Out on a Limb

Sherwood L. Washburn, the University of California anthropologist, dismissed him as a "popularizer of data he does not understand." Dr. Stuart Altmann of the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center in Atlanta suggested that the chief value of his second book was to amend the errors of the first. After reading the same text, Edmund Leach, the British anthropologist, announced that it was "best left alone altogether." Despite such forthright professional judgments of his writings, Robert Ardrey, 61, the author of two anthropological bestsellers, African Genesis (1961) and The Territorial Imperative (1966), has now produced another work in the same field, which is certain to draw even more caustic criticism from the discipline he has chosen to invade.

In The Social Contract (Atheneum; $10), Ardrey, with characteristic boldness, traces the evolutionary development of that effective and mysterious survival mechanism, the group. He has obviously done his homework; his bibliography runs to 322 entries. But his interpretation of this background soars well beyond most anthropological theory, to hypotheses and conjectures that are largely his own.

Closed Societies. According to Ardrey, every animal society--including man's--is "a group of unequal beings organized to meet common needs." A successful society will form a power hierarchy in which each individual knows and keeps his place; otherwise, relentless competition would doom to extinction any colony composed exclusively of top dogs. The individual is nothing, the group everything, Ardrey says. Hence, for example, it is not just the baboon or the human that evolves but the societies to which they belong.

Besides enforcing a pecking order accepted by all, Ardrey argues, successful societies must present a united front to the enemy. The enemy is everyone else. "That animal societies are closed, and kept separated by distrust and antagonism," he writes, "has been a worry to all Utopians devoted to an ultimate brotherhood of man." Yet this xenophobia, which Ardrey considers innate, not only knits a society but defines it: "The stranger is necessary, and antagonism directed against him has a biological basis beyond wishful denial. The hostility assures that the group will consist of familiars."

Ardrey contends that as man's brain grew, its new potential was vetoed for untold generations by the demands of the hunting society, a social structure so stable that it persisted--by Ardrey's reckoning, at least--for 15 million years. The hunting group needed not only leaders but also followers--and more followers than leaders. "I find no other persuasive explanation," writes Ardrey, "for the failure of the hominid line, through such an expanse of evolutionary time, to do anything much but survive."

Territorial Imperative. Climbing farther out on a limb, Ardrey suggests that it was the invention of the bow and arrow that liberated man from the solidarity of the hunting band. He could then hunt alone--and it was at that point, Ardrey theorizes, that individual man finally deployed his brain power to rise above the level of the pack and set himself to designing a new society. With the discovery of agriculture and animal husbandry, only 10,000 years ago, began the disbanding of the stable hunting group and the subsequent development of today's troubled civilization.

"The individual," Ardrey writes, "is the creature of the human future, and we still do not know quite what to do about him." The author expects him to survive, but he develops this expectation from a number of contradictions. In one breath he says that war is inevitable, being the sublimation of man's long hunting past. In the next, he states that since war is now unthinkable it is rapidly being succeeded by another sublimation: civil disorder. He believes optimistically that the territorial imperative--that instinct by which some societies regulate the distances among their members and stand aloof from other species--will lead man to solve the overpopulation problem.

But at the same time, mankind may be doomed anyway. "If we do not enlarge our concepts of innate human need," Ardrey writes, "then our societies will eventually either lapse into apathy or explode into anarchy." To forestall this, Ardrey proposes such measures as a tax on surplus children, enforced contraception, and an incest-like taboo against war.

Insatiable Appetite. Nearly every conclusion that Ardrey reaches can be--and probably will be--contested by rival anthropological theories. Moreover, it can be shown that Ardrey is not an anthropologist at all but a onetime playwright and film scenarist who parlayed a freelance magazine assignment to Africa into a new career. The impressive sale of Ardrey's books says nothing about their accuracy. But it says everything about man's insatiable appetite to know more about his past, even if he must accept a fallible guide.

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