Balder Ex-Libris - Ardrey RobertReview of books rare and missing2024-03-16T01:56:42+00:00urn:md5:aa728a70505b2fae05796923271581c2DotclearArdrey Robert - The territorial imperativeurn:md5:64f8df558bbba43897c565ccc814c2172013-07-13T23:37:00+01:002013-07-13T22:38:28+01:00balderArdrey RobertAfrica <p><img src="https://balderexlibris.com/public/img2/.Ardrey_Robert_-_The_territorial_imperative_s.jpg" alt="" /><br />
Author : <strong>Ardrey Robert</strong><br />
Title : <strong>The territorial imperative A Personal Inquiry into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations</strong><br />
Year : 1966<br />
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Link download : <a href="https://balderexlibris.com/public/ebook2/Ardrey_Robert_-_The_territorial_imperative.zip">Ardrey_Robert_-_The_territorial_imperative.zip</a><br />
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A Preliminary Meditation. Some years ago - it was February, 1955, late in the southern summer - I was introduced by Professor Raymond A. Dart to a room filled with fossil bones in the basement of Johannesburg's Medical School. In that room I met more than bones, for I encountered a variety of things that I had never heard of. I had never heard of man's origin on the continent of Africa. I had never heard of our probable ancestors, the australopithecines, a zoological group of small-brained erect-running creatures, hesitating between the roles of ape and man, who haunted the high African savannahs a million or two years ago. Neither had I heard that man's last animal ancestors were hunters and for unknown ages had been killing other species for a living before we started killing each other for fun. I had heard of none of these things. In the early 1930's I had lectured in anthropology for a season or two at Chicago's World's Fair. But after that I wrote a play, and so I became a playwright. For twenty years I divided my life between theater and films, and I naturally lost touch with the sciences. It was in these twenty years that all had happened. When I entered Dart's basement room I was anthropology's Rip Van Winkle, encountering the most enormous of alarm clocks. Normal human beings, jarred into consciousness of their own ignorance, tend to keep the information to themselves. Authors, being shameless, tend to rush into print. So fathomless was my ignorance, however, and so oceanic were the dimensions of scientific accomplishment while my back had been turned, that the rush consumed six years of my life, and even then I learned only to float. For it was not just a matter of Australopithecus and the predatory transition; there were alpha fish and pecking orders, gene pools and displacement activities, exploratory behavior and ritualized aggression, and all had bearing on the human condition. Above all, there was territory. There is a virtue, I must presume, in shamelessness, since by placing on parade the things one does not know, one discovers that no one else knows either. The pubhcation of African Genesis in 1961 dropped a clue as to how many people in how many lands shared the shock of my discovery in Dart's basement room, and could share as well the excitements of a six-year safari through unknown scientific lands. An intellectual excursion which a generation earlier could have concerned but an educated few now concerned an educated many. We forget, all of us, that not all the explosions in our reverberating era are those of population and nuclear devices. There is a literacy explosion, too. This perhaps was the most shining emblem to decorate my ignorance. I had not guessed how many people would care about what I was doing. Out of personal obsession I took my long detour through the new biology's beckoning yet forbidding fields. A playwright is a specialist in human nature, and as a playwright I sheltered a conviction that these specialists in animals extant and extinct had something to say about man. But it was a personal enlightment I sought. As a playwright I had my normal nostalgia for fields more familiar than fossil beds and tanks filled with fish. I had no least intention of pursuing my investigations beyond those broad conclusions recorded in my book. I had not reckoned, however, on my fellow man. With the book's publication my last alarm clock went off. Not only had the new anthropology in the time when I slept produced a revolutionary interpretation of man's emergence from the animal world; not only had the new biology begun a revolutionary interpretation of the behavior of animals in that world from which we came: also, as I was now to discover, our time of high stress was producing a revolutionary class of human being. A new human force - a force anonymous and unrecognized, informed and inquisitive, with allegiance to neither wealth nor poverty, to neither privilege nor petulance - was silently appearing on earth. And the class was massive. There is nothing so moving - not even acts of love or hate - as the discovery that one is not alone. It is part of our evolutionary heritage that this should be so, and the ancient chemistry worked on me. Theater and films need not be totally abjured but might on occasion be the object of a sentimental journey like a visit to the town where one was born. But what could not be denied - what could be denied no more than the future itself - was this land of high adventure which science was exploring. And since somebody cared, I went back to work. The Territorial Imperative is a volume comparable to African Genesis. Like the first book, it is a personal investigation into the contemporary, little-known accomplishments of the natural sciences, and a personal interpretation of what these revolutionary studies may bring to our knowledge of man. Unlike the first book, however, which attempted to gather in long perspective our increasing evidence for man's evolutionary nature, the present investigation resembles what we should call in films a close shot. It brings into focus a single aspect of human behavior which I believe to be characteristic of our species as a whole, to be shaped but not determined by environment and experience, and to be a consequence not of human choice but of evolutionary inheritance. In a way it is a pity that we must isolate from all that rich carpet of human impulse a single pattern for contemplation. No man or other animal lives as other than a whole being. If I am a dominant male lion with a vast impressive mane, then at once I am a predator seeking candidates for my next meal, or I shall grow unbearably hungry; I am also prey, and I must keep a wary nostril for men carrying guns, or I shall end up decorating somebody's wall; I am a proprietor, and I must keep rival lions out of my hunting territory, or game will grow scarce; I am a husband, and when one of my wives comes into heat then I must entertain her; I am a father, and with due regard to future lion generations I must brook no nonsense from my cubs while teaching them all I can; and I am also a social being for, sad to confess, I am deathly slow on my feet and an appallingly bad hunter except at close quarters, so I am dependent on the assistance of my wives and my friends, and whether I like them or not I must somehow get along with them. If I am a lion I am many things at once, and if I am a man I am even more. And so it may seem a temptation toward unreal simplification to select a single aspect of the human condition with which to absorb ourselves. And indeed it is most surely a temptation and an almighty hazard. In precisely such fashion some have reduced men to a sexual symbol, and others have excavated him like a kitchen midden, as if he were nothing but a cultural accumulation, and still others have embalmed him in economic determinism, like many of our friends on both sides of the iron curtain. Shall we not when we are done have reduced him to a walking territiorial principle ? Well, I can only say that I find myself dedicated to man's elevation, not his reduction; to his desimplification and not his distillation to a pale white definitive liquid. I shall do what I can. Focus our attention, however, we must. Territorial behavior in animals, over the past few decades, has attracted the attention of hundreds of competent specialists who have recorded their observations and their reasoned conclusions in obscure professional publications. The subject is very nearly as well known to the student of animal behavior as is the relation of mother and infant to the student of human behavior. Furthermore, many of the concerned scientists, as we shall see, believe as do I that man is a territorial species, and that the behavior so widely observed in animal species is equally characteristic of our own. And yet - it is astonishing - there exists in all the scientific literature but one book devoted exclusively to the subject. That book was written in 1920 and it concerned only bird life, and it established the concept of territory, and I have dedicated my book to its author. Since then no attempt has been made to publish in any language, for the benefit of either the layman, the scholar, or the scientist himself, a single volume exploring a subject which could be vital to our understanding of men. This book, then, must in the manner of a combined operation do several things at once: It must collect and organize a fair sample of science's observations of territorial behavior in animals. It must record all that is salient concerning the history, the interpretations, and the scientific controversies bearing on the concept. And it must attempt to derive from biology's conclusions whatever illumination may exist concerning ourselves. This will be about all that I can handle in one volume, and we must defer to some future date inquiry into other aspects of comparative behavior of equal importance to our daily affairs. The Territorial Imperative, in other words, is but a single forward step toward an understanding of man's evolutionary nature, an understanding compatible on the one hand with the revolutionary findings of biology, and on the other with our age-old human experience. Author and reader alike, however, must keep in mind that we are entering terra incognita, and that the crossing of an all-but-unknown intellectual continent may have its fascinations, but it has also its casualties. Many a conclusion which I recorded in African Genesis, only five years ago, today lies a victim of biology's ruthless, incessant raids. I shall acknowledge my losses. And with equal truth, many of contemporary thought's most sacred convictions are being pressed toward oblivion by the biological onslaught. I shall point to their corpses along our way, if I do not in all mercy shoot them down myself. Finally, before I close these preliminary meditations, there are motions of gratitude which I should like to offer. Many scientists have helped me in measure far beyond the line of duty; for one, my friend and counselor and drinking companion, the late Professor K. R. L. Hall of the University of Bristol, I have neither words nor means to express my gratitude, since his death occurred before the book was finished. To the others I must extend the hope that by treating their work with the discipline expected of me I have repaid their generosity. And for two longtime friends, Dr. Kenneth P. Oakley, of the British Museum of Natural History, and Professor Raymond A. Dart, until his retirement head of the anatomy department of the University of the Witwatersrand, I extend most special thanks: they got me into all this in the first place, ten long years ago. This work - this combined operation - could not be possible except for the collaborative assistance of many minds. I shall not neglect my wife, who has furnished me with far more than the illustrations which grace my pages. Nor shall I neglect a Middle Western American businessman, a manufacturer of machine tools and a man of many parts. It was Leighton A. Wilkie who in a critical hour of Dart's career rode to the rescue like a regiment of U.S. Cavalry in an old-time western film. And it was Leighton Wilkie, with his Wilkie Brothers Foundation of Des Plaines, Illinois, who rode to my rescue in a comparably critical hour and underwrote the formidable costs of field research involved in the present volume. Just where we should all be without him, I cannot say. ROBERT ARDREY Rome, 1966. <strong>...</strong></p>Ardrey Robert - The social contracturn:md5:f3caf72abb201750ee44a0cb34cbcae82013-07-13T23:30:00+01:002013-07-13T22:39:17+01:00balderArdrey RobertAfrica <p><img src="https://balderexlibris.com/public/img2/.Ardrey_Robert_-_The_social_contract_s.jpg" alt="" /><br />
Author : <strong>Ardrey Robert</strong><br />
Title : <strong>The social contract A Personal Inquiry into the Evolutionary Sources of Order and Disorder</strong><br />
Year : 1970<br />
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Link download : <a href="https://balderexlibris.com/public/ebook2/Ardrey_Robert_-_The_social_contract.zip">Ardrey_Robert_-_The_social_contract.zip</a><br />
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Tuskless in Paradise. A society is a group of unequal beings organized to meet common 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. Insect societies may include genetically determined castes, but among backboned creatures this cannot be. Every vertebrate born, excepting only in a few rare species, is granted equal opportunity to display his genius or to make a fool out of himself. While a society of equals whether baboons or jackdaws, lions or men is a natural impossibility, a just society is a realizable goal. Since the animal, unlike the human being, is seldom tempted by the pursuit of the impossible, his societies are seldom denied the realizable. The just society, as I see it, is one in which sufficient order protects members, whatever their diverse endowments, and sufficient disorder provides every individual with full opportunity to develop his genetic endowment, whatever that may be. It is this balance of order and disorder, varying in rigor according to environmental hazard, that I think of as the social contract. And that it is a biological command will become evident, I believe, as we inquire among the species. Violation of biological command has been the failure of social man. Vertebrates though we may be, we have ignored the law of equal opportunity since civilization's earliest hours. Sexually reproducing beings though we are, we pretend today that the law of inequality does not exist. And enlightened though we may be, while we pursue the unattainable we make impossible the realizable. The propositions that I have put forward are not self-evident. Were they so, then there would be no need for me to write this book, or cause for anyone to read it. Neither do I put them forth as subjects for immediate acceptance or rejection, immediate digestion or expectation of instant nourishment. Indeed, like uncooked rice, they are quite indigestible. But in the course of this inquiry you and I will do a bit of cooking and see what comes of it. And so, to begin with, I suggest that we content ourselves with simply lighting our fire. Let us inspect the dream that has brought to the climactic years of the twentieth century the assurances and rewards of a madhouse. The philosophy of the impossible has been the dominant motive in human affairs for the past two centuries. We have pursued the mastery of nature as if we ourselves were not a portion of that nature. We have boasted of our command over our physical environment while we ourselves have done our urgent best to destroy it. And we have pursued the image of human equality as citizens of earlier centuries pursued the Holy Grail. The grand escapade of contemporary man can be denied neither excitement nor accomplishment. Out of our dream of equality we have lifted masses from subjection, moved larger masses into slavery. We have provided new heroes, new myths, new gallantries; new despots, new prisons, new atrocities. Substituting new gods for old, we have dedicated new altars, composed new anthems, arranged new rituals, pronounced new blessings, invoked new curses, erected new gallows for disbelievers." We have reduced sciences to cults, honest men to public liars. We have even reduced the eighteenth-century vision of human equality, glorious if false, to a more workable twentieth-century interpretation, mediocrity, inglorious if real. Fundamental though the natural impossibility of equal beings must be to this inquiry, still it is not all. And if we are to glimpse a social contract leading neither to tyranny nor to chaos, then I prefer at first to consider it simply as a fraction of a larger delusion. The philosophy of the impossible rests on an article of faith, that man is sovereign. And the Greeks had a word for it: hubris. To lift your head too high: it is to challenge the gods and risk a few thunderbolts assaulting your skull. The skeptical Greeks, never excessively infatuated with gods themselves, turned less to supernatural than to natural explanations of why the world is the way it is. Yet never, from the early times of the Ionian philosophers down through later excursions and controversies of the lively Greek mind, am I aware of presumptions that man could master nature. Even Protagoras' celebrated statement that man is the measure of all things seems to have been intended more in praise of the individual than in denial of forces larger than man. As in Western thought various tides have swept this bay, assaulted that promontory, or, receding, have bared undistinguished flats, so we have turned now to gods, now to God, again to nature and its laws for satisfying answers. Our postures have varied from the compliance of slaves to the confidence of sailors. At our best we sought solutions of relevance to man; at our worst we avoided them. But never, till modern times, did men in any significant number presume a human sovereignty much larger than the human shadow. Never did we risk the Greek hubris, and a shattering knock on the head. "The conquest of outer space" for a most inquiring Greek would as a phrase have seemed as dangerous a possibility as it remains, in all fragility, a phrase of small reality today. The big brag preceded the big bang as a human possibility. Any demonstration that the earth revolves about the sun, while offensive to authorities in charge, did not presume that we could reverse its course. Any proof of a natural law called gravity did not presuppose that man could make apples fall up; designers of supersonic planes, indeed, still take account of the apple. To the frontiersmen of science the discovery of natural laws meant no more than that we had explored certain forces governing the dispositions of man. But for many a hoi-polloi scientific settler who came after the frontier such discoveries meant something quite different. Man could master nature. Eighteenth-century rationalism, while dispensing with the supernatural as a governing force, left a vacuum that not all the Encyclopedists could fill. And so an alliance between nineteenthcentury optimism, looking to the perfectibility of man, and the early modern scientists (Darwin was not among them) rushed in. And the sovereign rule of materialism came about. Man, with the aid of science, could do anything. As materialist were the socialist philosophies as the capitalist. Uninhibited by laws natural or divine, we busied ourselves with the building of Paradise. And no mean thing is this Paradise of the Impossible. Could animals dream, then our material heaven might well be the stuff that their dreams are made of. The small-brained hominid, dragging himself through the millions of years of our evolution, may well have longed for supermarkets. Yet he, I suspect, even facing the hostile African night, had a sense of certainty. And we have none. A philosophy of the impossible is indeed no philosophy at all. And a paradise lacking a philosophy is one of uncertain future. Aimlessly we prowl our highways, teach or attend our classes, swallow our drugs or our television dinners, quarrel, fornicate, fear our children, sigh for the unfortunate and avoid their presence, envy the fortunate and court their approval, work to forget our meaningless lives, drink to forget our meaningless work, purchase Our pistols, deplore all wars, and praise the dignity of man. It cannot be said that man, installed in his self-made heaven, has lost his dignity. The buffalo, small of brain, peering out of the African bush, commands dignity. Nor can it be said that if we have made mistakes we cannot learn. The amoeba can learn. Back in the 1920's an experiment was arranged in a darkened room whereby an intense beam of light barred the movement of amoebae. Among the brainless students there was one who never learned. On trial after trial it persisted in its efforts to cross the beam of light. But there was one who tried just five times and never moved in that direction again. Not only organisms lacking the least brain or nervous system could learn, but, significantly there was wide variation in their gifts. We have our dignity, which is the dignity of living beings. If we have made errors, then - since an amoeba can learn - there must be among us those likewise gifted. But what is it we must learn? In another time we should have taken our troubles to the priest in a certainty of faith. But the faith is gone and the priests are missing. Man omniscient, omnipotent man has none to talk to but himself. Arid, worst of all, it is how we wanted it. Who will save us? Who will inform us? We turn to science, our sole religion, our one maker of miracles. It is science that adjudicates the rivalries of nations, dictates economic triumphs, decrees disasters. It is science that with cosmic disregard for human fate adjusts the balance of military terror now this way, now that. It is science that saves lives here, destroys them there, perfects new means of postponing the grave, new means of making life unendurable. It is science that with perfect casting has assumed the role of the Unknown God. Yet were I the scientist - not science but the breathing, aching scientist who suffers from indigestion and achieves the respect of all but his children - and were I asked to save us, then I think I should put on a false mustache and other appropriate disguise, go out the back door, and vanish like some extinct bird over a former horizon. Yet it is not quite so. For what God has granted, God may take away. And it lies within the power of that present god, the individual scientist, to withdraw from mankind the illusion of sovereignty that science, in partnership with obsolete philosophies, has created. But courage as much as competence must be the endowment of such a rebel god. Natural law has been variously defined, as it has been variously abused. It might be described, in contrast with civil law, as the kind of law you discover only after you have broken it. Such is the predicament of contemporary Homo sapiens, who, looking about at his program of disaster, asks, "What did I do?" His refuge may lie in social paranoia such as that so favored by the young. It is somebody else's fault. But the mature must inquire more deeply. What did we do that was wrong? And there is coming about in our time a generation of scientists who, granted the courage, have the power to answer. A natural law is one made not by state, not by religious authority, not by man at all, but one which human reason may investigate, recognize, and prove. "Natural law" has been invoked by many by kings, for example, to support their right to rule but without proof. The ease with which "natural law" has been enlisted to invest with sanctity many a position of the status quo has given the term a bad name in our time. Yet natural laws exist. And they lie beyond human power to veto or amend. Unlike other laws, they deal impartially with big-brained man or smallbrained African buffalo. And it should be science that can identify them for us. Yet, to the bewilderment of the layman, scientists, as we shall see, do not provide the same answers. There is nothing new about passionate divisions within an accepted religion. But these are troublesome times for the sciences. A generation of paleontologists - Raymond Dart, Robert Broom, L. S. B. Leakey - has demonstrated that man's evolution from some gentle, ancestral forest ape is not what it was thought to be in Darwin's time. A generation of ethologists, pioneered by Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, C. R. Carpenter, has shown the behavior of animals in a state of nature to be not at all as we presumed. A generation of population geneticists Sewall Wright, J. B. S. Haldane, Sir Ronald Fisher has altered beyond recognition our former concepts of heredity. A generation of biologists, among them Sir Julian Huxley, George Gaylord Simpson, Ernst Mayr, has synthesized the advances of this century with older Darwinian theory to produce a new biology so revolutionary as to remain beyond the grasp even of some of its contributors. Few members of the natural sciences, however, would today dispute the evolutionary continuity of man and the natural world, or uphold the proposition that for man exists one fate, for nature another. Difficult it may be to part with the convictions of two centuries, and for some it is impossible. Yet part with them we must, for while the conviction of human sovereignty has led us to dare and aspire, it has led us likewise into the Age of Anxiety. We build paradises in which we have no faith. When we renounce our hubris; when we see ourselves as a portion of something far older, far larger than are we; when we discover nature as our partner, not our slave, and laws applying to us as applying to all: then we shall find our faith returning. We have rational faculties of enormous order. We have powers granted never before to living beings. But we shall free those powers to effect human solutions of justice and permanence only when we renounce our arrogance over nature and accept the philosophy of the possible. <strong>...</strong></p>