5. Time and the Young Baboon

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 the assaults of Moslems on Christians, the bloody disagreements of Protestants and Catholics, the horror of aristocrats facing the bourgeoisie, the terror of the bourgeoisie facing the proletariat, the shock of imperial masters facing the claims of colonials of whatever color, the pallor of auction-bridge addicts watching the encroachments of contract, and the implacable fury of devotees of New England clam chowder at the grossness of taste among those who would accept Manhattan clam chowder. There was a difference, however. Earlier clashes had been temporal, enduring for no more than a few centuries. But the revolt of the young seems to some -- and I am among them -- quite possibly a permanent feature of society's future landscape.

An evolutionary review of the relations between the young and their elders may do little to relieve our temporary agitation, but may do much to provide longer enlightenment. And a good place to start is with the work of a man named Gene Sackett, conducting experiments at Harlow's Wisconsin laboratory. His study was published in 1966 in widely read Science, and I must assume that skeptics have had time and opportunity to register their skepticism. This they have not done. Yet the study revealed an innate line of division and antagonism between young and old.

Sackett's experiment skated on thin laboratory ice since he raised young rhesus monkeys from birth in total isolation, and we have seen what neurotics may be produced. Harlow himself, however, had demonstrated that a mere twenty minutes a day of contact with peers was enough to ensure normal development. Sackett's ingenuity was to substitute for such contact a translucent screen for one wall of the cage, and rear-projected slides for social stimulus. And it worked. None of his subjects became the old-fashiqned neurotics clutching their heads, biting their skins. The daily visual stimulus was enough to contain monkey sanity, as the shadows on cave walls were enough to keep Plato busy.

The experiment began when infants were fourteen days old and had their first exposure to the cave wall. It extended for months. Their experience included nothing but the shifting images of the slides. Ten categories were provided, with so many different subjects in each that none was repeated in a week's time. Nine categories were of monkeys: such situations as mother and infant, adults copulating, an adult threatening, infants playing, postures of submission or fear. A tenth category was of non-monkeys, whether pretty girls or early American furniture. A certain level of excitement was induced by the very appearance of an image on the screen, but the response to non-monkeys was notably at a minimum from first to last. And although the question was not the subject of the experiment, still one must wonder: How did these monkeys know they were monkeys?

The varying response of naive monkeys to the different categories of monkey deportment was of course the object of Sackett's experiment. And all categories elicited degrees of vocalization, activity, stimulation, even investigating the screen. But with the exception of two categories there was no great variation in response. All subjects were interesting, so long as they presented monkeys. But I doubt very much that the observer anticipated which two monkey situations would prove the exceptions, galvanizing the attention of all: pictures of infants playing, and the sight of a threatening adult male.

Men and apes threaten with a frown, but, like many monkeys, the rhesus threatens by lifting the eyelids in a stare that exposes the eyelid skin. Anyone would assume that adult threat is learned through hard experience. But it was not so. The sight of a threatening adult brought cries, cowering, huddling, wall-climbing, resembling the response to no other situation. The adult threat is a stimulus in the naive rhesus releasing an innate, terrified response. The peak of the disturbance is reached at the age of about three months, then gradually drops away. Since nothing too terrible had happened in consequence, presumably the young monkeys became used to threat.

Response to the sight of infants playing was as decisive as, but more lasting than, response to threat. As I have asked how did these isolates know they were monkeys, I may ask how did they know they were young monkeys? Yet just as inborn were the responses of excitement, scampering, calls, investigating the screen, responses of undoubted attraction for their peers. The reaction to a mother and infant or to adults copulating received the normal ration of interest greeting any stimulation. Only play with one's peers and fear of one's elders could be described as innate in the infant rhesus.

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. Variations in this line -- seldom pleasant from the viewpoint of the young -- rest largely on the dispensability of males, and sometimes, when birthrate is high enough, on the dispensability of everybody.

Beaver kits at the age of two are thrown out, regardless of sex. There is a very good reason, though the two-year-olds may prove lacking in understanding. A beaver pair makes a huge capital investment of energy in the building of a dam, the conversion of some Canadian stream into a fair-sized pond, and the construction of lodges. They establish a defended territory of woodland around the pond to assure a supply of saplings for food and dam-maintenance, but it cannot be large or dragging-back saplings from a distance will bankrupt the family's energy. The population is therefore limited. The parents do not hesitate to exploit their young, and so until the age of two the young beavers, being of a hard-working line and likewise unaware of their fate, toil with a will at the cutting and pulling and stripping of saplings. Then the new batch of kits is born and out the two-year-olds go. They will wander, encountering foxes here, famine there. Lucky ones may find a good spot for a dam, and pair up, and start things new.

A chipmunk mother drives her young off her territory two weeks after they leave the nest. When W. H. Burt was the great man of Michigan's zoology department, he meditated on the lives of his favorite little beings haunting the meadows and woodlands near Ann Arbor. Wood mice, pine voles, white-footed mice, short-tailed shrews -- all faced the most hazardous moments of life when driven away, still young, from their familiar terrain, their assured hiding places. Few, he wrote, would die of old age.

So goes it with the young of species in which mathematics, not mercy, will provide sufficient survivors. In most species, however, a bias prevails in favor of saving the females. Whether human devotion to saving women and children first springs from courtesy or conservation, I do not know. In many species it is conservation of the child-factory. A dimmer view is taken of the male.

Male lions are driven out of the pride at three. Since the lionesses do almost all of the hunting, the male becomes little but an ornament with vast appetite. It is true, of course, that the ornamental value cannot be discounted, and one or two great long-maned beasts should be kept around to thrill tourists. It is true also that the sexual appetite of the lioness is such that males cannot be entirely counted out. George Schaller's study of the mountain gorilla broke some kind of ethological record; in his recent three-year study of the lion in Tanzania's Serengeti he observed the sexual capacity of a lioness that must break some other kind of record.

There is a huge two-male pride which, since its territory is not far from Seronera Lodge, is familiar to many visitors to the Serengeti. A lioness came into heat and Schaller enlisted for the duration. The two alpha males reported likewise for duty. One got there first, the other went to sleep. In two and one half days the lioness and the wakeful male copulated 170 times, at a regular rate, around the clock, of about once every twenty minutes. After Number One Hundred and Seventy, the male, for reasons scarcely obscure, disappeared into the bush. His partner woke up and, since the lioness was obviously not yet appeased, took over.

Alpha capacities in the lion establishment are perhaps as discouraging to the maturing young lion as are alpha incomes to the maturing human student. I do not know whether the three-year-old lion takes off because of alienation, of disgust for his elders, of an Adlerian problem of inferiority, or simply because he is kicked out. But he will become a nomad. And as he becomes older, and heavier, and more slow-footed, his chances of survival are low unless he finds females who will be enchanted by his alphaness, and will support him.

The maturing male of whatever species does not have it good. The sexually maturing male elephant must leave his mother and join the male band, with rank order already established, where he will find himself omega. "Psychological castration," a phrase invented by the American zoologist A. M. Guhl, is a common event in some species. The alpha buffalo assumes all sexual prerogatives; his male companions remain indifferent. The young male Uganda kob joins the all-male herd; if he secures high enough status, he will enjoy the privileges of the stamping ground and its sexual opportunities. But of any 500 male Uganda kob, only fifteen or so will at any one time be found on the stamping ground. The remainder seem to enjoy their lives, but they are psychologically castrated. So it is with almost all antelope species. A final indignity is placed on the omegas by territorial wildebeest males, who take all the best pasturage. Here the females and young of the nursery herds may graze, while the non-productive males are consigned to the stubble. One may observe a grand design in evolution's injustices.

Such a grand design seems to have impressed Bristol University's astute ethologist John Hurrel Crook, whose observations of weaverbirds I have reported. He went on to study the hamadryas baboon in Ethiopia, and that halfway house between the baboon and other monkeys, the gelada. Both, like Hall's patas monkey, have the one-male society with a harem. He watched his geladas -- big brown animals with manes like the hamadryas -- as family parties moved along feeding together while peripheral, psychologically castrated males were, like the wildebeest, condemned to the poorest tables. And it occurred to him, and to J. S. Gartlan, his colleague at Bristol, that in all the primate world there are known only three species in which a male normally monopolizes a harem. And these three live in the huge African area grading from Uganda's dry northern reaches through Ethiopia to the Sudan and, presumably, at one time to Egypt. Monkeys and apes live usually, like affluent men, only in verdant suburbs. But these three species, having to make their peace with arid environments short on food, all took a common road in the evolution of their societies. The solution was simple: dispense with unnecessary males.

And so we have the polygamous households of the primate in arid lands. An alpha male takes over as many females as he can attract, keep pregnant, protect, and put up with. For every extra wife, a male becomes redundant. An outcast, he vanishes into a marginal existence of psychological castration and undernourishment. In such species the establishment of alpha males offers few openings for any but the most extraordinary young.

Perhaps one cannot say that in the species I have been describing a visible line of tension exists between the mature and the maturing. The line is erased by banishing young males, or all that you do not have jobs for. However appealing the pattern may be, it is a solution unavailable to Homo sapiens. If you belong to a species in which you need your strong, healthy young males to hunt your food, defend your borders, conquer your neighbors, or stand as sentinel through nights where leopards prowl, then such simple solutions will not do. An accommodation, however disagreeable, must be found between the establishment and the candidates, but it is a rare species that accomplishes it without the line of tension. The problem remains always the same.

All juveniles are omegas, since all adults are dominant over all young. In this sense, the problem of the adolescent male is his omeganess. But there is a sea of anguish dividing the psychic shores of the adult omega and the adolescent omega. In any animal society the adult male who has settled to a lowly rank has done so through some deficiency in those qualities that make for alphaness. Whatever be his deficiencies, whether of strength or vitality, of courage or determination, it is unlikely that he has ambitions beyond existence. He makes his peace. But the adolescent bears only the low rank of youth. It is a deserved omeganess, since if his society is to survive, then he must have reached a fullness of development guaranteeing his responsibility when he enters the ruling ranks. It is an omeganess too that protects him, while he matures, from participation in the status struggles of the adult. But it is a class omeganess, and though his fires burn hotter, his muscles grow stronger, his intelligence grows keener, his ambitions fly higher, he must bear his stigmata until that day when maturity flings him into the establishment, an intruder to be resented and resisted by all.

The young do not have it good. Youth, shielded by its omeganess, may enjoy its careless raptures. But a condition of being young is time, and there is the fatal truth that being young cannot last forever. And if you are a maturing male in a species wherein young males are indispensable, then as your moment of truth approaches, you will have but one consolation -- that it will bring everyone just as much trouble as it brings you. I know of only one species where accommodation on the part of adults has been so spectacular as to eliminate all pain. But that is a species in which the indispensability of young adults becomes in itself of tragic proportions.

The African hunting dog, known in the early days as the Cape hunting dog, is perhaps the world's most successful predator, excluding only man. It is not a dog at all, not even a member of the family Canidae, but has four toes on his foot, ears like ping-pong paddles, and bears the scientific name Lycaon pictus. It looks like a dog, however, and not a very large one, since it weighs about forty pounds. Its success as a hunter has been based entirely on a capacity to outrun any animal in Africa, together with the superb coordination of its hunting pack. But despite its success, or because of it, the hunting dog is a rare animal today. Since the early times of settlement in the Cape, three hundred years ago, its reputation has been so terrifying that men have hunted it, even poisoned it, as vermin. The hunting dog has terrified not only men but other animals. I have watched Thomson's gazelle graze within two hundred yards of a hungry cheetah, the fastest of land animals. But in 1966, when Eliot Elisofon and I had the chance to photograph a large hunting-dog pack for three days, dawn to dusk, no antelope approached close enough to be identified without binoculars. Within our view was perhaps thirty square miles of flat, open, treeless plain; along the margins animals grazed. Just once four zebras strolled by at a distance of several hundred yards. Since they had the confidence, one must assume that the margin was sufficient for escape. But also the pack was sleeping.

At that time a study of one pack, over a period of a few months, was all that science had yet collected in the way of reliable observation. When I returned to the Serengeti two years later, however, Kruuk and Schaller, as by-products of their hyena and lion specialties, had collected more information on the entire predator community than science had ever possessed before. It is information which, although largely unpublished, I am permitted to use before this investigation closes. Now, in terms of adult-young relations of almost shocking amiability, I wish simply to describe one hunt.

Schaller, by the summer of 1968, had followed twenty-two packs. He came by my cottage about four o'clock one afternoon, having spotted a pack which he judged would hunt about five thirty. By four thirty we had found it, sleeping in the midst of a rolling area of plain parched by the dry season, burned black by fire. We animal-watched, waited, talked. There were ten adults and fourteen pups well over half grown. Schaller had known the pack when the pups were born six months earlier and there had been sixteen. They had lost only two. It was an infant mortality rate so low as to be difficult to believe. Finally three adults were stirring, nosing the others to their feet. All went to the pups, and now there was a rolling pell-mell of play, adults and pups together, and the strange twittering sound, like a flock of sparrows, that the dogs make when excited.

"War dance," said Schaller. And like a ritual it was, for the dogs when sufficiently excited were all on their feet. The three leaders headed off, other adults behind them, then the pups, and last a disabled adult on three legs. It was precisely five thirty; whether they had heard a factory whistle blow or Schaller earlier had given them instructions, I do not know. One of the most memorable sights in nature, however, is that of a pack strung out in single file almost a quarter of a mile long, headed into the late, gray light with white-tipped tails upraised like beacons to make following easier.

They trotted. The hunting dog -- like the albatross, the elephant seal, and few other species -- has no least fear of men, and one may drive beside the pack as if one were not there. We checked the Land Rover's speedometer, and they were doing fifteen miles an hour. The pups kept the pace with ease, as did the adult on three legs. Now the leaders speeded up to a run. The speedometer read twenty-five miles an hour. Still the pups and the three-legged rear guard kept even. But now the leaders were putting on pressure and a gap was widening between adults and pups.

Since game flee an area in which a pack is running, a common tactic is to approach a rise at high speed on the chance of surprising prey on the far side. Such speed for the three leaders, with whom none could keep up, was over forty miles an hour. They outdistanced us, and by the time we reached the rise the three had stopped, the others were catching up, and across the empty valley beyond, Thomson's gazelles were stotting half a mile away. The word was being spread. Hunting dogs kill by surprise in ten or fifteen minutes or have a long search ahead through a forewarned world. Yet 85 percent of all hunts observed by Schaller have been successful, a record to stun a lion pride.

The leaders were moving again in a new direction at a modest run, the whole torchlight parade of bouncing white tails reassembled behind them. Then the leaders were digging in at full run and we could see three large wart hogs ahead running at an angle to our left toward their hole. That monstrous machine, the Land Rover, will survive cross-country driving at such speed, but only with difficulty will its human occupants. I lost the wart hogs. Within my view, however, the dogs were beginning one of their notable maneuvers. When prey curves in its flight, each dog in the file sets a separate course so that the pack is like .narrowly set spokes in a wheel. They are not following; that is left to the leaders. They are setting courses of interception along the probable curve. But now there was no necessity. The wart hogs had vanished and we thought they had made it underground. But the leaders were struggling, for they had caught the last one by the hind legs and all one could hear was the squealing of the wart hog.

"Poor pig," said Schaller. Like a first-class nightmare, one is unlikely to forget a hunting-dog kill, since it does not kill but eats its prey alive. Nothing has so contributed to hunting-dog horror as the long-drawn manner of its prey's death. But in truth the dog cannot kill. He is small, and his teeth are small, even for his size. He has forty-two, and they are designed for slicing, not killing. Only the cats have killing teeth; even the wolf, taking caribou or moose, will proceed as does the hunting dog. And yet, while nature may provide its explanations, the spectacle remains other than nice.

I find it a subject for meditation that within my limited career of animal-watching, the two images most horrid and sublime were separated by little over sixty seconds. By now the hundred-pound wart hog's viscera were torn open and he was finished, though still squealing. Then the fourteen pups arrived, crowding into the living feast. And with their arrival every adult stepped back, none with more than a mouthful of meat. They were undoubtedly hungry, for their bellies were lean. Now and again they would string themselves out in hunting formation at some hint of further prey. But in the hour and fifteen minutes that Schaller and I sat beside the kill, no adult took another mouthful of meat. The iood was exclusively for the pups.

We sat in the gathering darkness in the middle of a plain emptied of all living creatures by fear of these formidable little beasts. And we discussed what course of natural selection could have produced such inhibition favoring the young. Only a very high adult death rate could place such selective value on the successful raising of young to maturity. I speculated on disability. In the lion pride all cubs eat last, and if kills are few or small, they starve. But the adult lion is very nearly invulnerable. The hunting dog, small and relatively fragile, may suffer a high casualty rate when attacking prey more formidable than wart hogs. Schaller shook his head. "I think disease," he said.

When it grew too dark to stay longer, we drove away. And six months later Schaller wrote me that distemper had hit the pack, leaving only nine survivors. When the young have it good, there is a reason somewhere.

The age group is one of the commonest features of animal social life, and in our changing times it is among the most poorly understood phenomena of human society. When you read Frank Fraser Darling's A Herd of Red Deer and find companies of stags -- mature males -- in which those of an age tend, despite maturity, to keep together; or when you hear that in an immense school of mackerel those caught within a given area tend to be of the same size: then you may begin to wonder about your contemporaries.

There are the young of the same age in an Israeli kibbutz who from infancy play as a group, go to school as a group, enter the army and fight as a group, and for whom members of a peer group throughout all their lives will probably find deeper attachment than any other association they will ever make. It is the same in the age groups of many an African tribe. Something of the age group is found in the mobilization of armies by year of birth, or the nostalgias of the American college graduate for the class of '52. We who are of an age will always understand each other a degree better than we understand others.

No human arrangement could more easily be dismissed as a product of conditioning or cultural institution. But we must recall Sackett and his infant rhesus monkeys. If an innate demand for one's peers exists in a primate species as highly evolved, as socially adept, as capable of solving complex laboratory problem as the rhesus, shall we dismiss remnants of such demand in men? Frequently a human cultural pattern exists to implement an underlying biological pattern. And I suggest that we can begin to comprehend the irrationality and frequent absurdity of the student revolt beginning in the 1960's only if we recognize its ancient, irrational foundations.

A line of tension between mature and maturing exists in most animal societies. Its visibility is increasing in human societies today. If a communication gap of abysmal depth widens between mature and maturing, and if at the same time we behold arraying against the elders an alliance of the young within which communication seems.perfect and mutual perception almost of an extrasensory sort, we may well deplore it as a grenade in our social bowels that could destroy us all. But we are permitted to wonder only so long as we are permitted those comforting illusions of human uniqueness and rational sovereignty, both of which have contributed so splendidly to the area of social disaster in which we serve.

The thoughtful, disturbed adult may say, "But why now? It wasn't this way when I was young." And I must agree that it was not this way at Chicago in the Class of 1930. But we have all of us been seduced. The Freudian enthronement of sexuality as life's prime mover has reached its climax of acceptance -- by ourselves as much as the young -- just as ethology begins to prove that it is not normally so. And the second Freudian seduction was that the family for all eternity is the unit of human affairs. Within its sex-empurpled embrace the attachments and antagonisms of early childhood become the determining agents of life. Jung was wiser. He dealt in broader contexts which brought the crisis of adolescence and the conflict of fantasy and reality into a focus of greater relevance for our times. We shall do well to re-study Jung as we re-study Adler.

What we watch today is the disintegration of the family which we were taught was universal and eternal. It is neither. The family was never the windowless chamber as the Freudians saw it.except in isolated, insecure arrangements of Homo sapiens. Neither has it been eternal. Its significance was sparse, I suspect, before farming succeeded the communal hunting band ten thousand years ago. But if the technology of farming did or did not create the individual family as a significant social unit, then with small argument it is technology, man's Frankenstein, that is destroying it.

The adult who asks "Why now?" must recall that only since the Second World War have technological advances, together with the vast organization of technological empires, reduced the family as a unit to microscopic scale. The young have discovered its insignificance; you and I have made it so, but we have not looked. And while we have been seduced by our view of the family as imperishable, we have been deluded as well by economic determinism. Capitalist and commissar, in perfect agreement, accept material satisfaction as the human rainbow's end. And while the most apoplectic defender of free enterprise in truth confesses in the Marxist box, youth turns away. Affluence after ten thousand years catches up with us. The family, that final cooperative unit in the war against want, disintegrates for lack of function. And the stricken father sighs, "I gave him everything I could."

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. We may put aside for the moment the problem of affluence, and the question of why a son raised in luxury and facing a future of material security has vanished into pot or protest. The question can wait. What concerns us is the power of the age group as it replaces the power of the family.

A significance of the primate is that his societies are seldom organized around family units, and unless nuclear lightning strikes us down, restoring to the few survivors the deprived conditions of our pioneer past, this seems the likely human future. In 1961 I wrote that the family is the building block of primate social life; it was an informed guess based on the scanty evidence of the time, and the information ran out. I was wrong. In none of the larger primate societies -- those such as the olive and chacma baboons, or the rhesus and Japanese monkeys -- is there a vestige of the family unit. And the evidence suggests that never in the evolutionary past has this been the principal primate way.

The true lemur is a pro-simian -- a pre-monkey primate -- dating back fifty million years to the Eocene before monkeys evolved. In his studies of the black and ring-tailed lemurs lingering today on Madagascar, Jean-Jacques Petter found mothers driving off their young at the age of six months, whereupon the young promptly formed age groups. Of the two great monkey sub-orders, the Old World and the New, the American species seem the more primitive. In his early studies of the howler and red spider monkeys in Panama, C. R. Carpenter found no trace of family life. The bond between mother and infant yields shortly after a sibling is born, and the older moves off into the world of its peers. The Old World species I have mentioned -- the baboons and rhesus and Japanese monkeys -- and others like the African vervet or the Asian langur follow the same pattern: the age group, not the family, is the juvenile's home. We may say with cynicism that technological man is returning to the way of the monkey. Or we may say, with greater reward, that to understand ourselves we have the fortune of the monkey to inspect.

In eastern or southern Africa large baboon troops are difficult to count as they go about their daytime feeding, since they spread out over large areas. Yet, following a troop, I have often wondered if one might not work out a rough arithmetical key to the whole population simply by encountering the young of the same age and size. So tenaciously do they stay together that if one finds four, or six, or nine, the probability is strong that one has found them all. And while we may grant that in a given season there may be some variation in the number of newborn, or in their rate of survival, still nine of an age must indicate a very large troop. And they will all be there. Whatever may be the qualities of the fascination that unites them, play is its social function. And in the animal, education is play.

Victorians like Herbert Spencer tended to take a gloomy view of play, regarding it as what the irresponsible do with their surplus energy. Even the founder of modern sociology, Emile Durkheim, could find little better to say for it than that the world is not all play. Not till 1896, when a continental psychologist named Karl Groos suggested that play has survival value in that it prepares the young for mature tasks, did anyone seem to have anything theoretically good to say about it. Since then we have come far. In 1934 Carpenter recognized in his howler monkeys that juvenile play was second only to the mother as an instrument of normal development. His view was more than confirmed by Harlow's experiment with the rhesus orphans. Washburn and Rensch have each concluded that the slow growth of primate young would offer a selective disadvantage to species were it not for the longer opportunity to play and learn. We come today to the remarkable insight of J. M. Burghers that play is a game with the environment, linking the organism with the future, in which decision-making is exercised without too great a penalty for deciding wrong.

Preparation for adult demand goes deeply into play. Young patas monkeys may run thirty miles in a day; speed is their defensive resource when they mature. Kittens and lion cubs spend their days stalking and assaulting each other; excellence in the hunt will be important someday. Though forest chimpanzees nest at night high in trees, if there is danger they seek the ground; and the young play rarely in trees. Baboons, on the contrary, find safety in the trees and seldom move far from them; and young -baboons are often in the boughs, chasing each other or playing follow-the-leader. I have suggested in another book that if human children play with guns, there is probably more to it than social corruption.

But there is more to play, also, than simple perfection of essential performances. William McDougall, an unfashionable name these days in sociology, saw play as preparation for adult competition, a comparably unfashionable conclusion. N. E. Collias found that even in play fighting, participants learn cooperation in keeping play play. Altmann invented the word "metacommunication" for the initial signal that all following screeches and yowls will be meant in fun. The adult human wink may be interpreted as metacommunication. Rules and regulations, and their acceptance, come about in play. The great Swiss child psychiatrist Jean Piaget, resisting the idea that children seek escape from rules, wrote: "Far from limiting himself to the rules laid down by parents and teachers, the child ties himself down to all sorts of rules in every sphere of activity, and especially that of play."

A sense of justice comes to us through play; we may think of young outrage when someone is accused of not playing fair. I was startled when first I read Suzanne Ripley's study of gray langurs in Ceylon, and found her description of monkey inhibition. Langur troops may be too small to provide enough young-of-an-age with a play group. An older juvenile may enter. But he will impose handicaps on himself to limit his strength and his roughness to the capacities of his juniors. Stuart Altmann, watching the descendants of Carpenter's transplanted rhesus monkeys on the West Indies island, found the same self-limitation on the part of older juveniles in mixed play groups. Beyond that, he observed that play groups tend to be unstable unless games are "fair," unless approximately equal opportunity is presented for chasing and being chased, for tail-pulling and having your own tail pulled, for winning and losing.

As we penetrate more deeply the animal world of play, and see it more clearly through young animal eyes, we come not only on the elemental importance of play, but on the elemental importance of the peer. Just as much as does the human child, the young animal lives in make-believe. Secret rules, secret signals, secret understandings are shared best by equals of age and experience. Out of the conspiracy the age group perfects the fantasy that is the play world of their waking hours. Emile Durkheim's "Life is not all play" would be echoed, I am sure, by the alpha rhesus signaling his status with upraised tail. The peer group, chasing one another around the social periphery, would not know what either Durkheim or the alpha was talking about.

Yet Jung's world of childhood fantasy must suffer its first collision with adult reality, whether human or rhesus or baboon, when the thrust of sex announces itself. Childhood is ended, adolescence begins. Few, however, are the primate species who, like man, have made a problem of it. And it may be that, just as with the declining influence of the human family we are turning to the primate solution of the age group, so some of us at least are turning to primate solutions to erase the problem of adolescent sexuality.

Chimpanzee or baboon, gorilla or vervet, the needy female takes on anyone who is interested. She is not undiscriminating. She tends to take the young ones first, subordinates of the establishment later, then perhaps on the fifth or sixth day of her estrus period to form an exclusive if brief consort relationship with the alpha. There is a suspicion that natural selection has acknowledged a subtle union of physiological and social relations for the benefit of the species. Her egg seems to descend and be fertilized, more often than not, in the period when she is with the alpha. If the conclusion is correct, then primate ingenuity is indeed a wonder.

The primate promiscuity of almost all species will be seen as an evolutionary advance only if we contrast it to what happens to subordinate males in so many lower mammal species. In Guhl's term, they are psychologically castrated. It is as if in primate species with increasingly complex societies and increasing individual diversity, a deal had been made. High-ranking males renounce sexual monopoly and sexual jealousy as a primate capacity, while in return maturing males, receiving the sexual franchise, agree to accept without too much fuss the exigencies of the social order. It is an accommodation between the mature and the maturing, a social contract. And while most obviously neither forgotten pro-simians nor evolution had it in mind when primate sexuality made its departure, still as a social innovation it has worked to preserve order in sexually rambunctious species. And it has preserved the individual, which psychological castration did not.

The young baboon, with adolescence, more and more becomes a part of the whole society. The play world slips away. Where peers once chased through the trees on the social periphery, as sub-adults they keep much the same range but now on the ground. They become the first line of defense, and if they still with their chasing spread far beyond the area of mothers and infants, then it is just as well. The more likely will it be that they will spot danger. Washburn and De Vore have written that a mixed group of impala, with their sense of smell, and baboons with their superb eyesight, is virtually impossible to surprise. And it will usually be these adolescents, out on the rim of danger, who provide the eyes.

On the same periphery one finds the four-year-old rhesus in process of integration into the establishment, but still sub-adult. John Kaufman, in another study of the descendants of Carpenter's transplanted monkeys, watched a peer group when their moment came to infiltrate the central area of hierarchy. They possessed no rank, of course, but only the omeganess of youth. Within any peer group throughout its growing up, however, distinctions will emerge, and leaders necessarily will have the advantage when the challenge to the establishment comes about. Nevertheless, when the seven challengers were resisted, they defended themselves in concert. The infiltration was in March. Into the summer they still acted together, but inequality was taking its toll. One was moving rapidly up establishment's ladder, but his fellows could not follow. Several found intermediate rank. But by September the peer group was gone, and the laggards had vanished into the omega throng.

They had fought for one another. Yet an inconspicuous justice remained. The one who rose so high was the princeling, the son of an alpha female whom I described in Chapter 4. And in two more years he was gone.

Human youth, turning from the disintegrating family to the communication and solace of its own generation, must reckon on factors both known and unknown in the world of the monkey. Human and animal must of necessity face one day integration into the larger society. Both, if the individual is to survive, must make compromises as a portion of the social contract to make survival possible. And boy or baboon, granted equal opportunity to display his worth, must be willing to settle for less. There is nothing new, in monkeys or men, about unequal performance.

But human youth, replacing the family as functionless, cannot substitute for it a functionless peer group. The young primate challenges, competes, plays fair, and learns. He prepares himself through a channel other than family for future contingency. If affluence has decreed that the human young will and must through innate longing accept the company of their peers as preferable to the company of their- elders, they must -- and I pray will -- accept the obligation to learn which all animals have accepted.

The elders, of course, must create a human world worth striving for. Our youth has a right to ponder. But it commands no right to drop out.

If you are young, ther» a difficulty is that you do not know as much as you think you know. Out of such ignorance a youth movement may empower a Hitler, suffer enthusiastically the manipulations of a Mao, and ensure catastrophe for all. It may speak for anarchy in the voice of romanticism and bring to ruin the most advanced society vulnerable through interdependence. The rising power of the peer group, with its growing autonomy, introduces as a permanent feature of the contemporary landscape a monstrous truck, brakes gone, catapulting down a long mountain grade while smashing with no more discrimination than gravity itself all that comes in its way.

But if the maturing male does not know as much as he thinks he knows, the established male may not either. As ignorance is a property of the young, habituation is a property of the adult. We accept the way of the past as the way of the future. We follow obsolete road maps when the roads are long gone. We do not look below a surface to which we have become accustomed. We welcome lies we are used to, though we know them as lies; shrink from truths of strange dimension, though we must know them as truths. Change cannot be in the interest of the established; but then, neither can be social disaster, since the established have the most to lose.

Were our societies reasonably perfect mechanisms, then in their defense we might resort to any means to compel order and law. Among us may be those who indeed believe that we possess such credible perfection; and they may also conclude through some private mathematics that the world can find sufficient policemen to patrol all the side streets of youth. It is difficult to believe, however, that among us are many who have survived to maturity with perceptions so dim that we accept such mathematics; or who are not at least vaguely aware that something is wrong. Something, unconfined by national boundaries, undeterred by degrees of prosperity, unimpressed by political systems or ideologies, is wrong with human societies.

In the sciences we search for organizing principles, as the layman may search for a lantern to enlighten his dark misgivings. But so disparate are the illnesses of governments and men -- of a Soviet Union, an Italy, a Britain, a France, an America, a Czechoslovakia, a China, a Japan -- that no common prescription seems likely to be found. A coincidence, however, if it is broad enough, may sometimes bring on a wondering. And the investigator may stumble on such a puzzling coincidence: just as universal as the social malaise -- as international, as apolitical, as divorced from levels of poverty and affluence -- is the readiness of the young to revolt. Is there a clue here? Do the young know something that we do not?

It is a waste of time to ask the young themselves, for the cry will be "Everything!" and you will be showered with natural wisdom to embarrass a young Rousseau. The cliches of a century, all tried and found wanting, will descend on your head, and you will retreat with the conviction that if the young know something, then their demonstrations parade no symptoms. But the conviction is too easily bought. If the coincidence implies some common cause, some debilitating, universal germ, then why should the young more than we be in a position to describe it?

In late 1968 a clue came my way, and, as is characteristic of clues, it was of random origin. But it led to the discovery of another coincidence, one of chilling order, and while I am not in a position to assess its value, I believe it should be recorded. The accident was a letter from a reader. The clue came later.

Many a letter is intriguing. This was written by a Dutchman named Willem James, the manager of a large oil refinery in Rotterdam. He had introduced a new theory of management to his plant with consequences so successful that he found them difficult to explain. He wondered if the territorial principle might have something to do with it. I find it exhilarating to read, in our time, about something besides hardware that works. I was dubious, however, that the territorial imperative had been more than a contributing factor to his success. But 1 could be no conclusive judge. My normal paths of eavesdropping, wiretapping, and common detective work introduce me more frequently to herds of zebra and parties of waterbuck than they do to oil refineries. Territory, as things turned out, was to prove little more than a lucky link between animal species and human specifics.

A few weeks later, again by good luck, Willem James came to Rome for a company meeting. We negotiated a side meeting on the Via Veneto. He had brought a variety of xeroxed reports as well as his private testimony. And as I listened and looked, it seemed to me that I was in the presence of one of the more exotic stories of our times. But, studying his documents later and obtaining more material from the United States, I recognized that, far from an exotic tale, I was beginning to glimpse what I had never seen before: the hulking identity of the twentieth century's third man.

I shall compact the story. For far longer ago than our more paranoid youth would accept, industrial management has been worried. Why should the modern worker have a sense of being a bush without roots? A famous experiment -- to become known as "the Hawthorne experiment" -- was made among Western Electric workers at the Illinois plant. Various efforts had been made to increase the production of telephones -- the company's technological destiny -- without startling consequence. More money, more light, more space -- nothing conspicuously affected production. Then a Harvard group under Elton Mayo was brought in. They isolated a few departments, introduced no dramatic changes, but emphasized that it was an experiment in which the workers were participating. Production boomed. Why?

That was in 1927. The experiment became famous. Management continued to chew its fingernails. And the soul-shrinking question to be asked is why did so few inspect the Hawthorne experiment to determine its psychic components? And of the few, why did almost none do anything about it? As I have previously suggested, capitalist and Marxist share the same idee fixe of the almighty dollar: that man works exclusively for reasons of economic determinism. The Hawthorne workers had been motivated by identity, not money -- by being people different. They were incomprehensible.

Finally in 1960 -- and this is where James begins to enter the story -- a professor of industrial relations at M.I.T. wrote a book called The Human Side of Enterprise. His name was Douglas McGregor, and he broached the theory that management throughout the world, regardless of political orientation, bases its strategies on a false assumption that man is lazy, shuns work, wants no responsibility, and reports for duty simply to avoid the punishment of material deprivation. He called it Theory X. One obeys out of fear, and so the management of men becomes possible.

You or I may recoil from such a generalization as Theory X. Can it be that all industrial enterprise of whatever shade of benevolence or ruthlessness, that all socialist or communist endeavors rest on such principles? What about Christmas parties, tea breaks, paid holidays on the Black Sea? Or is it all decor? And one recalls with a shock the environmentalist's dedication to security, the economist's presumptions of no want beyond material things. Overwhelmingly one recalls Pavlov's salivating dogs and Skinner's laboratory rats. We act as we do for no reason other than to secure reward and avoid punishment. An international, inter-ideological industrial superstructure has been shored up by the termite-ridden timbers of universally accepted behaviorist psychology. How can mere industrialists oppose "science says"?

Theory X presents the third coincidence: together with the human malaise and the revolt of the young, it passes beyond national borders, beyond political structures, beyond conditions of poverty or affluence. What if all three are related? And what if Theory X is correct?

McGregor said, No. He granted that it worked. The American economy could scarcely approach a yearly gross national product of a trillion dollars if it did not. But he maintained that it did not work well enough. He produced his Theory Y. And he turned to one of the heroic mavericks of American psychology, Abraham Maslow of Brandeis University, for a broader conception of human need.

At an earlier date Maslow had published Motivation and Personality, in which he presented his hierarchy of human need. Lowest and most fundamental came the physiological, then in ascending order came security, love or a sense of belonging, reputation or self-esteem, and finally, when others had been satisfied, the demand for self-actualization, for a man "to be actualized in what he is potentially." From it the late Dr. McGregor, to satisfy the whole man, put together his Theory Y of industrial management. Granted security, the worker was to be trusted, consulted, de-specialized, given every possible control over his own job, encouraged to learn others, allowed identity with the end product of his efforts. Theory Y implied the death of that most sacred of institutions, the assembly line.

Who would take a chance on a system like that? A man in California did. He was then vice-president of a small electronics firm producing high-precision instruments. His name is Arthur H. Kuriloff, and he faced too many defective instruments coming off the assembly line. The decision was made to adopt Theory Y. Management was reorganized to delegate authority down the ranks. Time clocks were abolished. The workers on the assembly line who had each learned and performed a small task were rearranged in teams of seven, each team responsible for producing a complete instrument, with distribution of tasks left to mutual agreement. At first there was confusion, helplessness, frustration. Then the more skilled taught the less, the helpless learned from the ingenious. Little over two years later Kuriloff could report in the professional journal Personnel, and later in his book Reality in Management, that man-hour productivity had increased by 30 percent, while reports by buyers of defective instruments had decreased by 70 percent. Absenteeism had dropped to one half the local average.

How much attention Kuriloff's experiment attracted, I do not know. Theory X remained in firm control of management the world around, and management remained worried, perplexed, and strictly doing business as usual. There were substantial questions. The California plant was small, its product complex. Large conclusions could not be drawn from an experiment so special. But it was then, in 1964, that Willem James made his leap in Rotterdam.

One can with difficulty imagine a less personalized installation than an oil refinery. His was fairly large, refining 80,000 barrels of crude oil a day. His dissatisfaction was entirely with efficiency and profits. He surveyed American refineries, studied Kuriloff's experience and McGregor's advice, concluded that a total reorganization -- indeed, a philosophical reorganization -- was necessary. While Theory Y was not entirely applicable to the operations of a refinery, he made his own adaptation. The hourly wage was replaced by a monthly salary. No checks were made on an employee reporting ill except to make sure that he was well when he returned. Since a refinery has no assembly line, the guiding principle became "management by objective." Wherever possible, groups were formed within departments and assigned an objective, but placed on their own as to the means of accomplishment. Advice was available, but management became more a consultant than a boss. The job was the group's.

"Job enrichment" was probably the most critical of the reforms, since as soon as a man had mastered a task he was encouraged to learn another. The more a man could do, the more money he made -- but this did not seem to be the final reward. Adventure, challenge, the cause to dare was introduced into the life of the industrial worker. James told me in Rome, "The figures don't say it and maybe it sounds silly. We have a happy oil refinery. People come to work because they enjoy it." Yet the figures are astonishing. Manpower was reduced by 49 percent, productivity per man increased by 172 percent. If one goes back to a 196a index of 100, then by 1967 production stood at 272. And labor turnover in these years decreased from 10 percent annually to 2 percent. It speaks much for James's happy refinery.

When I was a very young man I had the luck to meet the original Henry Ford. And in some manner that eludes description Willem James resembles him. But the one invented the assembly line and the other is destroying it. Ford was a rebel in American industry, since he paid his workers not what the labor market commanded, but enough to buy his product. Yet the assembly line denied innate needs. I recall, twenty years ago, a three-week experience in an aircraft plant in Texas recently removed, for strategic considerations, from Connecticut. There were seven thousand employees, and for reasons that need not concern us I had the freedom to ask whatever I pleased of the general manager or the floor-sweeper. It was a giant assembly line producing that most exquisite product, a carrier-based fighter plane. And I asked the personnel manager one day, "How could you have found in Texas seven thousand workers with such skills?" His answer demands long digestion: "Because there are only two hundred jobs that require more than six weeks training."

This is the assembly line, its limited demands, its limited rewards. It is likewise the assembly line of all organizations, mental as well as manual. You learn your job, and you do it. Theory Y denies all. Today McGregor's inspiration commands more and more attention. But it was Willem James's experiment in Rotterdam that proved that it works. Youth may regurgitate any notion that sheer profit can be the most revolutionary of motives. But we shall see.

Maslow himself once used a term of Ruth Benedict's which she had coined in a moment of rebellion against cultural relativism. "Synergy" describes the union of goals between the individual and his group. And synergy describes what has hap pened at Rotterdam. Theory Y has been proved a success. What will come of it? Perhaps nothing, despite all of management's conferences. Theory Y works. But labor unions dedicated to the cause of human mediocrity must and will oppose any change. Egalatarian intellectuals will join in the chorus. Yet, like the sight through a telescope of a planet and its satellites, the sight of a happy refinery in Rotterdam must give us pause to wonder. May not profits, like gravity, someday provide wonders?

I have not told this story to advocate an advanced approach to industrial competence. I do not know whether few, some, considerable, many or most of those enterprises consuming one third of the normal man's living hours are susceptible to the inducements of Theory Y. I do not even know whether few, some, considerable, many or most of the world's peoples have reached a degree of security permitting satisfaction of needs more profound. What I am permitted to suggest, within my own competence, is that a single experiment, broadly enough conceived and incisive enough in its outcome, can demolish a theory. And Theory X, though it be universally accepted, was damaged in California and demolished at Rotterdam.

From an evolutionary view I prefer my own triad of innate needs, applicable to all higher animals, to my friend Maslow's hierarchy of human needs. But they make in part the same statement: the pursuit of security bears reward only when you do not have it. And even possession of a slimmest portion may free us to seek impenetrable skies, imponderable answers, and a human dignity beyond definition. It is what youth in its ignorance knows, I believe, and we in our habituation do not.

Is this, then, the organizing principle of the triple coincidence of the international malaise, the international revolt of the young, and the international acceptance of the laboratory rat as the model for human aspiration? One* encounters abruptly a fourth congruence: relative affluence. It is among those peoples and societies shaking off the bonds of poverty that we find not only the adult malaise but the shrillest cries from the young. We acknowledge it; we speak of the revolution of rising expectations. Our habituated minds, however, can interpret such expectations only in terms of material wants. But the uprising of the young has corresponded with perfect timing to the diminishing pressures for material security.

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. An orthodox objection, whether by beleaguered management or bemused idealist, might accept the hypothesis but assert that the human being will not accept material sacrifice for immaterial gain. Yet the radical proof provided at Rotterdam denies material sacrifice. The refinery would not otherwise be in process of tripling its production today.

If we accept the hypothesis for its working value, then we may begin to comprehend many young displays: passionate concern for the individual and as passionate hostility for the organization; equivalent contempt for the labor union and the establishment of privilege; impatience with elder statesmen, older voices; equal disenchantment with political structures presumably individualist or presumably collective. We may even begin to comprehend why so often it is that the most intelligent among the young, the individual best equipped with perceptions to glimpse the universality of Theory X's degradation which maturity will force upon him, who accepts violence and the physical assault on social institutions as the only way: or turns to sexual abandon, to the kick of sensation, to drugs or other means of withdrawal, to decibels of entertainment too deafening to tolerate thought, and accepts the self-annihilation of the social drop-out as something that can at least be his.

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. Their drives rise out of the experience of species gone, and may be as obscure to the belligerents as they are to the besieged. Caught between the inadequacy of natural wisdom and the inadequacy of adult counsel, the most gifted spokesman for the young may dismay us with his ignorance, appall us with his heedlessness, divert us from responses short of apoplexy. And the irony is profound -- indeed, it is a pathos -- that the one counsel he accepts from us is false: the natural equality of men. Two centuries of lip service to a doctrine that no one ever truly believed has at last produced a generation who as true believers supervise their own castration. They condemn themselves to Theory X.

But do they believe it? My faith in evolutionary command commands me to doubt it. As youth, somewhere in his old-time bowels, rises in defense of the individual, that engine of primate supremacy, so I must suspect that our human brainwashing is not, as it has never been, a total triumph.

To take one last, sidewise glance at the inarticulate demands of the young, I shall turn in the final section of this chapter to the life of the baboon. Such an exercise is unflattering; it is also dangerous, for we are not baboons. Yet the ignorance of the young and the habituation of their elders may find some accommodation in the world of another species. Somewhere on the periphery of the baboon troop the young omega male barks sharply; the formidable alphas go to investigate. There is a cheetah, standing tall and thin on a high place, and he is looking at us. You and I will do well to look where our young are pointing. All comes more easily, one must admit, if you are a baboon and cherish no illusions, old or young, that you can survive without your troop. All comes more easily too, one must admit, for both alpha and omega if you possess no brain worth brainwashing.

The social contract of the chacma and olive baboons, in southern and eastern Africa, is the most severe in the world of the sub-human primate. Just as the citizen of a small, embattled nation will sacrifice a maximum of his civil rights to the order that he hopes will save him, so the eternally embattled baboon sacrifices a maximum of animal freedom to that social order which permits his survival. Yet he sacrifices little individuality.

The baboon is the largest of monkeys, and differs from the ape most conspicuously in that he boasts a tail. His largeness, however, is what invites the first of his vulnerabilities. All monkeys are edible, but most are too small for predators other than snakes and jackals and eagles to bother with. They are tidbits, and uncomfortably agile tidbits too. But the baboon's size, while offering unimportant temptation to social killers like the lion who must have a large animal to satisfy many hungers, comes very near perfection in cheetah or leopard estimate. Wherever men have killed off leopards, baboons have enjoyed a population explosion.

The second of baboon vulnerabilities is his life on the ground. Primate students are coming more and more unanimously to the conclusion that terrestrial life has commanded increased aggressiveness in the primate individual and tighter organization in the primate society. Life on the ground (and this is of untold significance concerning the evolution of the human primate) offers hazards beyond measure as compared with a life in the trees. Such a survival disadvantage has a monkey on the ground that the observer must wonder why anybody ever tried it. But baboons did, as did the human ancestor and many another. We shall wonder why later; now we shall simply observe the consequences. The edibly attractive baboon, whenever it was that he could no longer resist terrestrial temptation, became a famous target.

For the third of baboon vulnerabilities the baboon has no one to blame but himself. He cannot keep his hands off other people's goods. In the earlier millennia of his evolution, edibility was enough of a problem. Then came man with his weapons. In many a primitive African people the young proved their manhood by killing a dangerous animal such as one of the great cats. The baboon should have greeted man as a savior; he greeted him instead as a sucker. Baboon temptation could not resist the patches of maize grown by African farmers, as later it could not resist the fruit of the white man's orchards. The appetites of diminishing leopards and cheetahs were more than replaced by the angers of multiplying men.

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. The authority and responsibility of the few, the loyalty and obedience of the many, have through group selection perfected a social contract that works. There are today, against all odds, more baboons in eastern and southern Africa than there are people.

If the baboon contract is severe, then we are permitted to understand. If order weighs heavily over disorder, then the balance could not be otherwise. The rule of the alpha oligarchy may be unchallengeable; punishment for the delinquent heavy. Ruthlessness of leadership may be such that the sick or disabled must struggle frantically to keep up with the moving troop, since to be left behind is to become a dinner for the nearest predator. This is baboon life. Yet in all measures of personality -- alertness, diversity, aggressiveness, ingenuity -- baboon individuality remains. How have they done it?

Again let me consult my triad of innate needs, common, I have suggested, to men and all higher animals. There is identity, as opposed to anonymity; there is stimulation, as opposed to boredom; there is security, as opposed to anxiety. That the baboon troop has effected adequate security for the individual finds its proof in the survival of species. Yet the security is that of the group, and the security of the individual is that of his identification with the group. In the face of hazard, all survival rests on individual resource: the alertness of the young, the willingness of the alpha to accept risk, the fidelity of the mother to her infant. Washburn and De Vore reported that a baboon without a troop is a dead baboon. And it is as if, buried in the baboon subconscious, the truth, like one's shadow, can lie never far away. Security for the group becomes stimulation for the individual.

Interlocked in the baboon contract are identity, stimulation, and security. One cannot be insecure so long as identity remains solidly with the troop; and one can scarcely be bored if responsibility in the face of hazard falls on one as it falls on all. The contract implies, most obviously (though no more obviously than in man), recognition of what happens to a baboon without a troop.

In such fashion are innate needs satisfied by response to hazard. But all life is not hazard. And baboons retain the integrity of the group and of the individual in the less threatening avenues of the game reserve. Here man ceases to be a threat. Daily life consists of feeding, playing, grooming one another, dozing through the siesta hour, an occasional bout of sexual entertainment, an occasional quarrel broken up by the alphas, more feeding, and the dusky return to a cliff, if you have one, or, if not, to your sleeping trees. There is little apparent excitement.

Even in a protected area, however, there remain those enemies of older claim on baboon antipathy than men. Alertness cannot be dispensed with. One night in a camp at Lake Man-yara, a small gem of a reserve lying in the bottom of Tanzania's Rift Valley, we were awakened by baboon ruckus. The valley wall beside us was 2,000 feet high, the same wall that the elephants climbed, and a troop had a customary sleeping place in rocky cliffs several hundred feet up the cliff. The clamor of barking was of an order to be inspired by none but the leopard. We detached a portable spotlight from a truck, aimed it up at the valley wall. We could not see the bodies of the prowlers, only pairs of green eyes reflected in our light. It was a night of remarkable leopard sociability; two were hunting together. A pair of eyes would vanish for a while, probably behind a bush, then reappear. Baboons, unlike chimpanzees, do not vanish into darkness, silence, and personal safety. The racket became a deep uproar, the uproar a shrill cannonade. After a while we lost the green eyes. After a much longer while the clamor subsided to infrequent barks, then to the silence of the troop again sleeping in its cliff. Whether the leopards had retreated in discouragement or had taken a baboon or two and gone off to feed, we could not know. The baboons could not know, either. We too went back to sleep. Such is night in Africa.

And so must always be the life of the baboon, until poachers have taken the last leopard to be fashioned into an expensive coat. How will he manage at the heart of a rich, protected area in a world without want or danger? Would his innate needs yet be satisfied? I believe they would. And the secret of his success would lie in that undistinguished, unwashable brain.

The baboon will never persuade himself that aggressiveness is a product of frustration. The young will never blame their failures on lack of parental love in infancy, as adults will be unlikely to forbid the young their tendency to play in trees. Should the proposition that competition is somehow wrong come baboon way, small brains would be dumbfounded; should some mutant baboon idealist insist upon it, he would be greeted with the lifted eyebrows not of human surprise but of monkey threat. That baboons in their original state had been happy and good would create little but embarrassment for ancestors so dull; that society has brought baboon downfall would be greeted with a chorus of protest, for without society how would anyone learn even what to eat? The mutant idealist, despite all threatening eyelids, persists: there must be a declaration of the natural equality of baboons. He will receive the ancient roar reserved for the extinct leopard as a natural enemy of their kind. For who wants it? The young baboon? He demands the freedom to assert if he can his natural superiority. The mothers? They are busy enough with their infants, further responsibility is outrageous; and bleak indeed would be the sexual future without that breath-taking crack at an overwhelming alpha. The omegas turn to such displacement activities as digging roots; life is far more comfortable being a non-equal. The middle-class males are confused; what would they do for excitement without status arguments? The alphas sigh, retreat beyond a few bushes, and start up a crap game.

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 fundamental demand for security will be answered so long as the troop acts as one. But security cannot be transmuted to boredom so long as competition, free but subject to equal rules and regulations, invests the chasing peer group, the prospects of the maturing male, the jockeying for position between Number Eight and Number Nine, the sexual ambitions of the female in estrus working her way up the social order. Stimulation -- the excitement of victory within the rules of the game -- is written large in the rewards of baboon society as in the non-existent society of undeluded men.

It is identity -- what Maslow would call self-actualization -- that presents the most incisive challenge to the habituated human mind. Who am I? Where am I? Have I actualized myself, singularized myself as my genetic potential proposes? Why a Douglas fir will grow to its maximum height, why a chicken will struggle for her highest possible rank in the pecking order, why a man will sacrifice fortune for fame, why the aspiring leader of a juvenile gang will neglect all safety to retain his status, why a criminal will glory in a score none other would have dared to attempt -- all are avenues to identity in one's own eyes and the eyes of others.

But identity does not demand alphaness. Neither you the reader, nor I the author, yearn desperately, I suspect, to be President of the United States. Like many another being of lower rank, we may behold with wonder, with relief, and perhaps with amusement the insane efforts of some fellow citizen to get the job. If we shelter a personal hope, it is that the selected alpha will generate a following response that will affect us. For herein lies another powerful ingredient of identity, another means of answering the undying question, Who am I? To be so privileged as to point to a man with pride and say "That is my husband" or "There goes my boss," or to include a group, perhaps with switchblades shining, and say "This is my gang."

And still, identity does not stop there. For rank order in itself provides fulsome means of identification, and perhaps this is one reason why rank has been such an evolutionary success. One need not be alpha to know who one is. Number Six will do. Every rung on the social ladder carries its identification, and is a step higher than somebody else. There is always the omega, of course, but he seldom cares, and, like the village idiot or the town drunk, acquires his own special character and identity. If the omega cares, then there is probably something wrong with the system.

Many another means of acquiring identity is offered to the world's beings: There is association with a place uniquely one's own, like the starling's perching place, the Peruvian viscacha's sunning place, the topi's defecating place, the hartebeest's sentinel place on a termite mound. There is the defended territory of the Australian bower-bird, of the northern roebuck, of the Asian gibbon, of the African vervet-monkey band, offering not only identity of place but stimulation of defense and frequently security of food supply too. Place enters profoundly into identification, whether it be that of the drunken Southerner weeping in his cups at a strain from "Dixie," the dog returning home despite all his master's efforts to give him away, the Pacific salmon returning after years at sea to that little stretch of brook where he was hatched, or the seemingly superfluous identification of place by a painter called Leonardo da Vinci. Strange hobbies, strange religions, strange love affairs, strange dress -- any of them may reinforce our satisfactions of uniqueness. But as we must seek identity as we seek the sun, so we must dread anonymity as we dread the dark.

The young baboon matures with the assurance that in his natural society he will find a place unique and his own. The human youth has no such assurance. A tiny aircraft facing the dense, implacable wall of a cold front may turn back; but life is irreversible. Like some monstrous whale devouring plankton by the acre, so the organization of modern life devours the individual. Specialization will reduce him to a needle lost in the twentieth century's organizational haystack. Classification will place him with all beans of equal size. A workingman, he will be denied the right of excellence by his union. An organization man, he will be required to deposit his most secret riches in the company safe. His life is ordained. From an anonymous house in an anonymous suburb he will take his anonymous seat in an anonymous train to reach an anonymous office where he will perform the tasks he performed yesterday, eat the lunch he ate yesterday, suppress the resentments he suppressed yesterday, return to his anonymous seat in an anonymous train to an anonymous suburb and an anonymous home where he will have the martinis he had yesterday, renew the quarrels he had yesterday, watch lights and shadows on a television screen indistinguishable from the lights and shadows he watched the night before. And he will go to bed. A morning will come when he will not rise. His life, while it lasted, has of course(been secure. And to a degree, one must confess, an unnatural society will have achieved among its members a measure of unnatural equality.

Human youth recognizes that a few achieve identity. But it is a shrinking few, as organizations devour each other, while youth grows in numbers. And so there are those among the young -- today some, tomorrow more -- who suggest that if something does not give, then they will tear the place down as a house not worth living in. There is nothing unusual, in the quest for identity, to find those who will contemptuously reject security's last offer.