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Yahoo!While thinking about the recent changes in this country, I recalled an article by Robert M. Sapolsky (in Foreign Affairs, January 2006), who lived for a while among a troop of baboons in the wild, and witnessed a remarkable transformation.
Forest Troop was initially composed of a regular mixture of baboons: gentle ones, mean ones, and a few in-between. One day, a nearby hotel expanded its garbage dump, and another troop of baboons claimed the dump as territory and primary food source. Forest Troop’s meaner males (let’s call them Clique W) decided they would raid this exciting new resource, even if that meant beating up a number of the newly obese males from the garbage dump troop.
After feasting on the other troop’s half-rotten hamburgers for a while, Clique W got what was coming to them and died of food-borne tuberculosis. All that remained in Forest Troop were females and nice males. And even today, fifteen years after all the original docile males died of old age, Forest Troop remains a gentle culture, much more welcoming to new members, with a lot less fighting and a lot more cooperation, and a lot more playing with each other’s hair, even among adult males. And new members quickly learn that things are different in Forest Troop.
Until very recently, we in this country couldn’t imagine life without the aggressive baboons who, by hook and by crook (mostly by crook), were dominating our politics. But then one day, those baboons ate out of the garbage dump of a deeply mad foreign policy, and quickly killed themselves off.
We are not baboons, of course. For one thing, no microbes killed off our jerks; rather, we nicer folks did it. For another, the resource-hunting adventures of our own hostile males didn’t result in just a few dinged-up fat guys, but rather one million dead and four and a half million refugees.
Another key difference between us and Forest Troop may be that in our case, it wasn’t enough to rid ourselves of some of the creep baboons at the top. A lot of the supposedly gentler ones voted for war as well. Rather, right after the elections, and for many months after, we had to keep pushing with all our might to make sure that everyone, at all levels of power, understood that America would now be a culture of peace and generosity.
Fortunately, that’s just what we did. And though human nature hasn’t changed, nor the nature of politics, we’ve made our desires so clear that there is now no more room in Forest Troop U.S.A. for the garbage adventuring that dominated our last thirty years.
Just how much cultural isolation is needed for an alternative, less aggressive cultural paradigm to persist in the face of newly arriving memes of aggression?
The story of Forest Troop may be inspiring, but I wonder if its lesson is that in order to persist, peaceable cultures must innoculate themselves from aggression, either by a level of cultural isolation that’s impossible in modern human society, or by the periodic and tragic culling (or incarceration) of the ever-arising clique-Ws.
Perhaps the most hopeful lesson from Forest Troop is that in the 20-some years since the human-mediated plague that killed 50% of their males and changed their culture, we have managed to avoid doing it to them again.
Comment on November 12, 2008 09:06 pm