Humans are apes.
Insults from the White HouseWarships moving into position in the CaribbeanA mass murder incident in Australia
What is wrong with humans?
Answer: We are acting like the apes that we are.
Donald Trump succeeded politically in the past decade while expressing words that were shocking when he came down the escalator in 2015 and first uttered them. He insulted Mexicans. Some people found that disgustingly racist; others found his words refreshing and honest. Finally someone said frankly what they were thinking: that foreigners are dangerous and that they are different from us and don’t belong here.
Xenophobia works as a political device. Xenophobia is a primate characteristic. Apes are territorial social animals. We are apes. Hogan Sherrow studied apes.
He received his Ph.D. from Yale in anthropology. He studied chimpanzee politics in their natural habitat in East Africa. He advises political campaigns as the principal consultant for You Evolving, LLC (www.you-evolving.com).
Guest Post by Hogan Sherrow
“We could go one way or the other and we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country. Ilhan Omar is garbage, she’s garbage. Her friends are garbage.”
This is what Donald Trump said about Congresswoman Omar and every other person of Somali descent two hours and sixteen minutes into the December 2nd Cabinet meeting at the White House. Once again showing us that he operates at a very basic, primitive level and sees “others” through a xenophobic, aggressive lens.
I’ve studied primates in captivity and the wild for over thirty years. Nearly half that time has been spent studying one of our closest living relatives, chimpanzees, and using their behavior to understand our own. Over decades of research, I like to think I have gained a somewhat unique perspective on primate behavior, both non-human and human. After all, we are primates and nothing about primates is irrelevant to us. Everything we observe in our non-human cousins has some bearing on what it means to be human.
One aspect of chimpanzee behavior that is particularly prescient for observations of humans is their xenophobic and aggressive nature. Chimpanzee society is intensely territorial, xenophobic, and aggressive. Groups of related, bonded males actively patrol and maintain territorial boundaries through aggressive interactions with members of neighboring communities. Interactions between communities range from vocalizations and displays, to attacks on individuals or small parties, to battles, where multiple males simultaneously fight. When it comes to chimpanzees, males from outside the community are always enemies and are always potential targets for elimination. There are no exceptions. There is no nuance.
Humans are, obviously, not chimpanzees, but we do share a natural tendency to form in-groups and out-groups and see the “other” as dangerous. As the anthropologist Richard Wrangham has shown in his work, humans, like chimpanzees, are territorial, xenophobic, and aggressive by nature. Donald Trump has built his political career on tapping into these primal behaviors and exploiting them. While he is not the first to do this, his consistent behavior, actions, and policies towards specific groups is simplistic, targeted, and insidious. Unfortunately, it also very effective. Trump and his team repeatedly go after groups that are different, strange, or mysterious to his supporters and they eat it up.
Trump targets non-whites, the LGBTQ community, liberals, and intellectuals as criminals, perverts, snowflakes, and corrupt nerds. Whether he is attacking American citizens, who happen to come from an African nation, illegally killing citizens from other countries on boats in international waters, or suggesting that the free press be charged with sedition and treason for criticizing him, his attacks are chimpanzee-like, tapping into the chimpanzee-like instincts to protect against outsiders. It succeeds politically, because it has the inertia of our deep instincts as territorial apes. And it is far worse than anything we see in chimpanzees.
Chimpanzees simply do what chimpanzees do and the only calculations they make are whether the risks aggression are low enough to make them worth it. Trump has added the x-factor that humans have perfected: He groups and targets people based on easily distinguishable, ethnic and cultural traits that amplify our natural xenophobic tendencies. His attacks contribute to the dehumanization of entire groups, a phenomenon that, as philosopher David Livingstone Smith observes, has historically precipitated some of humanity’s gravest atrocities.
This weekend the world experienced yet another example of extreme, xenophobic behavior. At Bondi Beach in Australia, a mass shooting targeting Jewish individuals at a Hanukkah celebration took the lives of at least 15 individuals. It was intra-species killing, with the victims targeted because of cultural traits that marked them as “other”. It was the result of the dehumanization that occurs when xenophobic, aggressive tendencies are amplified and distorted by blind allegiance to an in-group.
We are not doomed to chimpanzee-like aggression and violence. Humans can, and do rise above our basal, primate instincts. The anthropologist Chris Boehm pointed out thirty years ago that humans have evolved empathy and developed multi-level cooperation, which keep our xenophobic, aggressive tendencies in check. Societies criminalize the chimpanzee-like behavior of killing others on sight or when there is easy opportunity. People learn to cooperate at multiple levels. These mechanisms are so powerful it takes the dehumanization of others and extreme psychological manipulation to turn humans into killing machines.
The question is, can we learn from our primate relatives and our own human history fast enough to rise above our xenophobic, aggressive instincts and continue our technological progress with weapons of mass destruction without blowing ourselves up?
After WWII, the military historian S. L. A. Marshall conducted post-combat interviews with thousands of American infantrymen from both the European and Pacific theaters. He published the results in Men Against Fire (1947). One was that only about 15–25% of riflemen in typical WWII infantry companies actually fired their weapons at the enemy, with most of their comrades either not firing at all or firing without aiming at an enemy target. According to Marshall, this was not primarily due to fear of being shot, but to a human resistance to killing another person behavior. While Marshall's data collection was subsequently criticized as insufficiently rigorous, the findings were too pronounced to be completely discredited. They validate Sherrow's assertion that cultural disapproval of violent aggression and its promotion of cooperation "are so powerful that it takes the dehumanization of others and extreme psychological manipulation to turn humans into killing machines." Nonetheless, our military has worked hard ever since to overcome that challenge.
I find it encouraging that the civilian who tackled one of the men shooting Jews on Bondi Beach was born in Syria.