The Human Animal

THE HUMAN ANIMAL by Weston La Barre THE. UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS CHICAGO AND LONDON' This book is also available in a clothbound edition from THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, CmCAGO & LONPON The University of Toronto Press, Toronto 5, Canada Copyright 1954 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved Published 1954. First Phoenix Edition 1960. Seventh impres5ion 1967. Printed in the United States oj America To MY WIFE, MY SONS, and MY DAUGHTER, who taught me these things H arrow the house of the dead; look shining at New styles of architecture, a change of heart. w. H. AUDEN The present edition has changed a few minor wordings in the text, but no major argument. In two important matters (race as adaptive and the old Anaxagoras-Aristotle argu ment) on which my views have somewhat shifted focus, I have left the text unchanged, and in readily identifiable paragraphs in the appendix I have criticized my own earlier opinions from the viewpoint of new evidence. I think no one who values scientific reasoning either makes or expects an apology for such a change of mind. Introduction Western culture is a strange paradox. For thousands of years we have proclaimed our primary or even exclusive allegiance to the spiritual world. But somehow, in the meantime, in spite of this protested loyalty -whether backsliding, ofThanded, unwitting. absent-minded. or per verse-we have historically created the most unusual and complex material culture the world has ever seenl This result is hardly to be expected from our pretensions and suggests that we have had some confusion about our nature and our motivations, for we have ,;urely shown less confusion about the nature of the phYSical world. At the same time, we have not been very clear about the nature of the realities we call "spiritual." A good deal of this confusion comes from the use of traditional COD cepts, which, when we look at them more critically, we can now see are inadequate. Modem man is coming to realize that there is only one integrated, unified kind of world, not two. But this is not all. We are sometimes deeply motivated to be confused about our human nature. ix That is, there are some aspects of man's nature which we have reasons for choosing not to know. In the current and chronic human predica ment, man has as many psychological blind spots and wilful misappre hensions about himself as does any patient of a psychiatrist. And for much the same reason: we, like the patient, are afraid of what we are. We wish to maintain other pretenses and to preserve certain delusions about ourselves, not to look at unwelcome facts; and we have our own peculiarly human reasons for all this, as we will see later. But almost in spite of ourselves the facts about man have been steadily accumulating. Paleontology-the study of ancient life from its fossil re mains-has given us a clear picture not only. of the biolOgical history behind man but also of the main outlines of his immediate ancestry. Physical anthropology, which used to be a dreary and sterile bone measuring science, too often used to argue the "superiority" ()f one race over another, has now become a genuine "human biology." And biology itself, transfonned by a century of growing insights into organic evolu tion, has given us a better sense of man's basic nature and of hi~ place in the larger natural order. The social sciences have also grown in knowledge. Sociology, sound ly based on the essentially social nature of man, has learned so much as to be a large group of specialties in itself. Cultural anthropology-the study of the SOcially inherited behavior patterns of men in different societies-has collected such a mass of information about the various ways in which man can be human that the professional student can barely specialize in one continent alone. Archeology, the main tool in the study of prehistory, now tells us not only the relative sequences of stratification but also, with the Carbon 14 technique, even something like absolute dating in time. Comparative linguistics has advanced its claim to being the most exact of the social sciences; and anyone who knows recent work will admit that it has made a good case. Psychology, and espeCially clinical psychology, has sharpened our understanding of man's behavior; while the more one learns of modern dynamic psychiatry, the more respect for it increases as one of the most subtle, precise, and profound disciplines of the human mind. Indeed-and I think rightly so-few of the newer generation of social anthropologists consider themselves fully equipped to get the best out of field work unless they have some knowledge of clinical psychology and analytic psychiatry. This is only one of the many signs that students of the social sciences are increasingly aware that they have much to learn from one another. Both in theory and in practice the social sciences are moving steadily in the direction of co-operation and integration. For example, sociolo gists and anthropologists now borrow each other's insights and tech niques with the same abandon as college roommates borrow each other's shirts and neckties. In fact it is hard to tell the difference be tween them to an interested person, beyond stating weakly, and not at all accurately, that anthropologists study primitive peoples and sociolo gists civilized ones. Cultural anthropologists are admittedly partly his torians, and modem historians are intentionally students of cultural history. Applied anthropology and political science merge skills in ad ministering our Pacific island dependencies. Government cannot get along without the economist. Jurisprudence and the law look into analytiC psychiatry for inSights" only to discover that the social case worke~ has preceded' them there. In fact, the modern child-guidance clinic is a team made up of the social worker, the psychiatrist, and the psychologist. The projective techniques of the clinical psychologist are among the best diagnostic tools of modem psychiatry, and of course the field anthropologist has long since borrowed them for research purposes. It is as if we had cut up the subject of man like a meat pie. But as all the specialists start from a common center, when each of them learns more of his own terrain, then all the social scientists begin to realize that the whole is a large circle and not a small triangular wedge-and that there are solid meat, hot potatoes, and gravy in all the slices. / The whole trend of twentieth-century science is plainly toward inte gration, a fact indicated in the very names of new disciplines: psycho somatic medicine, biochemistry, psychobiology, and the like. The inte grative movement in the social sciences derives further significance from this state of affairs. Our knowledge of the parts has now reached a stage when we can begin to seek a ''holistic'' understanding of larger wholes. Possessing now an anatomy of our various subjects, so to speak, we can begin to see the functioning phYSiology and relationships of xi these structures. Science, too, is discovering that there is only "one world." Probably the best example of this holistic naturalism is found in mathematical physics. By looking at the nature both of stars and of atoms and by an eHort of superb intellectual synthesizing, Einstein has sought to encompass them both within one consistent system, expressed in a mere handful of equations. In philosophy-partly derived from modem mathematics but almost equally inspired by the biological COn cept of the organism-we have Whitehead's impressive and deep-rooted holism, which sees all reality as a system of functional relationships. In psychiatry the commonest criticism of Freud has been that he was far too biological in his psychology. In psychology itself, the older ele mentistic behaviOJ:ism (which, in ignoring consciousness, left out the central fact of psychology) is gone, and modern learning theory is in fact highly concerned with psychic motivation; Gestalt psychology, a sophisticated and contemporary system philosophically, is thoroughl;: holistic in its very essence. In biology the interest in the ecological ap proach is giving us a larger sense of the complex relationships of organ isms and environments. Perhaps because of the nature of their subject matter, biologists are inescapably driven to a larger organismic view of life; and among biologists, none is more holistic ab OVO, so to speak, than Edwin Grant Conklin. W. B. Cannon's pan-systemic physiology and Sir Charles Sherrington's integrative neurology make sense to both psychologists and psychiatrists-and, indeed, the psychosomatic physi cian applies these same total-organism views to the practice of medi cine. Anthropology, too, is wor~ing in this direction. Curiously enough, however, it is one of its greatest scientifIc successes which has hereto fore impeded its progress: the discovery that the physical "racial" dif ferences among men have nothing to do with the speciflc cultural differences among them. 'Racial traits are genetically inherited; cultural traits are SOcially inherited. ,Since these vary independently, phYSical anthropologists can study this intricate animal biologically-but they do it mostly without any reference to its most signifIcant and conspicuous animal adaptation, culture!. Likewise, some anthropologists (I think mistakenly) believe that their subject matter is solely that abstraction xii from human behavior, culture, and not properly the study of man in all his aspects; and some of them, the "culturologists," have even seriously suggested that we ought to study culture as if human beings had never existed I Nevertheless, as we will see, it is impossible for the biology and the sociology of man to remain forever isolated from each other.

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