[Nettime-bold] Gorilla Wars

["Mark Dery" <markdery@mindspring.com>]

<A recent VILLAGE VOICE LITERARY SUPPLEMENT cover story, for your
delectation...>

Gorilla Wars



    There's a Planet of the Apes feeling to our
fin-de-whatever/eve-of-the-future moment; hairy apparitions of the
almost-human confront us on movie screens and in front-page articles. This
summer, Tim Burton is revisiting Planet of the Apes; in January,
Oregon-based scientists announced that they had created a rhesus monkey with
a jellyfish gene, a technique that may one day enable the creation of
monkeys with human genes. A quick trawl through Amazon.com yields a net full
of recent pop primatology titles, among them The Ape and the Sushi Master:
Cultural Reflections of a Primatologist by Frans De Waal, A Primate's Memoir
by Robert M. Sapolsky, and Significant Others: The Ape-Human Continuum and
the Quest for Human Nature by Craig B. Stanford-evidence of a dramatic
upsurge of interest in the intelligence and emotions of our closest kin.

    Simians are our Darwinian doubles-funhouse-mirror reflections of
humanity that caricature our animal nature, droll reminders that Homo
sapiens, for all his airs, is only "an ape with angel glands" (to borrow
Leonard Cohen's pungent phrase).[1]  As Hillel Schwartz points out in his
social history, Century's End, doubling and dichotomy are recurrent
turn-of-the-century themes; thus, it makes zeitgeist sense that the specters
of apes and monkeys should loom large, right about now.

    Near the turn of the last century, primate visions haunted the Victorian
imagination, as well-night terrors about devolution, conjured up by Darwin's
ideas. In Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr.
Hyde (1886), the good doctor uncages his troglodytic id, the "ape-like" Mr.
Hyde.[2]  Likewise, the degenerate Transylvanian count of Bram Stoker's
Dracula (1897) is an evolutionary throwback, his pointed ears and beetle
brows clear evidence of atavism. In Degeneration (1895), Max Nordau-the
Robert Bork-ian conservative crank of his day-blamed bohemian artists and
writers for the devolution of European civilization. Guardians of the social
order advocated eugenics as racial hygiene, a social-Darwinian line of
defense against the pollution of the gene pool by the mongrel masses.

    Now, on the threshold of the third millennium, our darker, hairier
doppelgangers are with us again, our fears and fantasies reflected in their
all-too-human eyes. They hold up a mirror to our anxieties about the
seemingly lunatic, monkey-house logic of our times. Language-using apes like
Koko the gorilla and Kanzi the bonobo are calling to us, across the
linguistic gulf separating humans and animals. Fearsome "hot" viruses like
Ebola have leapt the species barrier, from monkeys to humans. Genetic
engineering may soon create a monkey with human genes; xenotransplantation
has already given us a man with baboon bone marrow. Cognitive ethologists
like Marc Hauser and legal scholars like Steven M. Wise are breaking with
the time-honored anthropocentricity of Western culture to argue,
respectively, that animals are thinking beings, and that they should be
granted legal personhood.

    Are we going ape, as a culture? Everyone but the lone creationist
screaming at Carl Sagan's gravestone has known, for some time, that the
great apes are only a few branches away on the family tree. (It's a cliché
of pop-science writing that we have more than 98 percent of our chromosomes
in common with chimpanzees). Still, the leading cultural indicators suggest
that we're more in touch with our inner simians than ever before.

    Marc Hauser, whose Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think has helped put
the study of animal cognition on the media map, often uses chimps and
monkeys as poster children for his theories. A Harvard professor of
psychology who fishes where cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary
psychology flow together, Hauser believes that animals are "Kafka-creatures,
organisms with rich thoughts and emotions, but no system for translating
what they think into something that they can express to others."[3]    Then
again, human babies don't have language, either, notes Hauser. Just because
animals lack language doesn't mean they don't possess "uniquely sculpted"
cognitive abilities, he argues, "endowed by nature and shaped by evolution"
to meet the physical and psychological challenges of their environments.[4]
Vervets, for example, have alarm calls that function much like our words for
"leopard," "eagle," and "snake."[5]  There's an implicit,
to-each-according-to-his-needs cognitive relativism, here, that jerks the
chains of anthropocentrists, hard.   But Hauser's evo-psych heresies sound
almost orthodox next to Steven M. Wise's thesis in Rattling the Cage: Toward
Legal Rights for Animals, a book calculated to send sapien supremacists into
frenzied threat displays. Wise, who teaches animal-rights law at Harvard Law
School, argues passionately for the "legal personhood" of chimps and
bonobos, whose current legal status as things makes abducting,
incarcerating, and performing experiments of Mengele-esque cruelty on them
entirely lawful. A human in a permanent vegetative state is protected by a
broad canopy of legal rights. In contrast, a normal, healthy chimpanzee, who
can make and use tools, navigate the tricky straits of a tribal society so
political it is often called "Machiavellian," and be taught to use sign
language and do simple math, has no rights whatsoever.

    Legally, animals are property, albeit property that, unlike any other,
can feel pain and cry out in agony. Wise sears this irreconcilable fact into
our minds with the wrenching story of a chimp named Jerom. Intentionally
infected with three different strains of HIV, the wretched animal was then
condemned to solitary confinement in an empty, windowless cinderblock cell.
When he died, just before his 14th birthday, he hadn't played in fresh air
for 11 years. Everything done to Jerom, notes Wise, was perfectly legal.

    To call a creature with what Wise calls "consciousness" a thing is, in
his eyes, a logical fallacy and a moral obscenity-a throwback to less
enlightened times, when the great white fathers enslaved and exploited with
impunity, secure in their God-given dominion over brute beasts and subhuman
savages, whom they often likened to apes (a handy rationale for slavery). In
a fitting irony, Wise tears a page from antebellum lawbooks: slavery-era
statutes that enabled slaves (nonpersons, in the legal system of the day) to
bring suits could be used, he proposes, to mount a challenge to the
"thinghood" of non-human primates-the legal foundation of Homo sapiens'
right to own, exhibit, experiment on, and eat their arboreal cousins.

    If animal-rights lawyers like Wise, their activist comrades-in-arms in
the Great Ape Legal Project, and other fellow travelers in the, er,
guerrilla war against anthropochauvinism have their way, the day when a
great ape takes the stand and testifies in support of its rights, using sign
language or a speech synthesizer, may not be long off. When that happens,
Duke University law professor William A. Reppy Jr. told The New York Times,
it will be "a very important case. An animal has never conversed with a
judge."[6]  (Well, not since Curious George took the oath of office,
anyway.)

    Signifying monkeys seem to be everywhere, these days. But what are they
trying to sign us? Simians have always been liminal animals, marking the
border between human and nonhuman, culture and nature, even as they trespass
it. Too close to human for comfort, they're never quite human enough.
Preposterous in their human clothes and poses, the rubber-lipped chimps on
gag greeting cards reassure us that we're the ones with the biggest crania.
At the same time, they make monkeys of us, reminding us, as Darwin did in
The Descent of Man (1871), that we're the evolutionary heirs of "a hairy
quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its
habits."[7]

    Apes and monkeys are totemic animals for in-between, upside-down times.
At a moment when genetic determinism is emerging as the new American
religion, with each morning's headlines tracing <your personality trait or
sexual preference here> to a newly discovered gene, primates are shorthand
for the primacy of heredity. But they also serve as disquieting reminders of
the disappearance of nature: loggers' decimation of their habitats and
poachers' butchery of them for "bushmeat" has earned many apes and monkeys
spots on the endangered-species hit list. Ironically, simians are also
messengers from the future, in the tradition of the chimp astronauts of the
'60s, history's first true cyborgs. The great apes who are donating their
body parts to people (not that anyone asked) and the transgenic monkeys
whose offspring may have human genes are harbingers of a brave new biotech
world. In the decades to come, the "Beast Folk" who made Victorian readers
of The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) shudder may move in next door, in the
smiling guise of silver-haired boomers with xenotransplants.

    "By the late twentieth century," wrote the postmodern theorist Donna
Haraway, in her "Cyborg Manifesto" (1985), "the boundary between human and
animal is thoroughly breached."[8]  That trespass, which is also a violation
of the border between culture and nature, is profoundly affecting our sense
of what it means to be a member of the species Homo sapiens. We share our
Victorian forebears' anxiety over the radical redefinition of the human-in
our case, as a postmodern primate whose body may soon harbor animal-organ
transplants and high-tech implants.

    As well, we're struggling to reimagine ourselves in a world where many
of the philosophical boundaries that have always marked our territory are
being erased by science and its strange bedfellow, animal-rights activism.
What makes humans uniquely human in a world where lab rats may dream, palm
cockatoos use twigs as drumsticks to play hollow logs, grizzly-bear Heathers
sometimes have two mommies, and Alex, the grey parrot immortalized in Irene
Maxine Pepperberg's Alex Studies, may have more than an inkling of what he's
saying when he tells Pepperberg "Bye, I'm gonna go eat dinner; I'll see you
tomorrow"?[9]  The naked ape can't even copyright his wanton
destructiveness, often bemoaned as a uniquely human evil: A 1999 article in
The New York Times reported the grim discovery that dolphins abuse their own
offspring for no obvious reason and slaughter harbor porpoises, seemingly
for sport.[10]

    We're going to have to make room, in our world-view, for the
inconvenient fact that "we share the planet with thinking animals," as
Hauser puts it.[11]  We may never know their minds, but the accumulated
evidence that there's something going on behind their eyes is overwhelming.
Laurence H. Tribe, the renowned professor of constitutional law at Harvard,
pointed us in the right direction when he wrote, "the very process of
recognizing rights in those...with whom we can already empathize could well
pave the way for still further extensions as we move upward along the spiral
of moral evolution."[12]  With any luck, we'll scrap the antiquated cosmos
of anthropocentrism before it's too late-before we've pushed every species
but our own over the brink of extinction and made this hunk of rock
uninhabitable, even for ourselves. The moral evolution of man may entail
leaving Man As We Know Him behind. Human (in the old, 20th century sense of
the word) and humane, it turns out, are not necessarily synonymous.

- Mark Dery's latest book is The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture
on the Brink (www.levity.com/markdery/), a collection of essays on
contemporary culture.

ENDNOTES

Leonard Cohen, "Master Song" in Songs of Leonard Cohen (New York: Amsco
Music Publishing Company, 1969), p. 79.
2 Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and
Other Stories, ed. Jenni Calder (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), p. 47.
3 Marc D. Hauser, Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think (New York: Henry
Holt & Company, 2000), p. 209.
4 Hauser, ibid., p. 257.
5 See Hauser, ibid., p. 188.
6 Quoted in William Glaberson, "Redefining a Jury of Their Peers," The New
York Times, August 22, 1999, "Week in Review" section, p. 1.
7 Quoted in David J. Skal, Screams of Reason: Mad Science and Modern Culture
(New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998), p. 62.
8 Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
(New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 151.
9 Irene Maxine Pepperberg, The Alex Studies: Cognitive and Communicative
Abilities of Grey Parrots (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000),
p. TK.
10 See William J. Broad, "Evidence Puts Dolphins In New Light, As Killers,"
The New York Times, "Science Times" section, July 6, 1999, p. F1.
11 Hauser, ibid., p. 257.
12 Laurence H. Tribe, "Ways Not To Think About Plastic Trees," The Yale Law
Journal, vol. 83, 1974, p. 1315.




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