wings then open and flash the bright eye-spots in the face of the enemy. It has been proved experimentally that this exerts a valuable intimidating influence on the would-be killers, who frequently flee and leave the insects unmolested. Many fish and some species of birds and even mammals have adopted this technique. In our own species, commercial products have sometimes used the same device (perhaps knowingly, perhaps not). Motor-car designers employ headlamps in this way and frequently add to the overall aggressive impression by sculpturing the line of the front of the bonnet into the shape of a frown. In addition they add ‘bared teeth’ in the form of a metal grille between the ‘eye-spots’. As the roads have become increasingly crowded and driving an increasingly belligerent activity, the threat-faces of cars have become progressively improved and refined, imparting to their drivers a more and more aggressive image. On a smaller scale certain products have been given threat-face brand names, such as OXO, OMO, OZO, and OVO. Fortunately for the manufacturers, these do not repel customers: on the contrary, they catch the eye and, having caught it, reveal themselves to be no more than harmless cardboard boxes. But the impact has already worked, the attention has already been drawn to that product rather than to its rivals.
I mentioned earlier that chimpanzees appease by holding out a limp hand towards the dominant individual. We share this gesture with them, in the form of the typical begging or imploring posture. We have also adapted it as a widespread greeting gesture in the shape of the friendly handshake. Friendly gestures often grow out of submissive ones. We saw earlier how this happened with the smiling and laughing responses (both of which, incidentally, still appear in appeasing situations as the timid smile and the nervous titter). Handshaking occurs as a mutual ceremony between individuals of more or less equal rank, but is transformed into bowing to kiss the held hand when there is strong inequality between the ranks. (With increasing ‘equality’ between the sexes and the various classes,
this latter refinement is now becoming rarer, but still persists in certain specialized spheres where formal dominance hierarchies are rigidly adhered to, as in the case of the Church.) In certain instances handshaking has become modified into self-shaking or hand-wringing. In some cultures this is the standard greeting appeasement, in others it is performed only in more extreme ‘imploring’ contexts.
There are many other cultural specialities in the realm of submissive behaviour, such as throwing in the towel or showing the white flag, but these need not concern us here. One or two of the simpler re-motivating devices do, however, deserve a mention, if only because they bear an interesting relationship to similar patterns in other species. You will recall that certain juvenile, sexual or grooming patterns were performed towards aggressive or potentially aggressive individuals as a method of arousing non-aggressive feelings that competed with the more violent ones and suppressed them. In our own species, juvenile behaviour on the part of submissive adults is particularly common during courtship. The courting pair often adopt ‘baby-talk’, not because they are heading towards parentalism themselves, but because it arouses tender, protective maternal or paternal feelings in the partner and thereby suppresses more aggressive feelings (or, for that matter, more fearful ones). It is amusing, when thinking back to the development of this pattern into courtship-feeding in birds, to notice the extraordinary increase in mutual feeding that goes on in our own courtship phase. At no other time in our lives do we devote so much effort to popping tasty morsels into one another’s mouths, or offering one another boxes of chocolates.
The Naked Ape Page 16