Joe Gores: Menaced Assassin

“Remember the young rapist orang? Unmated. Equivalent in age to mid-twenties in humans. No economic base. And he stops raping and starts mating when he reaches full maturity.

“The murder statistics are comparable. The perpetrators are in the same age group as rapists, already criminal, from a lousy socioeconomic background. Murderers and rapists have several other things in common. Most are criminally inclined before and after committing their rapes or murders. They have a record of criminal offenses. They want something they aren’t getting. They operate outside the controls of their societies.

“Males kill their own kind forty to one over females. Among apes, among men. If a human female kills, it is usually her spouse.

“Ape males kill the infants of females just joining their troop; the female, deprived of her infant, immediately comes into heat again and is impregnated by the males who thus ‘know’ the offspring is theirs. Human stepfathers kill infants seventy to one over blood fathers (in the U.S. it is one hundred to one). The killings usually occur when a male-ape or man-is recruiting a new female.

“If a female kills her own infant-ape or human-she is usually young, unmated, and her resources are limited. A female with an infant-human or ape-has less of a chance to mate and reproduce than the same female without an infant.

“Finally, war. Since we left the hunting way of life to hold land and till the earth, which led to permanent shelters and then towns and finally cities, war has been our central preoccupation. Once there was something to be taken away from someone else, we began doing it on a massive scale.

“War is ordered by alpha males, in chimps, in men, and is always fought for the same things: resources. Chimps, led by their alpha males, set out to annihilate another chimp community-wage war upon it-because they think they can win territory, wealth, and females for reproductive purposes. Nobody starts a war he doesn’t think he can win.

“Rape. Murder. War. They are in our blood, in our genes, from long before we started to become man. Until we accept this, we cannot hope to make progress against violence.

“The chimp’s ability to wage war against his own kind grows out of his imagination-he can imagine doing it, so he does it. But imagination is positive as well as negative. Sometimes, as the evening light faded in the Kibale Forest, my troop of chimps, each one in its own nest in its own tree for the night, would begin to hoot softly into the gathering darkness, and would begin drumming, with its hands. Chanting, and thoughtfully drumming.

“Prayer? Not likely. But some aesthetic is at work here, probably to announce one’s self and also one’s solidarity with those around one. Comfort, perhaps. African tribesmen drum to the darkness; soldiers play ‘Taps’ to the sunset; we used to chant Evensong, Vespers, and Angelus. Why all these? Comfort.

“At the outbreak of huge thunderstorms, I have seen my male chimps charge up and down forested hillsides, hooting wildly, grabbing up fallen branches and striking the trees with them just as the wind and rain are doing. Huddled in the trees above are the females and children, watching the display. It is defiance of the storm. It is theater. It is also a rain dance.

“I have seen my troop start walking around a lightning-shattered stump in the center of a moonlit glade. First walking, then marching, then trotting around and around the stump, in rhythm, stamping hard with one foot, lightly with the other-in unison. Dancing.

“Could their dancing grounds be the first faint stirrings of reverence for the sacred? Must not Lucy and her kin have danced beneath the full moon in the same way? With no thought of deity yet, of course, but perhaps with an… unease at some faint glimmering of something beyond the leaf, the rock, the fig, beyond the pain and the pleasure of the now.

“Out on the edge of the unknown. How frightful and how exhilarating, all at once! It is for us. How much more so for a chimp, a Lucy, a habilis, without a brain big enough or complex enough to spin a tale about it and so master it.

“We certainly know that Lucy’s descendants danced; around the campfire, once we had fire; around the hearth, around the threshing floor. Learned how to drum, how to sing, how to re-create the day’s events. Then came the solo dance-the alpha male leaping into the center of the circle, his performance incarnating (literally, making flesh) the spirit of the prey.

“To Dudley Young, the dance became a dialectic of energies, love and hatred, expansion and contraction of the spirit. Until once, sometime, that alpha male in his pride in the center of the dance slipped, fell — and was fallen upon by the other dancers in their frenzy. And torn apart. And devoured, because he had become the prey whose spirit he previously had only represented.

“And man had holy communion. Frenzy, with remorse only later, when the frenzy had passed. All of it haunting echoes of the chimp hunting-and ritualistically devouring his prey.

“Since I am expert only in our primate brothers, and in our earliest hominid selves, I can only speak of who we were and of what we did in those earliest formative years. But I do know this about Homo sapiens sapiens: somewhere we have gone astray. We have written dead end across myth’s guidelines, forgotten their psychological truths. We have killed all the old gods of the spirit, embraced the gods of the material. But science now says the material is not real, it is merely a fistful of energy.

“I think Teilhard de Chardin was right, our evolution now is as social and psychological beings. This evolution is going on at a bewildering rate, each new complexity spawning a geometric progression of complexities. Perhaps this is how we can return to ourselves, find out who we were. Know that, and we can know who we are. Know that, we will know why we act as we do.

“Why we, with our big brains, cannot control our violence, is the wrong question. We should try to understand how we, with our big brain exaggerating all our natural genetic tendencies, are able to control our violence as well as we do.”

Will Dalton paused, a strange look on his face. To Dante it seemed a look of surprise, as if what he was going to say next was not what he had intended to say. It could even have been regret; or even fear.

“Anarchy stalks but does not rule our world. It is only the beginnings of a start, but I can only believe that as a species we are just at the threshold, not about to be swept out the back door of extinction by our own hand. I believe that by looking backward as well as forward, we can control our genetic heritage. I believe we are in a race with our own destructive nature, learning, evolving ways to cope with our own violence, and I believe that we will win that race. I believe that we, as a species, are that smart.

“Thank you for your attention here tonight. I will take questions…”

As an enraged female voice in the first row began, “How can you possibly suggest that…” Dante tuned out. Nothing had happened. Dante had miscalculated.

He waited patiently at the back of the lecture hall for almost half an hour as a core of hardy dissenters circled around Will like wolves, vociferous and finger-waggling as they disputed points of his thesis. Dante’s hand was on the automatic in its hip holster, but he was already quite sure that Raptor was not going to strike within this hall tonight. Why should he? Raptor need only trail Will Dalton back to the big old empty echoing house he had just moved back into…

Will finally broke free and came down the aisle between the folding chairs. Dante took his upper arm. “Now it’s my turn.”

“Not another critic, I hope.”