Planet of the Apes and Philosophy (43 page)

Humans, being so adaptively flexible, have been able to climb way out on the limb we have been sawing off, but once we started believing in the metaphor that the universe is a giant clock, we began ticking toward nullity. Neuroscientists need to realize that the machine-model of the brain is hyperbole, exaggerating the automatic aspects of our being and radically
undervaluing and even negating the spontaneous and creative aspects, as well as the deep tempered capacities of the passions. These are not merely “subjective,” but are real capacities produced by millions of years of engagement with wildness.

Mind, as Peirce and fellow pragmatist George Herbert Mead said, is a relational, communicative process of conduct between the individual and the habitat, not something enclosed in a brain. When that relation becomes contracted from the attunement to the wild intelligible habitat of the surrounding community of life to other dematured humans and their likenesses, and then even further contracted to projections and idealizations of the automatic portions of the human psyche, as though the living world is but a schizoid machine, then perhaps we can understand why Emerson said: “The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.”

We have been undergoing revolutionary new findings in the past few years that reveal that the planet of anatomically modern humans of the past 100,000 years or so was one shared with a variety of other humans. As anthropologist Chris Stringer put it recently, “there might have been as many as six different kinds of humans on the Earth,” including both Neanderthals and Denisovans, whose DNA are found in contemporary human DNA. They all disappeared, despite some interbreeding, for reasons that are not yet clear.

There are threats that the other great ape species living today could become extinct too, as many other animal species have, not because of natural conditions, but because human expansion has literally been a harbinger of death. It's time to consider how to remake human civilization into a harbinger of life, a question that animates a number of the movies in the series, but is especially highlighted in the conclusion of the last of the original series,
Battle for the Planet of the Apes
. There the Lawgiver, speaking to the integrated class of young human and ape children, says, “But as I look at Apes and Humans living together in friendship, harmony and at peace, at least we wait with hope for the future.” Yet the camera turns to the statue of Caesar, “Our Founder,” which sheds a tear as the movie closes, perhaps suggesting what we know will be a degeneration into
race hatred and hostility between apes and humans, the “same old, same old” of civilizational hubris, culminating in the destruction of the Earth from the Alpha Omega bomb.

Despite the ubiquitous cruelty between apes and humans in the series, there are numerous moments when the primate touch empathically bridges the interspecies gulf: Zira putting her hand on Taylor's in her office after she discovers he can write, or Taylor's kissing her on the lips near the end of
Planet of the Apes
, and her return kiss to fellow scientist, the human Dr. Lewis Dixon, in
Escape from the Planet of the Apes
. But perhaps the best example is found in circus owner Armando's warm sympathy for Cornelius and Zira and his subsequent raising, as we discover in
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes
, of their son Milo, later named Caesar, who will later lead the rebellion of the apes. Armando was devoted to Saint Francis, “who loved all animals,” and practices that devotion by risking his life, and ultimately losing it, on behalf of his adopted Caesar and the promise of life he holds.

The empathic bonding between ape and man found in the relations of these characters in
Planet of the Apes
may seem overly “sentimental” to some. In many ways it is, though I think “idealized” is a better term. But it also does strangely break through the human-centered portrayal of apes in the series to show unexpected possibilities to overcome dehumanization. Certain deep sentiments, such as the capacities for empathy, for mothering, for dreaming and playing, that we share with other primates and even with non-primate mammals, may turn out to be the mightiest weapon against the destructive tendencies of the unrestrained mechanization of life today, whose imagined catastrophic consequences are pictured in the
Planet of the Apes
movies. They are among our oldest primate and mammal capacities, yet crucial for our most newly acquired, characteristically human capacities, such as the self, speech, and rational reasoning, to function optimally and not pathologically.

Though we may think ourselves modern, we retain Pleistocene bodies, as ecological philosopher Paul Shepard put it, and Pleistocene needs, bodied into being over our longer two million year evolution. What Shepard termed “the sacred game,” the dramatic interplay of predator and prey, reminds us of that older evolutionary story, wherein degenerate monkey
emerges into being wide-eyed in wonder at circumambient life, a child of the earth foraging for edible, sensible, thinkable, and sustainable wisdom.

Consider what happened to that ape that became human in the past two million years, thanks to the community of mature, instinctive life to which it attuned itself. What is two million years in the long term view of evolution? What if we could redirect our science, technology, and civilization today away from its idealization and worship of the machine and inflated projections of the human, and toward an idea that the further creation and pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty involves a re-attunement to all-surrounding life, not isolation from it?

A creature aware that its destiny is tied to its origins, and that it must, perhaps for the first time, come to terms with itself as a degenerate monkey requiring self-controlling, sustainable limits to its civilization at all levels of institutions and beliefs, toward the purpose of a sustainable, proliferating planet of life? A new civilization capable of relating to the earth not as something put here for humans, but as something marvelous out of which humans were bodied forth to serve?

We might just find a creature in two million years quite different from the futures envisioned in
Planet of the Apes
, which remain trapped in the constrictive frame of “history.” We might find a planet where biodiversity is itself regarded as a great teacher, a planet teeming with immense varieties of life, revered and enhanced by a somewhat recognizable, but transformed life form. We might find the planet of the regenerate monkeys.

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