7. Space and the Citizen

The ten-spined stickleback, as a fairly simple exercise in arithmetic will reveal, is a fish with seven more spines than a three-spined stickleback. I have sometimes suspected that when Desmond Morris, the famous author of The Naked Ape and The Human Zoo, was a student at Oxford almost twenty years ago and chose as a principal object of study the ten-spined stickleback, he in truth was performing a delicate exercise in one-upmanship. His maestro, Niko Tinbergen, had devoted an immoderate portion of his career to study of the three-spined stickleback. By choosing the ten-spined, Morris with the simplest of ploys left Tinbergen seven spines behind. Then, when his work was published, the young zoologist whose genius for titles would one day be proved, legitimized his claim to the far-out with one of the farthest-out titles in zoology's literature, Homosexuality in the Ten-Spined Stickleback.

In an early season of my own research I encountered a reference to Desmond Morris' paper in somebody's bibliography, and I could scarcely wait for my next visit to London and the libraries of the British Museum to discover for myself what had been going on at Oxford. And much indeed had been going on in Tinbergen's dignified department. What Morris had begun as an experiment in overcrowding and its relation to aggression had concluded with observations that no right-thinking scientist could have anticipated.

Aside from their spinyness, the two species have a few distinct approaches to reproduction. The three-spined digs a nest in the sandy floor of some shallow backwater. Through the irresistible appeal of his red belly, he will attract a female to his nest and there she will lay her eggs for him to fertilize. But the ten-spined will have nothing to do with so crude a home for his children. In similar shallow waters he finds patches of water-weeds and among them, using the weeds for material, he builds a spherical nest pierced by a tunnel. Surrounding it is his territory, and when the breeding season starts, there is, as in all sticklebacks, an uproar of fighting with other males. But as is customary in territorial behavior, when borders are defined neighbors settle down to tending their nests and ogling females. The trouble-making, ten-spiked-devoted scientist, however, had purposely chosen an experimental tank large enough for only two territories, in which he generously placed five males. Three were necessarily beaten by their betters and retired in frustration to the corners of the tank. The winners, having built their nests, now waited for proper companions.

The sex life of the ten-spined stickleback has its lurid-aspects, even when all goes well. If a female ripe with eggs swims through a territory, the proprietor will attack her as he attacks all intruders. But if she is ready enough, then she will not flee, and if her belly is swollen sufficiently to inflame his interest, he will do a little courtship dance. The dance is a succession of little ducking jumps enticing her to his nest. At its entrance, timidity may overcome her, in which case he will bite her. Bitten, she will either flee and he will start looking for a more responsive female, or she will be overwhelmed by his attention and enter the tunnel of his nest, her tail protruding. Now he arranges himself beside her tail and shivers his nose against it. The excitement of his shivering nose being altogether too much for her, she will lay her eggs in the nest and move on. Now he enters the tunnel, fertilizing the eggs as he passes through. Emerging on the far side, he drives her away. Not only her fun but her maternal chores are finished; he will raise the young.

Such are normal sexual relations in ten-spined-stickleback life. But Morris had created an abnormal situation in the crowded tank with its subordinated, surplus males. And so, when he spied an omega male stealing through the weeds into the heart of a territory while the proprietor was off charming a female, he assumed that the fish was trying to steal the nest. But this was not the ambition. When the female fled, the subordinated male immediately took the position where she had been. The proprietor turned from his dance and, perhaps blinded by lust, failed to recognize that he was now facing a pretender. He did his courtship dance again, and now the pseudo-female followed, just as a female would do. His nose close to the proprietor's two little white ventral spines that become erect in courtship, he was led to the nest. A true female might hesitate and require a bite. The homosexual required none. He entered the tunnel, leaving the proper amount of tail protruding. The gulled proprietor shivered his nose against it. The homosexual accepted the attention for precisely the length of time that a female would have taken to lay her eggs, about forty seconds, and then fled. Now it was the potential father's turn to be frustrated, for of course on entering the nest he found no eggs.

The strange incident seems to have been no matter of aberrant ten-spined personality. Morris observed it again and again. On one occasion all three of the surplus, dominated males tried simultaneously to receive the sexual attentions of the thoroughly addled proprietor. While later laboratory experiments with overcrowding might yield more drastic results, that of Desmond Morris back in 1952 remains the most bizarre.

Among the more ominous experiments, that made by John Calhoun at Washington's National Institute of Mental Health has received widest attention. It was at the beginning of his career that Calhoun demonstrated the natural regulation of numbers in a rat population, as I earlier described it. Now his purpose was to force overcrowding. The experiment was conducted indoors, under controlled conditions, and its chief ingenuity was an arrangement of four interconnecting pens. The two end pens had each but one entrance which could be guarded by a strong male rat. But the middle pens, each with two entrances, could not be so guarded and so became the center of free social action. As the population rose, the action in these middle pens became such an animal nightmare that Calhoun was to describe it as a "behavioral sink."

In each pen was an abundance of food, water, and nesting materials, along with artificial burrows for nesting mothers. And each was large enough to accommodate comfortably a group of twelve adult rats, the number that Calhoun had earlier learned was a normal size in a natural population. But as numbers rose and crowding took place, nothing like an even distribution of numbers occurred in the pens, just as nothing like equivalent behavior developed.

At the beginning of the experiment a natural status struggle took place among the males, and each of the most powerful alphas to emerge took possession of an end pen. Since there was but one entrance, each had only to take his position beside it to guard the pen and keep order within it. Here his harem of females made their nests undisturbed. Calhoun wrote, "In essence the male established his territorial dominance and his control over a harem of females not by driving out other males but preventing their return." He slept by the entrance, paying no attention to the comings and goings of his females. If a male appeared, he was instantly alert, but he would tolerate the entrance of one who accepted his dominance. Such subordinates frequently slept in the pen. They never interfered with the females or attempted copulation. In general the harem females made good mothers, built proper nests, nursed and protected their young, and raised about half to weaning. But if there was order in the end pens, there was chaos in the middle.

As population rose, its weight fell on the unprotected middle pens. Here there was a class of dominant males, but they could hold no territories, and fighting was frequent. Rank order shifted with victories and defeats. There emerged also a middle class frequently attacked by the alphas but rarely contending. They were sexually active, but seemed unable to discriminate between estrous and non-estrous females, or even between females and juveniles. And then there were the totally subordinated omegas who "moved through the community like somnambulists," who ignored all others and were ignored by all. To look at them, they seemed sometimes the fattest and sleekest, and they remained unscarred by combat. These were the drop-outs.

So far, such a class structure in a crowded population might be expected. But with further crowding a class quite beyond prediction emerged. Calhoun called them "the probers." They were subordinate but active, and formed an essentially criminal class. They moved sometimes in gangs. Attacked by a dominant, they never contended, yet were never discouraged. They took no part at all in the status struggle, but they were the most active males in the colony. Hypersexual, they were also homosexual, and frequently cannibalistic too. Most astonishing was their tendency toward an action which can only be called rat rape. As the stickleback has a courtship ritual, so has the normal male rat. If he pursues a female to her burrow, he waits outside for her to emerge and accept. He never enters. But the probers dispensed with all courtship, chased females into burrows, trampling and killing young with abandon. Following their sexual activity, if dead babies lay about, they ate them.

The disorder of the middle pens disrupted female life more than male. Nest-building suffered first, and throughout the last half of the experiment no nests were built at all. Infants were scattered, abandoned, eaten. Whereas infant mortality in the protected end pens was held to 50 percent, in the middle pens it was 96 percent, amost total. Half of the females themselves died of pregnancy disturbance or sexual assault.

Calhoun's experiment, with all its horrifying human implications, caused wide comment. Yet one most incisive observation has been little recorded. The rats enjoyed the behavioral sink. The females in particular seemed incapable of resisting the social excitement of the middle pens. Protected harem females sought the middle pens when in estrus, without interference from their overlords. Although food and water was available in the protected pens, almost all sought the middle-pen hoppers. Their behavior in the rat mob was no different from that of the non-harem females. The one advantage protecting their young was the peace and the order of the end pens, to which they could retreat. But while the end-pen alphas never left their estates, only 3 percent of their females could resist the crowd.

People and times may change. But any consideration of space and the citizen must recognize the historic truth that people have tended to cluster in cities because they wanted to.

The evolutionist must approach the encounters of urban men with caution: the city is a human invention. He may accept the challenge of population control with quite a different order of confidence, since animal precedent demonstrates the self-regulation of numbers as approximating natural law. Conclusions become possible. He may approach such a painful exhibition as the revolt of the young with the assurance that since the young of all species have had their problems, an evolutionary approach may throw a fresh spotlight on shadowed areas previously unrevealed. He may delve into the question of leadership, and the alpha fish, and just what is such a fish made of, with the secure understanding that in social species examples of the alpha and of the status struggle have never been lacking. In none of these areas of contemporary dilemma are we bereft of animal example. They are situations common to natural arrangements, and from nature we may hope to extract information, hints, admonitions, sometimes laws. But the city was made by man.

For long we approached the city. We came to worship at lost temples impelled by lost dedications. We came to enjoy the excitements and exchanges of ancient markets, to beg or to bargain, to find pleasures in the stimulation of the throng. We traveled long distances sometimes. In a city of the Turkish highlands many thousands of years old there was even a foreign quarter, where envoys and traders from the distant Euphrates customarily stayed while they dickered for such treasures as obsidian. Old though it may be, the city as we know it was invented by man. And while we may look to the prairie-dog town, and discover in its ordered, competing yet integrated neighborhoods a flash of suggestion for urban man, still it is far analogy: the prairie-dog town is no Paris. Or we may look to the arrangements of the Japanese monkey with colonies larger than any known in the primate world: yet this is no Tqkyo, no city such as you and I must know and endure. We face in the urban concentration something new under the sun, something unanticipated except by the biologically, genetically directed termitary: but we lack the insect's genetic directives as we lack an evolutionary common ground. While we may live in our cities like ants in an ant-hill, as vertebrates we are genetically unprepared for such contingency.

Urban concentration must be approached with utmost care by the evolutionist. It is a challenge of a central sort in the contemporary condition. In that grand tradition of the modern human being, we oppose nature, master our environment, and, victims of nature's tricks, we are threatened by the urban environment which we in our hubris have created. The evolutionist's comments on the city must be limited to his comments on man.

Let us write down one more extension of the social contract: The group must present to all its unequal members equal opportunity to develop their genetic potential; in return the individual must by coercion or consent sacrifice any right to produce young in greater number than the society can tolerate, or the fulfillment of the individual must be suffocated by indiscriminable numbers. So, following the contract's equity, we proceed to a guarantee that must come from society: spatial arrangements must be such that minimum distortion, psychological or physiological, may inhibit or divert the development of society's members. But what are these arrangements? And how much does overcrowding as such distort us?

Ambivalence of animal attitudes toward space complicates an investigation. We seek space, but we seek also to destroy it. Calhoun's rats chose the excitements of the middle pens; had peace and distance been all they sought, no behavioral sink would have occurred. And we may say of urban problems that none will ever be solved by men willingly turning their backs on urban life. Human solutions must be sought within the context of innate needs, and overcrowding itself must be inspected with care.

Our preoccupation with population dynamics is producing a new scientific romanticism which explains all human fault by overcrowding. Such a fashionable view is presented by the Russells' recent Violence, Monkeys, and Men. The book is badly marred by the Russells' failure to acknowledge that men and other primates have led separate courses of evolution for at least twenty million years. The selective pressures that we have survived have been of quite different order from those of the ape. The book is likewise marred by a dismissal to a short appendix of the enormous question of man's hunting past, and what contribution to our violent present was made by the necessities of our evolving way. Their statement that only in the last fifty thousand years has man "lived to a large extent by hunting" is one for which they fortunately make no attempt to provide authority, since no authority exists. Nevertheless, through careful selection of evidence that violence occurs only as a consequence of overcrowding, and through just as careful avoidance of contrary evidence, they present a persuasive case.

An abundance of studies may be drawn upon to illustrate the violent consequence brought about by high-population density. Why the Russells did not compare three different studies of the langur in India, I do not know, since the evidence is so superficially convincing. The langur is a leaf-eating monkey, living in troops of twenty-five or so. Distributed widely in India, its conditions of life vary as widely; and it is the variation of population density that illuminates the comparative studies.

The first observations of the langur were made by Phyllis Jay in certain forests of central India where the creatures are fairly scarce. Each troop has a range of about two square miles and rarely contacts another. While troops tend to avoid one another, there is no conflict if contact occurs. There are no defended territories, and no evident boundaries between groups. Within the little society males have a rigid rank order, and almost never quarrel. The nearest thing to aggression may occur when a dominant male, copulating, is surrounded by a group of heckling adolescents.

The langurs of India's central forests seemed the ideal, sunny, non-aggressive creatures of legend, and Jay's study, completed in the early year of 1959, did much to reinforce the arguments of those primate students that monkeys never fight, never defend territory, never do anything but behave themselves in a fashion rarely glimpsed in human schoolyards. It was a time when we all still said that "langurs are this way."

Then, however, Suzanne Ripley made her equally careful study of langurs in Ceylon. Troops were of about the same size. But nowhere did there exist those infinite distances for the happy, wandering life. The troop's two square miles of India's central forests became an eighth of a square mile in Ceylon. And here there were not only territories, with actively defended, unchanging borders; groups sought combat. Like the howler and the callicebus, the langur is a noisy monkey. Morning treetop whoops would bring defiant answers from whooping neighbors and mobilization on the border. Ritualized displays might take place, with vast leaps through the trees. But in these combats between groups true fighting could take place too, with chasing, wrestling, biting, tail-pulling.

It is important to note that for these leaf-eating monkeys no shortage of food inspired conflict. Even the most arid zones of forest could carry numbers well beyond the actual population. Neither was any great damage inflicted by the continual conflict. Despite what must be described as violent behavior, in the best territorial tradition a maximum of excitement was generated with a minimum of physical harm. And, finally, the aggression directed outward infected not at all relations within the group. Although all groups studied by Ripley contained at least two adult males, and one contained six, harmony was near-perfect. Even females joined with their males in the territorial battles. This record of inner harmony was not to be duplicated in the third study.

Yukimara Sugiyama, of Kyoto University, went to India to gain some perspective on observations of the Japanese monkey. He found his perspective. Perhaps by chance Sugiyama chose the langur as a species and the Dharwar forest in western India as his scene. And there he encountered the nearest equivalent to Calhoun's behavioral sink that has so far been recorded in a population of wild primates. A legitimate criticism might be made of Calhoun's experiment, in that he had used domesticated laboratory rats whose behavior might or might not be duplicated in a wild strain; Sugiyama's appalling experience with the wild Dharwar langurs negates the objection.

Here in this western forest he found the extreme population density recorded by the three observers. Jay's had been less than 20 per square mile; Ripley's in Ceylon about 150; his almost 300. Whether density was the only factor contributing to social breakdown, Sugiyama could not know, but disorder was quite nearly perfect. There were territories, but borders were obscure and ill-defended. When troops met, leaders fought unassisted. Neither were there the rigid rank orders of dominance so characteristic of Jay's widely separated groups. Perhaps as a consequence almost all troops had only one adult male, though there might be six or ten adult females. Sugiyama speculated that without a hierarchy regulating the relationships of males, quarrels were so disruptive that only one male usually remained. The expelled males formed their own groups in the forest.

As we have seen, there is nothing unusual in disenfranchised all-male bands. The patas monkey in Africa, with troops consisting of a male and his harem, resemble precisely Sugiyama's langurs in India. But there is a very great difference. The patas organization is species-specific, and evolution of patas society has provided that surplus males be psychologically castrated. No such evolution has prepared the langur for the pathological social arrangements in the Dharwar forest. The loose gangs of surplus males are no more psychologically castrated than equivalent gangs of men. Overcrowding in the langur has produced a social situation for which langur behavioral evolution presents no answer. The results have been disastrous.

When the sexual season approached its peak, an all-male gang, with no more inhibition than Calhoun's prober rats, would descend on a troop containing females, kill or drive off the leader and any sub-adult males, and fight among themselves for sexual sovereignty. Far from mourning their departed overlord, the females would respond to the action with sexual stimulation which brought on an immediate peak of copulation with the conqueror. Infants were neglected. And the episode reached its climax when the conqueror bit to death all young.

Here is violent behavior on a grisly scale unprecedented in primate observation, and it seems a direct consequence of overcrowding. Of Sugiyama's nine troops under direct observation, such scenes of riot overwhelmed four in a season. The slaughter of the innocents, it is true, provides a form of population control. Yet I doubt that this is more than a by-product of social breakdown, of the triumph of disorder over order, of aggression no longer subject to social channels spilling over without inhibition into monkey immorality.

Similar situations have been observed in captivity. In another book I have described Zuckerman's baboons in the London Zoo who tore females apart, and Carpenter's rhesus monkeys, being shipped from India to the West Indies, among whom mothers fought with their young. Yet was it crowding alone? The late K. R. L. Hall once described to me an outburst of violence in South Africa's Bloemfontein zoo. In a single enclosure seventeen chacma baboons had lived for long in perfect adjustment. Then two strangers, one male, one female were introduced. For two days nothing happened, and one cannot say that population density had been markedly increased. Yet tensions built. What sparked the incident no one knows, but when the fighting was over, only two of the entire group remained alive, and these were so seriously injured that they were destroyed.

The story of the langurs is persuasive but incomplete, for a pair of studies of the African vervet monkey yields precisely the opposite conclusions concerning crowded populations. The first was made some years ago by Hall's student at Bristol University, J. S. Gartlan, on Lolui Island in Lake Victoria. All human inhabitants of the island were evacuated early in the century when sleeping sickness was found to be endemic. The vervets took over, and when Gartlan made his study there was a population of fifteen hundred. While the island has an extent of eleven square miles, still only its fringes have the forests that provide choice vervet food. And so this wooded margin has been divided up into territories under an acre in size, each with a group of fifteen or twenty members. In terms of overcrowding, Lolui's vervets might almost be in a zoo.

Yet they live in order and in peace. Gartlan has described to me the territorial borders as so fixed that they might be painted with whitewash. Almost never did intrusion take place. When on rare occasion a few individuals found themselves in their neighbors' yard, they were either chased off with dispatch or vanished as soon as discovered. Fights were unknown. Early primate students, dedicated for mysterious reasons to the territorial virginity of primates, seized on Phyllis Jay's study to show that "langurs are non-territorial," and likewise seized on Gartlan's study to show that vervets too proclaim primate innocence simply because on Lolui they do not fight. Without doubt there was peace.

Then, however, Thomas Struhsaker published in 1967 his penetrating series of studies of vervets in the Amboseli reserve. No such limitations of space prevailed in this Kenya immensity. Groups were of about the same size, but territories were from ten to a hundred times larger. Yet they intruded with purpose, defended in concert, and fought with relish. As aggressive were these vervets in the vast spaces below Kilimanjaro as were their fellows pacific on the crowded island acres. Enhanced aggressiveness, too, entered domestic arrangements as well as foreign policy. The vervet boasts a remarkably colorful genital arrangement: his penis is red, his scrotum blue, and a little white strip of fur runs from scrotum to anus. The dominant male, to discourage an ambitious subordinate, gives him what Struhsaker describes with all charm as "the red, white, and blue display." Yet Gartlan in two years never observed it among his crowded island citizens.

The human inhabitant of that evermore crowded island in space, the earth, struggling to work in his subway trains with their thrice-breathed air or along traffic-clogged streets where air has become an industrial product, returning home after dark with the prayer that his skull will survive intact the next darkened doorway, will do well to look anywhere for helpful insights concerning his problems. But at this developing stage of animal understanding he must beware of scientific simplifications. Overcrowding was, with little doubt, a factor in the violent behavior of certain Indian langur populations. Yet it contributed to peace and to animal treaty among vervets on an island in an African lake.

We must look further. We know that the phenomenon of space impinges deeply on our lives, far more deeply than we formerly understood. But let us forgo the quick simplicities, however authoritatively they may pose, and learn for ourselves whatever we can.

Glen McBride is a strong, red-bearded Australian lecturer in animal behavior at the University of Queensland whose work commands increasing international notice. Much of his study has been directed to the benefit of Australian stock raisers and poultry growers. But just as Schjelderup-Ebbe discovered the universal principle of social rank in a commonplace Norwegian chicken yard, McBride's imaginative inquiries into the spatial arrangements of quite ordinary barnyard citizens may well be leading us into some general principle concerning personal space.

The Australian, who evidently goes to cocktail parties now and then, was struck by the way people pose themselves in a crowded room. Almost never do two people in conversation face each other directly at close distance. (There is an exception, of course, if one is male and the other female and ideas are lurking.) But most men have had the uncomfortable experience of backing away from an aggressive male speaker who keeps pressing his face too close. We end up usually with our heels jammed against an implacable wall, and in our hearts a question as to why we ever came to the party. Yet if we sit side by side on a bench or couch, no matter how uncomfortably we may be jammed together, we speak freely and without self-consciousness. And if we are standing, then in a crowded room we shall make a satisfactory accommodation. We shall stand with our bodies at an approximate forty-five-degree angle to each other. And if one is forced to move by the passage behind him of a tray of hors d'oeuvres, then the other will unconsciously shift to retain the forty-five-degree angle.

McBride started taking pictures of hens in a fairly crowded chicken yard. His pictures were taken from above at intervals of seconds. And he found precisely the same arrangements where hens are pecking food from the same pan. There will be the similar angle. If one shifts, the other shifts. Only a highly dominant bird will move in, like the aggressive speaker at the party, directly to face another hen. But then the subordinate will quickly adjust her angle. And out of his observations McBride developed a concept of personal space.

Surrounding each individual is a portable territory with its deepest dimension in front. As the robin will threaten and fight any intruder on his fixed bit of exclusive space, so we resent intrusion into our personal space. The size of that space will vary, of course, with the species. There are kinds like the hippo school, indeed, demanding none at all, although our kind is not among them. Space will vary also with sex, confronting males demanding most, females less, male and female least or, happily, none. Size will vary with rank, alphas commanding and receiving most. It may vary with season, activity, even time of day. But a demand will always be there. That the demand is greatest in front -- what McBride speaks of as the field of social force -- received fascinating confirmation in a flock of turkeys which he condemned to an unendurably crowded pen. Wherever possible the turkey faced the wire fence, gaining the space outside as at least seemingly his own.

When I wrote The Territorial Imperative, my object was to establish the territorial principle as biologists have observed and defined it, relating to an exclusive area of defended space. I indulged in few speculations concerning the application of the principle to areas less tangible than real estate. Every such speculation, I judged, would weaken the rigor of biology's conclusions. Yet it was obvious that with the conceptual capacities of the human mind the imperative to defend a territory has been extended far beyond fence posts and locked doors. Jobs, departments in an organization, jurisdictions of labor unions, spheres of influence whether in politics or crime are as jealously guarded as a warbler's acre. When I first suggested the subject of my book to C. R. Carpenter, he was amused: Why bother with animals? Why not just visit Pennsylvania State University for a few weeks and keep an eye on the faculty? And one must add with lament that none so obeys the territorial imperative as a professor of sociology denying biology's intrusive suggestion that man is a territorial animal.

Any consideration of the problems of human space must begin and end nowhere if we deny the territorial propensities of man. If man is infinitely malleable, as so many would have us believe, then urban concentration should offer no dismay. We can adapt to anything, even to the crawling masses of insect life. It is a proposition that few would accept. The territorial principle has been evolution's most effective implement in the distribution of animal space. And if man is a being biologically equipped with territorial patterns, then at least we have a premise to work from. Urbanization is deterritorialization in the classic sense of denial of land. But perhaps there may be conceptual substitutes or symbolic channels that will preserve our biological sanity. We may be sure, however, that we must somehow preserve no trespassing signs.

McBride was dealing with that most subtle of territorial manifestations, personal space, and he showed how even this inviolable area offers accommodation in chickenyards or cocktail parties through avoidance of head-on clash. His observations of men were of course impressionistic. In the meantime however, an American psychologist, Robert Sommer, had been working on much the same problem, without benefit of chickens, in hospitals and an old folks' home. He found the distinct preference at small square tables for people to sit corner-to-corner. "They wanted eye contact but not so direct that they could not escape." In a college library study hall, with its long tables, the first to arrive would take an end seat; the second, the farthest seat away at an angle. As tables filled up, various offensive displays were resorted to. Belongings were distributed widely, as a Thomson's gazelle distributes fecal matter to repel intruders. When belongings no longer served, elbows were distributed, or feet.

Ingenious man has developed ingenious methods to ensure his biological privacy. Sommer's various studies have reminded me of the sophisticated techniques of a much-traveled California friend who on crowded planes has systematized the preservation of an empty seat beside him. Against the inexperienced air traveler one has only to place a brief case or coat on the seat. As crowding becomes more explicit, however, one faces the experienced traveler and such outworn tactics will not do. One may try body-juggling. If one stays on one's feet and through eternal rearrangement of belongings on the floor confronts the ambitious seat-taker with implacable buttocks, space may be protected. But if it becomes obvious that only one or two empty seats will remain on the plane, there is a single last recourse. Huddle wherever you are, taking as little space as possible, while firmly and conspicuously grasping the air-sickness container before you. The more experienced your fellow traveler, the more surely will he avoid the adjoining seat.

Preservation of personal space need not be so shameless as the techniques of my California friend. Dark glasses will do. By shielding one's eyes behind a transparent but darkened wall, one creates a space corresponding to McBride's field of social force. That the custom of wearing dark glasses even in the murkiest of night clubs was introduced by Hollywood stars suggests the determination of the alphas to command maximum space. That the custom has significance beyond contemporary fashion finds its testimony in Robert Murphy's study of the Taureg people, Social Distance and the Veil. The Tauregs are those nomadic "blue people" of the Sahara whom the traveler may, if he is fortunate, encounter in the market of Marrakech. Skeptical indeed one must be of any conclusion that the Tauregs, drifting occasionally out of their normal ranges beyond the Atlas Mountains, have in their ways been inspired by Hollywood invention. Yet the veil before the face protects the personal distance of the alpha Taureg precisely as dark glasses protect the space of the western alpha. I shall watch you: you will not watch me.

We are only beginning the investigation of biological privacy. It exists. Yet in our extremities of overcrowding we know little about it. Irwin Altman, like Sommer, is one of our rare psychologists distinguished by their habit of investigating what matters. The United States Navy, with an understandable interest in what matters to men in confined spaces, has been his patron. And Altman and his associates with sadistic glee have devised a series of space-torture chambers in which to confine shanghaied naval "volunteers." The space has been normally a room twelve by twelve feet in which the sad sacks might be confined together for periods of even three weeks. In such an area territories were quickly established: this bunk, that chair, this side of the table. The more quickly could such commands of personal space be established, the greater was the chance of success in a relationship. But matched pairs of sailors were studied emotionally before commitment to experiments. And a hypothesis of fair predictability was established: Two men, each highly dominant, could not last for more than a very few days. In a confined space the marriage of men, not unlike the marriage of man and woman, rests on the willingness of one or the other to accept a subordinate role.

Altman's experiments are still in progress, and their broader conclusions rest with the future. So do the observations of a clinical psychiatrist, Aristide H. Esser, today working in the mental hospitals of New York State. Like the wild men of African anthropology, Esser is a wild man of contemporary psychiatry, and he looks the part. Half-Javanese, Dutch-educated, he approaches the inhibitions of western psychology as an Attila once approached the bastions of Rome. As an adventurer he could not be more admired by the layman; as a professional, strangely enough, he could not be more admired by his colleagues. Esser is pioneering the investigation of personal space in relation to the mentally ill or deficient.

Almost half a century ago Eugene Marais projected the thesis that with insanity, and reduction of control of one's actions by the cerebral cortex, a reversion to uninhibited animal behavior takes place. Esser has found that in mental wards patients quickly form hierarchies little different from primate ranks. At the top, patients are quite free in their movements, confident, capable of receiving positions of trust. Lower, however, the disposition is to retreat into a small fixed territory where the patient will be found at least three quarters of the time. A nurse, approaching such a patient simply to light his cigarette, received a blow in the stomach. She had violated his personal space. By careful observation of individual patients in terms of dominance and territory, the arrangements of the mentally ill can be adjusted for the maximum comfort of all.

Even more revealing has been Esser's work with children so mentally deficient that they have been institutionalized. Among such children the problem of aggression has been a subject of much debate. Do reprimand and punishment reduce or enhance aggression? Experience has been ambiguous, seeming to point both ways. Esser found an answer. Such children almost always establish fixed territories. Inside his territory, the reprimanded child will cut his aggressions by half. Even the most hopelessly deficient child can learn in relation to a location he regards as his.

What we are just beginning to learn about the human significance of personal space stems almost entirely from the observations of Heini Hediger, who first established the concept of individual distance. On a March day in 1938, in Zurich's Bellevue Square, he noticed black-headed gulls sitting on the lakeside parapet. The gulls had arranged themselves evenly, just two railings apart. His curiosity caught, Hediger began watching other species. Flamingoes demand twice the distance, about two feet, whereas swallows will settle for six inches. All these and many others are "distance species," but there are also "contact species" with quite opposite inclinations. Hippos I have described in another work. Tortoises, some monkeys and lemurs, particularly at rest, even owls and spiny hedgehogs will crowd together in an animal pile. But such species are a minority.

Hediger's individual distance has become among students of men what I have referred to as personal space, the portable territory. The master zoo-keeper extended his observations to animal training. The distance an animal demands between himself and an enemy is of a special sort called "flight distance." This distance too tends to be species-specific, small animals demanding less, large animals more. But flight distance will vary according to accustomed conditions. In a protected African reserve, baboons normally may not move away until you have come within twenty yards, whereas in unprotected areas they will take flight at a hundred. It is the reduction of flight distance that is known as taming. When it reaches zero, the animal is a pet.

In the training of a circus act -- with lions, for example -- it is not to the trainer's interest to tame his charges too thoroughly. Instead he reduces the flight distance to a critical, predictable space. By entering that space just a few inches, he drives the lion in retreat with whatever decorative whip-snapping or chair-wielding may appeal to the customers. But when the lion encounters an obstacle such as a barred wall, the lion will whirl, snarl, roar in most impressive fashion. And now, if the trainer remains within the critical space, flight will shift to attack. The trainer, we assume, knows his business and he will have available an obstacle, such as a pedestal, which the lion must surmount to attack him. And at that instant when the lion is on the pedestal the trainer will step back out of the ciitical space. The lion will sit back on the pedestal, having gained his point, and the trainer will favor the audience with a deep bow, having gained his.

How perfectly such concepts gained from the behavior of the animal translate into the behavior of men has been demonstrated by the distinguished Columbia University psychiatrist Augustus Kinzel, in a study of inmates of a Federal prison. His paper was presented to the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in 1969. Kinzel chose among the inmates eight with histories of maximum violence and six who, however dark their sins, had least often indulged in violent behavior. What did personal space have to do with it? In a bare room floored by two-foot square tiles, offering quick estimate of distance, he placed his subject in the center and from various directions advanced on him, slow step by slow step. The prisoner was instructed to cry "Stop!" when he felt that Kinzel was coming insufferably close. By repeating such trials the experimenter mapped the personal space of his subjects. The non-violent group exhibited with fair accord a demand for no more than ten or so square feet. And, like the hens, their zone was somewhat exaggerated in front.

It was with the prisoners boasting a life-time record of violence that the startling departure was made. They reacted with clenched fists to an invasion of space almost four times as great as the non-violent inmates. Crowdedness, in other words, brings forth from some individuals a reaction far more violent than from others. These were the men who at a McBride cocktail party, heels against the wall, would have smashed the aggressive conversationalist in the face. But there was far more to it than that. The personal space of the violent inmates was skewed to the rear. While one must wait for experiments with a larger number of subjects, Kinzel's observations are too clear-cut to be dismissed. Prisoners with the longest records of manslaughter and assault sensed approach from the rear as a threat quite distinct from that sensed by the non-violent.

What did it mean? Was it paranoia? Was it a specific dread of the pederast? It seems dubious. Neither the psychiatrist nor this observer can give an answer, but the violent are prepared for violence. With repeated experiments over several months, and with growing confidence in the investigator, the personal demand for space on the part of all inmates dropped by about half. The rear-projection demands of the violent types dropped even more rapidly. Yet a demand for space remained, whatever the confidence and familiarity.

Kinzel's experiment confirmed the reality of personal space in man, measured it as the trainer might measure the space of his lion, affirmed the innate resentment against the intruder, and exposed a spatial contrast between those who react violently to life situations and those whose demand for space differs. Why do some men kill while others do not? Human diversity, even in response to space, must enter our reckoning. As we approach the stranger on the dimmed street, we must feel a cold wonder. Will his personal distance be approximately like ours? Or will he be different? We cannot be sure.

So new is scientific concern with the spacing of animals that discussion has not yet evolved reliable terminology with definitions agreed on by all. Hediger's "individual distance" has become "personal space" and, as we have seen, may vary with individuals in its dimension. Although Murphy applied to his Tauregs the phrase "social distance," personal space has become more generally accepted. Likewise it is widely accepted that personal space may vary with seasons. The lapwing and chaffinch may gather in quite tight little flocks in winter, but with the first sexual stirrings of the breeding season disperse to scattered, relatively large, strenuously defended territories in which the demand for space is maximum. In our examination of the human crowd we have at least a language for individual contacts. But for the contacts of groups, so pressing in our demand for human understanding, we have few such terms.

Besides individual distance Hediger gave us the term "social distance" to describe the farthest point to which an animal will go as it strays from its group. The social distance of a group, in other words, may be expressed as a measure of its scatter. A baboon troop may scatter widely as it feeds, exhibiting its maximum of social distance. But as dusk draws on, distance will rapidly shrink until all go to sleep in a few close trees. Social distance, then, is a measure of animal need for the familiar, and this too is a term we can agree on. But for the opposite and probably more powerful social force, the rejection of strangers, I can find no term in the literature.

I dislike and regard as an arrogance the contribution of terms to established sciences. But since this discussion cannot proceed without such terms, I shall refer to the social rejection of strangers as animal xenophobia. And even as personal space refers to the portable territory surrounding the individual, so I shall speak of social space as the similar area surrounding the society.

It is social space that must first concern us. If it is an area of permanent location, with fairly clear boundaries defended either by fighting or display, then it is a territory in the classic sense. Such is the social space of Ripley's Ceylon langurs or Struhsaker's Amboseli vervets. If it is an area of permanence whose borders, whether clearly or vaguely defined, need never be defended because they are never violated -- as is true of Gartlan's vervets, or of the savanna chacma baboon -- then ethology is in doubt as to whether of not it should be called a territory. So far as social space is concerned, the problem is one of semantics, since in either case the group has its fixed, exclusive property. But then comes a different sort, for the area, like personal space, may be mobile. India's populous rhesus troops shift their location from time to time, but frantic antagonism will be their response to any strange troop or individual who comes too near, violating their social space. Between two troops observed by Southwick, which had split from a single original group, antagonism was as great as between utterly strange bands. And finally, as we have seen in Jay's langurs of the central Indian forests, space may be so unlimited that antagonism is unnecessary and simple avoidance gives the group its integrity and psychological elbow room.

If we think, as I have suggested, in terms of social space, then many debates between specialists lose their heat. Is a species territorial or not? If territorial behavior comes about by innate command, then why, as in langurs or vervets, do we witness such disparity of display? The innate command is for preservation of social space. And the local population will draw from its genetically available bag of tricks that behavioral pattern which is suitable to ensure it.

Animal xenophobia is as widespread a trait among social species as any single trait we can study, and reasons for its incidence abound. There are the genetic reasons which I have explored earlier in this investigation. Were groups to mix freely, then any genetic advance would be nullified in the pool of vast numbers. Closer to our consideration is the problem of order and disorder. A limited group of familiars, many of them perhaps with kinship relation, know each other as individuals. Each has learned what to expect of his neighbor, and in such groups sufficient order comes easily. But the stranger presents a problem. Infrequently -- most infrequently -- his admission will be tolerated. If it occurs, however, normal procedure will probably condemn him to the bottom of social rank where his potentiality of social disruption will be minimum. Xenophobia guarantees the integrity of the group and the least possible chance of disruption.

Except for a few monographs by perceptive students of animal behavior, xenophobia has been little written about. And I shall join in that neglect until we debate the origins of human violence. What we consider here is the proposition that xenophobia, animal or human in its manifestations, keeps socially integrated groups separated. Whether that separation is accomplished through active territorial defense, through sophisticated acceptance of territorial rights, through active group antagonisms wherever space may lie, or as in a herd through indifference, group identity is effected and social space affirmed. It is an animal rule, and it has reasons. We may find it a human rule as well.

One would think that with all the studies that have been made of densely packed slums, little could be left for discovery. Yet two observers, Edward Hall, of Northwestern University's anthropology department, and the University of Chicago's sociologist Gerald Suttles have in the past few years found and traced invisible territorial boundaries. What in Chicago would seem to any eye the endless, amorphous, indivisible geometry of the South and West sides -- an appalling geometry to one who, like myself, grew up in it -- becomes through close inspection a mosaic of territories as discrete as those of the Ceylon langur. And they contribute to social order.

Hall's most recent field of study has been the black neighborhoods. Since he is white and our times are incendiary, most direct observation has been done by his Negro graduate students at Northwestern. And what they found were territories each normally including two adjacent blocks. Boundaries fell at the middle of the surrounding streets. You might have a friend around the corner in your territory, but not across the street. Fellow inhabitants knew each other, whether personally or through gossip. Any nearest adult had the right to punish a misbehaving child, whatever family he might come from. Anyone regarded as undesirable attempting to move into the territory was subtly discouraged; if he succeeded, then perhaps with less subtlety he would be convinced that he should leave. A definite although unofficial structure of authority invested the group. One or several individuals respected by all mediated quarrels, made final decisions concerning social attitudes. The rotting, packed Negro ghetto was in truth a series of independent villages.

It was a time when the city of Chicago, with belated conscience and all civic urgency, was replacing the infested slums with hygienic, high-rise apartments. And Hall's group found that the apartments, destroying the old territorial social structure, were in truth factories of disorder. No longer could adults on their broken stoops bring neighbors' children to heel. Now the young vanished downstairs into space to form their gangs beyond parental reach. The perceptions, the quick communication of gossiping neighbors, the reaches of unofficial authority were lost in the mathematical anonymity and isolation of tall concrete honeycombs. So drastic were Hall's conclusions that the city of Chicago considered abandoning the high-rise as an answer to the problem of the slum.

Suttles worked in a quite different area, publishing in 1968 his Social Order of the Slum, one of the richest books in sociology's slim list. His district is known as the Addams area, since it includes the famous settlement house founded by Jane Addams toward the end of the last century. Since Suttles was investigating changes in urban life, he chose his district purposely as one with a long history of study. But some of the phenomena he encountered have probably changed little in the time; they have simply gone overlooked.

The Addams area itself has distinct boundaries, compresses about thirty thousand people into its decaying tenements, and, unlike Hall's neighborhoods, is of mixed ethnic groups -- Italian, Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Negro. But a ghetto has risen within a slum. Shortly after the last war a public housing development replaced several blocks with a thousand-odd apartments. It was not high-rise. Even so, it is today inhabited exclusively by Negroes, the district's omegas, and they are confined to it. "Project living is one of the most permanent and inflexible forms of absentee landlordship." Suttles emphasizes the drabness, the uniformity, the lack of means of family identity, the estrangement of residents through suspicion, the oppressive homogeneity, the inability of friends and relatives to settle near one another and create a "little moral world exempt from the insinuations of the larger community." He writes: "There is steady appeal to force where familiarity and exceptional signs of trustworthiness or power do not furnish a clear indication of one's future safety. Acts of violence without material gain reach their apex among the Negroes of the area." Yet the Negroes constitute but 14 percent of the population of the Addams area. Hall's conclusions stand fairly confirmed.

"In slum neighborhoods, territorial aggregation usually precedes any common social framework for assuring orderly relations," wrote Suttles. Residents must memorize each other's personal character, even as would baboons. "It is advantageous for Addams area residents not to extend their loyalties or become too dependent beyond a narrow territory surrounding their own homes." Startlingly, he points to slum morality as a consequence of territorial loyalties.

Whereas we tend to associate the promiscuity explosion with high-density areas such as slums, we fail to recognize it as a middle- and upper-class phenomenon. Suttles lived for three years in the Addams area, in the mid-1960's, and so one cannot dismiss his observations as obsolete. Yet he describes the honor, the discretion, the secrecy with which boys' gangs, territorially organized, protect the girl who has made an understandable sexual slip. Thereby they protect her prospects for marriage. He makes the astonishing estimate that out of the Addams area's thirty thousand crowded inhabitants, not over a dozen or so girls have made and accepted a reputation of being sexually available.

Another of his observations, quite acceptable to the observer of evolutionary behavior, may startle the reader conditioned to human uniqueness. I have described in another work the amity-enmity complex, a psychological phenomenon that unites and enhances the energies of joint defenders of a territory. The Addams area is a mosaic of small territories normally restricted to ethnic groups. Yet there is a larger territory, the Addams area itself. Parents warn their children not to cross, for example, Roosevelt Road. There is a general animal xenophobia exerting its force against those who live beyond the spatial boundary. And the consequence is a form of integration. Though the despised Negroes may be segregated in the public housing project, still there remains a conviction that Addams-area Negroes are somehow better than Negroes elsewhere. Much though antagonisms and intolerances may flourish among the various little ethnic enclaves, whether Italian or Mexican or Puerto Rican or Negro, still there exist certain working arrangements. If you are a thief, then you will probably practice your trade outside the Addams area. If you are a fighting gang of young Mexicans, then in all likelihood you will go looking for trouble with Mexicans from Eighteenth Street, not some local gang. "Moreover, there is the suspicion if not the certainty that all street corner groups within a territory might join forces irrespective of ethnicity. By their assumption that residential unity implies social collaboration, inner city residents may help create the situation they imagine."

The works of Edward T. Hall and Gerald D. Suttles represent for the concerned reader a Klondike of urban truths far removed from normal sociological dogma. As at the overcrowded cocktail party we make unconscious accommodations to preserve our personal space, so in the overcrowded urban district we make equally unconscious adjustments to preserve our social space. Even in the most humiliating of slum conditions, a certain dignity and order remain so long as territories remain possible. It is when social space can no longer be defined and guarded that terror appears at the door.

In the past few years a suspicion has been growing in the minds of some of our most thoughtful students of animal and human behavior that territory and social rank are aspects of a single innate force, the drive to dominate. In The Territorial Imperative I described them as opposite faces of a single coin. If the new thought is correct, then the description, while coming close, does not quite illuminate the relationship. Dominance over a piece of space --territory -- would rather lie at one end of a long continuum grading into dominance over one's fellow beings. The absolute sovereignty of the robin over his acre stands at one extreme; the absolute despotism of the alpha hen in a rigid barnyard pecking order stands at the other. And in between appear many gradients of relationship.

Two of our foremost thinkers -- both, it so happens, with leanings toward physiology -- have independently explored the concept. One, an American, is David E. Davis of North Carolina State University. The other, a German, is Paul Leyhausen of the Max-Planck-Institut. Davis' many studies of the physiological consequences of overcrowding led him to propose that how dominance is demonstrated is largely a matter of space. The roomier the environment, the more likely it is that order will be achieved through territorial spacing; the denser the population, the more likely will it be that societies must turn to rank order as an organizing principle. Leyhausen, perhaps inspired by his own experience in a camp for prisoners of war, has been absorbed by the human and in particular the political implications of the concept. He sees dominance over a territory as guaranteeing the rights and the liberty of the individual, so that territorial behavior in man reinforces democracy. But with increasing density the role of absolute hierarchy increases proportionately. To a degree, hierarchy is always necessary as the essential instrument of law. But in the end "overcrowded conditions are a danger to true democracy which it is impossible to exaggerate."

We have inspected enough animal and human examples in this chapter to know that density alone does not determine the loss of territorial sovereignty. Adaptability -- a kind of animal common sense if the term be permitted -- may ameliorate a condition otherwise intolerable. The crowded vervet monkeys on Lolui Island no less than the crowded human beings in the Addams area have retained territorial integrity by renouncing the disposition to quarrel over it. Were monkeys or men under such conditions tempted to dispute their borders, there would be no energy left for such other delights as feeding and fornication. By honoring the neighbor's social space, freedom is combined with order. That such accommodations come about as unconsciously in men as in other animals is attested by Suttles' difficulty in getting any Addams inhabitant to explain the system to him. It was simply dismissed as "natural," or "the way things are."

We may find certain accommodations easing the pressure of overcrowding. This does not, however, weaken the concept of space as now being advanced. Nor does it subtract from Leyhausen's grim forecast that with sufficient human crowding we shall see the gradual emergence of an elite who through political and police power will come to control most social space and refuse to share it, leaving for the great majority living conditions comparable to those accepted by sheep. It is scarcely a forecast. In the Soviet Union the separation has been proceeding for decades, and the dachas of the political elite stand in contrast to the workingman's shared flat. Through the same period the American flight to the restricted suburb may be preceding that period when police protection must be invoked to ensure space's privilege.

Ingenuity, social traditions, cultural acceptances may in a variety of fashions shield us from pressure. In his Hidden Dimension Hall comments with humor on the Japanese capacity, through mental concentration, to shut out noise. For the western man, however, raised in a tradition of moderately thick, sound-buffering walls, a night in a Japanese hostel with its paper walls when a party is nourishing is an experience not easily forgotten. As a longtime resident of Rome, I can confirm Hall's observation. The Italian predilection for decibels is such as to press me to the conclusion that either a most improbable membrane protects the Roman eardrum, or something is wrong with me.

So we protect ourselves. But in the end neither Italian eardrums nor Japanese concentration can defend us from the tyranny of numbers. We may raise our children to enjoy and embrace the crowd; but, as Leyhausen has acidly commented, we can also raise them to enjoy alcohol or drugs. Whether the acceptance, the seeking, the abandonment to the mob is selectively adaptive or maladaptive in Homo sapiens is a question for which evolution will provide its irreversible answer. What we should consider now is the thought, today being explored within ethology, that all spatial arrangements reflect the innate drive of the individual or the group for power, in the most Adlerian sense.

Dominance has long been described as what happens when any two animals pursue the same goal; one succeeds in establishing the dominant relation, the other becomes the subordinate, and the relationship will determine without further quarreling all other rivalries. But in our most recent studies animal behavior comes to appear ever more complicated, ever more resembling our own. Just as a man may be dominant in his home, subordinate in his office, popular at the corner pub, and a rank-and-filer in the local political organization, so role plays a part in the life of social animals. The clearly alpha monkey may leave to another leadership of the group in its foraging for food, may lead or not lead a general territorial battle, tolerate without interference the sexual activities of a subordinate, leave to others the chasing off of strangers. Frequently it amounts to no more that the aloofness of the alpha that we have inspected in an earlier chapter. But frequently also there is a clear distinction of roles: the dominant animal in one social role may be otherwise in another.

Out of these studies of varieties of dominance one clear variable emerges: the relation of dominance to space. The starling is non-territorial, but it is dominant over all fellows in the vicinity of his nest hole. Fighting crickets defend no territory, but the winner will almost always be the cricket closest to his niche. Leyhausen has conducted intensive studies of cats, and found that the defeated tom, when he retreats to his home place, regains his confidence. One of the clearest of studies concerned rabbits in Australia. A warren is divided into group territories, each with five to eight adults and a clear linear rank order. The alpha may defend the territory so viciously as to kill an intruder. Yet if he enters another territory, he becomes a subordinate. The many observations have led the American William Etkin to comment that while a proprietor behaves like an alpha on his own territory, he behaves like an omega anywhere else.

Such have been the studies leading to the hypothesis that a territory is the consequence of dominance over a piece of space. The will to power is satisfied by real estate, and dominance over fellows beyond his borders does not concern the proprietor. If the hypothesis is correct, then we can understand why size of territory is of minor importance, and its significance to urban problems is considerable. You are as much an alpha on your own nest site in a crowded gullery as wildebeest bulls sixty to a hundred yards apart. And we may see also that in territorial systems there are as many alphas as there are properties, and all have what we might call political equality.

Returning our attention to man, we may sympathize with Leyhausen's forebodings concerning democracy. The rural peace which so easily inspires our nostalgias was not too long ago a spatial arrangement making possible a maximum number of human alphas. Whether farms were large or small, all proprietors were on an approximately equal psychological footing. But then as territories expanded, so their numbers shrank, compelling a reduction in the number of alphas. Pressed also by mechanization, the new class of rural omegas turned to the city. And while the city tolerated and encouraged territorial arrangements, they were of a quite different qualitative order.

The continuum of changing dominance from the robin's acre to the barnyard pecking order has been duplicated in the human experience. The urban concentration has come to present as its conventional prize not dominance over space but dominance over men. It is the status struggle -- that rat race which rats under natural conditions do their best to avoid. Territory lingers, but as a symbol of status and not as a prize in itself. For comfort's sake we seek a large apartment, but were comfort all, then we should not worry about the fashionable address. It is a symbol of status and, while presenting a degree of territorial security, commands through size and location its far more pressing symbolic contribution to rank. Similarly, the size of a man's office may offer no functional value whatsoever except as an advertisement of status. Dominance relates little to space, but almost exclusively to dominance over our fellows.

The ambiguity of the automobile in urban life bears fascinated if morbid inspection. It is a mobile territory without doubt, confirmed by the readiness to defend it emotionally on the part of both the driver and the dog beside him. The territorial boundaries of bumpers and fenders likewise separate proprietors so that even in a standstill traffic jam one confronts a territorial mosaic in which proprietors, aside from fleeting rage, acknowledge not at all each other's existence. Perhaps the car is a tender subconscious keepsake from a time when we walked beneath trees that were our own. Yet in urban life the car is a monstrosity. While it provides for the proprietor a tiny area of spatial privacy and a carpet on which to fly away, still in the city it exposes him to human density at its worst. As a territorial prize worth gaining, the car could not exist. Only its value as a symbol of status converts the urban automobile from prison to prize.

Throughout two volumes of these investigations I have stressed that territorial behavior is an evolutionary mechanism of defense. I stress it again. It is aggressive in that the proprietor, challenged, will fight. But almost never do we find in the territorial principle the concept of conquest as we human beings know it. I have resisted, despite many a temptation, the extension of the territorial concept into those human symbols, apparently equivalent, such as money and position. I may be thankful today that I have so resisted, since the Davis-Leyhausen concept of dominance reveals the distinction between possession that defends individual integrity and possession that encroaches on the integrity of others. Space is the essential criterion. Given space, territorial arrangements make possible the invulnerable individual. Stripped of space that is his own, de-territorialized man is stripped of his invulnerability. And that, down below all the asphalt and concrete, is the final statement of the urban problem.

As in my investigation of territory I resisted the temptation to extend the concept beyond my own territorial boundaries of inquiry, so in this investigation I must resist any pressure to stray far beyond the area of the social contract. Tempting it is to become absorbed with the technological horrors of the city's material environment. The pollution of air, the noise in chorus vomited by too many men and machines, the foraging for lunch when everyone else is foraging too, the lunatic adventures of telephone systems, the queuing in London or the scramble in Rome, the indignities of transport, what happens when something breaks down: there is one side of the urban problem, the side of which we are all most aware, which comes about when the machine that has been a willing slave in our mastery of nature turns its jaws about and masters us. For problems of technology this inquiry offers neither premise nor promise. But there is another side to the problem of the city.

As gradually de-territorialized man loses the exclusive space that once protected him, so gradually he proceeds through continuum's tunnel into the urban battlefield. We lose space as an ally. We enter the arena where man faces man and alliances are temporal.

Few strains on the social contract can today compare with the urban challenge. Space has been devoured and can be recaptured only with the romanticism which regards the summer cottage, occupied four weeks a year, as territorial reincarnation. The urban environment demands that we compose our bodies, our movements, our fecal matter, our gaseous extrusions, our aggressions, our drunken excursions, our noisy adventures, our quarrels man and wife, parents and children, our sexual dalliances, our ambitions, our frustrations, our personal loves, our personal hatreds, our political affinities or political aversions into an urban whole which approximates social order. If I am correct in describing the biological social contract as a balance between necessary order and necessary disorder, then the urban challenge must be described, with most delicate understatement, as a large order.

But as I have projected the philosophy of the possible, one must pause. To meet the material problem of the city, virtually anything is possible. And certain'y within this inquiry's confines I shall assume that for technological problems, however baffling, technological solutions for affluent societies must exist. We have a talent. Urban men, driven year by year toward maddened desperation, can and must find the will that put men on the moon. We have already the talent. But for solving problems of our emotional environment, evidence supports no optimism at all.

Space -- not that between Earth and Mars but between man and man -- remains today as great a mystery as were fire and water to the ancients. With ethology's hypothesis that decreasing space means increasing tyranny I am in accord. And perhaps it is an extension of the hypothesis that further disturbs me, for a peculiarly human fate overhangs the urban outcome. We compete, in Wynn-Edwards' terms, for conventional prizes. But as density increases, the prizes grow fewer.

For every territory there is a proprietor, an alpha who has won his conventional prize. Not even, of course, in the rural society of orchard and garden, small-town grocery store or dry-goods shop do all men become proprietors. Still the alphas are many and the prizes remain real. But as urban concentration grows and competition shifts from dominance over a piece of space to dominance over our fellow man, not only do we encounter the hierarchy of despotism from which territorial man was largely protected but we encounter a vanishment of alphas. Prizes grow fewer. And as we press farther into the ever condensing mass we find ever enlarging human organizations, be they corporations or labor unions, political groupings or taxpayers' protest meetings. And as organizations become larger alphas become fewer.

I have mentioned much earlier the plight of the maturing young, still invested with the demand to prove themselves as individuals, facing the immensity of organizations in which the individual risks annihilation. But now we must inspect the phenomenon from quite another angle -- the reduction of alphas. Whereas in a simpler and more spacious time a thousand shops provided society with a thousand alphas, now a single chain of department stores provides one. The conventional prize of the status struggle becomes as unreal as a kingship in Kansas.

We are turkeys standing against an Australian fence, necks outstretched, gazing longingly at that space outside which never again will be ours. Yet even as turkeys we are cheated, since no turkey ever endured a situation in which the goal of alpha bird became a figment of turkey imagination. You and I make accommodations, it is true. We invent side organizations wherein we may excel: the parent-teacher associations, the readers' clubs, the dedicated groups of butterfly collectors, the enthusiasts for antique motor cars, the impassioned devotees of political movements, the walkers who pound down the countryside, the travelers who bring back improbable photographs of improbable places to inspire temporary omegas into feats of yet more improbable tourist accomplishments. But for the born alpha such satisfactions are not enough.

I have mentioned that within any population normal diversity of individuals leaves between 3 and 3.5 percent in a group that must be regarded as mentally deficient. Measured in terms of IQ, this means 70 or less, but all forms of testing give approximately the same spread. And while one may debate just how much of the IQ score may be regarded as genetic and how much induced by environment, still there can be little argument that an IQ of 70 is so low that even an enriched environment is unlikely to improve it beyond 80. And this is an IQ still so low as to guarantee that the individual will remain within omega ranks. At the opposite end of the symmetrical curve one finds, of course, the 3 or 3.5 percent of gifted individuals with IQ so high -- above 130 -- that even a deprived environment is unlikely to drop them from the role of potential alphas.

In my discussion of the alpha fish I suggested that intelligence is far from being a final determinant of high rank. But it is a most important one, since it is unlikely that an unintelligent gorilla male will ever become the silverback who rules the band, or a dull elephant cow ever become the leader of the file moving silently through the forest. And while to my knowledge no studies of the subject have ever been made, still on the demonstrable basis of the deficient and the gifted, I consider it a most conservative guess that 5 percent of any human population consists of certain omegas, while a high 5 percent consists of potential alphas. In the American population this would indicate that there are ten million people for whom there must be room at the bottom, and another ten million who must have some hope for the top.

If you are a potential alpha growing up in the United States of America, this means that when you mature you must join the ranks of ten million other potential alphas competing for a diminishing number of alpha roles. Your aggressive potentiality is uncontainable within a society of such diminishing prizes. Equally severe, however, is the problem of the condemned omega. When men turned earth with a spade, moved coal with a shovel, cut hay with a scythe, carried hods on their backs, the body could support human dignity though brain be inadequate. Such work in a highly organized, highly technological society is all but gone. As opportunity for the demanding alpha is withdrawn, so refuge for the condemned omega ceases to exist. The frustrations of urban society reveal in nakedness what our earlier rural societies modestly clothed: the innate inequality of men.

Injustices visited upon the gifted are scarcely distinguishable from injustices visited upon the ungifted. The pursuit of equality, that natural impossibility, condemns to mediocrity the gifted. The expectations of status beyond hopeful achievement condemn to frustration the giftless. Human density as achieved by urban concentration provides, as in any system of natural selection, an audience for naked display concerning human worth. But as we know it today the city, failing to recognize the inborn inequality of men, provides neither sufficient prizes nor booby prizes for citizens condemned to the rigors of density's struggle.

In terms of the social contract it is the urban concentration, juxtaposing unequals within a crowded environment and without the protection of space, that places incontestable demand for other than romantic concepts of men. It is the urban concentration that commands reassessment of social views. The city perhaps in Homo sapiens' evolutionary course is like that hurdle in a steeplechase making impossible survival if this hedge, that ditch, cannot be leaped. Our philosophy of the impossible makes likewise impossible all but a fall into the urban ditch.

I do not know what our outcome may be. Nowhere in the history of animals can one find precedent for the urban dilemma. Nowhere in the history of man can one find instruction for the future of a Tokyo, a New York. You and I, like flying molecules within a microscopic area of space, must seek adjustments, alliances, dispensations, tolerances, mutual goals, mutual defenses, new rules of the game subscribed to by all, new opportunities of achievement underwritten by common consent, new sanctions for the violator, new compensations for the violated, new dreams, new dreads, new uncontested heroes, new uncontested dross. The city forces upon all of us whatever reason man can mobilize. So we go forward. Or so, like the pterodactyl, we vanish.

Civilization began in the city; and in the city it well may end. So impenetrable seem its problems in the later decades of the twentieth century, so predictable seemingly is the city's devouring might, so irreversible seem the forces that have pressed urban man into deepening dejection, that the throne tempts despair as its sole occupant. Yet I find an unreality in such pessimism since it denies our animal will to survive. If we are to despair of the city, then we must despair of the species that created it. And such a rejection I find premature.

The city is a cultural invention enforcing on the citizen knowledge of his own nature. Our fears must suggest that we are aggressive beings easily given to violence. Our intelligence, if we possess any at all, must inform us that we get along together more because we must than because we want to, and that the brotherhood of man is about as far from reality today as it was two thousand years ago. The city, that unreasonable invention, with thunderous voice announces that reason's realm is small, and that if human foresight were what it is presumed to be we should not be in the mess that we are in. Through belly-to-belly juxtaposition of beings, evidence is presented that we never have been and never shall be created equal, and that if man is perfectible he exhibits the utmost shyness in demonstration of symptoms. These -- all -- are considerations from which space tends to protect us. One must sympathize with Rousseau's rejection of Paris, and his yearning for those solitary woodland walks where the dream suffers least contradiction.

Such cannot be so in the city, for it is a hall of mirrors. Wherever we turn we must see a face, and the portrait does not please us. We flee. But in the city, spaces are few and mirrors are many. We proclaim the reflection false -- it must be of somebody else. What perceptions we have we blindfold with obsolete doctrine; what brains we have we abuse with comforting lullabies that someone once sang us. Yet the city persists, for it is larger than we are. And with giant arms it presses our faces, as in a childhood nightmare, closer and yet closer to the looking glass. And someday we must say: This is I.

In the cities of the Euphrates and the Nile and the Maya lowlands, in the cities of the Greek islands and peninsulas and of the Italian hills, a civilized way of life came about. And we cannot know but that the urban pressures of the twentieth century may include as another irreversible course a movement toward human understanding, a quality without which we can no longer survive. Falsehood, by and large, is a luxury. The romantic fallacy concerning man's nature, lively and pleasing a companion though it may be on a woodland walk, is a thug at night on a city street. The richer we grow, paradoxically, the less can we afford such a mistress.

The problems of the physical urban environment should not, as I have said, lie beyond human solution. Neither should uncontrollably increasing numbers place beyond our powers an urban answer. As we saw in the last chapter, population numbers do not increase indefinitely. And in any event, the urban dilemma reflects not numbers themselves but concentration of numbers. Japan has achieved population control of perfect order, yet the delirium of Tokyo remains. In the United States one has only to fly from coast to coast across its immensity to know that our urban problem has come about through human choice.

The city is not a concentration camp. All but the most unfortunate of us become part of its numbers not as slaves, not as prisoners, but as volunteers. Just as Calhoun's rats freely chose to eat in the middle pens and thus created a behavioral sink, we freely enter the city and, faced by conditions of intolerable overcrowding, we are as free to leave. Our departure may entail material cost; but that too rests on human choice. Overcrowding is a voluntary condition to which each of us makes his contribution, finds accommodation, or freely rejects.

It is not overcrowding but the breakdown of social structure that calls forth urban disaster. No example is more illuminating than the violence and the regime of fear that invest American urban life. That regime is as perfect in a relatively un-crowded Kansas City as in the massed densities of a Chicago or New York. Were overcrowding the cause, then this could not be so. What we witness is the shuddering, drunken tottering of a social structure supported by an inadequate philosophy. We lie to ourselves. It has been our way. Our lies we find pleasing.

Space leaves room for liars; the city does not. Here we live because we choose, live with each other because we must. Here the urban magnifying-glass of eternal encounter reveals the next man as he is, and the hall of mirrors reveals us as we are. Here we make treaties in equity with our fellow men founded on human reality, and we preserve and perfect a workable social contract; or we fail, lose all, and accept the dispensations of the despot.

The city as we know it now and shall know it for decades to come is a giant test created by civilized man which his civilization must pass or fail. There is no reason to believe that we shall pass it. Or, for that matter, that we shall fail.