Planet of the Apes and Philosophy (42 page)

That's precisely why my friends and I had to see
Escape from the Planet of the Apes
when it came out in 1971. Some fans identify with movies by acquiring costumes similar to those in the movie. But we thought we'd be clever by escaping
into
the movie at the nearby drive-in theater, sneaking in by foot through a hole in the fence with a couple of six packs of beer, moving a bench from the snack bar area to a spot where an auto should be, and creating a stereo sound for ourselves with a speaker at either end of the bench.

From the opening scenes, where the three astronauts returning to contemporary Earth turn out to be the chimps Zira, Cornelius, and another colleague from the future, through Cornelius's account of a future dramatic rise of the apes when a certain Aldo would be the first to utter No! to his human masters (which actually dropped out of the plots of sequels and never occurred in them), to the tragic killing of Zira and Cornelius and surprise ending survival of their offspring Caesar, we were riveted.

We couldn't really articulate why we liked it so much, but the revolt against authority was in the air, even if our prank was simply apolitical fun.
Escape from the Planet of the Apes
was the counter-culture in pop form, complete with expressions of racism, militarism, and scientific hubris which called for resistance. But all of that serious stuff of resisting authority also spoke directly to our youthful exuberance in sneaking in, playing, “like an angry ape . . . such fantastic tricks before high heaven as makes the angels weep,” as Shakespeare put it in
Measure for Measure
. Only in this case I hope the angels would laugh. Given the fantastic tricks that accompanied the establishment of agriculture and civilization, of history, they could use a break.

Agriculture and civilization, which propelled man from “his jungle lair,” expelled us from the living wild habitat through which we attuned ourselves to the mature communities of life in which we found ourselves, and which provided the means for our immature brains to reach relatively sustainable maturity. In citified ape-compounds civilized man learned to kill “for sport or lust or greed,” as the sacred scrolls of the apes put it. Cain the agriculturalist learned to “murder his brother to possess his brother's land.” Humans began to “breed in great numbers,” turning “the fertile crescent” in Mesopotamia into “a desert of his home” (remember “Operation Desert Storm” of 1991?).

Humans continue to breed in great numbers, now at seven billion. Refinements in the mechanization of agriculture made it possible to feed more people, and that has led to those people breeding more people, which has led to more agriculture to feed more people: the endless cycle which began with agriculture
ten thousand years ago, now amped up radically through modern technology. This is the scenario of civilization since its origins, forcibly driving out surrounding foragers who are believed to “waste” the habitat because they do not cultivate the land in endless expansion of population and food needs, a scenario duplicated in
Beneath the Planet of the Apes
. There the gorilla military commander Ursus calls for an invasion of the Forbidden Zone:

           
We must replenish the land that was ravished by the Humans with new, productive feeding grounds. And these we can obtain in the once Forbidden Zone. So now it is our holy duty to enter it.

Agriculture and its offspring, civilization, have been called progress. The progress that they made can also be seen as one step forward and two, three, or more steps backward. The evidence, from nutritional, ecological, societal, archaeological, and anthropological studies is unmistakable. Agriculture, settlement, and civilization brought about a transformation of humankind, a transformation involving whole new forms of society, ways of living in huge power clusters called cities, a whole new centralization of power and power complexes, with far greater hierarchy and social inequality, time required for work, and a devastation of the human body from reduced nutrition and increased work demands, literally resulting in people becoming four to six inches shorter on average, wherever it developed.

The increase in height of people in industrial societies in the past hundred years or so is merely a return to average heights of people from before agriculture, as numerous anthropological and archaeological studies show. Human socialization practices changed, including the spacing of births from an average of every four years to every two, as well as the relation of humans to the Earth, and the human mind itself.

The degenerate monkey evolved into being through a long evolutionary narrative of foraging, but departed from that narrative through the advent of agriculture, settlement, and civilization. This change is called history and progress, but from another perspective might be called regression. Degenerate monkey needs the mindset of foraging, or its moral equivalent, to find its maturity. It just might be that without it, without
that attunement to the Others, monkey goes mad, monkeying in its mirror of itself, fatally fixated, like Narcissus, and with similar results: planet of the civilized degenerate monkeys, monkeying to mayhem. That is precisely what happened both to the humans in their original nuclear war described in
Beneath the Planet of the Apes
, and to the apes driven to invade the Forbidden Zone in the same movie, a decision which resulted in the ultimate destruction of the living Earth.

The
Planet of the Apes
series pictured an atomic war and its aftermath, which remains a real possibility for our own foreseeable future, despite the end of the Cold War. But numerous other scenarios of the consequences of unsustainable living now compete with it: global warming and mass famine; viral pandemics such as swine or avian flu, induced by mutation-breeding manure lagoons of huge slaughtering operations—the “primordial soup of the Apocalypse,” such as emerged in La Gloria, Mexico in 2009; or genetic recombination gone wrong, whether resulting in resistant bacteria, dangerous “Frankenfoods,” or in a scenario similar to that pictured in the recent 2011 reboot,
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
, a global pandemic of the ALZ-113 virus: medical monkeying gone awry. Therein lies the tragedy of the degenerate monkey who is us. Yes, we “learn.” But learning unhinged from our special evolutionary requirements becomes a way of spelling suicide. And that is what we infantilized apes are spelling globally today.

Charlton Heston may not arrive back from the future in time to change things. It will take more than a Hollywood sequel to change the likely ending: Once upon a time there was a degenerate monkey.

In the end, the monkey mirror held up by these movies tends to downplay another real ingredient in the dehumanization of humanity. It too is a portion of ourselves, just as the ape in us is a portion of ourselves. But it is a far more deadly portion when falsely elevated into a ruling principle, truly the “harbinger of death” written about in the sacred scripture of the apes. It is the idealization of the machine, the schizoid machine, the overweening projection of degenerate monkey's highly elaborated prefrontal cortex severed from the community of passions
which had grounded it in its evolution into being. This is the alien of the
Terminator
and
Matrix
movies, but it also haunts the
Planet of the Apes
series as well, though playing second fiddle to the ape as other.

The human mutants who worship the doomsday Alpha Omega bomb in
Beneath the Planet of the Apes
have developed extraordinary powers of communication through telepathy and telepathic hypnosis, unlike their mute above ground fellow humans. A note in the script for the movie states of the mutant named Verger that: “he shares facial characteristics common to all the city's denizens: great beauty; an unwrinkled skin; deep-set eyes in shadowed sockets; and that slightly accentuated definition of the lip-line which, in men and women of our own day, is often accounted sexy. We are about to learn one other remarkable attribute which he shares with his fellows.” We learn that attribute during the height of their sacred ceremonies, when the mutants face the golden bomb rocket, and lift their hoods to reveal that they have lost their skin and wear rubber face masks.

They use actual speech in facing the bomb, saying, “I reveal my Inmost Self unto my God!” That self, sadly, is one incapable of true face-to-face interaction, despite its abilities to communicate at distances. It can get into other minds through telepathy, but it has utterly lost the living Earth, literally entombed in the subterranean post-nuclear New York. All it can really honestly “face” is the bomb machine, that symbol of the destruction which ravaged their DNA, yet which gives them ultimate hope of invulnerability. But a strange invulnerability it is, for in using it to defend themselves, they would also destroy themselves and all life.

They worship the cold-war strategy of “mutually assured destruction,” but also something more. They worship
deus ex machina
, literally, the god out of the machine, the technical device which promises to save and redeem us. These mutants, possibly the weirdest group of characters to appear in the entire series, might actually represent the most accurate prophecy of the entire
Planet of the Apes
series, not as found in the Sacred Scrolls, but as found in our own time today.

Those mutants prefigure the loss of face-to-face communication that is occurring today in the name of the Holy Facebook. They engage in faceless “telecommunication,” like
the Facebookies of today, who excessively outsource face time to faceless virtual interaction, frequently “masked” in pseudonyms, through telecommunication. Consider: a recent Kaiser Foundation study in 2010 found that American children 8–18 years of age reported spending a whopping 7 hours and 38 minutes of media screen time per day, actually 10 hours and 45 minutes including multitasking squeezed into those 7 hours, 38 minutes, which also does not count schoolwork. For ‘tweens between 11 and 14 years old it is actually 8 hours and 40 minutes per day. If someone sleeps for 8 hours and is involved with school for 8 hours, then virtually all remaining available time is totally enscreened time.

This represents a significant loss of face-to-face contact and tactile connection to a virtual world that is supposed to be there as a convenience, a means to self-direction, toward what I call self-originated experience, where you are engaged in the moment, emotionally available to the moment, and capable of self-determination. Social media can be all of that, yet for many kids and even adults, it seems instead to be a refuge where, “I reveal my Inmost Self unto my God!”

Yet our faces are subtle sources of gestural and empathic communication. Mind reading, it turns out, is a neurological reality, not only through mirror neurons, but also through micro-muscular mimicry below the level of awareness, through which one attunes to another in a face-to-face interaction, feeling inferentially another's emotions and potentially also intentions. Recent studies have shown that not only do “unwrinkled” Botox recipients, like the rubber-masked mutants, lose the ability to express their emotional states facially because of their facial muscle paralysis, but that they also suffer impaired ability to “read” the emotional states of their partners through subtle, subconscious micro-mimicry. This shows how one's own micro-muscular mimicry of others is a communicative practice which can atrophy from disuse, resulting in impaired empathy.

The mutants, despite their advanced telecommunicative prowess, were also notably deficient in empathy, for example, hypnotically inducing their human visitors to try to kill each other. But the possible empathy-deficient mutants we might be brewing today don't need to worship the bomb and practice torture. That is so old-school, so Orwell. We have transitioned to the conditioning of slavish unempathic conformism through
pleasure techniques, as first envisioned by Aldous Huxley in his 1932 novel,
Brave New World
, with its soma, promiscuity without relationships, and systematic methods of desensitization to emotions.

In his 1949 letter to his former student George Orwell, congratulating him on his new book
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, Huxley predicted that within the next generation pleasure conditioning would replace pain conditioning as a more efficient means of control:

           
Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience.

That next generation of the nuclear age saw the introduction of the screen, in the form of television, into virtually all American households, conditioning infants and adults to gaze in narco-hypnotic distraction. The cold war ended, yet the screen may prove in the end more powerful than the bomb.

Our god out of the machine is the device we always have at hand or nearby, which makes us feel good to use, and which, as we depend on it more and more, pressing its buttons thousands of times every day, pushes our buttons unwittingly “unto our god.”

The cult of the machine, inclusive of the human elements that are part of it, first hatched in the bureaucratic organizations of ancient civilization, which included explicit religious worship of the apparatus of the state, especially through divine kingship, and then came to dominance in the modern, secular era, though as an implicit, religious-like belief, symbolized through the clock. This watershed development has proved to be not simply an extension of our tool-using capabilities, but more a Frankenstein that has taken on a life of its own.