7. Look Homeward, Angel

On the day of the armistice in 1918 I was ten years old and playing in a gravestone storage yard on East 67th Street in Chicago. In the midst of the war my elementary school, to the delight of all, had burned to its foundations. It had been a wonderful fire, for in those days fire engines were still pulled by horses and were truly fire engines, with power for water pressure furnished by a coal-stdked furnace and boiler. They made a splendid spectacle of spark and smoke as they charged through the dull geometry of Chicago's streets. The disaster by some blessed fortune occurred at night, so that the burning of the school itself provided a further spectacle of such garish grandeur as none of us had ever witnessed. Flames roared high above the cottonwood trees, clouds of sparks assailed the ruddy heavens, and we the assembled children cheered the fall of every rafter. We believed, I suspect, that we should never go to school again. If so, then the hope was false. Within weeks the Chicago school board betrayed us and we were back at our desks in a dozen portable schoolrooms erected on a vacant lot in East 67th Street, across from Oakwoods Cemetery.

This, then, was the school that I was attending when on a November morning every factory whistle in Chicago announced that war was over. We had no schoolyard, but [210] there was a monument works down the street and some of us played in the storage yard, a granite jungle of immense stone blocks, fresh from the quarry and piled every which way, along with fractured crosses and noseless angels which had emerged from the works in a condition less than suitable for paying tribute to the dead. It was not too bad a play yard, for beneath the granite disorder were caves and mysterious recesses and passages, and it was from these that I emerged at the sound of the whistles to mount a pile of gravestones unmade or unworthy and to stand at the top and survey the peace. And I did not believe it.

There had been a false armistice a few days before, when everyone had run around and shouted in useless excitement. Now with the true armistice there was no sensation at all. Within my view a single figure showed agitation, a grown-up man running beside the cemetery wall. I thought that he was making- a fool of himself. I felt nothing. I was only ten years old, of course, and World War I had been going on for approximately as long as I could remember. I accepted it as I accepted the thunder of elevated trains on the structure above 63rd Street. Also, being unable to recall anything but war -- and a thoroughly dull and unremarkable experience it had been -- I possessed no pressing visions of peace. But beyond all that there was something else. I was cynical.

An adult who cannot comprehend the cynicism of children knows little about them. It may be a cynicism as petty as it is uninformed, yet still it contains that sophistication of young beings who have seen more than they will discuss. One night, for example, I had marched in a parade carrying somebody else's air rifle. And I had seen on the crowded sidewalk a young man knock an older man down because the older man had failed to take off his hat as our flag passed. I responded to the incident with the same lack of pleasure with which I recall it today. Yet I rushed to no parent, no teacher, to pour out my rejection of such remarkable adult emotions. I simply stored it away like a squirrel a nut, in a hole in a cynical tree.

Now the war was over and whistles blew and I stood on top of my granite jungle watching a lone man running beside the cemetery wall, and I was unstirred by the joys of peace as I had been unmoved by the rages of war. I disbelieved, in what I cannot say. And I should hazard today, looking backward, that I was not alone in disbelieving. The [211] whistles announcing the end of the First World War were our formal introduction to the Time of Disbelief, that period of necessary preparation for the Age of the Alibi.

Since we are about to take a look at war, and to inspect those forces which direct the human being to defend his country, let me make a very slow dissolve, as we say in films. Let me go from the monument yard in Chicago, in 1918, to a hotel room in New York on a Sunday afternoon in 1941, twenty-three years later. It was December, but the weather was decent and those of my friends who could take the opportunity had gone to the country for the week end. New York streets wore the silent Sunday look that induces wonder as to whether the inhabitants have not at last come to their senses and sold the island back to the Indians. I was enjoying my solitary state, for I was busy writing a final draft of my fifth play in preparation for Broadway. Indeed, I was feeling intolerably good about myself, for my last had developed into an inexplicable success in Britain, where it had been running all through the blitz before audiences hugging gas masks on their knees. Also, I had recently completed my first Hollywood experience, and I was not only prosperous for the first time in my life but the film itself had managed to combine a fair degree of art with an enviable run at the Radio City Music Hall. I was in good shape. Then my phone at last rang and it was an agent with some casting assurances which pleased me further, but he seemed in a hurry and said he had to-get back to the bombing. I asked, what bombing?

"You didn't know?" he said, with the tone one reserves for the feeble-minded. "The Japanese are bombing Pearl Harbor. You'd better turn on your radio." And he hung up.

I had no radio. I did not believe him, of course, but even so I shuttled vaguely about my room not knowing what to do next. I recalled a friend, an attorney, who was in the city for the week end. I called his house. I could hear his radio going in the background. The broadcast was coming from Hawaii and it was all true. I have little recollection of leaving my room or finding a taxi. My brain, I believe, went out of business for a while. I arrived at the apartment in Central Park West and my friend was alone and he said very little when he let me in because he was listening to the radio in the next room. I joined him there. It was afternoon in New York, early morning [212] in Hawaii. The broadcaster there had little to offer- but chaotic descriptions of the burning naval base, the sunken fleet -- how many ships, who knew? -- of hospitals choked with American wounded and dying -- how many, who knew? -- of the hundreds upon hundreds of Japanese bombers that had flown in from the sea to create a glaring, unguessed dawn.

It is always strange, recalling, to discover the precise and unreasonable moment when the knife strikes deep. I listened too shocked to respond. Then in the midst of it all came a bulletin that Ecuador had declared war on Japan. I choked. I saw my friend looking away in an effort to hold onto himself. It was an absurd thought that Ecuador had come to the rescue of the United States of America, it was like a bad line in a play, and yet what was happening to my emotions had no least connection with either thinking or playwriting. Something within me burst, and I ached with my gratitude to Ecuador, I ached with my love for my country, I ached with horror at the Japanese deception, I ached with sickness for the American loss. I had encountered, slam-bang, for the first time in my experience, i the territorial release.

After sufficient passage of time and sufficient exposure j to repetitive bulletins, my friend and I collected our wits sufficiently to conclude that what we had just witnessed ■ was the political blunder of the age. Not a significant segment of American opinion had favored our entry into World War II. That we might eventually have entered the war against Nazi Germany was possible but unlikely; that we should ever have gone to war with Japan was virtually unthinkable. So dedicated were we to our isolationist faith -- the faith that if you keep your nose clean you yourself will get into no trouble -- that our administration was pressing the most meager measures of defense through an unhappy Congress by the slimmest of margins. Only weeks before, an effort to end national conscription and return our army to its small peacetime size had been defeated by about four votes. Yet by a single spectacular stroke Japan had guaranteed that the most powerful country on earth should enter both wings of the war, that it should proceed as an undivided people, and that its resolve would remain undiminished till war's end.

I had most obviously not heard at the time of what a territorial intrusion does to the energies and the resolve of [213] a territorial proprietor; and neither, as obviously, had the Japanese. C. R. Carpenter had made his last return from the rain forest the previous year, but his message had not got around. The Japanese command, we may assume, took the calculated risk that Americans might react at least to a degree as they did. But every rational assessment of the American will to resist, every consideration of human behavior then prevailing, would have tended to confirm that the risk was small, and that a demonstration of Japanese power would further divide us and further discourage us from a course of military adventure. What was not assessed, of course, was the weight of the irrational: the behavior of a robin on a lawn in Devon or of a troop of brown lemurs in a Madagascar forest.

We tend today, with the equanimity of hindsight, to dismiss the Japanese command as a shipload of fools, and to shrug off the events of Pearl Harbor as the simple consequences of a simple if incredible blunder. But let us beware of equanimity. The story of World War II, from beginning to end, was a dizzying sequence of similar blunders. And despite the passage of a quarter of a century, despite the evidence which the new biology has so abundantly accumulated and the evidence which history has so abundantly disposed, we are in our day as innocent as were the Japanese in theirs. We shall discover, I believe, as this inquiry progresses, that our contemporary governments in one fashion or another, on small scale or vast, reiterate the Japanese blunder in faith as full, in folly as real. If the Japanese command was a shipload of fools, then ours is no less. And the equanimity, which for times past provides such becoming costume, may for times to come provide shrouds of even more expressive merit.

I submit, of course, that the continuity of human evolution from the world of the animal to the world of man ensures that a human group in possession of a social territory will behave according to the universal laws of the territorial principle. What we call patriotism, in other words, is a calculable force which, released by a predictable situation, will animate man in a manner no different from other territorial species. I recognize, of course, that no school of thought prevailing today on any continent will inform you that my proposition is correct. And so I must pursue my prey with all the delicacy of a stalking leopard. The American must become for the moment my study [214] species, Pearl Harbor my laboratory experiment, and I myself a convenient specimen to prod, measure, inspect, shock with electricity, inject with chemicals, dispatch, dissect, and if necessary grind up and feed to my friends.

Was my response to Pearl Harbor innate or conditioned? This is the question we must ask. Was it something I had been born with or something I had been taught? Was it truly a command of genetic origin, an inheritance from the experience and natural selection of tens of thousands of generations of my human and hominid ancestors? Or was it a display of a cultural heritage to which I had been conditioned during my lifetime?

We must grant first that my response was instant. I required neither opinion polls to advise me as to how others were responding, nor consultation with my neighbors, nor even discussion with my friend. We made our commitments in silence. Neither was the decision arrived at by inner debate of a rational order. At one moment I was at peace, the next at war.

As the decision was instant, so was it voluntary. No measures of government authority or sanctions of social disapproval or erosions of inhibition through inward guilt gave shape to my response. There was no time.

As my response was instant and voluntary, so was it universal among my social partners. Dissent must have existed, particularly among Americans of German or Japanese extraction: but dissent was so rare as to be statistically nonexistent.

As my response was instant, voluntary, and universal, so was it contrary to personal interest. I know of few Americans who by their inward commitment gained a richer, easier, or more comfortable life. The inconvenience of death was the reward for many.

My own response, then, was not unique, but common to my kind. Were the Americans a species, we should be justified in regarding it as species-specific. And so we must ask, if the remarkable uniformity was not innate, by what processes of social conditioning had Americans been instilled with such love of country as to guarantee that when challenge arose we should act as one?

Since the milieu of my growing up on Chicago's South Side was dismally typical of that of many another, let me continue in my role of laboratory animal. I have mentioned that when at the age of ten I stood on a pile of [215] gravestones listening to Chicago's whistles announce the end of the First World War, I entered the Time of Disbelief. From that moment on, when we sang the national anthem at school we forced our voices to break on the high notes and inserted ribald phrases in the lyric. Marching bands and martial music vanished from our streets; if you liked brass bands, you went to football games. The flag, making an occasional appearance, passed unnoticed. George Washington, we discovered, may have been the Father of our Country, but he was a mediocre sort of man blessed with a few bright lieutenants and uniformly dim-witted opponents. It was a bad time for heroes. Napoleon got where he did because he was five feet three. Ulysses was as commonplace as George Washington and infinitely sillier. England's eminent Victorians had been homosexuals, drunkards, and prigs.

Generals, in the time of my growing up, were something to be bidden under history's bed, along with the chamber pots. Anyone who chose the army for a career was a fool or a failure. At my high school there was something called R.O.T.C., a training course for reserve officers. If you wanted to sink out of sight in the estimate of your contemporaries, if you wanted to be checked off as someone whose pimples would prove to be permanent, you had only to appear at school in a khaki uniform. I doubt that among the 3500 students who were my fellows at this giant Chicago high school there was one who chose to be a professional soldier.

Certain words almost vanished from the American vocabulary during the 1920's, the Time of Disbelief. Honor was one, glory another. A man of honor was a hypocrite. He who achieved glory had undoubtedly a hollow leg, he who desired it a hollow head. Patriotism, naturally, was the last refuge of the scoundrel. It was the time of Watson and his striped muscles and conditioned reflexes. The human being, at bottom, is nothing. Watson's basic claim was that under ideal circumstances he could take any baby born and, by proper conditioning of a few basic reflexes, turn out a butcher or a banker, a soldier, a thief, an artist, a lunatic. Implied was the natural equality of man in the natural equality of zero. Although Watson plied his trade at the University of Chicago, just around the corner, I doubt that many of us in high school ever heard of him. He played a tune of a popular sort, however, and, like [216] "Yes, We Have No Bananas," you could hear it anywhere drifting along on the American breeze.

The Time of Disbelief gave way in the 1930's to the first mighty waves of the Age of the Alibi. Watson vanished from public view, but his doctrine of human nothingness manipulated by conditioning spread out into the broader concepts of environmentalism. We were still nothing, but a touch of nobility had crept into our nothingness. We were naturally good, amiable, gentle. Only social manipulation and pressures of environment made us greedy, antagonistic, brutal. At last we had something to believe in: that whatever happens, it is somebody else's fault.

In my first chapter I conducted a sufficient excursion through America's murky, depression-haunted streets. Out of our joint desperation something that we called the social conscience, as opposed to the older personal conscience, began to take form, and with it the political philosophy that we today call liberalism. But our liberalism was founded on "us" against "them." The generals and the munition-makers, sharks of the international deep, were among the most horrendously "them." The liberalism of the time was a bastion of pacifism.

We were conditioned, it is true. The generation that was to respond to the last man on Pearl Harbor's dawn had been conditioned to the last man to believe that wars accomplish nothing. Had America been an enormous laboratory and had we all been albino rats, no more elegant experiment could have been devised to test the powers of social conditioning. Perhaps its only equal has been that of the Soviet Union in its total effort half a century long to induce the Russian farmer to put his heart into crops raised on land not his own. Ours was as total in its way, and it lasted for twenty-three years, and it failed in a dawn's bad hour. Yet human gullibility is such that a generation who survived the experiment will instruct another generation that patriotism is something we are taught.

Pearl Harbor was a phenomenon less than unique in the history of peoples. Its significance rests on that period which preceded it, when a people chose its gods from the disenchanted. I may look homeward, search old corridors, old streets, old schoolrooms, hear once again Chicago's tongue, and I shall find in my memories no instant's instruction concerning the virtues of dying for one's country. [217] I may recall New York and the years of protest against man's injustice to man. I may recall California and the growing terror and thunder as war at last extended its heat and its horror across all of Europe, as I may relive our sympathies for Britain and for France. But except in the unpopular anticipations of a far-sighted few, nothing in our sympathies, our fears, or our revulsions persuaded us that war could ever bring human solutions. To the very last moment we preserved like laboratory rats the perfect posture of our perfect conditioning. Then all in an hour evolution took charge.

If life is to go on, then there must be those moments in the history of animate beings when nature will brush aside the most perfect of conditionings, as it will brush aside the most imperfect of philosophies, to put older, more trusted mechanisms to work. Towers of reason, of impeccable design, will topple in a dusty instant. The waters of our most genuine idealism and of our highest moral purposes, which have made green our fields of longing and made seemingly real our gentlest hopes, will be dimly recollected tomorrow as a mirage upon the desert. The intruder will have knocked.

The territorial imperative is as blind as a cave fish, as consuming as a furnace, and it commands beyond logic, opposes all reason, suborns all moralities, strives for no goal more sublime than survival. Today's American may give thanks that on December 7, 1941, this was so. But today's American must also bear in mind that the [218] territorial principle motivates all of the human species. It is not something that the American thought up, like the skyscraper or the Chevrolet. Whether we approve or we disapprove, whether we like it or we do not, it is a power as much an ally of our enemies as it is of ourselves and our friends.

The principal cause of modern warfare arises from the failure of an intruding power correctly to estimate the defensive resources of a territorial defender. The enhancement of energy invariably engendered in the defending proprietor; the union of partners welded by the first sound of gunfire; the biological morality demanding individual sacrifice, even of life; all of the innate commands of the territorial imperative act to multiply the apparent re- j sources of a defending nation. We have traced the terri- } torial power back through the ape and the monkey and the lemur; we have weighed it in other mammals -- beavers i and antelopes, chipmunks, roe deer, squirrels; we have observed it in birds, in reptiles, in fish, even in certain insects like the cricket and a species of wasp; the force has been apparent in slime molds so ancient that we have no knowledge of its evolutionary genesis. Yet the force has been anything but apparent to those who intrude on the territories of their fellow men.

"It is high time that social and group psychology began to occupy itself with the physiological side of behavior and more especially with the innate processes," Konrad Lorenz once told a symposium. "Hitherto it is only the demagogues who seem to have a certain working knowledge of these matters." In a way, Lorenz was right, for it is the demagogue's intuitive knowledge of what men are -- as opposed to what they think they are or are told they are -- that manufactures his principal stock in trade and perhaps makes possible his success. But for once Lorenz was in part wrong: while the master politician seems acutely aware of how far the forces of outward antagonism will go toward unifying his own people in support of his rule, history offers few evidences that he is equally aware oi what the same forces will accomplish with his enemies.

In 1940, when Carpenter completed his investigations [219] of the primate social territory, history was arranging an exhibition of incomparable gore and variety to demonstrate, one might conclude, the human validity of his findings. In the space of a few years the laboratory of war provided almost every possible combination of territorial intrusion and territorial defense. Shock and immediately applied overwhelming power might crush the defenses of a nation: it was the essence of the blitzkrieg. Poland, Norway, and the Netherlands fell, for the multiplication of territorial resources, as we have seen, cannot be extended indefinitely. Or a major population which the world had come traditionally to regard as a nation might turn out to be a noyau.

The fall of France shocked the world far more, I suspect, because of the collapse of the French will to resist than because of the failure of French arms. In the most profound recesses of our animal-subconscious minds -- of our visceral brain, as someone once described it -- we take for granted the territorial imperative (in our friends; in our enemies it is known as fanaticism) though we have no name for it and we live in a culture that would deny its existence. The French collapse seemed a kind of cry against nature, an evolutionary sin for which the French have been demonstrating guilt and neurosis ever since. And yet, one must suggest, the fall of France was an event less dramatic in territorial terms than evidence would warrant. France in the years between the wars had slipped, like Italy, to the status of a noyau, the society of inward antagonism which it yet, in all probability, remains.

Whatever may account for the French territorial collapse -- the vulnerability of the noyau, the shock of the blitzkrieg still redolent of terror, the emasculation of a people by World War I -- it was the last territorial collapse of World War II. The succession of events to follow -- in which Pearl Harbor, shattering though the blunder may have been, was still just an incident -- gives us the classic demonstration of the intruder's inability to assess properly the multiplied powers he confronts. While the intruder faces always the temptation to estimate an opponent nation as indeed a defenseless noyau -- and he may very well be right -- still the record indicates that the intruder who counts on a fall of France with every territorial invasion lives dangerously indeed.

One is apt to forget about Finland's Winter War, while [220] at once hoping that the Russians will not. When in modern times has an insignificant nation met the intrusion of a great power with such resolve? The free world thrilled, as it will and must always to the spectacle of any David facing any Goliath. One lacks the imagination, however, to apprehend the consternation which must have gripped the Kremlin when, out to accomplish a bit of minor larceny, it had to witness its divisions being slaughtered in the snow-gripped Finnish woodlands. Why did Finland fight? No explanation less than ten million years old can provide a significant answer.

I mentioned in passing the Battle of Britain. If one asks, why did Finland fight? there is a shadow of an answer in the truth that the Finns had nothing to lose: it was fight, and at the worst be destroyed; or surrender, and at the best be devoured. No shadow of an answer greets the question, why did Britain fight? With Hitler in control of the Continent, the British for all their power were as isolated, as helpless, as hopeless on their islands as the Finns in their forests. It is this quality of inspired lunacy that so distinguishes the defense of a social territory. The British had every sane reason to accept an accommodation with the Germans which Hitler, many believe, was eager to offer. Hitler, on the other hand, had every sane reason to anticipate acceptance. If nothing else, German devotion to the principle of economic determinism, which had so limited the mind of Karl Marx, would direct an Adolf Hitler to regard the British as a nation of shopkeepers, and nothing more. That they should turn out to be a nation of madmen was beyond calculation. One can only reflect that what human reason must regard as madness, relative to our living to a ripe old age, evolution -- careless concerning the fate of individuals -- may regard as utter logic relative to the survival of populations. Britain fought. A world survived.

In our terrifying laboratory, the Second World War, we watch the repeated spectacle of predatory powers, directing the most sophisticated war machines which the mind had yet devised, colliding blindly again and again with energies galvanized and organized by an animal instinct the existence of which would have been denied by the most learned minds of the time. I have said enough about the lapanese and Pearl Harbor. A less-remembered episode in southern Europe is equally revealing. [221]

Benito Mussolini was one of the century's more imposing cynics. His prestige was created in equal parts by world credulity, fineness of Italian calculation, and magnificence of lung power. I live in Italy, and I have acquired the most humble respect for that superb Italian capacity to discriminate between the demonstrative and the dangerous, to pursue the bella figura with minimum risk of its decorating a bello cadavere. And I' find it impossible to believe that a man like Mussolini would have invaded Greece had he not regarded the invasion as an in-the-bag, one-hundred-percent, falling-off-a-log sure thing. The little Greek army, undoubtedly recalling Marathon and Thermopylae, stopped the Italians at the first mountain ridge. It was the most embarrassing moment of World War II. A furious Hitler, preparing for his invasion of the Soviet Union, had to rescue his partner. From that moment on, Mussolini ceased to exist as a figment of anyone's imagination other than his own.

Greece was crushed by German arms, as Poland had been crushed, as Norway had been crushed, as the Netherlands had been crushed. The social territory commands its partners to join against an intruder though chance of success be nonexistent. If the inexplicable multiplication of power which territory vests in the proprietor is insufficient, the defense of course will fail. Territory cannot of itself provide miracles, but it can provide inconveniences of a superb order. Hitler encountered such an inconvenience in Greece at a most inconvenient hour. Greek unreason, combined with a Yugoslav passion for nonsense, combined to put Hitler's invasion of Russia five weeks behind schedule. [222]

In the logical elaborations of hindsight it is easy to lose one's focus on the uncertainties of the past. That the Soviet Union with all its might and immensity survived the German onslaught may seem inevitable today. It seemed impossible at the time. I was working with the overseas division of our Office of War Information through the period, and while there must have been those who had their hunches, I can recall no reputable authority who expected of Russia anything but total collapse. Within a few weeks after the invasion, a prominent American magazine published an analysis, in the past tense, of how Hitler had conquered Russia. The issue of that magazine is a treasured object for collectors today. And while American inability properly to assess the Russian will to resist may have been influenced by our antipathy for the Soviet political system, still this cannot explain the world's underestimation of the Finnish will to resist, or of the British will to resist, or of the Greek will to resist, or of the Yugoslav will to resist, or, for that matter, of our own will to resist.

Our side's failure to comprehend the force which in the end would save us had no effect on the course of the war. We acted by instinctual command. Whether we were enlightened or ignorant, self-aware or self-deluded, whether we acted in the light or we acted in the dark, we should have in any case acted the same. But the same cannot be said of the intruder.

I suggest that had the leaders of the predatory powers in World War II known what in the end they would be up against, the war might not have taken place. I recognize that human capacity for folly has a splendor all its own. I recognize that no human gift carries quite such unimpeachable authority as that of self-inflation, and that Adolf Hilter, Benito Mussolini, and the Japanese military clique were all so singularly gifted. None, however, were true fools. All were men of war who made a business of war: who laid their plans with care, totted up their machines and their manpower, their resources and their deficiencies, made estimates of their potential enemies as they made estimates of themselves, and concluded from balance sheets, however wishful, just what they could get away with. But it seems to me a pity that the compounding powers of territorial defense could not have been included in their statistics of aggression. [223]

The record of the Second World War suggests total ignorance on the part of intruders as to how defenders were likely to behave. The record likewise suggests that were men fashioned from those designs which we so fash--ionably suppose, then the balance sheets of aggression would have been neither wishful nor inflated but precisely correct. Were we creatures of the conditioned reflex; were we products solely of our environments; were we beings revolving like slow solar systems about this sun or that, this sexual organ, that material interest, or yonder parental circumstance: were we any of these things, then the design of man would have fitted nicely the designs of aggression, and a world that was ours would today be somebody else's. But we were more than these things; and in aggression's miscalculation of man lay the margin of aggression's failure.

Any species is a contemporary expression of the total of its evolutionary potentiality. The complexity of the human past is rivaled only by the complexity of the human present; and so man must be regarded as incalculable. From an inquiry into a single innate pattern of human behavior we shall gain few precise formulas to feed into the computer of the human future. We shall be unable to guess, for example, what would have happened in 1940 if France had possessed an alpha fish of the order of a Churchill, a De Gaulle, or even a Joffre. The incisively different responses of the Belgians in the two wars, in the first led by Albert I, in the second by a nonentity, would point to the importance of an alpha fish in the territorial tank. About such matters as these we cannot speculate without valid knowledge of the social mechanism. But this we may say with definition: the presence of a single, dominant, even magical individual in a society would be meaningless were there not in his social partners a territorial imperative awaiting release.

Man may be incalculable. But within his potentiality are knowable ingredients which may combine. They were unknown to the intruders of the 1940's, as they are unknown to the intruders of the 1960's. Twenty-two years after Dr. Carpenter's last return from the rain forest to the century's intellectual wilderness, it was still possible for a military adventurer to approach catastrophe lacking the roughest estimate of the territorial imperative's lunatic dimensions. [224]

We need not stir about among buried recollections to recall that in the autumn of 1962 an irreproachably innocent Kremlin directed the secret mounting of nuclear missiles in certain shy Cuban preserves. Since the missiles were directed at various American capitals, they constituted a territorial intrusion of magnitude. The Americans, however, were believed to be fat, they were rich, they were preoccupied with the material things of life, they were politically divided at home and diplomatically irresolute abroad. That they were all of these things is indisputable, yet such indulgences did not add up to a noyau, for American society was not held together by inner antagonisms and we remained a biological nation. The threat was revealed. And while a helpless, watching world suffered a succession of. cold sweats and heart attacks, the American put his Cadillac in the garage, returned his two-inch steak to the frigidaire, turned off the television set and the air-conditioning, kissed his wife and his children and the stock market goodbye and marched as one man to the confrontation. The Soviets withdrew. And the world in a dead faint was carried out of the ball park.

None can fail to be grateful to a Kremlin willing to admit its error, and with its withdrawal publicly to accept a humiliation from which Soviet prestige has not yet recovered. No man alive, however, has the right to expect that the next intruder will have the willingness or the capacity to accept a comparable humiliation. And so we face a choice of clear order: we may provide ourselves and all aggressors among us with more reliable information on which to base our estimates of man; or, when the moment of truth arrives, we shall be permitted to take our seats in the last grandstand and to put our hands over our ears. We shall have had it coming. We shall have been selected out.

Territory is not the cause of war. It is the cause of war only in the sense that it takes two to make an argument. What territory promises is the high probability that if intrusion takes place, war will follow.

In his Essays on Human Evolution, published soon after the last world war, Sir Arthur Keith expressed his view that [225] to discover the causes of war one need look no further than to territory. His final great work a few years later, A New Theory of Human Evolution, incorporated the territorial principle into a general hypothesis regarding the emergence of man from his subhuman primate ancestry. It is the only major work in which the modern concept, denied Darwin when he wrote The Descent of Man, is fully ex-plored^as a force playing on our origins and on the development of modern and ancient societies. Much of it is cluttered; much of it leaps to conclusions which we know today are unjustified; much of it records the thoughts of a very old man who, knowing that he is committing to print his last words, commits too many: yet among modern studies in anthropology it stands as a masterwork, a memory of the time of the giants. But the final great work by the greatest of anthropologists was published in 1948 when the dogmas of environmentalism had begun to establish their cartels in the traffic of learning, and so the master-work remains all but unread.

Much of Keith I agree with, but I do not accept and have not accepted his conclusion that territory is the cause of war. I have been frequently misinterpreted, although I wrote clearly in African Genesis:

I should suggest today that Sir Arthur . . . spoke too soon. The more recent revelations of our African beginnings have contributed factors more starkly terrifying than simple territoriality to the animal instincts directing our behavior. In contrast, the drive to gain and defend a territory, even to live in undying hostility with one's neighbors, must be interpreted ... as a conservative force in the broad panorama of species.

Later in the book I added:

But the drive to maintain and defend a territory can be regarded not as a cause but only as a condition of human war. One can recognize its workings in the fury of a Finland attacked by a monstrous large enemy; in the madness of Hungarians attempting to reassert their land's integrity; or in the lonely, irrational heroism of the Battle of Britain, when never did so many owe so much to so few. These were [226] defensive social actions taken in strict accordance with territorial law and deriving from profound instinct the unbelievable magnitude of their energy. But in every case territory was the condition of war, not its cause.

Since I wrote these lines, our new knowledge of monkeys and apes has underlined the conservatism of the territorial principle. The biological nation we have seen emerge as at once the maximum guardian of a population's integrity and the maximum source of social amity as a product of outward antagonism. But in primate societies the biological nation as guardian of security has perhaps been too perfect, for it has sacrificed stimulation, the second of territory's psychological functions. The fun, one might say, has gone out of the border. The concerted defense of a border by forty, fifty, or a hundred animals leaves the intruder in a condition less stimulated than stupefied. And so the more sophisticated and highly evolved among primate species -- the great apes, the baboons, the langurs, the vervet, rhesus, and Japanese monkeys -- no longer intrude but maintain each other's exclusive space by avoidance.

If this be so -- and I am speculating, since we possess no fossil record of ancient behavior to confirm this evolutionary progress from defense to avoidance -- then a great red question mark must overhang the human species: Why has man, with all his intellectual resources, been incapable either through intuition or instruction of absorbing a lesson so obvious to monkeys and apes? Why do we still intrude when the consequences are apt to be more painful than paying?

Primate example is not quite so speculative as lack of a fossil history might indicate. Washburn has estimated that in two years we shall have doubled the material we now possess, whereas two years ago, for lack of observations, it was difficult to teach a class in primate behavior. It is a time, today, of chilling risk to make sweeping generaliza-* tions concerning not only the behavior of primates but the evolution of that behavior. Nevertheless, strong hints have] already accumulated. Pairs like the gibbon and callicebusj intrude and defend with all the enthusiasm of gulls on moor hens. The noisy, belligerent biological nations are'i confined to species forming groups of moderate number* [227] whereas with the exception of the rhesus the more potentially powerful societies -- larger and stronger as individual animals, or larger and stronger in numbers -- have substituted avoidance for defense, outward indifference for outward antagonism.

The student of man, perturbed by the future of human warfare, by the apparently inviolate laws of territorial conflict, and by human reluctance to abandon the intruding way, may find the baboon the most instructive of species. Among primates his aggressiveness is second only to man's. He is a born bully, a born criminal, a born candidate for the hangman's noose. As compared with the gorilla -- that gentle, inoffensive, submissive creature for whom a minimum of tyranny yields a maximum of results -- the baboon represents nature's most lasting challenge to the police state. He is as submissive as a truck, as inoffensive as a bulldozer, as gentle as a power-driven lawnmower. He is ugly. He has the yellow-to-amber eyes that one associates with the riverboat gambler. He has predatory inclinations, and in certain seasons he enjoys nothing better than killing and devouring the newborn fawns of the delicate gazelle. And he will steal anything. The thief of Africa harbors an insatiable appetite for everything a farm [228] can provide, from maize to orchard fruit. Men and baboons have been at war since the farmer black or white first planted a crop. But the creature has cunning. Raiding an orchard, a troop shows little fear of women. Should, however, an outraged farmer appear disguised in a woman's dress, the troop will spot him at hundreds of yards and go over the hill.

It is this animal -- this oversized terrestrial monkey whose ways are so uncomfortably reminiscent of man's -- who has proved just how brilliantly the primate alliance of body, brain, and highly organized society can be made to pay off. It is this animal -- with his gang of implacable thugs at the top, also so unpleasantly reminiscent of man -- who has proved how effectively tyranny and fear may socialize the most incorrigible of rogues. Yet K. R. L. Hall, S. L. Washburn, and Irven DeVore, in a combined 2000 hours of published observations of the most aggressive of subhuman primates, never witnessed a single demonstration of territorial conflict. Exclusive ranges are large, so large that there may be overlap around the edges. But troops maintain exclusiveness by avoidance. Even at waterholes they ignore each other.

Has the baboon learned, as man might learn, that intrusion on a social territory defended by fifty or a hundred members is an experience so unrewarding as to be best not attempted? Should this be so, then the experience must have come about so long ago that avoidance has become a segment of the baboon's innate behavioral equipment; the observers witnessed no example of juveniles learning through the punishment of experience. Or, on the other hand, is the baboon simply the way he is because it is the way he always has been, thus offering no evolutionary hope for intruding man? A single observation points to the optimistic conclusion that the baboon is as territorial in his responses as the most belligerent of] proprietors, and that it is experience, probably ancient, that has brought peace to his kind.

Some time after Hall had completed and published hi study of the chacma baboon in the Cape of Good Hope he shifted his attention to the patas monkey in northwesteri Uganda. Ronald Hall was widely regarded as the world' foremost student of primates in the wild; perhaps it wad because of his energy, perhaps because of his attitude toward science, which combined formidable imagination [229] with the formidable objectivity of a hard-nosed Chicago cop. It was in the superheated bush-and-savannah country lying at the bottom of the Rift Valley that we met and, for reasons unclear to either of us, became instant friends. Later, in the spring of 1964 on his return through Rome, he described the incident which for him had been of such highly dramatic order.

Since baboons and patas monkeys in this area frequent the same regions, Hall had been keeping an eye on his old loves as well as his new. The patas troop moves so rapidly, it takes an energetic observer to keep up with them. Nevertheless, Hall had become familiar with all the baboon troops in the area, knew their ranges and approximate populations. Then one morning, pursuing his patas group, he came on a troop of baboons feeding peacefully in the heartland of another troop's range. He knew that the resident troop was small, numbering no more than twenty-five. The intruding troop was large, over twice the size. He had never witnessed such a deep intrusion, nor to bis knowledge had Washburn or DeVore. The residents were away somewhere on their range, far out of sight. What would happen when and if they returned? The potential drama was too much for Hall. He let his patas go their way, and settled down to wait.

The morning slipped past into the stunned, low-altitude African noon. The baboons before him, all up in a clump of trees gathering fruit, continued to feed peacefully. Then it happened. Over a distant yellow rise came a few young males, the normal vanguard of a baboon troop in movement. They sighted the intruders, started barking and advancing. And that was all that was necessary. The feeding trees rained baboons like palm trees their coconuts in a sudden tropical storm. Within minutes the intruders were a mile away.

In Hall's opinion it had been territorial behavior in the strictest sense: the attack of the defenders despite all odds; the instant recognition on the part of the intruder of the proprietor's rights; the panic flight. The intrusion, so rare in baboons, may have come about by accident, by oversight of leadership. But the incident had demonstrated that baboon peace is maintained not by unwillingness to defend, not by lack of that innate territorial command dominating the lives of roebuck and gibbon, three-spined [230] stickleback and great-crested grebe, but simply by unwillingness to intrude.

An innate compulsion to defend one's property lies, of course, at the heart of the territorial principle; but just as close to its heart lies recognition of the rights of the next animal. And this too must command the attention of the political scientist, the statesman, or any student, amateur or professional, whose thoughts turn to the human future. Stephen Gartlan, until Hall's death one of his students at the University of Bristol, spent almost two years in the midst of Lake Victoria on an island inhabited only by himself and 1500 vervet monkeys. It is thirty miles to the nearest landfall on the Kenya shore; when and how the ancestors of the present vervet population became isolated on Lolui Island we do not know. Natural increase, however, has brought about conditions verging on overcrowding, for the island is but eleven square miles in extent and only its margins offer vervet comfort. The troops have divided this margin into territory-ranges little over an acre in size, and Gartlan has told me that the borders are so clean and so permanent that they could be marked with whitewash. Every economic pressure would seem to impel intrusion. Yet Gartlan never observed territorial conflict or defense. A troop on infrequent occasion might intrude along the edges of the next troop's property but it would flee at the sight of the residents.

Jean-Jacques Petter on Madagascar watched black lemur groups, regularly leaving their territories to seek water, skirting the borders of other groups' properties though it meant taking the long way around. Durward Allen and his students from Purdue University have watched for season after season two packs of timber wolves on a huge island in Lake Superior. The wolves have divided the island into hunting territories, one approximately double the size of the other. The large one is oc- i cupied by a pack of fifteen or sixteen animals, the smaller j by a group no larger than three or four. Yet the large pack 1 is never to be found on the smaller pack's domain, despite ] the minimum resistance which the small pack could offer. 1 Farley Mowat found the same recognition of rights among i Arctic wolves on Canada's forsaken Barren Lands of the! Keewatin Peninsula. In one of the most hilarious yetl penetrating books on animal behavior ever published,! [231] Never Cry Wolf, he records the arrival of visiting wolves at the local pack's borders. Sniffing, nose rubbing, and tail wagging denoting friendly intentions are dutifully, even ceremoniously, exchanged. And the visitors in all hospitality are issued their visas.

A comparable ceremonial gathering was witnessed by P. O. Swanberg in his remarkable observations of a remarkably specialized bird, the thick-billed nutcracker. The bird lives in Swedish pine forests, nesting in holes in the trees, but gains its living from adjoining hazel woods. For thirteen years Swanberg kept track of his pairs on their exclusive domains and never witnessed intrusion except just before nesting time. Then all the local proprietors would gather on the homestead of an amiable host in what Swanberg could only interpret as a ceremonial festival.

With or without ceremonial exception, we witness the observation of property rights in species after species. Baumgartner watched great horned owls in Kansas. Never so far as he could observe did they leave their hunting territories. Loye Miller watched the same great predatory birds in California's San Bernardino Mountains. He learned to imitate their calls, and to coax them to follow him; but he could never coax them to cross the neutral strips into the next pair's hunting territory. Bushmen may wound an animal in the Kalahari desert; but, famished though they may be, they will not follow it if the animal crosses the neutral zone into the next band's territory.

We have seen in all our collected observations of arena, [232] pair, and social animals the inhibition that saps the confidence of the intruder; it is recognition of the proprietor's rights. And almost from the beginning of territorial observation students have jotted in their notebooks the evidences of a sense of wrongdoing on the part of the lawbreaker. Long ago Kenneth Gordon reported the behavior of a thief on a territory adjoining his camp in Oregon. This was one of the Douglas squirrels that frequent the towering stands of Douglas fir. The proprietor of this territory was 200 feet overhead, busily occupied with scaling cones in the crown of a fir, quite unable to see what was happening on his borders below. Scales fluttering down testified to his location and to his preoccupation. Yet when the thief intruded to steal a cone on the ground, his movements were furtive, hesitant, nervous, "guilty." Even longer ago Stevenson-Hamilton, founder of South Africa's renowned Kruger game reserve, reported on the obvious "guilt" of a blue wildebeest intruding on the exclusive pastures of another herd. And that hard-nosed observer of the callicebus monkey William Mason has recorded the same behavior on the part of the thief in a noyau. Normal intrusion, we may recall, is formal, takes place at an appointed hour, and will never occur unless the neighboring proprietors are present to contribute their share to an elegant row. But after hours and for other purposes intrusion takes a far different form. The callicebus may be tempted to steal a bit of fruit from his neighbor's estate. He will accomplish the larceny alone, when no one from either his own side or the other can observe him. And "guilt" again becomes the only word to describe his actions. Furtive, alert, nerves a-popping, he will consummate his theft and leap back to the portion of the earth's surface where his presence violates no rights.

The austere Niko Tinbergen, in his The Study of Instinct, condemns subjective interpretations of animal actions: "Because subjective phenomena cannot be observed objectively in animals, it is idle either to claim or deny their existence." And yet so objectively demonstrated is this universal recognition of territorial rights that in a later book he was moved to write: "Trespassers are personifications of bad conscience; territory owners those of righteous indignation." I have said that at the heart of the territorial principle lies the command to defend one's property, but as close to the heart lies recognition of the next animal's rights. But [233] we may state it in .another way, from the viewpoint of the intruder. Fundamental to the territorial principle are two opposing impulses: there is the urge to intrude on the property of one's neighbor, and the urge to avoid it. Out of the basic psychological need for stimulation or the alluring temptation of loot, the balance will be swung in favor of intrusion. But if the life of a species keeps the animal too busy gathering hazelnuts in far-off thickets or provides him with such hazards and natural excitements as abundantly to fill his daily quota of thrills, or if some defensive asset of the proprietor -- shocking fangs, appalling claws, a murderous disposition, or the concerted ranks of a biological nation -- renders loot unlikely and excitement suicidal, then the balance of innate command will be swung toward avoidance. Animal treaties will be signed. Rights will be not only recognized but honored. Uninvited guests will be few.

There is nothing in the territorial principle to deny peace among nations. The student of man's evolutionary nature may ask his great-aunt to embroider the statement on fine linen, that it may be framed and hung on the wall where once hung the testament home sweet home. Nothing in animal example or primate precedent offers any but the conclusion that territory is conservative, that it is invariably defensive, that the biological nation is the supreme natural mechanism for the security of a social group, and that when intrusion becomes maladaptive and no longer of selective value to a species, the territorial imperative will itself command its abandonment.

The question, then, must again arise: Why do men intrude? And once more we must remind ourselves that we are not the descendants of these monkeys and apes which today we so assiduously observe. We are distant, distant cousins with our own ancient line of evolutionary experience and selection. And once more we must remind ourselves, too, that as man is not all sex, and not all economics, and not all cultural tradition, and not all a pot rounded on environment's wheel, so he is not all territory. We are also predators.

The Miocene was an epoch of world-wide benevolence. Rain was abundant; lakes brimmed. Forests were richly [234] disposed, lending comfort of leaf and fruit to their arboreal inhabitants. Modern grasses took root as never before. Broad were the prairies, green the pastures, fat the grazing creatures who dined thereon. And in this fortunate time the ape that would someday be man spoke his evolutionary farewell to the ape that would someday be chimp or gorilla.

It was a long time ago. The Miocene ended as best we can reckon about twelve million years ago, to give way to the deepening despairs of the drought-ridden Pliocene. Good times had lasted long, however -- almost twenty million years. For the human mind to comprehend such spacious vistas of ensuing seasons is a challenge as formidable as the counting of milestones lying between stars. Time and space may yield to our mathematics, but they become as one in their defiance of our perceptions. And yet, with a reality as true as tomorrow or the fall of next autumn's bright leaves, the Miocene passed like infinity's procession through twenty long millions of years. Animals bred, died. Generations of horses and mice and monkeys joined the ancient democracy of death. The advancing shore of life formed new coves, new sea cliffs, or clung to old broad seemly beaches facing out on posterity's unknowable sea.

We went our way. We left our bones on this old mountainside or beside that lake. More and more we lived beneath the open sky, less and less beneath the forest canopy. We were the adventurers, the seekers after farther fields, whereas our cousins of the forest remained the conservators of the arboreal primate traditions. Luck and circumstance combined, here and there, to preserve our bones for a fossil eternity. Rarely in the depths of the forest, amid the rot and disintegration of broken bough and fallen leaf, could the arboreal ape anticipate such immortality. Fragmentary though knowledge of our own history may be, our knowledge of his is less.

Even from these bits and pieces, however, that have come to us from most ancient of days, we may demonstrate or deduce a few fair certainties. When in the midst of the Miocene, twenty or twenty-five million years ago, our hominid line renounced the arboreal way to embrace a life on •the ground, we accepted hazards and opportunities, stimulations and social necessities of an order quite different from life in the trees. The ruthless commands of natural selection would press us one way, press the ape of the forest [235] another. We retained the vulnerable primate body, but any mutation favoring survival on the hostile earth would spread through the generations to whole populations, fhrough the ages to entire species. Our feet flattened, our backs straightened, our buttocks strengthened their muscular arrangements to permit us to run. And as more and more we became specialized earthlings, so more and more it became anatomically impossible for us to return to the arboreal life. Such trends take place in an evolving world. A minor alteration of behavior and body, a change of equivocal value, may command that further genetic alteration be of increased specific value until a course is determined, and horses are set upon their way, men upon theirs. Now evolution becomes irreversible.

As important as our anatomical adjustments to the terrestrial life were the psychological changes which such life commanded. Shyness is a luxury permitted the mountain gorilla in his high, remote, cloud-softened bamboo thickets. The modesty once demanded of the tiny, primitive mammal in his monster-dominated times retained a value in the lives of jungle primates with profound green tangles of vine and leaf in which they might vanish. But for the ape of the field in those long-gone Miocene times, hiding places might be far from hand. Not unlike the baboon today, the aggressive spirit became a survival asset. Time and again we had no alternative but to stand and fight. And the social necessity, since the time of the true lemur a primate compulsion, doubled and redoubled its survival value.

So we, the developing hominid, found ourselves committed to a course quite unlike our ever more distant forest cousins. We scratched for a living. Like the baboon we became omnivorous. Apes and monkeys in their forest home might retain their dependence on fruits and shoots. We came to eat anything. In all likelihood, long before the Pliocene presented all primates with a climatic crisis, we developed a certain taste for meat. The savannah chimpanzee, Jane Goodall has learned, will kill a young bushbuck or monkey and devour it with utmost relish. The baboon when fortune presents him with a victim will do the same, and when the season is right will become a systematic predator. Neither, however, is dependent on meat, and neither, probably, were we -- not so long, at least, as the mellow Miocene brought to our table a copious larder.

Millennia passed upon millennia. And something new [236] came into our lives -- new in the history of primates -- and the new thing was freedom. Our growing adaptation to life on the ground gave us the freedom to move anywhere; our growing independence from any single source of food made us free to adapt to this environment or that; our growingly aggressive spirit gave us the freedom to dare, to explore. It is a quality in animals which ten years ago we should have dismissed with raised scientific eyebrows. But now we know that in countless species there is an innate compulsion to explore, lacking either the pressure of deprivation or the seeking of economic reward. Adventure -- there is no other word for it -- satisfies the basic need for stimulation. Whether we sought adventure in the old lost golden days, we cannot know. But we were free to. And then came the Pliocene.

The prime time of a good, ripe earth slowly vanished. Seasonal rains on the high African plateaus became shorter and more irregular. Old lakes shrank; rivers became less dependable. Forests diminished, and with them the primate populations imprisoned by forest necessity. Grasslands spread, and impenetrable deserts like the Sahara and the Kalahari made of certain African areas impassable seas of sand. Perhaps these were the days when the ancestral baboon took to the field, and certain monkeys like the patas and vervet found marginal accommodation to terrestrial life. But we do not know anything for sure. So dry became the Pliocene that the fossil record vanished. There was not enough water to provide the lime to turn bone into stone.

We who complain of a drought lasting four or five years, what shall we say of a drought that lasted, with deepening ferocity, for ten or twelve million? And yet it was the time that saw the making of man as we know him. He became a carnivore. The grasslands still teemed with those edible grazing creatures prepared by evolutionary fortune to survive on the Pliocene's scant offerings. Perhaps at first we scavenged the kills of the lion and cheeta and leopard, and we competed with hyena and jackal and vulture for the crumbs of the kills. We retained our omnivorous way, our taste for roots and tubers, when we could find them, and for berries and edible greens; even the chimpanzee when he is consuming a monkey will after each bite eat a leaf, just as man, today, will eat salad. But we became [237] dependent on meat as our main source of sustenance, and sooner or later we*became systematic hunters.

When exactly did it happen? Again, we do not know. It was Raymond A. Dart who discovered man's predecessor in the hominid line, southern Africa's small-brained aus-tralopithecines, and it was Dart who formulated the theory of the predatory transition from ape to man. And in the past five years -- in the same period when, as with a burst of stage lighting, science has illuminated the lives and the dramas of monkeys and apes -- science has likewise gone far to illuminate the hominid stage on which the human drama was prepared. The spectacular discoveries of Louis S. B. Leakey and his family in East African fossil beds have confirmed the theories of Raymond Dart. But they have not informed us as to just when proto-man became a predator, dependent on his hunting life for survival.

I have regretted in these pages that we must confine our thoughts to the subject of territory and cannot stray far into the evolution of society and the influence of animal dominance on the ways of modern man. But I have little regret that for another five years I may postpone an inquiry into the relation of predator and prey and its significance to our evolutionary behavior. In African Genesis I predicted that Tanganyika's Olduvai Gorge would prove to be the Grand Canyon of Human Evolution. Then it was all but unknown; five years later it is besieged by tourists. What will happen in the next five years to our knowledge of human evolution, no one can say. Discoveries pile on discoveries. For lack of time, adequate scientific descriptions are lacking. Authorities disagree as to interpretation; contradictory statements appear in the scientific press. It is a poor time indeed for lasting conclusions.

In our concern for territory one deduction, however, will probably prove unshakable: with the coming of the [238] hunting life to the emerging hominid came the dedication to territory which we regard as human. S. L. Washburn and V. Avis, just before the rush of discoveries, stated admirably the effects of the hunting life:

Hunting as an important activity had three important effects on human behavior and human nature: psychological, social, and territorial. Man takes pleasure in hunting other animals. Unless careful training has hidden the natural drives, men enjoy the chase and the kill. In most cultures torture and suffering are made public spectacles for the enjoyment of all. The victims may be either animal or human. This behavior is strikingly similar to that of many carnivores, and no parallel behavior has been observed in wild primates. . . . Hunting not only necessitated new activities and new kinds of cooperation but changed the role of the adult male in the group. Among the vegetarian primates, adult males do not share food. They take the best places for feeding and may even take food from less dominant animals. However, since sharing the kill is normal behavior for many carnivores, economic responsibility of adult males and the practice of sharing food in the group probably result from being carnivorous. The very same actions which caused man to be feared by other animals led to more cooperation, food sharing, and interdependence of the group. . . . The acquisition of hunting habits must have been accompanied by a great enlargement of territory since the source of food was now more erratic and mobile.

They conclude:

The world view of the early human carnivore must have been very different from that of his vegetarian cousins. The interests of the latter could be satisfied in a small area, and other animals were of little moment, except for the few that threatened attack. But the desire for meat leads animals to know a wider range and to learn the habits of many animals. Human territorial habits and psychology are fundamentally different from those of apes and monkeys. For at least 300,000 years (perhaps twice that) carnivorous [239] curiosity and aggression have been added to the in-quisitiveness and dominance striving of the ape. This carnivorous psychology was fully formed by the middle Pleistocene and it may have had its beginnings in the depredations of the australopithecines.

I have quoted Washburn at length because of his broad knowledge of man's place in the natural world. He published these thoughts in 1958, just before Leakey's discovery of the australopithecine Zinjanthropus in the Olduvai Gorge. That discovery led to the uncovering of Homo habilis in the oldest sediments of the gorge and publication in 1964. Whether habilis is in fact man or an advanced australopithecine is a matter of scientific dispute, and largely one of semantics. But neither his antiquity nor his manner of life is disputable. He lived about two million years ago, an age corroborated by two independent means of radiogenic dating, fission-track and potassium-argon. And he was a hunter.

The predatory life, and with it the human commitment to territory, was pushed back a few ages with the discovery of Homo habilis. A small, agile, toolmaking being with a brain half the size of modern man's had flourished in East Africa a million and a half years before the demonstrated presence on earth of those developed beings which we might call true men. And he had lived at least in large part by killing, as the litter of bones on his living site bears testimony. But how much earlier had the way of the killer been the way of man's ancestors?

It is at this point that we encounter just one of those confusions and ambiguities so characteristic of the new discoveries. In his early announcements and at two lectures which I attended in London, Leakey emphasized that the fossil bones of creatures found at the early living sites were of small animals, giving indication that Homo habilis was an awkward and inexperienced hunter, and that the predatory way was new. But in 1965 the Cambridge University Press published the first of a series of definitive volumes on Olduvai Gorge, its geology, its climates, and its fossil remains. And in this Dr. Leakey refers to the presence of Bovidae, that zoological family which in Africa includes all manner of buffalo and antelope. And he writes:

Fossil remains of Bovidae are exceedingly plentiful in the Olduvai deposits. There are two reasons for this. [240] In the first place Bovidae normally represent a high proportion of the total animal population of most African habitats other than dense forest. Consequently it is only to be expected that fossil remains of this group should outnumber those of any other. Secondly, the vast majority of the fossils which we find in the excavations come from living-floors or camp-sites of prehistoric man and represent the remains of his meals. Man apparently preferred the flesh of Bovidae to that of many other groups, as he does throughout the world today.

At the end of his long and exquisitely detailed examination of the extinct genera and species of Bovidae which have been found and so far described, he writes:

Perhaps the most remarkable fact that emerges so far is the scarcity of fossils representing the smaller members of the Bovidae, for example the duikers, the dik-dik, the oribi, the steinbok and the klipspringer. This cannot be due to the bones of these species being small and possibly escaping notice since thousands of bones of much smaller size are in the collections. There must therefore be some other and at present unexplained reason for the scarcity of small antelope remains on the living-floors of the early hominids.

Despite our most clinging antipathies concerning the antiquity of man's predatory ways, or our most personal prejudices against acceptance of Raymond Dart's thesis, ■so long held, so long rejected, that the selective necessities placed on ancient killers accomplished the transmutation of ape to man, there must seem to the layman no unfathomable mystery about the scarcity of small antelope remains on the living-floors of early hominids. Homo habilis killed ancestral buffalo, eland, kudu, and wildebeest because they had more meat on them than the ancestral duiker, dik-dik, oribi, and steinbok. And far from being a beginner at the killing game, far from being as first described an awkward pursuer of dassies and rabbits, this pygmy-sized predator of the high savannah, two million years ago, was a skilled and successful hunter of what man today would still call big game. One must surmise that he had been practicing his trade, even then, for quite some time. [241]

We killed animals ten or twenty times our size. Did we kill each other, or was this some later and more manlike innovation? When Leakey first announced his sensational discovery but had not yet concluded that his find deserved the title of Homo, he told a Washington press conference that the child -- Homo habilis was perhaps twelve years old -- had been murdered. The headlines glared; so did his colleagues. Leakey had offered science no evidence to support his claim. Nor did he ever to my knowledge repeat the claim in public or provide appropriate evidence. The sensation died away. Few realized that the murdered child, called by Leakey "pre-Zinj" in 1961, was 1964's Homo habilis. But I have examined the fossil, and the once-living being died of a radiating fracture of the skull. Did the youngster run into a tree on a dark night? The fracture is centered on top of his head, an awkward situation for such an injury. Did a stone roll down the steep slopes of the gorge to score a direct, unlucky hit on his crown? There was no gorge two million years ago; the site was then a flat plain beside a lake.

Leakey was correct, I believe, when he issued his original statement, and until convincing evidence is offered to the contrary, the supposition must remain that the earliest known specimen of our probable ancestry died from a blow by a probable weapon in the hands of another of our probable ancestors. But why this most significant attribute of the world's most famous and significant fossil should be consigned along with other skeletons to the concealing darkness of the human closet remains any man's guess.

Back in 1910 William James anticipated the new anthropology when he wrote, "Our ancestors have bred pugnacity into our bone and marrow, and thousands of years of peace won't breed it out of us." Man is a predator of long predatory origins, whose predatory nature has shaped much that we are. We cannot in this brief digression inquire into the nuances of our predatory past, nor do our rapidly accumulating, hastily interpreted evidences yet permit such inquiry. But we may be permitted, nevertheless, certain broad conclusions:

The dependence of our small-brained hominid ancestors on the hunting life may date back perhaps millions of years into the demanding, desiccated Pliocene. So long have we been hunters that a specific instinct has become part of our [242] evolutionary equipment. Even Tinbergen grants, "The human male is a hunting animal."

Unarmed and unarmored because of our primate legacy, we were pitifully equipped for offense or defense on the hostile savannah. In the mid-Miocene we still retained, like today's baboon, formidable canines, our fighting te,eth. But the adoption of the weapon in the hand reduced such teeth as redundant. The canines of Homo habilis are as small as modern man's. And a startling fossil from Kenya's late Miocene, fourteen and a half million years ago, shows the same reduced canines. Were we armed, perhaps defensively, even at that date?

We were small, we were vulnerable. We could have hunted large game successfully only in bands with certain, reliable leadership and certain, reliable co-operation of individuals willing to risk death for the success of the band. The way of the chimpanzee was not for us.

As we were predators, we were also prey. While we hunted the grazing creatures of the savannah, so the carnivorous creatures hunted us, for we were edible. There is little reason to believe that in those far-off years before the development of sophisticated weapons the lion regarded emerging man with fear, or as anything other than a proper luncheon.

That we preyed on each other is probable, and rests on evidence broader than the fractured skull of some forgotten youth. Cannibalism has been a prevalent pastime throughout all of the human record. Half a million years ago Peking man left the first real assemblage of true man's remains in the caves of Chou Kou Tien. The skulls had been opened to extract the brains.

Faced by equivalent necessities for successful aggression and successful defense, the hominid band faced ultimate necessities for social amity and co-operation and maximum exercise of primate wit. Are we to wonder that emerging man turned to the biological nation, the defense of a social territory, and a society of outward antagonism to weld his numbers into one?

From his beginnings in Miocene days through the deprivations of the desperate Pliocene and on into the vagaries, the glaciers, the pluvials of a Pleistocene blowing now hot, now cold, now wet, now dry, the evolution of man has brought him to his present estate: he is the world's [243] most successful predator, and the richest of all the world's prey.

Are we to wonder that man intrudes?

The He Rousseau is not much over a hundred yards in diameter and it is covered by poplar trees that in midsummer drop a deep clear shade on the island and furnish intense contrast to the shining lake. Whether one should say that the island rises in the middle of the Lake of Geneva or in the middle of the River Rhone is a matter of taste; the lake at this point is narrowing so rapidly into its outlet, the Rhone, that one cannot be sure. A long flat bridge with a bend in the middle -- the shape is that of a dog-leg fairway on a golf course -- connects the two halves of the city of Geneva and makes of the island a leisurely moment of stock-taking at the point of the bend.

When I first moved to Europe I lived for two years at one end of the bridge in a venerable hotel which, mourned by many, was later torn down. On my occasional visits since then, I have found it rewarding to stop at a hotel at the other end of the bridge. Despite not infrequent times of despair and disillusionment which I associate with Geneva and share with the world, I love the city. And despite those [244] cherished animosities which I lavish on the man for whom the island was named, I love the lie Rousseau. It provides for the traveler as it provides for the bridge a rare moment of stock-taking, a contemplative opportunity to watch nothing but swans go by.

It was in this lovable Geneva that, on a recent trip back to Rome from somewhere, an airline strike grounded me for a day or two. There are joys that one never seeks but must have forced upon one. I read my newspaper under the plane trees of a favorite riverside place; I consumed slices of that orange cake which only the Genevoise seem to know how to make; I drank renverse, the local concoction of hot milk and coffee which is not cafe au lait and is not cappuccino. I walked in the Jardin des Anglais and recalled with something like affection the summit conference of 1955 when Eisenhower met here with Bulganin and Khrushchev to settle some territorial disputes; their affable accord -- it was called the Spirit of Geneva -- lasted, as I remember, for about six weeks. And I recalled with greater melancholy a night when the city of peace and reason lost its self-possession. Hungarian dreams had been blasted in Budapest by 4000 Russian tanks. Every light in the city was turned off. I had never seen the Swiss weep before, nor have I since. But the Genevoise, that night, dressed themselves in black and marched in silence through their darkened streets. There was no sound but the shuffle of feet, and the slow, grave tolling of the great deep bell in the cathedral up on the hill. Men wept that night, and old walls too.

You sit in the shade of the poplars on the He Rousseau, or take a table \n the islet's little restaurant. You order a Punt e Mes or a second-rate omelet. A swan slides past in state. You take stock, look back with nostalgia on a city that ever so briefly was once your home. It was never reason that failed in this city of failure so world-renowned; it was unreason. Sentimentality, ignorance, hypocrisy, illusion -- these have been the legions that marched and countermarched on the fields above the shining lake. On the parade grounds before the Palais des Nations, savagery could pass in the gowns of civilization, brutality in the disguise of man's nobility, greed and relentless self-seeking on the stilts of high purpose. Here on this neutral ground spies of all nations could meet to sell each other secrets, and diplomats to exchange human rationalizations of animal [245] demands. Self-delusion, the final lie, has been amply tried here and amply found wanting. Truth and reason, on the other hand, have seldom been tested.

It is a paradox of sorts that one who defends the primacy of instinct in the transactions of man finds himself defending the primacy of mind as well. In the course of meditation I have found it necessary, now and again, to invent new terms or give new meanings to old ones. So broad is the no man's land between the natural and the social sciences, between reality and romance, that there does not exist even a common vocabulary. I have kidnapped from ethology certain terms like alpha fish, "pecking order, displacement activity, territory itself, and in their human application I have adhered to strictest biological definition. I have never, for example, extended the concept of territory beyond its biological meaning, defense of an area of space. But in other situations there exists no vocabulary at all. And so I have introduced such terms as the noyau and the biological nation, and the societies of inward and outward antagonism. I have spoken of a biological morality to describe that conduct dictated by innate command which sacrifices individual interest for a larger or longer good, and soon I must turn to the amity-enmity complex.

So it has been that I have introduced the terms closed and open instincts, more sharply to define those innate patterns of behavior common to all higher animals which to complete their patterns must gain information from individual experience, from home and school and the street. A Frenchman must learn that he is French: the passion for territory is inborn, its borders learned. The German must learn to speak German: his capacity to speak and his necessity to communicate with his kind are innate, but the words he must learn. And so it is that one who defends the primacy of human instincts defends the quality of human mind that in the end will complete the innate patterns.

The failure of Geneva has been symbolic of a worldwide failure of mind: the failure to recognize those inborn patterns which human experience must fill. We have led our children to believe that babies are born good, and that if subsequent behavior leads them straight to the jailhouse the fault must be somebody else's; we have not spoken of that Intruding Man lying within every human- heart, and for which every human being must assume responsibility. [246] We have many of us encouraged our children to believe that Territorial Man is a disgrace, a creature of greed and cruelty. We have not mentioned that Intruding Man and Territorial Man are fraternal twins, born on the old, dry African savannah, the Cain and Abel of the inmost human psyche.

Geneva is a symbol: here we enshrined our fallacies, entombed our futures. Truth was never explored, never displayed, never tested. Why not? Because, I believe, we could afford the luxury of lies. The fate of nations might be always at stake, but never the fate of man. Such times are gone. You and I know that we live in years of strange grace. It is a time of peace enforced by terror, an era without precedent since those terrestrial apes who someday would be man first emerged from the forest galleries of the African Miocene. It is an interlude which mathematical probability dictates must end at some unpredictable date in ten or a hundred years -- or even tomorrow -- when the wheel stops and the ball falls on double zero, when the house wins and all customers lose, and total accident or total cynicism at last finds us out. We face, in other words, Judgment Day. And when the day comes, natural selection must make a grave decision. For all of its show and all of its splendor, just how much has the natural experiment with the big brain been worth?

The great apes have failed. The orangutan, the gorilla, the chimpanzee proceed at varying pace toward an extinction hastened but not caused by man. No remote destiny, no orthogenetic favor reaching down through the billennia from the time of original animation dictates that man's fate will be unlike the gorilla's. Every species comes equipped with its own Judgment Day when changing environments demand a balance sheet of total assets and total liabilities. Man's uniqueness among species rests on his capacity to perfect the arrangements for his own Judgment Day, instead of waiting for nature to do it for him.

In this interval of the second chance, how shall we conduct ourselves? Shall we continue on the course of falsehood, accomplishing with remarkable consistency the precise opposite of our best intentions? Or shall we with all resolve and courage look into our most secret hearts and, allying the wisdom of old natural forces with that intelligence which has made us men, trust that a hand will reach into the game and stay the wheel as the ball nears double [247] zero? If we dispose such trust, then we must know, of course, that the game will continue. Homo sapiens must learn not only to live with a final fear, but to use it. He must recognize that from Hiroshima to eternity he will live and behave in full knowledge that the Judgment Day of his own invention awaits his error and will demand an inventory any beclouded morning.

One cannot be neutral in the conflict of falsehood and truth. One cannot sit out these years of grace on an islet however refreshing in the middle of Geneva's failing waters. Beside us the lake's intense blue shades off into river green. Across the way on the left bank's quai stately buildings sit shoulder to shoulder like dowagers at a New Orleans carnival ball; they watch the dance but take no part. Beyond and above lies the Old Town with its cathedral and its memories of Calvin. But you and I must go: you and I must dance.