Will Self - Great Apes

Simon, squinting in the noonday equatorial glare, stared for a long time into the brutish muzzle of the human infant, who stared back at him, his white-pigmented eyes glazed and turned in on themselves. Simon took in the bare little visage, the undershot jaw and slightly goofy teeth, then he turned on all four of his heels, vocalised “H’hooo,” and gestured to the rest of the patrol, ‘Well, that’s that then,’ and they headed back towards the camp.

Late that night Simon Dykes and Zack Busner were indulging in a groom before nest on the small veranda outside their hut. The rest of the group were already asleep and their snuffles and gasps could be heard from inside the hut. The two males were squatting by a table on which a gas lantern was set, and the hissing this light made augmented the sounds of the night around them.

They were lazily passing a bottle of Scotch between them and picking over the events of the day. ‘This is a good drop,’ Simon signed. ‘“Grnnn” Laphroaig, isn’t it “huuu”?’

‘That’s right,’ his alpha countersigned. ‘I managed to pick it up in Duty Free at Dar es Salaam — have another drop.’

When they’d taken another drink, Busner squatted upright and reached out to beard Simon, inparting his chin, ‘Well, old ally, so there was no hint of recognition as far as Biggles was concerned “huuu”?’

‘No, none at all, he looked just like any other human to me, nasty, brutish and long of leg “huh-huh”.’

‘And show me.’ Busner leant forward. ‘Do you feel that with this “grnnn” revelation, your delusion has dissolved “huuu”?’

‘Yes, there’s that and there’s also this camp — that’s wrought a change in me as well, seeing the lengths that that female has gone to to deny her own chimpunity.’

‘You know, Simon.’ Busner’s signing was subtle, the lightest perturbation of the air. ‘It’s occurred to me for some time now that your human delusion really was not at all an ordinary psychosis “chup-chupp”.’

‘Really “huu”?’

‘Yes, I mean to sign, your reality testing — as we psychologists like to ascript it — has, throughout all of this, been “hooo” different, rather than straightforwardly wrong. Given your preoccupation before your breakdown with the very essence of corporeality and its relation to our basic sense of chimpunity, it crossed my mind — and I hope you’ll “gru-nnn” forgive me for this speculation in advance if you cannot concur — that your conviction that you were human and that the evolutionarily successful primate was the human was more in the manner of a satirical trope “huu”?

Simon mused for some time before countersigning, then simply flicked, ‘It’s an image.’

For a long time afterwards, the two allies tenderly touched each other, and passed the Scotch back and forth, while all around them in the equatorial night, the humans yowled and yammered their near meaningless vocalisations, “Fuuuuuckoooofff-Fuuuuuuckooofff- Fuccckooooofff.”

Hooogeaa! we chimpanzees are now living through an era in which our perceptions of the natural world are changing more rapidly than ever before. Furthermore, these same perceptions are being distorted by the ways we, as chimps, now live. Some thinkers describe our current way of life as ‘unnatural’ — but this is too simple, for chimpunity has often been defined as just this adaptive trait — the capacity for social evolution. Suffice to sign, these ‘unnatural’ ways of living do themselves impact on global ecology.

This is a bewildering state of affairs: our capacity for judging our own objectivity is circumscribed by itself. Is it any wonder that in such circumstances the chimps who have given the whole question of animal rights their fullest attention have dared to consider enlarging the franchise of chimpunity to admit subordinate species, such as humans?

It is worthwhile at this point representing the signs of Dr Louis Leakey, the pioneering archaeological palaeontologist. On learning from his protégé researcher, the celebrated anthropologist Dr Jane Goodall, that she had observed wild humans fashioning twigs and then using them to probe termite mounds, Dr Leakey remarked, ‘Now we must redefine tool , redefine chimpanzee – or accept humans as chimps!’ He referred of course to the traditional definition of chimpanzees as pongis habilis , the tool-making ape.

My intention in writing this novel has not been to make any simple-minded plea for human rights, or the welfare of humans. I personally believe that, despite the apparent inchimpunity of the way humans are employed for scientific purposes: held in large compounds, isolated, diseased, in pain, malnourished etc. etc., these experiments will continue to be necessary, particularly as regards CIV and AIDS.

The issue of CIV corrals us once more in the vicious moral circle. If humans are genetically close enough to us to be infected with CIV (and the most recent research suggests that humans share as much as 98% of our genetic material, and are closer to chimps than they are to gorillas), then surely they are worthy of some small measure of our sympathy?

To this the answer must be a qualified ‘yes’. Humans should be preserved. The dying-out of the human species would be an incalculable loss, and it is one that seems more than likely as bonobos [8] Throughout this book I have used the term ‘bonobo’ and its variants to refer to chimps of African origin. I appreciate that some bonobos prefer the ascription ‘Afro-American’, or in the case of the British, ‘Afro-Caribbean’, but on the whole ‘bonobo’ still seems — to me — to have the widest application. encroach further and further on their habitat. [9] It is estimated that there are now as few as 200,000 wild humans left. A shocking state of affairs when you consider there were probably several million as recently as fifty years ago.

But don’t bonobos need our sympathy as well? Aren’t bonobos more important than humans? Yes, of course, but the utility of preserving humans goes further than the search for a cure for AIDS, or any other medical research. The humans have much to teach us about our own origins and nature. Chimpanzees and humans had a common ancestor who lived as recently as five to six million years ago, an eye blink in evolutionary terms.

Furthermore, if humans were to become extinct in the wild, what would be the fate of domesticated humans? If, as anthropologists like Dr Goodall suggest, humans do indeed have some form of culture, then this would be effectively wiped out. It may even transpire that the behaviours of domesticated humans which reinforce this theory are in fact dependent on some form of morphic, resonant association with wild populations. Wipe out the wild humans and even the domesticated ones who have learnt to sign (some humans have a lexicon of five hundred or more ES signs) may fall motionless. Gesticulation between our two species will be at an end.

But let not the above be taken as an attempt to primatomorphise humans. Humans are what they are because of their humanity. Humans in the wild are very very different from chimpanzees. Human social organisation may be impressively complex when viewed through the lens of scientific enquiry, but stripped of this the raw facts are brute. Humans often consort — and therefore mate — for life! Instead of resolving conflict in a simple manner concordant with dominance hierarchies, human society appears horribly anarchic; bands of humans gather together to propagate their own ‘ways of life’ (perhaps primitive forms of ideology) on their fellows.

And while humans may display as much regard for their offspring as chimpanzees do, their perverse adhesion to the organising principle of monogamy (perverse because it confers no apparent genetic advantage) means that the gulf between ‘group’ and community ties is a large one. Old humans are disregarded and neglected far more than old chimpanzees.