Planet of the Apes and Philosophy (41 page)

              
T
AYLOR
:
Oh God . . . should let them all die, the gorillas and every damned . . . what it comes to. It's time it was finished…. finished . . .

              
B
RENT
:
Taylor, come on, come on. The Bomb . . .

              
T
AYLOR
:
Yeah. . . . Why not?

Here there is a clear failure of communication between the two men. Brent is driven by the horror of the impending catastrophe, doing all he can to avoid it. In fact, he is killed while trying to distract the gorillas from interfering with the bomb. Taylor goes to the final confrontation with quite different intentions. “It's doomsday,” he says just as Brent is killed, “end of the world.” Despite being severely wounded, he determinedly uses his failing power to reach the trigger (“Yeah. . . . Why not?” as he said to Brent moments earlier), while cursing Dr. Zaius for failing to help him along.

In the first
Planet of the Apes
film, Taylor seems inspired by a vision of dignity and nobility, of “something better” than humankind. By the end of the second film, it's evident that he sees no value or dignity in the other kinds of creatures he has encountered. He is intensely critical and judgmental, even of those who would be his friends, such as Zira and Cornelius. Finding the wrecked world that is now the Planet of the Apes, and losing the one being with whom he had managed to build a close and intimate relationship, his own disappointment, frustration, and despair is given vent in a final utterly destructive act. He who dreamed of something better now carries to its logical conclusion the very politics of mutually assured destruction that was at the heart of military strategy during the Cold War.

Had Taylor been less of an idealist about himself and humanity in general, he might have done less damage. If he had been less self-centered, he might have cared more about the other lives around him. The human-centered theory of value is a parallel, at the species level, to a self-centered worldview. So in our present attempts to tackle the challenges of global warming, ever-increasing species loss, world poverty, the displacement of humans and animals from their homes, the loss of intrinsic value on a tremendous scale—what can we learn from Taylor and the
Apes
movies? Just this: to be too self-interested is not only a personal moral failing but also a danger to ourselves and others. Taylor's fate reminds us of the importance of expanding our moral horizons and extending our care beyond ourselves, our communities and our species. Holmes Rolston, one of the fathers of modern environmental philosophy, puts it like this:

           
We worried throughout most of the last century, the first century of great world wars, that humans would destroy themselves in interhuman conflict. . . . The worry for the next century is that humans may destroy their planet and themselves with it. . . . Today and for the century hence, the call is to see Earth as a planet with promise, destined for abundant life.

The
Planet of the Apes
movies, taken overall, show how the promise of the planet is easily lost, squandered through human greed and self-interest. After viewing them, we have to hope that it is not already too late to fulfill the Earth's promise rather than to betray it.

E
UGENE
H
ALTON

           
I
can't get rid of the idea that somewhere in the Universe there must be a creature superior to man.

              
—G
EORGE
T
AYLOR
,
Planet of the Apes

Once upon a time there was a degenerate monkey, degenerate in the sense of not maturing as quickly as the wild Others, in being newborn-like much longer, something the biologists call neoteny.

The Others were blessed with robust instincts, which seldom led them into blunders. What they knew instinctively the degenerate monkey could only get from guessing, with a good amount of blundering thrown in. But the degenerate monkey was blessed with good guessing, sensing with awareness, even if not yet knowing. The very “weakness” of its plastic and flexible brain, proved, under the right conditions, to be its greatest strength.

The degenerate monkey found that by closely observing the Others, it could guess the right things to do more often than not. The living instinctive truths embodied in the diverse creatures and living habitat surrounding it were its great teachers. It discovered that it was a true child of the Earth, literally, in its genetic, physiological constitution.

Its beliefs allowed for the fact that the newest portion of its brain, its prefrontal cortex, through which it learned to make
art and speak, was also the most immature part of its brain, precisely because it was the latest to evolve. It may not have even known this consciously, but it lived the fact through beliefs which allowed that the mind of nature, the spirit living in and through all things, was a great teacher, and of a higher order of intelligence. It found that in attuning to and marveling at the instinctive maturity of the Others, it could find its own maturity.

It learned that by hunting like a bear, it could catch the seal. It learned that by acting like a seal, it could attract the bear and hunt it. Immersed in the intelligence of the Others, it learned the sacred game of life, which included the taking of life, the game of predator and game. In revering the sacred game and its rules of sustainable sustenance, it became a harbinger of life. Its attunements to a wide range of habitats and life, not only through observation, but also through ritual, artistic, and practical communicative and cooperative activities among its own kind, allowed it to spread around the globe, creating a planet
of
degenerate monkeys, but not
for
degenerate monkeys. Its relation to the community of life was one of networking with the Earth.

It learned so well that eventually it thought itself mature enough to change the rules of the game: instead of finding its maturity in attuning to and marveling in the instinctive intelligence of the Others, it reversed the process. It began living in settled ape-clusters, which were artificial neoteny environments. It began to turn the Others into degenerate forms like itself, that is, no longer wild, but selectively dematured, domesticated.

The ape reshaped The Others, turning them into mirrors of its newborn-like, dematured self, genetically as well as behaviorally. It domesticated itself with and through them, fixing partial aspects of their full instinctive intelligence. It turned them from wild wolves into domesticated dogs, from aurochs—oxen—into cows, from mouflon into sheep, from wild independent grasses into dematured grasses—wheat, barley, rice—codependent on human cultivation for survival. Even though domesticated, it remained a wild body itself, albeit a degenerate monkey, new-born like, neotenous.

All the while the neotenous or newborn-like ape neotenized its world, living from its domesticated food and walling itself
into its cities. It changed its relation to its habitat, physically and spiritually, also walling in its reverence for life, for the game of life it participated in, as predator and prey. It walled that reverence into self-mirroring gods and human-centered (or anthropocentric) consciousness.

It became a spectator at creation, networking with its progressively human-centered reflections of itself, its gods and goddesses of fertility, its domesticates, losing in the process the direct interplay with the wild Earth. It fell prey to the mirror of Narcissus. In moving away from direct participation, it narrowed circumambient creation to the human focus, elevating the dematured human to an object of worship, devaluing the wild other to a slave, devaluing the bulk of its own population into slaves and functionaries of its exalted ego, personified in the form of a divine king.

Degenerate monkey became proud of itself, losing its sense that, as a dematured, newborn-like primate, it required the relationship to the wild others in order to find its maturity. But with its self-mirroring environment as an illusory matrix, effectively walling it off from the instinctive intelligence of the wild others, the shut-up monkey went mad. It went mad within its self-created house of mirrors, its Gods, kings, saviors, prophets, science, machines, its agriculturally created population explosion, its transformation of the “fertile crescent” and other habitats originally teeming with life into desert, and the entire ant-farm it had made of itself. It went mad with itself and called its madness progress.

It went from being a child of the Earth, engaged in communicative attunement, to a civilized infant, wanting ever more. Yet it thought itself the be-all and end-all of evolution and the creation's purpose. And in its civilized infantilism, its unlimited expansionism, it raged against its true mother, the earth, Gaia, the living ecological intelligence on which it depended to find its maturity.

Its homicidal rage was a murderous suicidal call for help, one might say, the rage of a two-year old backpedaling in its mind to the womb. But it found itself murdering that which was its own source, and so it was in reality backpedaling to nothingness, backpedaling, until. . . .

Once upon a time there was a degenerate monkey.

Near the end of 1968's
Planet of the Apes
, Cornelius, the ape archaeologist and historian, reads from the sacred scrolls: “Beware the beast Man, for he is the Devil's pawn. Alone among God's primates, he kills for sport or lust or greed. Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother's land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him; drive him back into his jungle lair, for he is the harbinger of death.”

Well, this does not present a very pretty picture of humanity. But it does speak truths civilized people either don't know or do not want to hear, not of uncivilized peoples so much as the costs of agriculturally based civilization itself, and its inventions such as mass-killing war, property and poverty, over-population, and devastated ecosystems.

Philosopher Charles Peirce, the founder of American pragmatism and a leading mathematician of his time, drew an unflattering portrait of man similar to that of the sacred scrolls, depicting him, with some humor, as “a degenerate monkey.” As he put it in 1901, “man is but a degenerate monkey, with a paranoiac talent for self-satisfaction, no matter what scrapes he may get himself into, calling them ‘civilization,' and who, in place of the unerring instincts of other races, has an unhappy faculty for occupying himself with words and abstractions, and for going wrong in a hundred ways before he is driven, willy-nilly, into the right one.”

Homo sapiens
, man the knower, is the way we humans like to distinguish ourselves from the rest of nature. But if we consider ourselves as degenerate monkeys,
Homo errans
, or
man the blunderer
would have been a better term, calling attention to our softened instinctive intelligence, our greater “plasticity,” as the biologists call it, in contrast to the “unerring instincts of other races,” as Peirce put it elsewhere.

Peirce's concept of
degenerate monkey
is not mere monkey business, but contains a serious philosophical outlook. It attempts to draw attention to our prolonged newborn-like nature, which biologists call neoteny. He means “degenerate” both in the mathematical sense of a genetic falling away from a pure form, in this case from more quickly matured genomes of other primates, and he also means it in the more everyday
sense in which the newer portion of the human brain, the prefrontal cortex, which allows the capacities for symbolic and rational communication, for language, can also contribute to monkeying-around hubris. The degenerate monkey in this sense can get into some bad scrapes, falsely idealizing them as “civilized.”

I take Peirce's term “degenerate monkey” as not limited to moderns, but applicable to
Homo sapiens sapiens
, the technical term for anatomically modern humans, generally. Considering humans as degenerate monkeys is a key to understanding human development, precisely because we need to attune ourselves to the intelligence of the wild environment, drawing its intelligence into our dematured, blundering selves through intuitive inference, or what Peirce termed abductive inference, our gift for guessing, as well as other ways of thinking, and therein finding our maturity.

           
Which is it: is man one of God's blunders, or is God one of man's blunders?

              
—F
RIEDRICH
W
ILHELM
N
IETZSCHE
,
Twilight of the Idols
(1889)

The alien is typically a symptom of human alienation, projected out into fantastic form. Those visitors from outer space? They usually represent fears of how our science and technology are running away with us, ruinously. In
Planet of the Apes
humans become the visitors in space ships, but the aliens are both the intelligent apes they discover, and the humans who are “ape-like” savages.
Planet of the Apes
presents us with specters of ourselves, alienated not only from our humanity, but alienated
in
our humanity.