In a lifetime studying the behavior of chimpanzees, Jane Goodall became something of an authority on the aggressiveness of alpha male adults. Now, in an interview released just days after her death, the famed primatologist reveals what she would do with Donald Trump, Elon Musk and other human beings she saw as showing similar traits: launch them on a one-way trip into space...“There are people I don’t like, and I would like to put them on one of Musk’s spaceships and send them all off to the planet he’s sure he’s going to discover,” Goodall tells interviewer Brad Falchuk during the revelatory 55-minute special discussing her life, work and legacy...[Musk would] be the host. You can imagine who I’d put on that spaceship. Along with Musk would be Trump and some of Trump’s real supporters,” she said. “And then I would put [Russian president Vladimir] Putin in there, and I would put [China’s] President Xi. I’d certainly put [Israeli prime minister Benjamin] Netanyahu in there and his far-right government. Put them all on that spaceship and send them off.”...In a 2022 interview with MSNBC she said [Trump] exhibited “the same sort of behavior as a male chimpanzee will show when he’s competing for dominance with another. They’re upright, they swagger, they project themselves as really more large and aggressive than they may actually be in order to intimidate their rivals.”...“We get, interestingly, two types of alpha. One does it all by aggression, and because they’re strong and they fight, they don’t last very long. Others do it by using their brains, like a young male will only challenge a higher-ranking one if his friend, often his brother, is with him. And you know, they last much, much longer,” she said.She also examined the “politicization” of behavior, and what her studies had taught her about aggressive behaviors shown by groups of humans and chimpanzees when confronted with something they perceived as hostile, even if no threat existed.“Chimps see a stranger from a neighboring community, and they get all excited, and the hair stands out, and they reach out and touch another, and they’ve got these faces of anger and fear, and it catches, and the others catch that feeling that this one male has had, and they all become aggressive,” she said.“It’s contagious,” she added. “Some of these demonstrations that turn aggressive, it sweeps through them. They all want to become and join in and become aggressive. They’re protecting their territory or fighting for dominance.”Falchuk asked if she believed it was the same for humans. “Probably, sometimes yes. But I truly believe that most people are decent,” she said.
I quite agree with her that most people are decent. See adjacent post about loon rescues.
Photo and text excerpted from The Guardian.
Unfair to the chimps!!!
ReplyDeletebobbie
Here's a quote from the Guardian article you cite:
ReplyDelete"Goodall, born in London five years before the start of the second world war, likened the fight against the darkness of present-day politics to Britain standing up to Nazi Germany, and the 'spirit of obstinance' shown by Winston Churchill.
'That doesn’t mean you don’t have moments of depression, but then you come out of it and say, ‘OK, I’m not going to let them win,' she said.
'It’s like Churchill in the war, his famous speech, we’ll fight them on the beaches, we’ll fight them in the streets and the cities, then he turned aside to a friend and was heard to say, ‘and we’ll fight them at the ends of broken bottles because that’s all we’ve bloody well got’.”
So, here we have Goodall praising and celebrating an archetypal alpha male. But every alpha male mentioned in the post--all to be murdered essentially, given the rocket to space idea--is someone's Churchill. It's a matter of seeing it from another perspective. Putin, for example, has a very high approval rating in Russia and is no doubt seen in Churchillian terms by many Russians.
So is Goodall really anti-alpha male--as could be inferred from the post? Or selectively weaponizing gender against leaders she doesn't like? Throw in the chimps and it seems to me we have a muddled mess.
Afterthought: If I described Margaret Thatcher an "alpha female" and said she should have been shot into space, would that sound like I was sexist and/or misogynistic? That is, not as a complaint about her values and leadership alone, but about her values and leadership as a function of her sex? Why is it okay to talk about men this way? Gandhi was an alpha male. Does the "male" or "alpha" make him anything less? I smell misandrist and supremacy feminism in the whole line of reasoning.
DeleteIf you want to go back in time and launch Thatcher into space, that's fine by me. Signed, a lifelong feminist.
DeleteThis comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
DeleteShould I go back in time and proclaim Thatcher to be an "alpha female" and then launch her into space or just do the launching without making it about her sex?
DeleteSeems Ms. Goodall only ever read the main stream media.
ReplyDeleteI wish I was able to form firm convictions about people from reading what some privately owned news company told me about them.
So much hand wringing over the "'politicization' of behavior" and (ironically) zero mention of the politicization of primatology. Funny how that turned out...
ReplyDeleteRetRsvMike
I am surprised Dr Goodall would use the term "alpha male" at all, as the original concept, which involved wolves, has been disproved: it was based on captive behavior, not natural behavior in the wild.
ReplyDeleteThe person who claims to have been the first to use the term to describe chimpanzees appears to agree with her that the 'alpha' chimpanzees who are physical don't win for long:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/alpha-male-alpha-chimpanzee-primatologist-frans-de-waal-a8421291.html