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Part 8:4G The fragility of the love-indoctrination, mate selection process In Parts 8:4B and 8:4D it was explained that love-indoctrination is an extremely difficult process to develop, but not impossible. Its difficulty was illustrated by the fact that while chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans have been able to develop a high degree of love- indoctrinated selflessness and the equivalent (or thereabouts) level of consciousness of that of a two-year-old human, where they have self-awareness and can recognise, appreciate and favour selfless behaviour, not one of these species has been able to completely bring an end to the ‘animal condition’ because they still live in a male-dominated, patriarchal world where males aggressively compete for mating opportunities. It was also stressed that even the bonobos who have been able to develop love-indoctrination to the point of bringing to an end male competition for mating opportunities and the male dominated world that results from it, have not yet completed the process because they still need to use sex as an appeasement device to contain residual aggression. So although the development of love-indoctrination assisted by mate selection meant the impasse to developing the fully integrated state had been finally completely breached, that didn’t mean the fully integrated state would automatically develop. Rather, the technology was in place for it to be developed but the process was still a difficult one to complete. What follows are some powerful illustrations that show just how difficult and fragile the development of integration through love-indoctrination and mate selection is. To provide background to these illustrations I first need to introduce the work of the legendary and visionary palaeontologist Louis Leakey (1903-1972). The son of British missionaries in Kenya (where he was born), Leakey so believed ‘that knowledge of the past would help us to understand and possibly control the future’ (Disclosing the Past, Mary Leakey, 1984) that in 1959, against prevailing views, he began the search for fossil evidence of the emergence of humans in Africa. This search, which was to prove stunningly successful, wasn’t Leakey’s only incredibly inspired initiative, he also handpicked three women to study the great apes in their natural habitat—Jane Goodall, who began her field study of chimpanzees in Tanzania in1960 ; Dian Fossey, who began her field study of gorillas in Rwanda in1967 ; and Birute Galdikas, who began her field study of orangutans in South East Asia in 1971. As part of his plan to only study the African apes Leakey originally wanted Galdikas to study bonobos but because of the difficulties involved in living in the Congo she ended up studying the orangutans in Borneo instead. So impressed by, and thankful for, Leakey’s initiatives in palaeontology and primatology—the former of which his wife Mary, son Richard and his wife Meave, and granddaughter Louise have carried on—that I dedicated my 1991 book Beyond The Human Condition to him (alongside Sir Laurens van der Post and Sir James Darling). With Dian Fossey Leakey ‘struck gold’, for she fearlessly acknowledged the truth in what she was observing about the crucial role nurturing was playing in producing the exceptional gentleness and cooperativeness of gorillas. Fossey was a remarkably strong-willed woman and the universally practiced denial-complying variety of mechanistic science held little sway over her. It seems entirely appropriate that after she was murdered at her research station in Rwanda in 1985 she was buried alongside her gentle gorilla friend Digit, who had given his life defending his group from poachers. Part 8:4G The fragility of the love-indoctrination, mate selection process 625
Without the relief from unbearable self-confrontation that comes from being able to understand the human condition, few, if any, have been able to cope with the honesty of Fossey’s studies and, as a result, she has been misrepresented as merely a fanatical gorilla conservationist—such as in the 1988 film of her life,Gorillas in the Mist. However, Fossey’s wonderful treatise on gorilla behaviour—the 1983 book Gorillas in the Mist upon which the film was based—shows just how courageous a scientist she was. As mentioned in Part 8:4F, and prior to that in Part 5:1, when illustrating the strength of character that had to be developed to curtail male aggression and the centred, security of self needed to be an effective, love-indoctrinating mother, Fossey, in Gorillas in the Mist, wrote about how ‘Old Goat’ was ‘an exemplary parent’ and that, as a result, her son ‘Tiger’ was ‘a contented and well adjusted individual’. While gorillas have not been able to develop as much love-indoctrination as bonobos, seemingly because they have lacked ideal nursery conditions, denial-free, honest studies of their behaviour, in particular Fossey’s, have revealed the strong relationship between nurturing and integrativeness that is the love-indoctrination process. The following extracts from Gorillas in the Mist reveal more about Old Goat’s nurturing of Tiger. Not only that, they also reveal the extreme fragility of the love-indoctrination process, showing how any disruption to it would result in a regression back to the competitive, each-for-his-own, opportunistic, divisive, ‘animal condition’ existence. Again, the underlinings have been added for emphasis: ‘Like human mothers, gorilla mothers show a great variation in the treatment of their offspring. The contrasts were particularly marked between [the gorilla mothers] Old Goat and Flossie. Flossie was very casual in the handling, grooming, and support of both of her infants, whereas Old Goat was an exemplary parent’ (p.174 of 282). The effect of Old Goat’s ‘exemplary parenting’ of Tiger is apparent in the following extract: ‘Like Digit, Tiger also was taking his place in Group 4’s growing cohesiveness. By the age of five, Tiger was surrounded by playmates his own age, a loving mother, and a protective group leader. He was a contented and well-adjusted individual whose zest for living was almost contagious for the other animals of his group. His sense of well-being was often expressed by a characteristic facial “grimace”’ (pp.186-187). The ‘growing cohesiveness’ (developing integration) brought about by ‘loving mother[s], and a protective group leader’ is love-indoctrination. Incidentally, with regard to the ‘protective group leader[s]’, namely the male silverback gorillas, their large size is not only due to having to compete for dominance but also reflects that while bonobos depend on the safety of trees for the secure, threat-free environment, gorillas evidently selected for physical size and great strength, particularly in the males, to protect their groups from external, predatory threats—as the anthropologist Adolph H. Schultz noted, the adult male gorilla ‘is a remarkably peaceful creature, using its incredible strength merely in self-defence’ (The Life of Primates, 1969, p.34 of 281). Fossey’s account of the love-indoctrinated Tiger later in life illustrates how nurtured love is necessary to produce the integrated group. It describes how the secure, integrative, loving Tiger tried to maintain integration or love in the presence of an aggressive, divisive gorilla after the group’s integrative silverback leader, Uncle Bert, was shot by poachers: ‘The newly orphaned Kweli, deprived of his mother, Macho, and his father, Uncle Bert, and bearing a bullet wound himself, came to rely only on Tiger for grooming the wound, cuddling, and sharing warmth in nightly nests. Wearing concerned facial expressions, Tiger stayed near the three-year-old, responding to his cries with comforting belch vocalizations. As Group 4’s new young leader, Tiger regulated the animals’ feeding 626 Freedom Expanded: Book 1 The Biology
and travel pace whenever Kweli fell behind. Despondency alone seemed to pose the most critical threat to Kweli’s survival during August 1978. Beetsme…was a significant menace to what remained of Group 4’s solidarity. The immigrant, approximately two years older than Tiger and finding himself the oldest male within the group led by a younger animal, quickly developed an unruly desire to dominate. Although still sexually immature, Beetsme took advantage of his age and size to begin severely tormenting old Flossie three days after Uncle Bert’s death. Beetsme’s aggression was particularly threatening to Uncle Bert’s last offspring, Frito [son of Flossie]. By killing Frito, Beetsme would be destroying an infant sired by a competitor, and Flossie would again become fertile. Neither young Tiger nor the aging female was any match against Beetsme. Twenty-two days after Uncle Bert’s killing, Beetsme succeeded in killing fifty- four-day-old Frito even with the unfailing efforts of Tiger and the other Group 4 members to defend the mother and infant…Frito’s death provided more evidence, however indirect, of the devastation poachers create by killing the leader of a gorilla group. Two days after Frito’s death Flossie was observed soliciting copulations from Beetsme, not for sexual or even reproductive reasons—she had not yet returned to cyclicity and Beetsme still was sexually immature. Undoubtedly her invitations were conciliatory measures aimed at reducing his continuing physical harassment. I found myself strongly disliking Beetsme as I watched his discord destroy what remained of all that Uncle Bert had succeeded in creating and defending over the past ten years…I also became increasingly concerned about Kweli, who had been, only a few months previously, Group 4’s most vivacious and frolicsome infant. The three-year-old’s lethargy and depression were increasing daily even though Tiger tried to be both mother and father to the orphan. Three months following his gunshot wound and the loss of both parents, Kweli gave up the will to survive…It was difficult to think of Beetsme as an integral member of Group 4 because of his continual abuse of the others in futile efforts to establish domination, particularly over the indomitable Tiger…Tiger helped maintain cohesiveness by “mothering” Titus and subduing Beetsme’s rowdiness. Because of Tiger’s influence and the immaturity of all three males, they remained together’ (pp.218-221). It is clear from this account how very easily any disruption to the love-indoctrination process can cause a regression back to the competitive, opportunistic, each-for-his-own, pre- love-indoctrination, ‘animal condition’ situation. A further example of the difficulty of completing the love-indoctrination process comes from studies of chimpanzees, particularly Jane Goodall’s studies of chimpanzees at the Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. In 1996 the British primatologist Richard Wrangham published a book titled Demonic Males in which he suggested that our aggressive human nature can be traced back to the kind of aggression found in chimpanzees. To support his theory, Wrangham particularly referred to the killing and partial eating of a human child by a male chimpanzee named Frodo, and the killing by one group of male chimpanzees of nearly all the members of a neighbouring group—both incidences involving Goodall’s research troops at Gombe. The following is a condensation of dialogue from the 2004 BBC documentary, The Demonic Ape, which was based on Wrangham’s demonic male hypothesis and featured Goodall. Early in the documentary, to illustrate the similar level of consciousness a chimpanzee has with a young human, footage is shown of a human child demonstrating that she is capable of what is called ‘theory of mind’, which is being able to know what another person is thinking. Goodall is then seen to observe that ‘chimpanzees’ also ‘clearly…do have theory of mind’. Further on the narrator says that ‘we discovered the so-called [chimpanzee] vegetarians Part 8:4G The fragility of the love-indoctrination, mate selection process 627
are hunters, they’re particularly fond of baby monkeys’, to which Wrangham comments, ‘You get incredibly excited when you watch chimps hunting…because you identify so strongly with the chimpanzee. They are so intent and they are so excited, the passion that they feel [in killing and eating a monkey] is just so extraordinary…there is far more meat eating going on in chimpanzees than there is in any other species of primate than humans.’ The narrator then says that Goodall found that chimpanzees ‘did something else that was far more chilling, they killed their own kind. In the sixties the group that Goodall studied split into two factions, Kasakela & Kahama. The rivalry between the two turned into a bloody civil war…One by one the males in the Kasakela group killed every male and some of the females in their neighbouring group. Only a few years before the victims had been their constant companions.’ The program then reported how chimps from one community killed, mutilated and pounded on the body of a neighbouring chimp: ‘They’d ripped his trachea out, they’d removed his testicles.’ Wrangham commented that ‘There is a sense in which this looks sadistic, the joy, this is kind of hard to take you know because again it’s got horrible echoes of what happens with humans at times. The males who attack, they do seem to take a certain joy in the attack, their drinking of the blood sometimes…They look as though they’re in a state of intense excitement and maybe joy.’ The narrator then says, ‘Chimpanzees can be described as sadistic because they have theory of mind, they know when they’re inflicting pain. Not all animals have this ability.’ The primatologist Frans de Waal then observes that ‘You cannot have cruelty in creatures that don’t have empathy…I don’t think a shark can be cruel, it doesn’t have the brains to understand what the effect is of its actions. Now chimpanzees do have that kind of understanding. Chimpanzees have empathy and sympathy and so as a result they can also inflict pain on purpose I think.’ The narrator then comments that ‘There is only one other animal on the planet that has a similarly dark side, human beings…Because of these revelations Richard Wrangham…put together…[a theory] about the origins of human behaviour [claiming that] what chimpanzee aggression seems to show is that we, like them, are programmed to be violent. Wrangham calls his theory the demonic male hypothesis’, because, according to Wrangham, ‘of course essentially females don’t do it’. The narrator adds that ‘In Britain men are 24 times more likely to kill or assault another person, and 263 times more likely to commit a sexual offence than a woman.’ The narrator then says that ‘Of all the demonic males there have been at Gombe the most demonic is Frodo.’ Goodall adds, ‘Frodo was aggressive from a very small age…[and grew up to be] a real bully.’ The narrator then reports that ‘In 1998 Frodo…became the dominant male. From the start it was clear that Frodo would rule through brute force…he attacked Jane Goodall herself…Not only is Frodo the most powerful chimpanzee at Gombe he is also its finest hunter. In four years he reduced the Colobus monkey population by 10 percent single-handedly…In May 2002 Frodo battered to death…[a human] baby girl…The baby’s body had been gruesomely mutilated.’ The narrator then says, ‘So had Frodo behaved like a predatory animal, or was this a partially human act, a murder? There is a third possibility…Deep in the heart of the Congo in an area known as the Goualougo Triangle, a young American scientist [Crickette Sanz] has recently begun to study a group of chimpanzees…[who had] never seen a human being before…[and, while] The chimpanzees of the Goualougo are like those at Gombe, [in that] they too use tools and they have their own culture…there is one crucial difference, they are not as aggressive.’ Sanz confirms this saying,‘ we’ve never seen chimps killing other chimps. We haven’t seen highly elevated territorial disputes.’ The narrator then points out that ‘The place where most violence in chimpanzees has been witnessed is Gombe, and the circumstances are indeed special…Once Gombe was surrounded by forest 628 Freedom Expanded: Book 1 The Biology
but now the trees have been felled. There is a village within the park which is expanding, refugees surround it. The chimps are completely cut off from the rest of the rainforest.’ The primatologist Christophe Boesch adds, ‘People are to realise that this encroachment that humans do on nature… including chimpanzees…can present a tremendous stress on them.’ The narrator then comments that ‘Chimpanzees in these long term study sites are losing out to logging companies and to poachers who invade the rainforest and snare them for bush meat…Some now believe that stress caused by humans can make chimpanzees more violent.’ Jane Goodall then says, ‘I didn’t see aggression to start with. There’s no question that chimpanzees become more aggressive as a result of crowding, as a result of competition for food.’ The anthropologist Robert Sussman then notes that ‘she [Goodall] actually stated that the chimpanzees were much less aggressive than they were after provisioning [them with food to attract them to her study area, which she had been doing for many years]’. After which, the narrator concludes that ‘In our desire to understand ourselves we may have distorted the very animals we were using as a mirror. We do share much with our closest ancestors, but ultimately chimpanzees are not windows into the human soul.’ Yes, this last comment is perceptive: chimpanzee (and gorilla) behaviour does ‘not’ provide a window into our human nature. It does provide a window into the origins of our moral ‘soul’ but not into our present aggressive, human-condition-afflicted behaviour—and I’m sure that in saying ‘into the human soul’ what was meant was ‘into human nature’ because the documentary is all about the origins of our aggressive nature, not the origins of our moral soul. It is about the ‘demonic male hypothesis’; ‘that we, like them [chimpanzees], are programmed to be violent’; that ‘the origins of human behaviour’, our ‘dark side’ can be found in the brutal behaviour of these chimpanzees. As we are now able to understand, the immensely upset, brutally angry, aggressive and murderous state of the human condition that we suffer from is a result of the conflict that emerged well after this two-year-old-equivalent infancy stage of consciousness that chimpanzees and gorillas are presently in. In fact, as all the relatively innocent races, such as the Bushmen of the Kalahari, evidence, it is us modern humans today who are the extremely upset, aggressive variety of humans. We humans progressed from an original innocent, upset-free state to an increasingly upset, angry and aggressive state. There are millions of years between the time when we were living in our primate infancy stage and our present extremely upset, human-condition-afflicted, late adolescence stage. To say that ‘we, like them [chimpanzees], are programmed to be violent’ provided a convenient excuse for our extremely divisive behaviour—and, no doubt, many people felt relieved to be able to blame our violent behaviour on our distant ape ancestry—but it is not true: we humans have an unconditionally selfless, all-loving instinctive heritage, not a brutal, aggressive one. But if our aggressive behaviour is not related to this aggressive behaviour in chimpanzees, what is the cause of this ‘demonic’ behaviour in these chimpanzees? Firstly, as the evidence provided in the documentary reveals, the lives of the demonically behaved chimpanzees at Gombe have suffered extreme disruption. The ideal nursery conditions that the process of love-indoctrination is so reliant on have been decimated; in terms of the analogy of being swept back downstream, the lives of these chimpanzees have been hit by a tsunami of disruption. But why would this disruption make them ‘demonic’? In Part 8:4D it was described how relieving and exciting it would have been for our ape ancestors—and for bonobos now— to be liberated from the horrible oppression of the ‘animal condition’ and at last allowed to Part 8:4G The fragility of the love-indoctrination, mate selection process 629 be part of the all-loving, true, integrative, ‘Godly’, ‘heavenly’ state. It was emphasised that being afflicted by the human condition where we have practiced living in deep denial of the existence of the all-loving, integrative, true world makes it virtually impossible for us humans to now recognise the excitement, relief and satisfaction that comes with being able to access the integrative, all-loving true world, nevertheless, the truth is that it is an awesomely wonderful state to be able to access. While chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans haven’t been able to become fully liberated from the competitive and aggressive animal condition and become fully part of the all-loving, integrative, ‘Godly’, ‘heavenly’ true world, they have been able to be part of it to a significant degree, significant enough for these chimpanzees at Gombe to be psychologically devastated from having lost access to it. The demonic behaviour of the Gombe chimpanzees (especially Frodo who, like the gorilla Beetsme, obviously suffered from a lack of nurturing as an infant) would have arisen from the fact that knowing both instinctively and consciously of the existence of the all-loving, animal-condition-free, true world, and then being denied access to it, effectively rejected from it, left them feeling extremely distressed, resentful and angry—even furious to the point of being hateful and sadistic. Once you have a situation of love then you also have the potential for the reversal of that situation, for the possibility of the situation of there not being love—there exists a negative counter-position. For once animals know love, to then find themselves deprived of it and/or unable to be loving is a very frustrating, upsetting and even guilt-producing situation to be in. In the case of the human condition, what the human race did to artificially rid itself of the agony of that condition was to say that there is no integrative meaning/purpose to life because then there was no problem with not being integrative, no dilemma and thus no agony of the human condition from which to suffer. We got rid of the positive situation so we wouldn’t experience the negative situation—actually, we only deluded ourselves we had eliminated the positive situation; as stated, we only ‘artificially’ rid ourselves of it—but the point being revealed is that once you have the positive situation then you also have the potential for the distressing negative situation to occur. Once a species was liberated from the animal condition and knew love, whenever there was a subsequent breakdown in nurturing, or a break-out of competition for resources, those animals then knew what they were missing out on and/or not behaving in accordance with, which could make them extremely upset, psychotic (soul-hurt) and neurotic (mind-distressed); it could make them ‘demonic’. The commentary in the documentary actually seems to recognise that there is psychosis and neurosis involved in the behaviour of the chimpanzees, with the narrator having noted that ‘Chimpanzees can be described as sadistic because they have theory of mind, they know when they’re inflicting pain. Not all animals have this ability.’ Similarly, Frans de Waal was recorded as saying, ‘You cannot have cruelty in creatures that don’t have empathy…I don’t think a shark can be cruel, it doesn’t have the brains to understand what the effect is of its actions. Now chimpanzees do have that kind of understanding. Chimpanzees have empathy and sympathy and so as a result they can also inflict pain on purpose I think.’ Recognising that chimpanzees ‘understand’ the ‘effect[s]’ of their ‘actions’ and ‘have empathy and sympathy’ leaves the inference that something has happened in the ‘understanding’ mind of these chimps for them to no longer be ‘empath[etic]’ and ‘sympath[etic]’; it infers that they have been psychologically and neurologically upset—that their psyche or soul has been hurt and their conscious mind has become distressed and angry. 630 Freedom Expanded: Book 1 The Biology
Yes, as has been emphasised, any breakdown in nurturing, or any disruption to the all- equally-nurtured situation, invariably leads to a reversion to the old ‘each-for-his-own’, opportunistic, selfish-genes-rule, competitive and aggressive ‘animal condition’, whichcan be extremely upsetting because it is such a retreat from the ideal, all-loving state. We saw at Gombe how ‘Frodo was aggressive from a very small age…[and grew up to be] a real bully’, and how ‘From the start [of the time he became the dominant male] it was clear that Frodo would rule through brute force.’ We similarly saw in Fossey’s studies of mountain gorillas how ‘Beetsme…was a significant menace to what remained of Group 4’s solidarity’, how he ‘quickly developed an unruly desire to dominate’, how he began ‘severely tormenting old Flossie three days after Uncle Bert’s death’ despite ‘the unfailing efforts of Tiger’ to stop ‘his continuing physical harassment’, and how Fossey found herself ‘strongly disliking Beetsme as [she] watched his discord destroy what remained of all that Uncle Bert had succeeded in creating and defending over the past ten years’. So, our upset human condition is not a result of ‘we, like them [chimpanzees]’ having been ‘programmed to be violent’, as the ‘demonic male hypothesis’ claims, rather ‘the origins of human behaviour’, our ‘dark side’, results from a psychological and neurological conflict that developed after the infancy stage that the great apes are presently in. It was during the latter stages of childhood, when our conscious mind began to experiment in self-management in the presence of instincts that are ‘programmed to be’ loving, not ‘violent’, that our upset condition emerged. As usual with our practice of denial, while using the reverse-of-the-truth lie that our instincts are ‘violent’ relieved our conscious mind of its sense of guilt it only served to bury us deeper into Plato’s dark cave of deathly alienation. It should also be clarified that while women are less aggressive than men—that, to use the statistic cited earlier, ‘In Britain men are 24 times more likely to kill or assault another person, and 263 times more likely to commit a sexual offence than a woman’—the reason men are so aggressive is because, as explained in Part 7:1, they were the ones who had to take up the extremely upsetting task of championing the conscious thinking self or ego over the ignorance of our original instinctive self. As explained, the aggression of male chimpanzees is a result of that species having not yet reined in the animal condition where males relentlessly compete for mating opportunities. There is a world of difference between the human condition and the animal condition. Another powerful illustration of the effect of a breakdown in nurturing is supplied by zookeeper Barbara Bell and Professor Harry Prosen’s work with bonobos at the Milwaukee County Zoo in the USA, which has one of the largest collections of captive bonobos in the world. Harry Prosen, who is Professor Emeritus at the Medical College of Wisconsin, provided the wonderfully enthusiastic commendation in Part 2:2 of our work at the WTM of bringing understanding to the human condition. Barbara Bell was also introduced earlier in Part 8:4F when describing the integrative behaviour of bonobos. The following is a condensation of a radio interview that was conducted in 2012 with Harry Prosen and Barbara Bell about a very disturbed bonobo named Brian whose condition had, fifteen years earlier, prompted the Milwaukee County Zoo to seek Professor Prosen’s assistance. (The full interview, which was broadcast on the Lake Effect program on Milwaukee Public Radio on 21 February 2012, can be listened to at:
Barbara Bell: ‘Brian came to us as a very young individual from another institution. He had not had a normal social upbringing [later in the interview Bell said that unfortunately Brian never had a mother…so that’s half his problem]…What we didn’t understand was how severely disturbed [Brian] was mentally…Brian was seven years old and he had developed a lot of behaviours that were self-destructive. Some were physical, like he would sit and bang his head on the wall, he would pick his fingernails off. I think we could consider him bulimic, with the vomiting that he would do. When an animal is self- destructing to a point where you have self-mutilation that has to be stopped or the animal will not survive…that is where Harry came in because we had no clue what to do.’ Harry Prosen then said that ‘I proceeded to do what I had done for many years with humans in difficulty and that was to have a case conference…which actually led me to a psychiatric human diagnosis. I thought that Brian had a social anxiety disorder, with a lot of infantile aspects to it, that his development had been regressed or held back. As Brian developed he began to try to act like a mature male and then he’d get torn apart, not literally, but pretty badly [by the other bonobos because, according to Bell further on in the interview, Brian had absolutely no social culture and as a result they didn’t consider him worthy of being in the troop]…I realised that mimicry was a way of surviving for some of these adolescent males who are mature in body but had not gone through the normal developmental processes for a bonobo male. And then, using that knowledge, we worked together and Barbara tried many different social groupings. We put Brian on a little medication for his anxiety and it took probably a year or two to begin to see some changes in behaviour but the self-destruction diminished and Brian began to thrive.’ Bell then said, ‘We talked to Dr Prosen…[and from his] advice…[we worked out] what we could do…Brian had his whole day planned out, we didn’t deviate one minute, every day was predictable because this animal lived in fear of change…bonobos’… brains are very plastic, they go with the flow[but that left]…Brian swimming in the deep end. So he had to go all the way back and learn how to be a little boy again, and learn how to have joy. So one thing we did was to pair him up with kids [two to three year old bonobos] who were much younger than him to teach him proper play behaviour…so Brian had to go all the way back, learn the right sequence of play behaviours in order to grow mentally.’ Prosen concluded: ‘It is very significant to realise that a lot of bonobo psychological difficulty is almost identical to that that we see in humans…Barbara and I gave a paper [about our work with Brian that]…got worldwide attention and invitations to talk and a multitude of consultations…[from other institutions about] problems they were having with bonobos.’ In commenting on this interview, I would firstly like to point out that there is strong evidence of bonobos favouring integrativeness in Barbara Bell’s comment that the reason the bonobo troop attacked Brian was because ‘he had absolutely no social culture’ and as a result ‘they didn’t consider him worthy of being in the troop’. But more significantly, I should say that what is ‘almost identical’ about the psychology of bonobos and humans is not that bonobos suffer from an instinct versus intellect type human condition, but that through love-indoctrination they, like humans, have developed a deep appreciation of love both instinctively and consciously and therefore, like humans, psychologically suffer when they are deprived of that love. In terms of how much nurturing bonobos have been able to develop and, as a result, how sensitive they are to the ideal, all-loving true world, Harry Prosen had this to say in the interview: ‘I think what I found extremely interesting is that bonobos are a matriarchal society whereas chimpanzees are patriarchal and that makes for a lot of very interesting 632 Freedom Expanded: Book 1 The Biology
differences between the two species. I became interested because my background work has always been in empathy and very quickly…I realised that bonobos are extremely empathic and that really turned my interest on…Empathy is kind of the realisation of the feelings of somebody else…Bonobos are I think the most empathic creatures next to Homo sapiens…brain imaging has also shown that bonobos have empathic brain centres just as humans do.’ In terms of Harry Prosen’s enthusiastic support of my work, I think this comment, also made in the interview, is particularly relevant: ‘My background is that of a psychotherapist. I’ve been treating people in psychotherapy for many, many years and my original training was in dynamics therapy…by that I mean I have to understand where my patients are coming from, their background, which is why I wanted a history on Brian, and out of that I can build a picture—I think I can understand why many of the symptoms that we see are there. And once you understand then you can begin to design treatment programs or therapeutic programs.’ Yes, as Harry Prosen has often said to us at the WTM, what he values so highly about the explanation of the human condition that we are putting forward is that it supplies the ‘understand[ing]’ of where all the pain in humans is ‘coming from’, which is the crucial understanding we need to ‘begin to design treatment programs’ for the entire human race. I might mention that Harry Prosen and his wife Yvonne have become very great friends of mine and of us all in the WTM. They stayed with us in Sydney in 2007 and I have spoken on the phone to Harry in America on average two or three times a month since he first responded to our documentary proposal in 2005 to the present time of writing, which is 2012, and throughout this time, he has been consistently enthusiastic in helping and encouraging us all. I should also say that Harry’s recognition of the importance of the explanation of the human condition is no surprise given his life’s work studying empathy closely parallels my own study of the human condition—after all, ‘empathy’ is simply mechanistic science’s evasive word for ‘love’, for the consideration of others; so studying empathy means studying love, the effect of it and the effect of the lack of it, which is what study of the human condition boils down to. Harry is a most wonderful psychotherapist, capable of a truly extraordinary co-presence, and he has deep insight into human and animal nature, all of which is apparent if you listen to him in the 2012 radio interview that the above extracts are taken from. In fact, Harry is a denial- free, prophetic thinker, someone blessed with an ability to look into the human condition, and we in the WTM are so very, very fortunate to have his great love and support. To return now to our comparative analysis of primates, the distressing situation of having been ‘locked out of love’, then to finally being allowed into the world of love, only to be thrown out of love once more, has also occurred in the lineage of orangutans. What inhibited the development of love-indoctrinated integration in the lives of orangutans is the scarcity of food in their native forests of South East Asia. Orangutan infants are nurtured with love in a long infancy only to suffer being thrown out of love when, as Part 8:4G The fragility of the love-indoctrination, mate selection process 633
adults, they have to live mostly solitary lives due to shortage of food. Older orangutans have a reputation for being morose and bad-tempered and it makes sense that this ‘outcast’ existence would be the cause. In fact, an article published in 2006 in Scientific American described a study comparing orangutans living in the isolated, food abundant Kluet swamp in Sumatra with those cut off from the swamp and that abundant food supply by the wide Alas River. The Kluet orangutans are more social, outgoing and gregarious. They also show a greater propensity to innovate and use tools, presumably because the greater interaction allows for innovations to be shared, passed on and thus accumulated (Scientific American, Vol.16, no.2, 2006, pp.30-37). Of the monkeys, in the case of baboons, as the quote from Shirley Strum’s study of her Pumphouse Gang troop of baboons in Kenya that was included earlier indicated, the females of the species are beginning to contain competitive male sexual opportunism, which implies they have been able to develop some integration through love-indoctrination and mate selection. It was described how Peggy, who was an extraordinarily self-assured, strong-willed, authoritative, charismatic individual, successfully led the Pumphouse Gang for many years. In Strum’s words: ‘She [Peggy] was the highest-ranking female in the troop, and her presence often turned the tide in favor of the animal she sponsored. While every adult male outranked her by sheer size and physical strength, she exerted considerable social pressure on each member of the troop. Her family also outranked all the others…another reason for the contentment in this particular family was Peggy’s personality. She was a strong, calm, social animal, self-assured yet not pushy, forceful yet not tyrannical’ (Almost Human: a journey into the world of baboons, Shirley C. Strum, 1987, pp.38-39 of 294). As with chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans, the difficulty for baboons is that their natural environment is normally not one in which food is plentiful. At this point, it would be interesting to look at the lives of some other monkey species. The capuchins from South America have by far the largest brain to body size ratio and are considered much more intelligent than other monkeys—but they have not yet attained the level of consciousness where they have an awareness of the concept of ‘I’ or self and can recognise themselves in a mirror, as the great apes can. As has been briefly explained, love- indoctrination liberated consciousness, so the degree to which love-indoctrination can be developed in a species is the degree to which that species can become conscious. Capuchin females are extremely maternal and nurse their infants for a longer period than other monkeys, weaning them in their second year. Both male and female capuchins live for over 40 years compared to the 20 or so years managed by most other monkeys, possibly reflecting the drawn out stages of maturation mentioned earlier that may result from extending the infancy stage to allow for longer nurturing. Female capuchins decide when and with which individual to mate and have been observed forming successful coalitions against males. Male against male competition is less obvious amongst capuchins than in other monkeys and, like the bonobos, capuchins frequently engage in same-sex sexual interactions. 634 Freedom Expanded: Book 1 The Biology
It should be mentioned that the weaning of offspring, which all species have to practice because offspring have to grow up and take their place in the adult world at some stage, is itself an example of having to be thrown out of love, of having to leave the love-indoctrinated state. Offspring typically don’t like being weaned, they don’t like being thrown out of love, and this resistance is evidence of the beauty and magnificence of the fully integrated maternal situation. Weaning for any species, especially for mammals who suckle their young and therefore develop a lot of love-indoctrinated integration, is akin to being thrown out of the all- loving situation into the hard reality of the animal condition. The following descriptions of the endangered muriqui or woolly spider monkeys indicate that this species has also been able to develop some degree of love-indoctrination: ‘Wrangham and Peterson suggest that a South American monkey, the muriqui, displays similar behaviours to the bonobo, with females being co-dominant, males less aggressive and females more sexual than other mammals’ (from website of Stuart Birk, senior lecturer at Massey University, New Zealand: see
where all animals are on the ‘ladder’ of integration—starting with the bonobos, which are by far the most advanced of all primates behind humans who, as will be summarised next in Part 8:4H, reached the top of the integration ladder some five million years ago. Since chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans are still patriarchal or male-dominated they are less integrated than bonobos. And so it goes on; according to how much love indoctrination they can develop, other species are variously stranded down the rungs of that ladder. Yes, the full story of life on Earth can be, and has at last been, told! It might be pointed out that in order to explain the origins of humans’ moral nature and the human condition that it gave rise to, and to also explain the differences between other animal species in terms of how much integration they have been able to develop, the truth of Integrative Meaning and the unconditional selflessness or love needed to achieve it had to be discussed. As such, this whole presentation has been one long dissertation on love. Given mechanistic biology was living in such deep denial of any truths that brought the issue of the human condition into focus that it couldn’t even recognise ‘love’ as a meaningful concept it is no wonder it hasn’t been able to make any real sense of either human or animal behaviour—as mentioned in Parts 4:7 and 8:1, the linguist Robin Allott neatly summed up mechanistic science’s attitude to love when he wrote that ‘Love has been described as a taboo subject, not serious, not appropriate for scientific study’! Much more will be said in Part 8:13 about mechanistic science’s denial of the concept of love, but this extract (from Part 8:13) powerfully illustrates just how extremely insecure mechanistic science has been: ‘In his 1989 book Peacemaking Among Primates, Frans de Waal records: ‘For some scientists it was hard to accept that monkeys may have feelings. In [the 1979 book] The Human Model… [authors Harry F.] Harlow and [Clara E.] Mears describe the following strained meeting: “Harlow used the term ‘love’, at which the psychiatrist present countered with the word ‘proximity’. Harlow then shifted to the word ‘affection’, with the psychiatrist again countering with ‘proximity’. Harlow started to simmer, but relented when he realized that the closest the psychiatrist had probably ever come to love was proximity.”’’ Yes, without the defence for our corrupted human condition there have been so many truths that have been unbearable to confront, most especially the truth of the significance of love; it is no wonder that, to adopt Charles Birch’s observation, biology had not made any real progress since Darwin!
Part 8:4H Humans’ development of integration through love-indoctrination and mate selection In the case of our ape ancestors, it is being suggested that love-indoctrination and mate selection of cooperativeness occurred for a sufficiently long period for cooperative integrativeness to become an instinctive part of their make-up, thus creating our ‘moral sense’. It is important to remember, however, that this process involved an indoctrination or training in unconditional selflessness, not anunderstanding of it. The search for knowledge still had to take place, which is why the human-condition-producing clash between our instincts and intellect occurred.
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