the human animal

403 Pages·2013·7.08 MB·English

THE HUMAN ANIMAL
by Weston La Barre
THE. UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO AND LONDON'
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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, CmCAGO & LONPON
The University of Toronto Press, Toronto 5, Canada
Copyright 1954 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved
Published 1954. First Phoenix Edition 1960. Seventh impres5ion
1967. Printed in the United States oj America
To MY WIFE, MY SONS, and MY DAUGHTER,
who taught me these things
H arrow the house of the dead; look shining at
New styles of architecture, a change of heart. w.
H. AUDEN
The present edition has changed a few minor wordings in
the text, but no major argument. In two important matters
(race as adaptive and the old Anaxagoras-Aristotle argu
ment) on which my views have somewhat shifted focus, I
have left the text unchanged, and in readily identifiable
paragraphs in the appendix I have criticized my own earlier
opinions from the viewpoint of new evidence. I think no one
who values scientific reasoning either makes or expects an
apology for such a change of mind.

Introduction
Western culture is a strange paradox. For thousands of years we have
proclaimed our primary or even exclusive allegiance to the spiritual
world. But somehow, in the meantime, in spite of this protested loyalty
-whether backsliding, ofThanded, unwitting. absent-minded. or per
verse-we have historically created the most unusual and complex
material culture the world has ever seenl This result is hardly to be
expected from our pretensions and suggests that we have had some
confusion about our nature and our motivations, for we have ,;urely
shown less confusion about the nature of the phYSical world. At the
same time, we have not been very clear about the nature of the realities
we call "spiritual."
A good deal of this confusion comes from the use of traditional COD
cepts, which, when we look at them more critically, we can now see are
inadequate. Modem man is coming to realize that there is only one
integrated, unified kind of world, not two. But this is not all. We are
sometimes deeply motivated to be confused about our human nature.
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That is, there are some aspects of man's nature which we have reasons
for choosing not to know. In the current and chronic human predica
ment, man has as many psychological blind spots and wilful misappre
hensions about himself as does any patient of a psychiatrist. And for
much the same reason: we, like the patient, are afraid of what we are.
We wish to maintain other pretenses and to preserve certain delusions
about ourselves, not to look at unwelcome facts; and we have our own
peculiarly human reasons for all this, as we will see later.
But almost in spite of ourselves the facts about man have been steadily
accumulating. Paleontology-the study of ancient life from its fossil re
mains-has given us a clear picture not only. of the biolOgical history
behind man but also of the main outlines of his immediate ancestry.
Physical anthropology, which used to be a dreary and sterile bone
measuring science, too often used to argue the "superiority" ()f one race
over another, has now become a genuine "human biology." And biology
itself, transfonned by a century of growing insights into organic evolu
tion, has given us a better sense of man's basic nature and of hi~ place
in the larger natural order.
The social sciences have also grown in knowledge. Sociology, sound
ly based on the essentially social nature of man, has learned so much as
to be a large group of specialties in itself. Cultural anthropology-the
study of the SOcially inherited behavior patterns of men in different
societies-has collected such a mass of information about the various
ways in which man can be human that the professional student can
barely specialize in one continent alone. Archeology, the main tool in
the study of prehistory, now tells us not only the relative sequences of
stratification but also, with the Carbon 14 technique, even something
like absolute dating in time. Comparative linguistics has advanced its
claim to being the most exact of the social sciences; and anyone who
knows recent work will admit that it has made a good case. Psychology,
and espeCially clinical psychology, has sharpened our understanding
of man's behavior; while the more one learns of modern dynamic
psychiatry, the more respect for it increases as one of the most subtle,
precise, and profound disciplines of the human mind. Indeed-and I
think rightly so-few of the newer generation of social anthropologists
consider themselves fully equipped to get the best out of field work
unless they have some knowledge of clinical psychology and analytic
psychiatry. This is only one of the many signs that students of the social
sciences are increasingly aware that they have much to learn from one
another.
Both in theory and in practice the social sciences are moving steadily
in the direction of co-operation and integration. For example, sociolo
gists and anthropologists now borrow each other's insights and tech
niques with the same abandon as college roommates borrow each
other's shirts and neckties. In fact it is hard to tell the difference be
tween them to an interested person, beyond stating weakly, and not at
all accurately, that anthropologists study primitive peoples and sociolo
gists civilized ones. Cultural anthropologists are admittedly partly his
torians, and modem historians are intentionally students of cultural
history. Applied anthropology and political science merge skills in ad
ministering our Pacific island dependencies. Government cannot get
along without the economist. Jurisprudence and the law look into
analytiC psychiatry for inSights" only to discover that the social case
worke~ has preceded' them there. In fact, the modern child-guidance
clinic is a team made up of the social worker, the psychiatrist, and the
psychologist. The projective techniques of the clinical psychologist are
among the best diagnostic tools of modem psychiatry, and of course
the field anthropologist has long since borrowed them for research
purposes. It is as if we had cut up the subject of man like a meat pie.
But as all the specialists start from a common center, when each of
them learns more of his own terrain, then all the social scientists begin
to realize that the whole is a large circle and not a small triangular
wedge-and that there are solid meat, hot potatoes, and gravy in all
the slices. /
The whole trend of twentieth-century science is plainly toward inte
gration, a fact indicated in the very names of new disciplines: psycho
somatic medicine, biochemistry, psychobiology, and the like. The inte
grative movement in the social sciences derives further significance
from this state of affairs. Our knowledge of the parts has now reached a
stage when we can begin to seek a ''holistic'' understanding of larger
wholes. Possessing now an anatomy of our various subjects, so to speak,
we can begin to see the functioning phYSiology and relationships of
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these structures. Science, too, is discovering that there is only "one
world."
Probably the best example of this holistic naturalism is found in
mathematical physics. By looking at the nature both of stars and of
atoms and by an eHort of superb intellectual synthesizing, Einstein has
sought to encompass them both within one consistent system, expressed
in a mere handful of equations. In philosophy-partly derived from
modem mathematics but almost equally inspired by the biological COn
cept of the organism-we have Whitehead's impressive and deep-rooted
holism, which sees all reality as a system of functional relationships. In
psychiatry the commonest criticism of Freud has been that he was far
too biological in his psychology. In psychology itself, the older ele
mentistic behaviOJ:ism (which, in ignoring consciousness, left out the
central fact of psychology) is gone, and modern learning theory is in
fact highly concerned with psychic motivation; Gestalt psychology, a
sophisticated and contemporary system philosophically, is thoroughl;:
holistic in its very essence. In biology the interest in the ecological ap
proach is giving us a larger sense of the complex relationships of organ
isms and environments. Perhaps because of the nature of their subject
matter, biologists are inescapably driven to a larger organismic view
of life; and among biologists, none is more holistic ab OVO, so to speak,
than Edwin Grant Conklin. W. B. Cannon's pan-systemic physiology
and Sir Charles Sherrington's integrative neurology make sense to both
psychologists and psychiatrists-and, indeed, the psychosomatic physi
cian applies these same total-organism views to the practice of medi
cine.
Anthropology, too, is wor~ing in this direction. Curiously enough,
however, it is one of its greatest scientifIc successes which has hereto
fore impeded its progress: the discovery that the physical "racial" dif
ferences among men have nothing to do with the speciflc cultural
differences among them. 'Racial traits are genetically inherited; cultural
traits are SOcially inherited. ,Since these vary independently, phYSical
anthropologists can study this intricate animal biologically-but they do
it mostly without any reference to its most signifIcant and conspicuous
animal adaptation, culture!. Likewise, some anthropologists (I think
mistakenly) believe that their subject matter is solely that abstraction
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