Quigley begins with his version of the \u201cpop psychology\u201d canard:<\/p>\n
\u2026in this book there is no more science than there is in a comic strip.\u00a0 As an entertainer, Ardrey is the Scheherazade of the present day, telling tales about strange animals, in far off places and in remote times, with every assurance that they are true, but, like the Arabian Nights, it is foolish to worry about how true they are, they are so unbelievable and so glib.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
That would have been news to the people whose work Ardrey quoted.\u00a0 They were usually chosen from among the most well-known and respected researchers of their day, who described the behavior of animals that, far from being far off or remote, were often quite common.\u00a0 Geoffrey Gorer, himself a Blank Slater, but one who managed to preserve some semblance of common decency, observed that,<\/p>\n
Almost without question, Robert Ardrey is today the most influential writer in English dealing with the innate or instinctive attributes of human nature, and the most skilled populariser of the findings of paleo-anthropologists, ethologists, and biological experimenters\u2026 He is a skilled writer, with a lively command of English prose, a pretty turn of wit, and a dramatist\u2019s skill in exposition; he is also a good reporter, with the reporter\u2019s eye for the significant detail, the striking visual impression. He has taken a look at nearly all the current work in Africa of paleo-anthropologists and ethologists; time and again, a couple of his paragraphs can make vivid a site, such as the Olduvai Gorge, which has been merely a name in a hundred articles.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\u2026he does not distort his authorities beyond what is inevitable in any selection and condensation\u2026 even those familiar with most of the literature are likely to find descriptions of research they had hitherto ignored, particularly in The Territorial Imperative, with its bibliography of 245 items.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
It\u2019s not clear why Quigley thought he was qualified to lecture Ardrey on animal behavior in the first place.\u00a0 He certainly had no claim to expertise in the field.\u00a0 However, he so distorted what Ardrey had to say on the subject that his expertise was irrelevant in any case.\u00a0 For example, he writes,<\/p>\n
It is true that Ardrey has read a great deal about animal behavior, but he never seems to grasp what it all means, and his biases prevent him from seeing what is really there. For example, he gives the impression that he is constantly exploring Africa, watching lions with George Schaller, or chatting with the world’s greatest experts about elephants. He tells us that he “made a general survey of predatory communities” in Africa in 1968, but his ignorance of lions is so great that he misunderstands most of what he sees, reads, or is told. For example, one afternoon, Ardrey and his wife roused a lioness “a few hundred yards” from a herd of browsing impala. Two of the impala came over to see the lioness as it sought another sleeping place, while the others “never for a moment stopped eating.” Ardrey was amazed at this, but decided that he could not say that the impala were “suicidal” since the lioness was so sleepy. Then he adds, “Nevertheless, one can state in very nearly mathematical terms the survival value of approaching or fleeing the presence of a lion of unknown antagonism if you are an impala.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This is typical of the ponderous way Ardrey covers his ignorance. Despite his claims of intimacy with Schaller, who studied lions in Africa over three years, 1966-1969, Ardrey apparently does not know that killing by a lion (1) is not motivated by “antagonism”; (2) almost never takes place in the middle of the day; (3) is never directed at an animal which is looking at the lion; and (4) the attack never is made from a distance of over 40 to 50 yards. Ardrey will find these rules stated by R. D. Estes in Natural History for February and March 1967 or by Schaller in National Geographic for April 1969. The latter says, “The lion must stalk to within a few feet of a potential victim before its rush has much chance of success. Prey animals are fully aware of the lion’s limitations. They have learned how near to a lion they may wander without danger of attack\u2014usually to within about 120 feet. This leads to ludicrous situations . . . A visible lion is a safe lion.” Need I add that Ardrey’s “suicidal” impala were about 500 feet from danger.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
To see that this critique is not only preposterous but a deliberate and malicious distortion of what Ardrey actually said, one need only read the passage in question.\u00a0 I found it on page 76 of my hard cover copy of The Social Contract<\/em>, and it can be seen by clicking on the “Order and Disorder” chapter and scrolling down at the above link to book.\u00a0 It is worth quoting in full:<\/p>\n
One afternoon we passed an all-male herd of twenty or twenty-five browsing impala, then a few hundred yards away came on a lioness sleeping under a tree.\u00a0 Approaching her too closely, we disturbed her.\u00a0 She rose, and for the first time was observed by the impala.\u00a0 We could hear the instant far off snort.\u00a0 Now the lioness moved away at deliberate pace toward another tree and another spot of shade.\u00a0 Immediately two impala detached themselves from their fellows and came running after her, sending back to the party repeated warning snorts.\u00a0 When she settled herself again, the two still lingered, watching tensely, giving their occasional snorts.\u00a0 Not until she had most evidently gone back to sleep did they trot away to rejoin their fellows, who never for a moment had stopped eating.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
One cannot say that the two impala had accepted risks of a suicidal nature by following a lioness as sleepy as this one.\u00a0 Nevertheless, one can state in very nearly mathematical terms the survival value of approaching or fleeing the presence of a lion of unknown antagonism if you are an impala.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The observant reader will notice that Ardrey never expressed “amazement,” did not take the possibility seriously that the impala were “suicidal,” obviously had no intent of using the term “antagonism” as a scientifically rigorous description of lion behavior, and nowhere stated the minimum distance between the impala and the lion was either 500 feet or any other distance. He is merely using a personal anecdote to illustrate a point, and nowhere makes any claims, express or implied, about the feeding behavior of lions that would in any way justify Quigley’s gratuitous blather on the subject.<\/p>\n
A familiar tactic of the old Blank Slaters was the blowing of smokescreens with scientific jargon.\u00a0 For example, they furiously pounced on anyone who used the term \u201cinstinct\u201d in connection with human beings.\u00a0 \u201cInstinct,\u201d you see, was reserved for such programmed behavior as the building of nests by insects, and using to refer to open-ended predispositions became an inexcusable sin.\u00a0 Nowadays, of course, \u201cinstinct\u201d is back in fashion as a vernacular term, and no one seems particularly confused when it is applied to humans.\u00a0 Here\u2019s Quigley\u2019s version of the smokescreen:<\/p>\n
Moreover, this slovenly thinking, which ignores the distinction between animal societies and human societies, also ignores the distinction between social acts and biological actions.\u00a0 Thus he says that \u201cthe social life\u201d of a leopard is \u201climited to a few occasional hours of copulation;\u201d copulation is biological, not social, just as parturition is.\u00a0 The whole book is filled with his confusions of quite distinct things in this way.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I really doubt that anyone, except, perhaps, Quigley, was confused by Ardrey\u2019s \u201cunscientific\u201d use of the term \u201csocial life\u201d to describe copulation in leopards.\u00a0 Fortunately, the physicists have not seen fit to go around correcting everyone who doesn\u2019t use terms like \u201cwork,\u201d \u201cenergy,\u201d \u201cpower,\u201d etc., as they are defined in the scientific jargon.\u00a0 The substitution of jargon for the vernacular in this context would likely be similarly unhelpful.<\/p>\n
Just as with the polemics exchanged between the iconoclasts and the iconodules, or the believers in Communion in both kinds with the believers in Communion in only one kind, such \u201creviews\u201d usually conclude with the striking of moralistic poses and the raining down of anathemas on the object of the author\u2019s ire.\u00a0 Quigley\u2019s was no exception.\u00a0 Here is how \u201cscience\u201d was\u00a0enforced by the Blank Slaters:<\/p>\n
Fundamentally, Ardrey is a racist, devoted to a belief in human inequality and unfreedom, an enemy of social \u201cdisorder\u201d which must be suppressed by authority because man is a predatory, violent, aggressive creature, compelled by irresistible hereditary compulsion to war over territory.\u00a0 These are fascist ideas, and, in this book, Ardrey is doing for America what Treitschke, H. S. Chamberlain, Alfred Rosenberg, and others did for Germany:\u00a0 preparing an intellectual basis for fascist political action.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
That Ardrey believed none of the things Quigley attributes to him in the above quote is a fact familiar to anyone who has actually read his books.\u00a0 He was, in fact, a liberal of the far left who nearly became a Communist himself at one point, or at least he was until he became familiar with the real nature of \u201cprogressive\u201d ideologues in the school of hard knocks.\u00a0 None of this mattered to the \u201cscientist\u201d Quigley, who was intent on character assassination, not uncovering the truth.\u00a0 Comically enough, this ringing tribute to freedom of thought\u00a0appeared a few paragraphs after Quigley piously observed that Ardrey seemed to think that the truth was being suppressed by the scientific establishment, and that,<\/p>\n
The reasons for this conspiracy are not stated, but it seems to be partly because the established don’t want these brilliant young researchers, whom Ardrey has found, to eclipse them and show them up for the old fuddy-duddies that they are. Partly also for more secret political reasons related to Ardrey’s idea that there is a profoundly unscientific liberal establishment which is based on a number of lies like equality, democracy, and freedom (!)\u00a0which makes it necessary for them to want to suppress the scientists that Ardrey is reporting on.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Not the least interesting bit in Quigley\u2019s opus is the manner in which he actually slips in the knife, the ideological shibboleth of the Blank Slate cloaked in the mantle of science, quite unobtrusively midway through the review:<\/p>\n
Ardrey tries to tell us what man is like.\u00a0 He insists that man is simply an animal (which implies that animals are simply men).\u00a0 This is, of course, contrary to general scientific belief, which holds that man evolved from an animal when his survival shifted from dependence upon inherited behavior to dependence upon learned behavior.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This, of course, is the actual point of all the browbeating and histrionic posing.\u00a0 Failing this \u201cscientific fact\u201d all the cherished utopias of the Blank Slaters collapse like a house of cards.\u00a0 Indeed, the most prominent of them, Communism, collapsed quite spectacularly, exposing Quigley\u2019s \u201cgeneral scientific belief\u201d as one of history\u2019s most successful and damaging hoaxes in the process.<\/p>\n
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