Ecce Homo or I Am Who I Am

PATRICK COSGRAVE

The Social Contract Robert Ardrey (Collins 50s) This book is dangerous because it may ert. courage us to relax; it is so, as much for the many things in it which are right as for the many, many things—including the principle of its strategy—which are wrong. It is an important book because it is the deeply felt work of an able man and will be widely read; and because it attempts to deal, fun- damentally, with the immediate problems of Homo sapiens. Mr Ardrey tries to teach us, by the light of science, properly understood, how to live. Since his conclusions are congenial to the resurgent wave of conservative, traditional. civilised, anti-egalitarian, anti-romantic. ana utopian, anti-liberal, reactionary thinking (of which I am myself a member), we may feel obliged to welcome them. We would be wrong to do so because Mr Ardrey and many of his favoured sources are unscien. tific in method and unsound in principle. The latter is the favourite point of the unlearned against the informed; so the former point must be dealt with in detail, if concisely, if a critical argument is to stand. First, 10°.* ever, the critic must state the Ardrey case fairly. Mr Ardrey is the prophet of the instinctive society. He believes that, through random sexual combination, individuals are produced with different abilities, but that genetic CO ing, itself the product of evolution, instils in those individuals the desire (aggression) td excel and fulfil themselves; implants in their minds a code or ritual of behaviour ordaining, a measure of respect for fellow-creatures °I the species; and thus provides equality of 05 portunity without guaranteeing eclualitY

achievement, through seeking the end of sur-

vival of the species. The novelty of this I

thesis lies, not in its bald statement, but in

the wealth of naturalistic learning supporting

it, by way of analogy from animal life. 'A society'. Mr Ardrey says by way of introduc- tion and conclusion, 'is a group of unequal beings organised to meet common needs.' Thus Mr Ardrey's enemies are the socio- logical manipulators, those who, since the fall of the eighteenth century, have tried to engineer society in a way agreeable to certain half-formed ideas of progress: they are the Marxists, the Nazis, the liberals and the planners, those who regard all brains, in the right light, as equal and who, in Mr Ardrey's phrase, 'hold to a central assumption that the human brain owes little or nothing to evolutionary experience' and all to acquired ideology. They have, according to Mr Ardrey. their modish equivalents in the cultural anthropologists, the behaviourist psychologists and the environmental psycho- logists. They are every dogmatic liberal or do-or-die comprehensive educationalist you have ever met.

So far, so good. But the case for the , instinctive society, Mr Ardrey argues, is scientifically based, where the case for the manipulated, or liberal, society is not: not so. Mr Ardrey's case depends on general- isations extrapolated from animal studies which are supposed to show the affinity be- tween man and the animal kingdom: 'Never have we known', Mr Ardrey says, 'a "re- ligion" to approximate the religion of ani- mals. a set of assumptions accepted without question by an entire species'.

But the ,analogies are not scientifically

proven. Mr Ardrey's emphases on stereo- types of man and animal have already been criticised by Barnett. an ethologist in sym- pathy with his general phylogenetic approach,

as insufficient to comprehend the pheno-

menon of man as learning as well as in- stinctive animal. In fact, Barnett shows, no scheme of animal thought can be effec- tively placed in analogy to a human scheme.

And Mr Ardrey quotes, in support and veneration, the work of Konrad Lorenz, Austrian founder of modern ethological studies—the word, aggression, quoted earlier, should have given the clue. I believe I

scarcely yield, even to Mr Ardrey, in my

admiration for Lorenz as a general student of animal behaviour but, in his recent work,

On Aggression Lorenz used, in support of

the thesis of innate aggression (crucial to Mr Ardrey), work on aggression in rats in overcrowded conditions which had already been proved, by Calhoun, to be false, in that an infinite variability of conditions produced an infinite variability of response from the rats. so that the simple aggression thesis could not be sustained.

In fact, it has recently been shown by scientists that aggression is really no more than a department of emotion: without de- Pending on Scientists, we may conclude that emotion, with rationality, is the crucial human function. Emotion is properly moti- vated by rationality plus experience. Ration- ality and experience combine to produce systems of value: that they do so has been crucial to the traditional and conservative system of thought since it went underground after Shelley's description of it as a cold interval, before Romantic self-indulgence be gan to masquerade as value. If you look

rationally at emotion and experience You an only conclude, with Yvor Winters: L experience appears to indicate that abso- lute truths exist, that we are able to work t°ward an approximate apprehension of

them, but that they are antecedent to our apprehension and that our apprehension is seldom and perhaps never perfect, then there is only one place in which these truths may be located . .

God is absent from Mr Ardrey's pages and so is value and so, therefore, is the great part of human experience and evolution. But these are what the traditional mind, often unknowing, has always fought for. Thus, while Mr Ardrey has brought a certain amount of evidence to bear against the mani- pulation-minded atheists and liberals, the traditional fight goes on. And the difference, it may be said, between men and animals, is that man pursues the definition of an absolute and sophisticated system of values, out of his nature. Great naturalists, like Eliot Howard, quoted by Mr Ardrey, saw this: the implications of the argument, as Winters said, are clear.