THE APE OF SORROWS by MAURICE ROWDON
Summary by Edward Hill 15th January 2010
Writing in 1932, Solly Zuckerman describes a baboon brawl in the
London Zoo, which turned into something of a massacre. The
baboons were already deeply disturbed by their alienation from
their rightful habitat, and this was why they reacted spitefully
by killing and mutilating each other. Like the monkeys in the
ZOO, humans too have lost our rightful original fixed habitat
and can only govern ourselves with difficulty. This is why we
need law enforcement, judicial systems, and bills of rights,
which are written down or passed from generation to generation.
Civilization, through adaptation and improvisation, has replaced
the old instinctive memory, which served when the habitat we
found around us was what precisely fitted our nervous systems.
Civilization is our human biological tool to contain madness.
Is there a need for religion? All the civilizations we know
about are known to us by their religions, which preceded them.
No civilization, even the most practical or rationalist, can
believe in its own world unless it came from an awesome
experience. Christ, Buddha, Moses, Mohammed-these were the names
that divided one civilization from another, or one phase from
another. These men were visionaries, spoken to by gods or angels
in caves, meadows, and on mountains. Unlike the people around
them, they spoke with authority. This is the key to their
authority and to the fact that others follow them. Such
experiences determine what is to be taken as logical, ethical,
and truthful in any particular civilization. There is no
experience we know of which can achieve this truth except what
comes in a visionary form. When a new vision seizes hold of a
people, stories begin to be told, and these we call myths, which
can be set out in a thoughtful metaphysical form.
Of all the teachers of our civilization, only St. Francis in the
12th Century personified in himself respect for all living
creatures. They weren't simply equals but God's masterpiece. He
called the sun Brother Sun and the moon Sister Moon. He brought
everything close in this way. He preached to man and beast the
universal ability and duty of all creatures to praise God (a
common theme in the Psalms) and the duty of men to protect and
enjoy nature as both the stewards of God's creation and as
creatures ourselves. This was a truly environmental theology.


The 12th Century Muslim master Averroes foresaw a scientific
world system which would have no reference to religion or
revelation. God should be left out of that area of certain and
irrefutable knowledge on which future human enlightenment
depended. None of the foremost theologians foresaw the
Enlightenment of the 18th Century, which excluded religion
altogether.
In the last weeks of his life (1274), Saint Thomas Aquinas told
his secretary that everything came to him in the form of
revelations. You couldn't have said this publicly. To defend
your "personal" vision was to excite the Church's distaste for
hallucination. Besides, it would have opened the debate to all
kinds of mad-cap fanatics and magicians who thought everything
had been revealed to them. So intellect was politically a safer
bet for the Church. Aquinas placed his bet on that side and
became known as the greatest intellectual pillar of the Church.
His position was that human reason cannot reason about God, but
instead can think about nature, leading to greater
understanding.
Living at the same time as Aquinas, the Englishman Roger Bacon
prophesied our modern world in detail, including the fact that
machines would carry round the world a message that these were
marvels of Christian/Western thought. And the effect would be to
sideline religious experience and make the religious past look
incompetent.
For Duns Scotus (about 1300 AD), everything was distant from the
human, not only God but nature and his fellow creatures. Life
was an extraordinary alienation, and the only real and lasting
rescue from this was love. He was one theologian who tried to
confront human madness and build a bridge over the chasm that
divided man from his own nature and from his God. This quest for
tenderness is why he attached SO much importance in his prayers
and reflections to Mary, the Mother of God. Man must, through
worship, create a connection with God and with the world around
him with continual effort. Understanding can only come through
love, a rejection of the enlightenment-by-intellect idea.
In the 1480s, Pico della Mirandola said we were singled out by
God to have free minds, and that our freedom from animal
attachment to the habitat would give us the truth about it. On
the contrary, our detachment is our only means of controlling
the habitat, not a means to truth. If the metaphysical idea is
wrong, this will lead to disaster. Medieval thinkers wisely saw
the danger of splitting God from nature-of robbing the earth and


human flesh of all sweetness. Later Christians began to believe
that God belonged to the mind, not to the earth, and the
conscious mind could go it alone. Theology-not only Christian
but certain Jewish and Muslim thinkers-said that if you detached
yourself sufficiently from life, you could achieve special
insight into it.
In a certain way, the Puritan temper was the scientific temper-
extreme detachment from all natural phenomena, especially the
passions within, and any suggestion of personality in the
research, for the good reason that the goal was mental
illumination devoid of any animal presence whatever. So we find
that practical science was pioneered in those countries which
had the strongest Puritan movements. If you expound a theory of
"matter" that is, to all intents and purposes, dead, and if this
becomes inherited knowledge, what else are you going to get but
huge populations perceiving the world as dead? The exploitative
human treatment, not just of animals but of the whole
environment, is one result.
One version of the evangelical doctrine is that nature requires
working on with will and purpose if survival is to be assured.
Nature, for Darwin, was harsh and implacable. His theory, which
came to be dubbed by others as the "survival of the fittest,'
was excellent material for the optimism of the time, and soon
combined with the idea of "progress." But evolutionary
"progress" has led from the bow and arrow to the atom bomb, and
from the first wood-smoke to global pollution.
Human intimacy is an echo of the animal within. For instance,
the weekly or monthly local market is the very expression of
intimacy, an exchange of goods produced within a few miles.
Familiar faces are brought together, personal stories exchanged.
This old system was still a form of capitalism but had few
points in common with the later industrial system. Most of the
last human links with the habitat were gradually cut. Production
systems and even packaging come to have no reference to any one
locality or person, any one group or religion or community. This
achieves the program of detachment without words, or police, or
admonition. It is the worst conceivable plan for a primate
biologically saddled with an alienation problem.
Being a thought-animal, the human has built up a whole new
reality distinct from the habitat and all but independent of it.
To do this, he has had to turn his thoughts into impulses as
strong as animal ones-into deep perceptions. Perceptions take
time to build and time to dismantle. For instance, no amount of


ecological data with their carbon-gas warnings can wholly
penetrate our perceptions because locked up within those
perceptions is a concept of Mother Nature, inexhaustible in her
healthy nourishment.
From about 1945, mental depression became something that doctors
had to deal with, and for which they turned to new prescription
drugs that enhance our moods but also weaken our faculties. And
what else was all this but a deep desire to change our
perceptions? It said plainly, "The world's all right but I
A wise man, in the view of Aristotle, needn't be wise at
something or even good at anything to arrive at truth. He said
that the most finished form of knowledge can be conveyed to a
man directly without any recourse to reason, more often as an
intuition than in a verbal or visual form. Aristotle said that
it is this partly divine element of the soul which makes the
human mind distinct from the animal mind. But we can't get rid
of the idea that we act by free choice and that animals don't,
because our lives are based on thought. We overlook that our
thinking is automatic and that our automatic actions are
necessarily most of all our actions.
Let us look at the men and women in the 1930s who were still
claiming Homo sapiens to be wise. What was their actual degree
of wisdom, as displayed in their lives? Well, they had just
finished the worst World War in history and were heading for
another, much huger one. And they walked into both with entirely
blind eyes, no more expecting them than they expected the end of
the earth. Today we can acknowledge at last a certain wisdom in
animals-if only because they do not go on murder sprees, or
wars, or pogroms.
How we arrive at truth is the fundamental metaphysical question,
whether through the heart, the soul, or the mind. Powerful truth
can only be perceived by all three coming together. What is
known only through our conscious minds lacks the force to
persuade us to act, even in the face of dire environmental
problems, because of the way our minds are detached from our
environment rather than part of it. A teaching which the
Christian church adopted from Socrates rather than Jesus was the
idea that the intellect could reason the truth if it could avoid
the senses in every manner possible. In this, we can recognize
the start of our own culture with its rejection of the habitat
and its loss of the physiological sympathetic bond between
people and communities.


Recent history has shown what remorseless environmental
destruction and acts of cruelty are possible through this human
capacity for "detachment."
It can be said that animals have shown consistently a much
greater wisdom than humans have, which is revealed in the fact
that they leave their habitats enhanced rather than degraded.
The truth is that the habitat is sending us a thousand messages
every moment, which our animal organism is meticulously
constructed to respond to through numberless electrochemical
activities of which we are largely unaware. These are habitat
processes no less than what happens in the veins of a leaf, and
we cannot detach ourselves from them for an instant.
In medieval times, anything that suggested "mystery" in the
Greek sense of the word-anything touching the closed secrets of
initiatory sects, visions, and states of ecstasy-was as out as
out can be, just as it is for us today. But apparently, humans
are unable to live in what they perceive to be a dead universe
for long. And the moment they start saying it is alive, they
have to say alive with what, and a new religion begins, which is
always revealed as some kind of refurbishment of the old
religion.