THE SOCIAL CONTRACT

ROBERT ARDREY

Subtitle: A Personal Inquiry into the Evolutionary Sources of Order and Disorder, Atheneum, N.Y., 1970, 405 pgs., index, bibliography, illustrations

Biography of Robert Ardrey in Wikipedia

Reviewer's comment:
The biography describes the author's work and the important influence of this book. This is his third book of four that are focused on the evolution of mankind. In this one he elaborates and expands on his analysis and conclusions from the discovery by Raymond Dart, the Leakeys, and others of pre-human and human remains in southern Africa. He is an ardent believer in Darwinian theory of evolution and a materialist.
The Wikipedia entry describes Ardrey's background as a playwright and screen writer and his political activities during and after WWII. These clearly show his great skill as an author and his political - social opinions that influence his conclusions about the human behavior he considers in this book.
He develops theories about human political and social history as evolutionary results from pre-human and even animal societies. He expresses his thesis clearly in the first page of the book. And it is anathema to 'progressives', and to conservatives for other reasons, even more violently today than when the author announced it. Writing in 1970 he is very pessimistic about the human family deterioration but his predictions about the then future are nothing compared to what has happened and is continuing. But his conclusions about causation and about necessary government - or society - interventions are terrible.
A student of the French Revolution will know how the process unfolds into Terror and then dictatorship. A reader of today's uncensored news sources will understand that all of the various revolutionary groups are destroying the family.

Chapter 1 -Tuskless in Paradise:
The author begins the first lines of the first chapter with his assessment of real human nature. "A society is a group of unequal beings organized to meet command needs. In any sexually reproducing species, equality of individuals is a natural impossibility. Inequality must therefore be regarded as the first law of social materials, whether in human or other societies. Equality of opportunity must be regarded among vertebrate species as the second law" .... "Violation of biological command has been the failure of social man. Vertebrates thought we may be, we have ignored the law of equal opportunity since civilizations' earliest hours. Sexually reproducing beings though we are, we pretend today that the law of inequality does not exist. And enlightened through we may be, while we pursue the unattainable we make impossible the realizable."
The chapter is a lament about the results of these failures with mentions of his previous book The Territorial Imperative in which he described one result of the evolutionary development of human nature.

Chapter 2 - The Accident of the Night:
In this chapter he describes the role of sexual reproduction and the diversity it creates during evolution over millennia. He describes genetics, and statistics of probability.
The book was published in 1970. It contains his wide ranging references to the scientific studies published by then. In the 40 years since then the volume of research, especially in biology, has exploded using new tools. A recent Wikipedia entry is listed below.

"The accidental consequence of sexual recombination has been a problem to nature and not just to naturalists." Among many other specific topics within the general theme of the chapter, Ardrey considers the subject 'race'. He digs into detail noting that in Africa there is much more diversity than Americans, for instance, consider. "Yet all is black Africa. What we regard as a race is an intricate mosaic of some thousands of tribes, each an interbreeding unit with a common history but isolated from tis neighbors by language, by widely varying customs and traditions, and, as a rule, by hostility." "The first division of the race we call black is between Negro and Bantu, and the genetic origins of the Bantu peoples may, for all we know, be as varied as they are obscure. But another migration, this from the northeast, created entirely new groups. Hamitic peoples, Caucasian in origin, had crossed from southern Arabia to spread through Somalia and Ethiopia and to hybridize in varying degrees at varying racial borders."
He recognizes that the entire subject "race' is fraught with political and emotional contention.

Chapter 3 - Order and Disorder:
In this chapter he considers animal (including human) desire for order - that is grouping in a specific manner. He begins with: "The loneliness of man is the loneliness of the animal. We must have each other. ... The animal cannot stand alone."

He is writing about societies and the intrinsic need of animals to form societies. He considers as a guess that a drive for this is "fear and avoidance of strangers". "Few forces of order are more universal in animal groupings or more resonant of human ways." Further on he considers other reasons. "What ever the need, the true society, human or animal, encloses structures organizing its members of varying endowment, and fulfills functions which the individual cannot accomplish alone".
He discusses in detail some fascinating examples of animal social behavior. Moreover, "Out of our need for each other we form our alliances, forswear our temptations, accept our compromises, obey happily or unhappily the rules of social order." Throughout the chapter he discusses the social behavior of a large number of different animal societies with fascinating different alarm signals known from birth or before by every member. In many cases the alarm signal specific to a vulnerable society is different in relation to each of the different predators against which it must defend. He notes that for some animal societies education of the young is more important than defense - especially for societies in which the young require considerable time to mature. He deplores the condition in human societies to ignore in educational methods the principle of innate aggressiveness and the drive to learn and to master problems of the environment. The chapter contains much more about the nature and critical importance of the society. In this he gives considerable attention to Rousseau..

Chapter 4 - The Alpha Fish:
Here Ardrey takes up psychoanalysis begining with Freud and Jung and Adler. This is about the 'alpha fish' (the existence in society of a dominant leader) and different ideas about competition - the struggle to 'rise' 'advance' become superior to others. This, then, means fear and aggression. Ardrey favors Adler for having focused on what is relevant today and for providing answers. Ardrey quotes cogently Claude Levi-Strauss who doubted that material benefits could ever explain who some people try to be leaders. "because there are , in any human group, men who unlike most of their companions enjoy prestige for its own sake, feel a strong appeal to responsibility, and to whom the burden of public affairs brings its own reward."

Well, Machiavelli long ago gave a different definition. There are two types of political men - those who strongly desire to dominate, and those who desire to avoid being dominated. Ardrey cites several scholars who have studied dominance and social status. Ardrey writes: "Any society has as its basic structure a hierarchy of members unequally disposed. He calls this 'alphaness'. He concludes that human personality is a mystery. And "such a mystery is the alpha fish". He describes a variety of potential factors including being first born sons, being very old and senior individuals having high IQ, having favorable family environment, masculinity (the bane of feminists).. He comments;; "So many variables enter the determination of alphaness that one faces an equation beyond solution." Interestingly, he also describes 'political' attributes in the selection and establishment of the alpha male or female in some societies.

Chapter 5 - Time and the Young Baboon:
His assessment of the then recent revolt of the young generation is pessimistic. " In the later decades of the twentieth century the revolt of the young absorbed the debates of adults as passionately as had in previous eras ...." a long sentence listing many follows. "But the revolt of the young seems to some - and I am among them - quite possibly a permanent feature of society's future landscape."
Today we live in an era of expanding such revolt that seems to make his prediction one of the most astute of any. Ardrey describes 'revolts' among animal species as his evolutionary background to behavior of modern mankind. "As we consider our human young and the widening gap between generations, we shall do well to inspect the alpha-omega relations of other species. We need not confine ourselves to such primates as the rhesus, or to laboratory experiments. In almost every society of animals the line of maximum tension lies between the maturing males and the adults of the male establishment." He describes the conditions of the young males in many different animal species. They are forced to leave their mother's side and become bachelors unless they can achieve 'alpha' status. If not, he notes that they are 'psychologically castrated" and knowingly accept their fated status.
Among the species, he describes the African 'hunting dog' which is not a dog but looks like one. It is the most feared predator of all but man. And it is the only species that Ardrey has found that purposely pays attention to raising its young rather than rejecting them. He considers that this is because for other species, such as the lion, the mature adult then survives and excess males are not only unneeded but an evolutionary problem. But the hunting dog adults die early from disease or accident and must be replaced.

He turns again to the human species. "A line of erosion between mature and maturing exists in most animal societies. Its visibility is increasing in human societies today." ..."What we watch today is the disintegration of the family which we were taught was universal and eternal. It is neither." He believes that it is modern technology that is destroying the family unit.
His conclusion: "A virtue in the study of primate societies is that we study social organizations not only recalling the human past but perhaps anticipating the human future."
Ardrey admits that in his early compilations of early scientific studies for his 1961 book, African Genesis, he was wrong in believing that the family was a critical component of a primate society. It is not. "And the evidence suggests that never in the evolutionary past has this been the principal primate way." Meaning the family. Further, he notes that now we know that even the earliest proto-primate, the lemur, rejects the young once a new sibling is born. The young leave their parents and form social groups by age and learn the necessities for survival by educational play amongst themselves. And they learn both cooperation and competition and develop a sense of 'justice' in fair play.
He considers what the human youth must learn absent the disintegrating family. This is where the 'social contract' comes in.

"If you are young, then a difficulty is that you do not know as much as you think you know."
Ardrey indulges in philosophy, discussing issues pertinent to a Rousseau. He devotes pages to discussion of managerial activities in industrial organizations. he quotes not his usual sources, students of animal species, but students of contemporary human behavior such as Abraham Maslow writes in his Motivation and Personality. He delves into the human problems created by the adoption of the assembly line method in manufacturing. He considers that the 'revolt of the young' is an international phenomena.

"In our search for hypotheses of predictive value, I suggest that the concept of human organization motivated by material need has been sufficiently successful to destroy itself; and that if we do not enlarge our concepts of innate human need - our- portrait of the human being himself - then our societies will eventually either lapse into apathy or explode into anarchy."

"If we follow my hypothesis that our needs are innate, and of animal origin, then we may likewise comprehend why the young need not know what they are doing to act as they do."
Ardrey returns to the study of the baboon as an example of a species that lives in a 'severe world'. The baboon is the largest monkey species which makes him a delicious repast for predators such as the cheetah and leopard. And he lives on the ground in a dangerous territory. We can wonder about why he chose to move there, but only observe that he did. The baboon is himself responsible for his third venerability, namely as Ardrey puts it "he cannot keep his hands off other people's goods". Thus he replaced the cheetah and leopard by making himself the enemy of a far more dangerous predator - MEN. Ardrey's comment: "The baboon is at war with the world and has been so for time without known beginning. Beset on all fronts through an eternity to make the siege of Leningrad seem the flicker of an eyelid, baboon defense has been the order and concert of numbers." He has developed a social contract that functions - indeed Ardrey writes - there are more baboons in southeast Africa than humans. He continues: "Interlocked in the baboon contract are identity, stimulation, and security."
Further, "Baboons - out of intellectual limitation, perhaps, and most certainly out of an incapacity for self-delusion - are unlikely to surrender a society that fulfills their innate needs." ... "The young baboon matures with the assurance that in his natural society he will find a place unique and his own." It is the failure of today's human youth to achieve his quest for identity that he contemptuously rejects security's last offer.

Chapter 6 - Death by Stress:
Ardrey describes an early and little noticed experiment with guppies in aquarium tanks. They produce very large numbers of offspring and immediately eat most of them to preserve the ordained ratio of 3 males to 6 females. "Birth control is the law of the species." As a dedicated believer in evolution, Ardrey, disagrees that contraception violates 'natural law'. On the contrary he claims that it is an inherent function of 'natural law'. But contraception is not the only or major determinate of periodic mass decline in animal populations.
Contrary to Thomas Malthus populations do not increase indefinitely. Ardrey describes situations in which a huge population increases then suddenly - suddenly - dies off to near extinction. This immediately is matched by a similar crash in the population of a different species that is the predator of the first. Many species exhibit the same phenomena -rapid expansion of population followed by a huge crash, and then another cycle. Scientists have postulated about the causes, suggesting food supply, sunspots, climate, even arithmetic or to the density of the numbers of the population.
Ardrey devotes space to examining different theories about the cause. One successful experiment found that Norwegian rats would create small families, establish territories of sufficient size, defend them and be amicable to members of their own clan. He concludes that population size is related to territorial size. But that example is insufficient because in normal -uncontrolled space - the animals can simply expand their clan territories into unoccupied areas. Yet, they self constrict the total area that they divide up into the family's own territory.
So in this book he repeats his conclusion about territory - The Territorial Imperative that links possession of a prefered territory by the male attracts the property loving female. In succeding sections he turns out to be wrong in his predictions and as well as an advocate for the most drastic measures for population control by governments imaginable - as the Chinese example demonstrates. He describes experiments with humans to study their varied demand for 'personal space' . Then he considers experiments and studies of animal groups in terms of individual 'personal space' and social group space. For human groups he selects studies of Chicago neighborhoods. They comprise defined territories. But among other things the observers have found disastrous change when the low level houses from which the adults could control the young were replaced by the high rise public apartments and adult control of the young disappeared. The results of scientists observations indicate a complex social organization.

He repeats his statement of the three innate needs which demand satisfaction. "The first is identity, the opposite of anonymity, and it is highest. The second is stimulation the opposite of boredom. The lowest is security, the opposite of anxiety."
But achievement of any of these, especially security, leads to the loss of the others, especially identity.
He has written many other quotable opinions. "The violent way that I discuss is the creation, by means of physical threat or assault, of dark little worlds in the image of the society of which they are a part and against which they transgress." ... "That openly or secretly, consciously or unconsciously, we applaud violence's success can be inspected only in terms of human unreason and humanity's original sin. Yet we do: ... And much more.

Chapter 7 - Space and the Citizen:
Remarkably he states that recent studies have been ascribed to a strong psychological desire to 'dominate'. "Dominance over a piece of space - territory - would rather lie at one end of a long continuum grading into dominance over one's fellow beings."
Amazing that it takes sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists with Ph.D.'s today to recognize and declare that the driving force of political man is the conflict between those whose goal is domination and those whose need is to avoid being dominated - and we know that this central observation was the principle factor identified by Machiavelli in the early 1500's.
Ardrey devotes considerable space and ink to elaborate on this obvious fact. But Ardrey insists on limiting the role of dominance to control of defined territorial space, while Machiavelli claims its relevance in all human political activity. But Ardrey has been attacked by environmentalists so devotes attention to explaining what the term 'aggressiveness' means.
He devotes another section to trying to understand war as a favorite human activity. And he is pessimistic about what he believes in the propensity to violence. By this he includes civil violence. Again, his outlook is pessimistic.

Chapter 8 - The Violent Way:
Ardrey turns to focus on aggression. "In this chapter I shall attempt to discriminate as clearly as possible among three categories of conflict. There is aggressiveness, arising from the composition of beings without which natural selection could not take place. There is violence, that form of aggressiveness which employs or effectively threatens the use of physical force. And there is war, that particular form of organized violence taking place between groups." ... "Not for money and not for space, neither for women nor a table in heaven do men seek to best one another."
He insists that it is an implacable force. It is his first commandment of independent life, that we come to terms with our environment." This is the origin of the demand to achieve dominance.
He names some names among those who seek to deny aggressiveness is innate.
He insists that "Aggressiveness is the principal guarantor of survival."

He would not be shocked to see that today the deniers of innate aggressiveness are defunding police departments and discharging aggressive males from jail. He predicted it.
As usual he provides detailed descriptions of aggressive behavior in predatory species to include eating their own kind. He mentions various incidents in which lions and other species engaged in violent combat and killed the looser for which he claims to know any reason.
with that introduction he turns to examples of human violence, the first being the American use of atomic bombs on two Japanese cities. His observation is that this incident generated considerable emotional horror while the previous total destruction of Tokyo by fire bombing and the destruction of Dresden did not.
He offers another thought: " Human violence, once fulfilled on the battlefield is today being fulfilled in the city's streets."

And another: "That animal societies are closed, and kept separated by distrust and antagonism, has been the worry to all utopians devoted to an ultimate brotherhood of man."

He then quotes Vernon Reynolds, "Modern man is territorial and aggressive, hostile to and intolerant of strangers, and lives within an authoritarian social structure in which self-assertiveness and competition for dominance characterizes the successful male."
He continues, but even this concept "has been acclaimed widely if uncritically, since it shores up the tenet of cultural anthropology that, since human fault has been culturally determined, it may be culturally corrected."

He predicts: "The future of violence is immense beyond conception, the richest crop today ripening in human fields."

Many more observations abut human society follow. Such as: "Action and destruction are fun."
And: "The Age of the Alibi, presenting greater sympathy for the violator than the violated, has with elegance prepared us for maximum damage as we face a future of Maximum civil disorder."

Written in 1975.

He quotes White's comment, that "when a people cannot agree on how to rule themselves, someone else will do it for them."

I think immediately of the French, who when faced with new condition that they had never faced in a 1000 years, the absence of the decapitated king, set to violent conflict among the revolutionaries and non-revolutionaries, could not fashion an agreed new political order into which Napoleon decided to 'do it form them'.
Julius Caesar did the same for the Romans after years of internal social war.
Ardrey concludes: "I can find nothing shocking in the hypothesis that within a democratic society any tolerance of violence, whatever its original justification, that leads to the proliferation of violence leads in all likelihood to the death of democracy."

Exactly stated.
He considers democracy a recent experiment. He expects that if violence extends beyond social control "we may be well assured that anarchy will not be the winner. order will be imposed upon disorder. And we shall return to more primitive political dispensations in which the citizen submits to violent impositions beyond his power to challenge, and keeps the peace because he must."

Ardrey comments: "I can find nothing shocking in the hypothesis that within a democratic society any tolerance to violence, whatever its original justification that lead to the proliferation of violence leads in all likelihood to the death of democracy?"

I also find nothing shocking and think of the French Revolution=Terror=Napoleon.

Chapter 9 - The Lions of Gorongosa:
"Hunting is the master behavior pattern of the human species. It is the organizing activity which integrated the morphological, physiological, genetic and intellectual aspects of the human organism and of the population who compose our single species." Ardrey credits these thoughts to William Laughin and also to S. L. Washburn. He continues: 'No inquiry into the social contract can be completed without review of what is known or speculated about man's hunting past." But Ardrey credits, again, as he did in his first book, African Genesis, Raymond Dart with the first recognition that the pre-human Austrlopithecus Africanus was a hominid who hunted, was a carnivore and was armed with weapons before mankind developed the large brain.
He notes that in the decade since then very much new information has been collected using newer and newer technologies. Since then very many scientific articles have been published. He notes that there remains objections, controversies, including about the consumption of meat in the human diet. He cites various studies to insist that meat was the major food and hunting was its source for millions of years. Other controversies swirl about the egos of some of the explorers eager to claim that THEIR find prior or more significant that those of other scientists - or that their identification of the find is different.
As his title indicates, Ardrey focuses here on the Gorongosa valley and the lion, but he describes the hunting capacities of all the predators whom the pro-to humans faced as both competitors and prey - the cheetah, hyena, jackal, leopard, hunting dog, vultures and lion. All not only hunt but also scavenge on occasion. And hominoids the leopard especially ate with gusto having taken his prey to his usual tree limb to avoid being overpowered by lion or hyena.
He draws much more information by analysis of fossils. One interesting fact that snows the ancient origin of evolutionary development is that the female human who today normally only throws underhand likewise did so hundreds of thousands of years ago. And it was the female inability to throw overhand that prevented her from participating in the hunting party but to confine her contribution to collecting fruit and carrying for the young.

Chapter 10 - The Risen Ape:
The author summarized his conclusion in this chapter. Note his evocative writing style. "The years passed by the millions, as indistinguishable one from another as stones on a shingle shore, or scattered, flat-topped thorn trees on a sun-struck, shimmering savanna." .... "Now the years passed by like a procession of mourners in slow single file." He shifts from the evolution of humankind as a process of 'survival of the fittest' on the individual scale to maintaining it on the social group scale. This is the predicate for his concept of the "Social Contract".
"A nation of man at war, fighting for survival, will tighten its social contract, renounce individual demands, exist as a single group". ... "I find no other persuasive explanation for the failure of the hominid line, through such an expanse of evolutionary time, to do anything much but survive. Our essential demand for social order virtually eliminated that necessary disorder giving room to individual assertion." ...
"I should like to present an hypothesis: Not until the invention of the bow and arrow was the individual freed from the social order commanded by the cooperative hunting band. In human history it was the long-distance weapon that made possible the invention of the individual. Our ancient prison of conformity was broken open. The risen ape soared".
Actually the history of the development of weapons shows that the slingshot predated and remained superior to the bow even to the armies of Alexander the Great and Hannibal.
Ardrey expands on his theory to include the issue of the sudden expansion of the human brain. As always he marshals his forces by citing the studies of many professional scientists. He proposes another controversial theory, writing "since I lose my reputation anyway as regularly as oak trees lose their leaves..." He brings up two known facts - one is the explosion of an asteroid about seven hundred thousand years ago and a coincidental reversal of the earth's magnetic field that turned north into south, during which time the earth lacked any magnetic field for abut 5,000 years. This lack opened earth to greatly increased bombardment by cosmic rays. And this could mean a greatly increased rate of mutation within species. He deploys the results of scientific studies in many different fields and proposals by theorists such as Arthur Koestler and Paul Maclean to support his ideas about the development of the human brain. It became and is 'defective'. He identifies many ways in which it is "defective" and the results this has caused in human beliefs and activities. For one thing, he believes that human society had 'natural equality' but that 'materialism' has ruined things.

References

Robert Ardrey - African Genesis

Robert Ardrey - The Territorial Imperative

Robert Ardrey - The Hunting Hypothesis

Austrlopithecus- Wikipedia entry

Evolution - the Wikipedia entry - mostly about biology a subject that has advanced greatly since Ardrey wrote