Planet of the Apes and Philosophy (24 page)

Landon says “We got off at the wrong stop” but there's no right stop because in two thousand years, nothing has changed. The optimism of Taylor and Nova on the horse, the pessimism of the Statue of Liberty—represent the two sides of Serling's view of human nature. But all is not lost—perhaps in place of the Statue of Liberty there'll be a “life-size bronze statue” of Taylor and Nova on their horse as the new George and Martha Washington—riding into the sunset to found a new frontier. The statue's head is still intact symbolizing hope for the future and the creativity to start again—in Tom Paine's words to “make the world over.”

M
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ou have to feel affection and respect for
Planet of the Apes.
How else do you regard a movie that takes the superstar Charlton Heston—he of Moses, Ben Hur, Michelangelo—and puts him in the lead role of a swaggering astronaut, and then promises his character castration in the name of scientific research?

But truly, apart from the chuckle that that always sparks, especially among those of us old enough to remember Heston in his prime,
Planet of the Apes
is the gift that keeps on giving. I show it almost every year in my Philosophy and Film course that I offer to our honors program students, and at each showing the students enthuse and I get something more to ponder. And this all apart from the fact that it is a rattling good story, moving to one of the greatest endings in the history of cinema, the discovery—I guess there's no need for a spoiler alert here—that the spaceship has in fact returned to a future Earth, one made desolate by human power and stupidity.

I'm a philosopher and as a philosopher I look at movies for what I can extract. Well, not always. I have tried to kid myself and my students that I watch my favorite zombie movie,
Shaun of the Dead
, for insights into the body-mind problem. But I'm lying really. I look at
Shaun of the Dead
for the blood and gore and whatever—although come to think of it, isn't there a philosophical problem about an aging professor like me, who never served in the military or the police, actually enjoying a movie where most of the characters go around covered in tomato ketchup from head to toe?

However, I do try to look at movies philosophically and not just those movies that cry out for such a treatment—Ingmar Bergman's
The Seventh Seal
for instance. And I find material in many unexpected places. The cowboy movie
Shane
seems to me to have the greatest portrayal I have ever seen of a figure faced with an existential crisis—“a man's got to do what a man's got to do.” (Actually the line is: “A man has to be what he is, Joey. You can't break the mold. I tried it and it didn't work for me.”). Of course,
Shane
is helped by the fact that it has the biggest badass in the history of cinema—black-clad Jack Palance brought to town for the ultimate shootout.

But back to
Planet of the Apes
. For me as a philosopher of science, one who specializes in evolutionary theory, the obvious issues are about evolution, specifically with respect to progress and degeneration. Will evolution always push upwards? Suppose humans mess it all up and become pathetic shadows of their former selves—similar themes are explored in the movie based on H.G. Wells's story the
Time Machine
—does this mean that other organisms will move in? As it happens, this is a very hotly contested issue today among evolutionists, some (like Simon Conway-Morris, paleontologist of the Burgess Shale) thinking that we will rise again, or if not us some facsimile, and others (like the late Stephen Jay Gould, paleontologist and popular writer) thinking that degeneration and extinction are for keeps. Once we're gone, that's it.

Planet of the Apes
, with its subpar humans and its intelligent apes, plunges us right into this debate. And as a bonus, there are all of the racial issues that it raises. The gorillas, the black thugs of the movie. The chimpanzees, the highstrung, intelligent, but in some respects childlike actors in the drama. And the orangutans, in charge and confident that they should be in charge. This in fact is all a bit ironic, because phylogenetically we know that orangutans are off to one side a bit and not quite as bright as the others, with chimps, gorillas, and humans all going it alone, until the gorillas go their way and then finally comes the human-chimp split. We also know that orangutans are a bit anti-social so they would not have functioned well in a society. And finally we know that the pygmy
chimpanzees, the bonobos, obviously the species of this movie, spend huge amounts of their time copulating. This is how they form social bonds. Hugh Hefner would be a celibate compared to the average member of a bonobo troop. I doubt that the two chimp heroes, Zira and Cornelius, would have had time or inclination for much scientific investigation.

But there are other things raised in the movie, and I want here to think about the topic of forbidden knowledge. It's one of the themes that emerges later in the movie, and, you'll remember, is focused on the Forbidden Zone, that area outside the ape-occupied territory that is under taboo and where no self-respecting primate is allowed to go. It turns out that Cornelius has already visited the Zone and in a cave found artifacts that he does not know or understand. He takes the Heston figure (“Taylor”) and his girlfriend Nova to the cave, where they encounter the leader of the orangs, Dr. Zaius, who it turns out, knows exactly what's going on and what the significance of the artifacts in the cave is. As Taylor identifies and ponders over them—dentures, spectacles, a child's doll—Zaius explains that they are evidence of a long-ago human civilization that destroyed itself and its land.

The Forbidden Zone, now desolate desert, used to be a land of milk and honey. He knows this and is determined to keep it secret: the possibilities it opens up of repetition are too dangerous. As the movie ends, Zaius blocks off the cave once and for all and at the same time the truth of his claims about human madness are made apparent. Taylor discovers that humans had indeed destroyed their own world.

This whole question of dangerous knowledge, knowledge that should be banned and not explored or exploited, was not new to cinema (
Planet of the Apes
appeared in 1968). World War II, and in particular the discovery, building, and use of atomic power for weapons, hovered over a generation. It was bad enough that we in the West had such knowledge, but then the Soviets got it too (admittedly mainly through spies and traitors from the West) and that really was dreadful. As it happens, that time around, it led to the Cold War and a standoff, but it wasn't much fun. And so naturally it led to the movie theaters.

One particularly striking early movie was
The Day the Earth Stood Still
. Here the theme was not so much the use of dangerous knowledge but the threat that it posed. In this particular case, other extra-terrestrial intelligent beings decided that humans were a threat to everyone and so a stern warning was issued to Earth about the consequences if it was so foolish as to use its knowledge.

Another striking movie was the Japanese film
Godzilla
. Here atomic testing had brought about threats and destruction through the creation of a monster from the sea. Clearly a metaphor for the atomic destruction itself, Godzilla wreaks devastation on the cities of Japan, causing untold harm to the people, especially children. The monster is stopped by a heroic scientist who has discovered a way of depriving matter of oxygen. The scientist dies in the act of killing Godzilla and, as important, intentionally through his death destroys his own knowledge about his own discovery. A present and a future threat are simultaneously eliminated.

There are other examples on or around the theme. But the point is made; or rather the issue is raised. Knowledge can be extremely dangerous. Should we therefore, following Dr. Zaius, rule certain kinds of knowledge off limits? Meaning, presumably, that people should not be encouraged or should even be forbidden to follow certain lines of inquiry, and if such knowledge is acquired it should not be disseminated. It should rather be sequestered and perhaps even destroyed. Knowledge is in a very important sense a virus—not a meme, as Richard Dawkins has suggested, and thus something that infects minds—but in the sense of something very dangerous, like smallpox. It spreads and can harm. Better therefore to nip it in the bud or to contain and destroy it. Not all knowledge, obviously, like not all viruses, obviously. But knowledge and viruses that are dangers to humankind.

I don't think this is a silly position to take. Knowledge can be dangerous. Nuclear weapons show this only too clearly. But the problem is not confined to physics. In the 1970s, molecular biology came to the fore. As Stephen Stich has discussed, the new techniques of recombinant DNA (rDNA), where one could shift
genes around, shift the parts of genes around, move genes from one organism to another very different, and all of these things that came from our new understanding of the molecules of life—understanding that dates famously to the discovery in 1953 of the double helix, the structure of the DNA molecule—seemed to threaten human safety. Could some mad dictator—as I remember, Idi Amin was just then doing his worst in Uganda—run up a poison organism on the cheap, something that could go in an aerosol or be popped into the water supply? Concerns have also been raised about unforeseen and unintended consequences of gene therapy and genetic enhancement—some of which come to fruition in
Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

As it happens, over the rDNA issue, saner heads soon prevailed. The people who delighted in running up ghastly scenarios, especially on the national evening news shows, tended to be laboratory-bench scientists. That is to say, people who had not the faintest idea about epidemiology, as Bernard Davis has pointed out. As soon as the relevant experts weighed in, it was realized just how difficult it is to make a Frankenvirus and the big worries subsided. Not that there was no danger or that the danger from biology has lessened. In 2012 there was concern about research on the bird flu virus and whether the results could end in lasting harm. Scientists agreed to pause their research for a while, although it picked up again later. As Donald G. McNeil reported in the
New York Times
, matters were not helped by the comments of one of the lead scientists:

           
Some of the early alarm was fed by Dr. Fouchier speaking at conferences and giving interviews last fall in which he boasted that he had “done something really, really stupid” and had “mutated the hell out of H5N1” to create something that was “very, very bad news.” He said his team had created “probably one of the most dangerous viruses you can make.”

Fouchier said afterwards that his comments had been overblown and taken out of context. That is a little bit like Jerry Sandusky saying that his activities in the showers were only spurred by hygiene issues to do with boys' bottoms.

One can also think of ways in which knowledge from the social sciences can be dangerous. The 2012 presidential election
showed very clearly that those interested in polls—forecasting results, spotting points of weakness, suggesting moves to improve standings—have reached a level of sophistication never seen before. (At least, those on the winning side have reached such a level!) One might well think that, even if your candidate did well this time around, the knowledge acquired could be very dangerous in the wrong hands. Manipulation of people's intentions is easy given the right tools. The Nazis showed us this. Imagine if a present-day Dr. Goebbels with present-day techniques and knowledge got involved in matters.

So let's agree that knowledge can be dangerous and that this is a serious problem. I think that over the years we've grown so used to the nuclear threat that we don't worry as much as Rod Serling did when writing the
Planet of the Apes
screenplay. Also the fall of the Soviet empire should be factored in. But the threat is certainly there, and perhaps—worry or not—even worse. It was one thing for the Soviets to have nuclear bombs. It's a very different thing that the North Koreans have the bomb. And if Iran gets the bomb, what price a little flare-up with Israel?

What should we do about such knowledge? One obvious solution is that of Dr. Zaius. Stop the inquiry right now and lock up anything we've already discovered. Just declare the topic off limits. This was the kind of position that used to be taken by people like Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin in the 1970s, as Ullica Segerstrale discusses in
The Sociobiology Debate
. Work on areas like the sociobiology of humans, that is to say work on the underlying, selection-fashioned, genetic nature of humans—can only lead to prejudice and harm—Jews, women, and blacks being declared inferior and that sort of thing—so stop it, ban it, right now. But things are not quite this simple and there are two immediate and obvious responses.

First, it's all very well saying that we should stop inquiry and shut away that which has already been done, but that is a lot easier said than done. As soon as the Americans had the knowledge to make the atomic bomb, it was leaked to Russia, and we have seen similar patterns since. The Pakistani scientist who gave secrets to North Korea and other countries comes
at once to mind. Especially in this day and age of the Internet and other means of instant communication, it's really implausible to suggest that anything can really be kept secret for all that long. It doesn't follow that having the knowledge means you can do anything with it, but as North Korea shows—possessing both the Bomb and intercontinental missiles—poverty-stricken, despot-ruled groups, with enough desire, can go a long way, longer than most of the rest of us would want.