The Great Apes.
The orangutan. The gorilla. The chimpanzee and bonobo.
Impressive beasts, all of them, but none compare to the pure superiority of the greatest ape: man.
Many of these creatures can use tools and use primitive communication, but their skills are dwarfed by the far better human. Man is defined by his use of tools and his superior communication abilities.
These impure monkeys swing through the trees and walk on their knuckles. Man walks upright. Man walks distinguished. Man has fire.
The ape is a hairy, grotesque, angry, dirty, masturbating, poop-throwing, godless beast. He is motivated by raw sexual desires, raw tempers, and raw hunger. He uses brawn before he uses brain. He has no control over his primal emotions.
Man, on the other hand, is a civilized creature. He is handsome, clean, respectful, and intelligent. He is motivated by love, honor, and religion. He uses his brain. He prides himself in his masterful control of his emotions.
Orangutans and gorillas were long believed to be rapists who would kidnap human women and violate them. All apes were considered monstrous brutes who would jump at the chance to attack noble hunters.
Rather than talk, they shriek like banshees in their jungle homes. Rather than settle disputes diplomatically, they mob their enemies and mutilate them.
Gorilla and chimpanzee males create harems of females, often through brute force. They display their sheer power by running around and beating their chests or pulling down trees. If they have to, they will fight and kill other males to earn females. It isn’t uncommon for chimpanzees to even beat the females and their children into submission.
Chimpanzees never peacefully interact with other groups of chimpanzees. When two troops meet, there is bloodshed. The two groups will go to war until one of them is utterly destroyed. The troop that wins has its pickings from what’s left of the losing troop. Sometimes that involves taking surviving females from that troop for themselves. Sometimes it involves cannibalizing members of the enemy troop.
But surely there is a good ape, right? Bonobos, close cousins of chimpanzees, are very peaceful. They are hardly known to kill each other. Group interactions are often peaceful. What is the secret to their success?
Well, bonobos often partake in what has been referred to as the “bonobo handshake,” where individuals will quickly get it on with each other to strengthen bonds.
Even the best of apes do not compare to the lowest of humans. Man is simply superior in every way to these savages. Every last one of those animals are savages.
They kill.
They rape.
They’ll gobble up their own vomit when given the chance.
They have no morals.
They have no control over their impulses.
They are just stinky, hairy, horny, shit-throwing savages.
Savages.
Savages.
Haven’t I heard that word before?
I’ve heard it thrown around a lot in our history.
“Because your kind were once our ancestors. Man was born with the ape, and there’s still an ape curled up inside of every man. The beast that must be whipped into submission, the savage that has to be shackled in chains. You are that beast Caesar, you taint us, you poison our guts. When, when we hate you, we’re hating the dark side of ourselves.”
Governor Breck, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972)
Man might be inherently superior to the ape, but not all humans are created equal, are they? There’s the uncivilized cannibals of the jungles and islands. Those wicked, lowly people participate in the most unholy practices imaginable. They worship all sorts of primitive deities and feast on human flesh.
Then, of course, there’s plenty of primitive tribes who do not participate in cannibalism, but it’s sometimes hard to tell who’s who in this giant, untamed world. But does it really matter who’s who? They worship primitive gods. They participate in unholy practices, even if not cannibalism. Their tools are inferior to ours. Their society is inferior to ours. They are inherently inferior.
Maybe we can take them and educate them. Convert them to civilization. Western civilization. But even if that works, they are tainted by their blood. They’re better, but still inferior to us. We are civilized pure bloods. We’ve been chosen by God. They are savages, and they will never be able to escape that reputation.
They are stinky, lowly, primitive savages.
Wasn’t that a convenient way of thinking for colonizers?
People of numerous races and cultures at one point or another hated another race, and how did they justify it? The others were violent. They worshiped false deities. If the enemy’s technology was less advanced than yours, the enemy was “primitive.” Violent and primitive? That makes them savages. Being savages makes them inferior. Being inferior means we can do whatever the hell we want with them.
Humanity is a race dependent on proving itself superior, or at the very least different. We have to stand out. We have to be better. We have to be above the natural order. For a long time, we humans didn’t define ourselves purely scientifically, but philosophically too. We were the sole tool users. We were the sole language users. We were entirely different from the animals we shared the planet with. After all, if we’re above the animal, we can conquer the animal.
“Now we must redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as human.”
Dr. Louis Leakey in response to Jane Goodall’s discovery that chimpanzees made and used tools
And somewhere, that bastard train of thought got applied to people.
The Oxford Dictionary defines “savage” as a noun as “a brutal or vicious person.” I like that definition for the most part. I wouldn’t consider being “primitive” (which is another term I hate) a trait of being a savage. If I think of savage, I think of violence. I think of someone or something that has committed a horrible act against someone or something else.
Using that logic, a lot of the “savages” of the past can still have that title applied to them. There were cannibals. There were groups who participated in human sacrifice. There were tribes who attacked and killed settlers and colonizers.
But using that against them is entirely unfair, because violence very much existed in the cultures who applied this awful title to these so-called “savages.”
While some colonial cultures didn’t partake in human sacrifice necessarily, they pressured their people into making “sacrifices” for the greater good of their nation. Sometimes, the nation demanded their lives. They may not have cannibalized, but they developed tools of war that far surpassed the horrors any cannibal could imagine. Explosives. Shrapnel. Machines that can mow down human lives as wastefully as a weedeater to grass. Torture methods that would put anything Satan would have to come up with to shame.
And many of the savages who “attacked” settlers were defending their ancestral lands from invaders.
I would call it pretty savage to force innocent human lives into bondage as slaves. I would call it pretty savage to force millions upon millions of people out of their homelands and into the realms of uncertainty. I would call it pretty savage to take over an inhabited island and turn it into a military base. I would call it pretty savage to hand out blankets covered in sickness to displaced people in an attempt to exterminate them like rats.
But they’re inferior, so it’s fine we treat them like vermin.
And even when these nations tried to “civilize” these people, they used it as an oppression tactic. They destroyed cultures. They forced people into submission. And they intentionally kept many of them poor, illiterate, and uneducated in order to stay above them. In order to lord power over them.
The term “savage” was never used to properly separate the “civilized” ones from the “violent” ones. It was a false means of justification. It was always about being different, not violent.
“Being both more systematically brutal than chimps and more empathetic than bonobos, we are by far the most bipolar ape. Our societies are never completely peaceful, never completely competitive, never ruled by sheer selfishness, and never perfectly moral.”
Frans de Waal, primatologist
At a zoo, I had an up-close encounter with a gorilla (I talked more about this in my post 98% Gorilla from August of last year which I couldn’t link here because I’m writing this from my phone and it’s not cooperating). A silverback knuckle-walked his way over to me on the other side of the glass. Down on all fours, the larger animal was actually shorter than me. His posture had him looking down towards hell, which differed from my bipedal stance that kept me looking to heaven.
But then he switched it up on me. He looked up into my face, forcing me to look back into his. I looked down, he looked up. But he wasn’t looking at heaven, and I wasn’t looking towards hell. It was just two apes looking at each other. I tried to avoid eye-contact since that can be seen as a threat among gorillas, but he didn’t seem like he was trying to intimidate me. Rather, he seemed like he was looking at me for the same reason I was looking at him.
Curiosity.
To me, that silverback was capable of the things that are most important to me in humans. He was capable of the same level of curiosity, and probably the same level of empathy. The same level of intelligence? Perhaps not, but does that matter? Does intelligence make me superior? Superiority is often relative. It’s more of an opinion than a fact. And even if I am superior to that gorilla, does it give me the right to rule over him?
Looking at him in his literal cage made me think about the social cage I was trapped in that he wasn’t. He didn’t look like a savage to me. He looked like a raw human being, what I was supposed to be.
Now I know, there are fundamental differences between gorillas and humans on a biological scale, but that’s not the point. He was an ape obeying his natural instincts. I was an ape trying desperately to obey how his society told him to behave.
On the other side of the glass from me was a big, hairy monster who was motivated by primal emotions. But what is a human being if not that?
And if he’s the savage, what does that say about us? No member of his species caused a war that killed millions. No member of his species ordered six million innocent lives to be murdered. No member of his species created a doomsday cult. No member of his species went on television and lied to millions every day. No member of his species inspired a holy war. No member of his species sold others into sex trafficking. No member of his species created atomic bombs.
I can’t say the same thing about my species.
Between the two of us apes, the silverback seemed more animalistic. He was hairy, had little white in his eyes, a long muzzle, sharp fangs, and walked on all fours. I was hairy but not nearly as much as he was, had very blue eyes with dramatic white surrounding them, an extremely short muzzle, dull teeth, and walked upright. But even with all that said, I knew that I was just as much of a monkey as he was.
Is his the face of a savage, or is mine a more accurate depiction?