Planet of the Apes and Philosophy (27 page)

And even with language we don't really know what someone else thinks, feels, or believes. We can be deceived by language just as Borgia's family was deceived by Tristan's alarm call. We can deceive ourselves with language too and come to believe things that aren't actually true of ourselves. Language can lead to great invention and “progress” but it can also contribute to conflict and destruction.

And language itself can be a type of enclosure—it constrains how we think and limits possibilities. But if we liberate ourselves from thinking that all we can know is through language, then it may be easier to imagine the rich, independent worlds of non-language using apes. Giving Caesar language helps us to understand his kin.

If non-language using chimpanzees are autonomous, as I've suggested, and want and deserve their freedom, then isn't it wrong to deny it, even if their lives in captivity are otherwise going well?

Though Caesar ultimately escaped captivity in search of “home,” that possibility doesn't exist for captive apes today. The wild places where apes live are being destroyed at alarming rates and more and more wild apes are disappearing. Orangutans, gorillas, bonobos, and chimpanzees are all endangered and some scientists predict that wild great apes will become extinct in our lifetimes. There are fewer and fewer wild spaces left and it's extremely unlikely that a captive born and reared ape could adapt to the wild if he were released. Just as Taylor discovered on his ride on the beach, their home world no longer exists as it once did.

Great ape captivity poses a real moral dilemma. It's wrong to deny them the freedom to control their own lives, but to release them would probably be a death sentence. So it looks like the best we can do is to ensure that they receive the highest level of captive care. We can provide opportunities for them to develop stable social relationships with others and let them be who they are. Respecting their wild dignity may go some way toward helping them come as close to feeling at home as is possible in a world of “maniacs!”

J
OHN
S. W
ILKINS

C
aesar's breath fogs the window of his attic room as he cries out in anguish, watching his “grandfather,” Charles Rodman being harassed by an angry neighbor on the sidewalk below. The neighbor's finger jabs Rodman in the chest; his face is red with anger at his damaged car; Rodman's face is cherubic with childish innocence and ignorance. Caesar sees only a threat to his loving caregiver and leaps to his rescue.

Caesar races down three flights of stairs and attacks the unsuspecting neighbor, tackling him in the street, chasing him down the sidewalk, pummeling him with blows of decidedly chimp-like fury. Standing on the neighbor's chest, Caesar holds this man's life in his hands; he could easily smash the man's brains in and satisfy his animal bloodlust.

But Caesar doesn't kill the neighbor. Why? Is it because he sees the growing crowd of spectators eying him with social disapproval? Does he realize that killing is contrary to the moral contract of the group he lives within? Is such a realization even possible for a chimp?

Here we see Caesar the Chimp in all of his complexity: fierce animal and fierce moralist. Does such a creature, born of chimp lineage and genetically enhanced, have an intrinsic moral nature? What is a moral nature? What, for that matter, is morality? Where does it come from, where is it located, and how is it acquired? Merits of the acting and filmmaking aside, when I first saw the movie I was completely captivated by these questions, which I believe are best understood by thinking of moral behaviors as traits on the family tree of the Great Apes, humans included.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes
presents an attempt to understand what morality is. Caesar is the movie's most moral agent: he protects all primates, including humans, and acts only in defense of those who are unable to defend themselves. The source of his moral stance is shown as twofold: his upbringing and his attainment of reason.

Caesar's ability to reason makes him what some would call a
Kantian exemplar
(this has nothing to do with the Knights Templar, even though it rhymes). The eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that the moral sense—the sense that stopped Caesar from crushing the neighbor's skull—follows from simply possessing rationality. If you're capable of reason, then you must rationally assent to what he called the Categorical Imperative, which is a little bit like the old Golden Rule, but more universal: you must act according to rules that could be required of everyone. This moral imperative, or law, is the basis for any moral duty. Kantian ethics treats other persons as moral ends, not as means to ends, and so Kantians are respectful of the integrity of other persons.

So, when Caesar leaps to the defense of his adoptive granddad, he does not tear the neighbor apart, as a chimp could easily do. He restrains himself and stops short of brutal murder. Compare that with the pet chimpanzee, Travis, who attacked and seriously mauled a woman in 2009 in North Stamford, Connecticut. Travis behaved as wild chimps do—chimps without (human) reason—attacking interlopers and killing them. Caesar behaves in a most unchimpish fashion.

The humans in the movie, on the other hand, are shown as mostly nasty and brutish, self-interested and exploitative, of each other as well as the apes. The humans in the ape holding facility, for example, behave abominably towards the apes and sneakily towards other humans. They use their powers of reason in a most un-Kantian way: they treat other people as means to selfish ends, rather than ends unto themselves. These brutish humans exemplify
rational egoism
, in which their every act, and much manipulation of others, is calculated to serve their own interests. Popular movies are rife with such characters, but using people without considering
their wants or needs in real life strikes us as not very moral. And we all know someone who operates like this, don't we?

This somewhat bleak assessment of human nature in the movie, discussed by Thomas Hobbes in his
Leviathan
(and by Leslie Dale Feldman in this book) and the almost Rousseauesque portrayal of the apes as “noble savages,” has a long history in Western thought, stretching to at least the seventeenth century. But as far as we can tell from modern research, it is wrong.

Study after study shows that we humans, in contrast with most other primates, act with empathy and a bias towards pro-social behavior—towards treating others not merely as means but as ends worthy of care, even when we expect to receive no benefit. Non-human primates in general, and common chimps in particular, do tend to behave like the selfish traders of economic models, getting whatever they can when the risk is outweighed by the reward in predictable fashion. Chimps are known to attack and kill their fellows when it is to their benefit, as a matter of course. And even when they grant a favor, as the primatologist Frans de Waal has pointed out in one of his TED talks on YouTube, chimps are anticipating that it be returned—selfish trading at its finest.

So, if humans are the rational, morally behaving species and other primates are the selfish, opportunistic creatures, why do the
Planet of the Apes
movies, and a good deal of other literature, portray humans and other primates in this upside-down fashion?

The reason is that we have clung to an outdated view, sometimes called the Great Chain of Being, in which reason is the zenith of the living world, and moral behaviors arise out of the capacity for reason. In traditional philosophy, only humans occupy that zenith, both as moral agents and rational agents, but in the movie, the humans are clearly less rational than the apes. Are scriptwriters Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver employing this inversion to make a not-so-subtle point about morality? Examining this Chain of Being idea will help us sort all of this out.

Very famously, Charles Darwin came up with the idea of the evolutionary tree. Not many realize that the tree hypothesis is more uniquely Darwin's idea than natural selection, for which he is better known, though both are widely misunderstood. In the pre-Darwinian view of human nature, there was a sequence of organisms, either along a scale of increasing organization or a temporal sequence in which simple organisms shade into more complex ones over time. The historian E.A. Lovejoy called this the
Great Chain of Being
, giving it a convenient visual aspect of discrete links in a linear chain.

This chain idea was a commonly held view in the period preceding the European renaissance. Raimond Lull, a sixteenth-century humanist, illustrated the idea in his famous figure
Arbor scientiae venerabilis et caelitus
, which shows grades or ranks of being from stones through flames, plants, beasts, humans, heaven, angels, and finally God himself. Another woodcut from the sixteenth century details the ascent from mere existence to reason. During the Enlightenment, Lull's graphic ideas triggered a number of philosophers and naturalists to try and rank living things from simple and non-moral to complex and moral. Well before Kant or even the Enlightenment, to be moral was to be rational.

Through the seventeenth century and much of the eighteenth, the chain metaphor was expounded upon and embellished, but hardly challenged. It's easy to see it as blatantly arbitrary today, but the status quo was entrenched. Until Peter Simon Pallas challenged it in 1766.

Pallas came up with the idea that, rather than a single linear arrangement of kinds of living things, a better metaphor was that of a tree with two trunks, one for plants and one for animals. This new idea lined up nicely with something Linnaeus had been toying with: a nested hierarchy of species and groups of species. Every species was closely related to some other species, and less closely to even more. The tree was a good way to represent these “affinities,” or sets of shared traits, as well as differences. This set up the problem that Darwin solved with the idea that a series of shared traits indicates a temporal sequence
and
common descent.

So, what does the Great Chain of Being or the Tree of Life have to do with morality? And what does any of this have to do with
Planet of the Apes
? These ideas have everything to do with the much contested, debated, and rejected notion of Human Nature. And I think we can all agree that the
Apes
films are really all about human nature.

If being rational and being moral are features solely of human beings because it is in our nature, the difference between the ‘Chain' way of thinking and evolutionary tree thinking is that they will make different claims about whether or not we do in fact have a nature. And if we do, then these two schools of thought will also differ on what exactly the relations between reason and morals are.

If we adopt the Chain view of the living world, then we accept that there are objective levels (or “grades”) of organization. Simple things are the least cognitive, emotive, and moral; complex things are the most. This simple view underlies almost all uses of evolution in science fiction right up to
Star Trek
and
X-Men
. I recall (but I can't find it now) a science fiction short story from the 1940s in which the protagonist traveled faster than light, causing him to individually “devolve” back down the “evolutionary scale,” leaving him as a tarsier (picture a cross between a lemur and Tolkien's Gollum) when the space ship arrived, but oddly, not leaving the space ship as a rock of metal ore. Since tarsiers have never been seriously proposed as ancestral forms of human beings, the sole justification for this conceit, often found in science fiction from H.G. Wells's
The Time Machine
onwards, is that tarsiers and lemurs “represent” a “lower grade” of primate.

“Never say lower or higher,” Darwin wrote in the margin of a book. For if we evolve not by rising up a chain the way Darwin's predecessors had held, but by branching outward, “higher” and “lower” have no real meaning. Everything that exists, from the simplest single cell to the most complex ape, dolphin or cnidarian (jellyfish), has exactly the same pedigree length, dating back to the common ancestor of all existing living things, whatever that was.

In a Darwinian view, change in itself is important, but not nearly as important as the branching points, the events that
lead to new species. Sometimes these may bring about changes in “grade” (for example, from quadrupedal to bipedal), or sometimes they may result only in a species that's very similar to what they branched from. But it is the branching that matters.

The Enlightenment view that humans are the pinnacle of the living world rested squarely upon the Chain. So does the view of Dr. Zaius that Apes are the pinnacle of the living world and humans a lower form of primate. After we assimilate Darwin, a process we are still undergoing mentally and socially, the view that there is one superior species and below it a chain of lesser links no longer flies. For this reason, many eighteenth-century philosophers ran this argument in the opposite direction: they rejected evolution because it undercut this notion of grade. What did evolution replace this “grade” notion with, though? How does a tree undercut a grade?

The answer is to think less of the trees we see in the real world, like the tall redwoods Caesar and his fellow primates escape to at the end of
Rise
, and think of a tree-like flow chart on a piece of paper. In an evolutionary tree, there is no “up” or “down,” only “out.” And while sometimes branches of the evolutionary tree will happen to evolve traits that exist elsewhere on the tree, a process called convergent evolution, mostly they will not. The earlier
Apes
films supposed that apes would converge upon human traits, like bipedalism and the ability to use their hands, but maybe that was a function of the problem of costuming, as in
Star Trek.