Niccolò of the Apes, Or Aping Machiavelli

Chapter 6 Niccolò of the Apes, or Aping Machiavelli

We have charted the growth of the Machiavelli myth, first in management, and then coincidentally in social psychology. The appropriation of Machiavelli in management and in social psychology seem to have begun independently, but in maturing they have intersected and interacted, each legitimating the other. Management scholars impose the Mach iv questionnaire on captive students. Social psychologists have become management consultants to ad- minister the instrument in search of a correlation between Machiavellianism and, well, almost anything in vogue. Many practitioners, in both fields, prob- ably use Machiavelli’s name as an innocuous label, a dead or perhaps dormant metaphor, seeing no need to enquire into its origins. Yet when a dormant metaphor is deployed in a new area, it cannot remain in slumber. Its very use as a metaphor implies deliberation and a sense of its fittingness. Hence, when we turn to yet another field of research, a little later than management and social psychology, to find Machiavelli invoked, we can expect to find the stereotype. And so it proves, this time in primate studies or primatology. Primates have long fascinated humans, and these days Machiavelli is part of that story, too. Frans de Waal, a Dutch primatologist then at the Arnhem Zoo in the Netherlands, observed chimpanzees with interest, care, diligence, and insight and published a book called Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among the Apes.1 It treats its subjects with respect and brings out fascinating aspects of primate behavior. It also maligns Machiavelli, though not nearly as libel- ously as was to follow when other primatologists got to work. De Waal began innocently enough when he wrote that ‘entire passages of Machiavelli seem to be directly applicable to chimpanzee behavior’ and refers to the constant struggle for power.2 If we take that to mean that the world of the chimpanzees he observed was turbulent with ambitious contenders, there is no objection to be made. It was heartening to read that ‘Unfortunately, his [Machiavelli’s] admirably realistic analysis has often been mistaken for a moral justification for these practices.’3 He thus did what so few others do, distin- guish Niccolò from Machiavellianism, the man from the myth. Alas, he went

1 Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998 [1982]). 2 Ibid., 4. 3 Ibid., 208.

Niccolò of the Apes, or Aping Machiavelli 155 on to say he felt ‘uncomfortable labeling’ his chimpanzees as Machiavellian. This discomfort was not the result of respect for Machiavelli but rather affec- tion for the monkeys. De Waal put it this way:

An adult male waiting for the right moment to reconcile with his rival … [is] not exactly ‘Machiavellian’ in the usual sense. Sensitivity to others, conflict resolution, and reciprocal exchange all demand a great deal of intelligence but are left out of our terminology that one-sidedly empha- sizes one-upmanship.4

Of course, de Waal is right about the stereotype of Machiavellianism, but we also are right in stressing yet again that the myth has virtually nothing to with Machiavelli but that the distorted myth is invoked because it is seen as appo- site. That Machiavelli recommended repeatedly that a ruler should search for common ground with rivals, try to befriend enemies, and offer good will, all of these make no difference, because it is the mythical Machiavelli of the stereotype that de Waal summons forth. It is the Machiavelli of dark imagination that can only manipulate for the sake of manipulating, but again, it is this Ma- chiavelli with his cognate terms that has been ushered into primate studies, not as dead metaphors but as living stereotypes, dispersing in yet another form a reputation for malevolence that is totally undeserved. A few short years later, Richard Byrne and Andrew Whiten made its inclu- sion into the lexicon of primatology official in the title of their magisterial book, Machiavellian Intelligence: The Evolution of Intellect in Monkeys, Apes, and Humans.5 Here we have the first breaths of what has since been termed the Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis, which has worked its way deeply into primate studies and gone on from there to other fields attentive to cogni- tive evolution in both other animals and machines.6 If de Waal was equivocal because he took Machiavelli to be a fellow ana- lyst and because he respected his subjects, that equivocation eroded quickly enough. Let us see what happened. In the preface to their book Byrne and Whiten raised our very question:

4 Ibid., 218 N5. 5 Richard W. Byrne and Andrew Whiten, eds., Machiavellian Intelligence: The Evolution of Intel- lect in Monkeys, Apes, and Humans (Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1988). 6 For a very simple description of the Hypothesis, see Michael Jackson, ‘The Machiavellian Intelligence Hyothesis,’ in The Springer Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning, Norbert Seel, ed. (Berlin: Springer, 2011), 2081–2082.