Brutal Kinship

  • Michael Nichols &
  • Jane Goodall
Aperture: 1999. 127pp $25, £15.95
Rival claims: a chimp responds to Jane Goodall's pant-grunts of greeting by refusing to return to his beach photographer owner.

At first glance, Brutal Kinship looks like a simple picture-book: a collection of magnificent, thoughtful photographs of chimpanzees in various situations. It is that, but it is also something more. The text is mostly by Michael Nichols, who took the photographs, but partly also by Jane Goodall, who accompanied him. They describe the life of the apes in the wild and contrast it, quietly and factually, with the details the of apes' conditions in various kinds of captivity — zoos, circuses, laboratories, breeding facilities, holding stations, backyards in African villages and private homes. Once grasped, this contrast cannot fail to be shocking. The writers do not ham up the facts, because they do not need to.

“As soon as I became aware of the plight of the chimpanzees at the hand of Homo sapiens, I felt that I had to make a strong statement and effect change,” says Nichols. He and Goodall note that the apes' similarity to us in intelligence and genetic structure allows us to learn from them about human thought, speech, sociality and disease. “Yet we refuse to extend to them even the most basic rights that beings with their intellectual and emotional qualities deserve.”

The authors hope to arouse awareness of what they call “our moral myopia”. They found, for instance, that staff at medical laboratories genuinely cared about the chimpanzees in their keeping while having little control over their conditions. “But this does not excuse them or us of our responsibility,” say the authors. “If we can see that our treatment of chimpanzees has been and is wrong, then we will have truly evolved.”

In short, something is happening which has occurred repeatedly in human history. The institutions involved are anachronistic; they were formed when people had a different set of beliefs about the relation between humans and other animals from the one we have today. Institutions, however, persist by their own inertia. Their persistence leads to grating moral conflict.

The central change involved is, of course, one within science itself. Today, our understanding of our evolutionary continuity with the rest of the natural world calls on us to attend to similarities, to understand humans as a kind of animal and other animals as akin to humans. From that perspective, the burden of proof tends to be on anyone who asserts that animals are radically alien to us.

But during the formative period of modern science, things were very different. The reigning Christian perspective of the time showed humans as radically distinct from the rest of nature, since they were made in God's image and were the only creatures possessing souls. It is unlucky that the world-view of scientists at that time was so deeply influenced by Descartes, who hardened and expanded this mind-body dualism, equating soul with consciousness, and ruling that non-human animals, being soulless, were literally unfeeling automata.

Descartes' dualism was widely welcomed because it helped to define and establish a clear realm for physics. Dualism therefore pervaded the idea of a ‘scientific’ outlook which was so important to Enlightenment thought. It carried with it the notion of intelligent human observers as essentially magisterial beings, minds standing outside and above the brute physical world that they studied. From this perspective, attempts to relate human experience to that of other animals were considered illicit, a sentimental error stigmatized as anthropomorphism. Scientific thinkers, even when they did not think animals were actually unconscious, commonly took these lives to be so distant and inferior that they could not possibly concern humans.

Two things, however, went wrong with this dualism. First, the idea of a separate soul went out of fashion, taking with it the disembodied observer. Second, as knowledge of biology grew, the wide gap that was supposed to divide us from all other creatures began gradually to fill up with intermediate terms. The discovery of the great apes themselves was, of course, a crucial stage in this process, and the Darwinian revolution finally gave it shape. That tremendous change, if it is taken seriously, surely means that what we think of as a ‘scientific attitude’ today is much more likely to be one that sees humans as an integral part of the natural world than the seventeenth-century one which placed them outside it.

Unavoidably, this change has practical consequences. It questions the rigid barrier that was held to exclude other creatures totally from our consideration. Goodall asks: “How should we relate to beings who look into mirrors and see themselves as individuals, who mourn companions and may die of grief, who have a consciousness of ‘self’? Don't they deserve to be treated with the same sort of consideration we accord to other highly sensitive beings — ourselves?” Her question comes from inside science, not outside it. It does not arise from ignorance, but from her thorough, well-documented understanding of the apes, gathered through scientific work with them over 40 years.

She speaks, in fact, for many scientists who have moved on from Descartes' world to Darwin's, scientists who no longer think that there is anything unscientific about being humane. For them, the paradox that Nichols mentions — that the apes' likeness to us both strengthens their claims on us and, at present, subjects them to extra ordeals — is profoundly disturbing. The question of how we can act on these new insights, how to make our institutions less unsuitable to our moral perceptions, is a hard one.

This book carefully describes the practical problems and explains many ingenious devices by which dedicated people are working to resolve them. It calls for our help in these efforts. And that call is surely entirely in accord with the spirit of science today.