Born in Violence

AFRICAN GENESIS (380 pp.)--Robert Ardrey--Atheneum ($6.95).

When Robert Ardrey was a small boy in Chicago, his family attended services at a neighborhood church, while the young congregated in the basement for Sunday school. "A new member or two would be initiated," says Ardrey, "and if injured seriously, helped home to his mother. There would be a short prayer and a shorter benediction. And we would turn out all the lights and in total darkness hit each other with chairs. It was my Sunday-school class in Chicago, I believe, that prepared me for African anthropology.''

That preparation has resulted in a curious book, African Genesis, which has been widely discussed in intellectual circles and stirred a minor storm of irritation among scientists who are familiar with the subject matter. The book is entertainingly written in spots, opaquely obscure in others, often achieves eloquence. But while many of its scientific facts are correct, they are often misapplied, and the general conclusions are wildly wrong.

Deeper than Woman. Ardrey is a playwright who went to Africa in 1955 to concoct magazine articles and lick his wounds after a Broadway flop (his Shadow of Heroes, a play about the Hungarian Rebellion, opened to mixed reviews last week). He was fascinated by South African Anthropologist Raymond A. Dart, discoverer of Australopithecus, a man-ape who lived about 750,000 years ago. Ardrey was deeply impressed by Dart's contention that the small-brained Australopithecus used antelope bones as clubs and that these weapons changed him from a vegetarian into a successful predator and allowed him to develop into true, big-brained man. On this narrow foundation, Ardrey builds a wide-swinging theory that man, including modern man, is naturally a killer and that weapons are his creator and his dearest love. Writes Ardrey: "Man emerged and triumphed over his rival primates for this single reason--he was a killer . . . Man takes deeper delight in his weapons than in his women. He will pledge a treasury to the one; a pittance to the other. Nor have the failures of nations or the descents of civilizations ever slowed the weapon in its even advance. It is the hallmark of human culture.''

For the second leg of his thesis, Ardrey turns to zoology. He cites studies of certain animals, mostly nesting birds, which show that they establish a territory and fiercely defend it against intruders long before they think about getting a mate to share their domain with them. Other studies have demonstrated that animals that live in groups often have social hierarchies with dominant and subordinate members. Man, Ardrey says, has inherited both these animal customs, and so it is natural for him to kill for property or status. Ardrey believes that this information has been deliberately kept from the public, but that "a revolution in the natural sciences'' will soon convince the world that murder and violence are the unavoidable inheritance of man.

As science, most of this stuff is highly questionable. Australopithecus was a great discovery, but the evidence that he used weapons is extremely flimsy, and there is even less proof that it was the weapon that led to his development into true man. In any case, weapons are only part of the bag of tricks that raised primitive man above his apelike relatives. Equally important were nonviolent, food-getting tools such as game traps, digging sticks and mills for grinding hard seeds. Fire was vital. So was speech, which enabled men to cooperate closely, form permanent cultures and exchange useful information. Ardrey hardly mentions these things, preferring to emphasize only the weapons of "man the killer."

Feathered Lizards. Just as shallow is Ardrey's use of bird territoriality to justify violent human greed. Birds are feathered lizards whose instinct-dominated brains do not resemble the brain of man; consequently, their customs have little bearing on human affairs. When Ardrey tries to draw human lessons from the property instincts and sex relationships of lions, antelopes, baboons, seals, monkeys and many other animals, he gets hopelessly mixed up. No wonder; he should not have tried. Each species has its special and widely differing customs, and seldom do they resemble the ways of social man. Perhaps the most important difference is that man, being completely dominant, has no significant enemies among other animals. This salient distinction colors everything that man does.

Modern man, like all his known ancestors, is partially carnivorous. He kills food animals, usually by proxy, but this is not the same as being a "killer" or a "Cain." These emotional terms, which are favorites with Ardrey, imply that murderous violence is common among humans. The contrary is true. In spite of the prominence of killing in popular literature, the great strength of man, far back into prehistory, has been his ability to live in large cooperative groups whose members seldom kill each other. No other animal does this as well.

Human societies do make war and kill one another's members. But human wars are seldom simple struggles for food-yielding territory, like the summer wars of birds. They are fought for complicated reasons--religious, idealistic, nationalistic, commercial, dynastic--that have little in common with animal or Australopithecine motives. Almost never are wars started by individuals who want to kill other individuals with their own hands.

Juvenile Heroes. Toward the end of his book, Ardrey begins to glorify violence, not merely justify it, and the modern juvenile delinquent seems to evoke his admiration. "In the shadowed byways of his world," he writes, "this ingenious, normal adolescent human creature has created a way of life in perfect image of his animal needs. He has the security of his gang, and finds a rank among its members. He has sex, although it does not preoccupy him. Without any learned instruction he creates directly from his instincts the animal institution of territory. In defense of that territory, his gang evolves a moral code, and his need to love and be loved is fulfilled. In its territorial combats, the gang creates and identifies enemies, and his need to hate and be hated finds institutional expression. Finally, in assault and larceny, the gang and its members enjoy the blood and loot of the predator. And there is always the weapon, the gleaming switchblade which the nondeliquent must hide in a closet, or the hissing, flesh-ripping bicycle chain which the family boy can associate only with pedaling to school."

Hardly a scientific observation.

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