Planet of the Apes and Philosophy (6 page)

But should language be such a threat, and such an important measure of intelligence? One philosopher, Quine, just says ‘No.'

Quine developed a thought experiment to illustrate a concept called
the inscrutability of reference
, by which he meant that we don't really ever know for sure what anyone else is referring to, even if that person is speaking the same language that we are. Take, for example, the case of an anthropologist who has been assigned to decipher a newly discovered foreign language that is solely spoken by an isolated tribe. There are no natural translators for the language. In his example, Quine suggests that the smart anthropologist will go out and observe the tribe's speech behaviors just as any cognitive ethologist would, taking notes in a notebook every time a certain word is spoken. On day one, a member of the tribe walks out of her hut,
points at a rabbit, and utters the sound “Gavagai.” The anthropologist makes note of this, guessing that perhaps ‘gavagai' means rabbit. On day two, a man walks out of the brush, points in the direction of a rabbit, and also says ‘gavagai.' Our anthropologist again makes a note of this, and is pleased with herself for having figured out what some words in this language might mean.

But Quine suggests that our anthropologist is overly confident, because there is ultimately no way to know exactly what these natives are pointing to when they speak. Perhaps, in their minds, they are pointing to
undetached rabbit parts
or
temporal slices of rabbitness
or something that we have not even conceived of yet. Since there is no way to tell the difference between our ordinary conception of
rabbit
and
undetached rabbit parts
, there is no way for us to know exactly what the tribe members mean when they say ‘gavagai.' Indeed, Quine concludes, there really is no way for us to be sure that we know what anyone is referring to at any given time, because we cannot see inside the mind of another person. While uttering ‘gavagai' might still get us the result of a rabbit, we don't know how the other person conceives of the rabbitty-like-thing she hands to us in our discussion.

Since we can't be sure exactly what anyone means when he or she uses a word, there seems to be a real worry regarding using language as the ultimate measure of intelligence. There is a real-world example that helps to reveal just how prejudiced we are toward language. People with Williams-Beuren syndrome often have strong speaking ability and tend to be very cheerful, friendly, trusting, and talkative. In other words, on first meeting, they can be completely charming. However, the down side of the condition is moderate mental retardation. No matter how verbal they are, they often have difficulty doing many of the other tasks we associate with intelligence, such as problem-solving, planning, learning, and memory. As biased as we are toward language, there are still cases that show that language is not the last word on intelligence.

Perhaps remaining silent is more intelligent than using language. Is this why Nova continuously tried to stop Taylor from
speaking? She put her hand over his mouth, smeared out his word written in the dirt, and persisted in refusing to say her name. Perhaps she knew something about speech that Taylor didn't—that it can be used against the orator, that it can be misinterpreted, that it can create prejudice, bias, injustice, and bombs.

Nova may well be protecting him from the consequences of his speech, which may be seen as a threat in their religious setting—analogous to the pre-Darwinian era—in which the simian brain alone is believed to have the spark of the divine. Zira and Cornelius urge Taylor to “be clever . . . be quiet” at his trial. Indeed, the films of
Planet of the Apes
as a body of work suggest repeatedly that the smart are the silent, perhaps obliquely suggesting that the animals do not speak to us because of their intellectual superiority. Zira and Cornelius themselves attempt to seem speechless as they arrive on earth in
Escape
. As Milo says, in
Escape from the Planet of the Apes—
this is “a time not for lies, but for silence.”

In
Beneath the Planet of the Apes
, Brent looks at the eroded subway station and wonders about the nature of the mute: “Are you what we were before we learned to talk and made fools of ourselves?” Language has led to the destruction and devastation he sees around him. Is this why the native humans do not speak in the early movies? None of the brain surgery and psychological testing that take place in simian psychological research of the early films answers the question of the mute humans. All we know from the first film is that the key to human muteness is not to be found in human physiology. Could it lie instead in a decision the humans made?

Beyond annihilating the planet, language has led us to destroying each other, simian or human. In
Escape from the Planet of the Apes
, we're warned “If you are caught by the gorillas you must remember never to speak . . . If they catch you speaking they will dissect you and kill you in that order.” Even the Caesar of
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes
must pretend he is silent like the other pet chimpanzees, for his own safety. And the Caesar of
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
finds himself a circus-trained orangutan companion who tells him, “Man no like smart ape.” In an oppressive society, it may well be smarter to follow the methods of American slaves, who developed a linguistic vernacular like “black English” that seemed stupid and
halting to their captors but was actually sophisticated and as rule-bound as any language is. To be smarter than your oppressors, play stupid. And a great method for appearing stupid is to behave as if you don't comprehend language, or enact it poorly. As MacDonald says in
Battle for the Planet of the Apes
, “Brightness has never been encouraged among slaves.”

Cornelius's advice to a morally outraged Zira in
Escape from the Planet of the Apes
was “Have a grape, dear, and look the other way,” but this urge to refuse to re-think our judgments of intelligence and what they so often seem to allow in terms of “sub-human” treatment is exactly what these films help us to overcome. By watching the
Planet of the Apes
movies, we look right at our own prejudices, tendencies toward unfairness, and biases about intelligence. The series helps us do better than drink more “grape juice” and lapse into our denial about the treatment of others who do not speak (or who fail to speak our language). Through art such as movies, we have the ability to go beyond our prejudices regarding intelligence and re-think our treatment of non-human animals. We just say no to our bias toward language as the most important measure of intelligence and moral worth.

D
ON
F
ALLIS

P
ierre Boulle's novel
Planet of the Apes
is clearly an allegory about how we should and should not treat other people. In
Planet of the Apes as American Myth
, Eric Greene suggests that, taken as a whole, the
Planet of the Apes
movies present a case against the enslavement and oppression of people who seem to us to be more primitive or less than fully human.

But also, Boulle's novel and the subsequent movie series directly raise the question of what it takes to be a
person
. Are any nonhuman animals, such as apes, smart enough to count as persons? In his recent review of the documentary
Project Nim
, Princeton philosopher Peter Singer suggests that the answer is
Yes
.

One obvious indicator of superior intelligence and cognitive development, and the one that Singer focuses on, is the ability to use
language
. But while several researchers have tried to teach primates (such as Koko and Nim Chimpsky) to use sign language, the results have been inconclusive. For instance, it has been suggested that these researchers were (much like the trainers of Clever Hans, the horse that could allegedly do arithmetic) unconsciously giving the apes cues about what to sign and that the apes were just imitating them.

Maybe the apes were just
aping
the humans. In the original 1968 movie, the apes are at first quite skeptical of Taylor's ability to use language. The keeper thinks that his attempts to speak (which he is unable to do because he has been shot in the throat) are a case of “human-see-human-do.” Cornelius is sure that even Taylor's written notes are just a “stunt.”

But another possible indicator of intelligence (and, thus, of personhood) is the ability to
deceive
. In fact, many years before Boulle's novel, Robert Heinlein (1907–1988) wrote a science fiction story called “Jerry Is a Man,” in which genetically enhanced apes are able to perform menial tasks and have some ability to speak. When the human characters are deciding whether one of these apes is a person (and, thus, should not be euthanized when he is no longer able to work), a critical piece of evidence is that Jerry is able to lie.

Such deception requires fairly sophisticated cognitive capacities that we usually only associate with humans. In order to deceive, you must be what Tufts philosopher Daniel Dennett calls, in his 1981 book
Brainstorms
, a “second-order intentional system.” Not only must you be capable of having beliefs, desires, and other intentions, you must be capable of having beliefs and desires
about
beliefs and desires. In particular, it must be possible for you to
want
someone else to have a
false belief
.

General Thade, from Tim Burton's
Planet of the Apes
, is a good example of a mendacious second-order intentional system. In order to get permission to eliminate the humans, he lies to Senator Sandar. Thade tells the senator that his daughter Ari has been kidnapped by the humans. He does this because he
wants
the senator to have the
false belief
that they kidnapped her.

In addition to deception requiring sophisticated cognitive capacities, many psychologists argue that deception is how we became humans in the first place. According to Andrew Whiten and Richard Byrne's
Machiavellian Intelligence
hypothesis, the evolutionary advantage of being able to deceive other members of one's social group is what led to the remarkable brain size and intelligence that separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom.

As the philosopher David Livingstone Smith explains in a 2005 article in
Scientific American Mind
, “social complexity propelled our ancestors to become progressively more intelligent and increasingly adept at wheeling, dealing, bluffing and conniving.” Those individuals who had a greater ability to
deceive (and a greater ability to detect deceivers) were more likely to pass on their genes.

If it's so advantageous to be able to detect deception, it's a little bit strange that humans are so bad at it. Experimental studies suggest that most of us are able to detect liars at only slightly better than chance. We're not at all like the subterranean mutant humans with telepathic capabilities (a.k.a. the Keepers of the Divine Bomb in
Beneath the Planet of the Apes
) who can simply tell that Brent is lying when he says that “the Apes are a primitive, semi-articulate and underdeveloped race whose weapons have not progressed beyond the club and the sling!” In order to be sure that someone is not lying to us, we've had to develop assistive technologies, such as the sodium pentothal that Dr. Otto Hasslein uses on Zira in
Escape from the Planet of the Apes
or the “Authenticator” that Inspector Kolp uses on Armando in
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes
.

In his book
Telling Lies
, Paul Ekman—the inspiration for Cal Lightman, the protagonist of the TV show
Lie To Me
— offers an explanation for why we need such technological assistance. He claims that “our ancestral environment did not prepare us to be astute lie catchers. . . . Serious lies probably did not occur often, because a lack of privacy would have made the chances of being caught high” (pp. 341–42). But Ekman's suggestion here, which conflicts with the
Machiavellian Intelligence
hypothesis, can't be right. Anybody who is part of a family knows that a lot of deception goes on even though privacy can be hard to come by. But does this apply to ape families or just human families?

Just like humans, the highly intelligent apes in the
Planet of the Apes
series certainly have the ability to deceive. General Thade is a notable example, but he's not the only untrustworthy ape in the series by a long shot. In
Escape from the Planet of the Apes
, after the “ape-nauts” land on present-day Earth and are taken to the Los Angeles Zoo, they pretend that they are unable to talk. And once Cornelius and Zira do start talking, they start lying. They tell the Presidential Commission that they do not know Taylor, and they conceal how apes treat humans in the time that they come from. In
Conquest of the
Planet of the Apes
and in
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
, Caesar also has to pretend to be just a normal, non-talking, ape. But not only that, in
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes
, Caesar feigns being electrocuted so that the humans will think that he's dead. (Fortunately Mr. MacDonald had just turned off the power.)

The apes in the series don't just deceive humans. They frequently attempt to deceive other apes. In Boulle's novel, Cornelius tricks the other apes by substituting Ulysse Mérou, Nova, and their child for the three primitive humans that (much like Ham the Astrochimp) were originally going to man an artificial satellite. In
Beneath the Planet of the Apes
, Zira tells Dr. Zaius that “Cornelius hit me . . . for my bad behavior at the meeting.” She tells this lie in order to explain the bloody bandage that she had been using to clean Brent's gunshot wound. In the original film, in order to help Taylor escape, Zira's nephew Lucius lies to the keeper about taking Taylor to the zoo. And let's not forget the unnamed ape that cheats at cards and one that wears a toupée in Burton's movie.