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Robert Ardrey was a man who had the unusual combination of a brilliant mind, and a rare talent for explaining to a broad audience what he was thinking.\u00a0 The series of books he wrote in the 1960’s and 70’s emphasized a common theme; the effect of innate predispositions, or human nature, if you will, on human behavior.\u00a0 One aspect of our behavior that has had a profound and decisive impact on our history, and may well bring that history to an end one day unless we learn to understand and control it, is the Amity\/Enmity Complex, our innate tendency to categorize others of our species into in-groups and out-groups.\u00a0 Ardrey describes it in a chapter of his book, “The Territorial Imperative,” taking the reader through a review of the origins of the idea, salient observations of human and animal behavior that support it, and the logical basis for the hypothesis.\u00a0 If you read nothing else of Ardrey’s writings, read this chapter.\u00a0 If you do so with an open mind, I think some of the constantly reccurring manifestations of the Complex, including\u00a0such notorious examples as the anti-Semitism that has stained the histories of so many European countries, the racism that has justified slavery and rationalized discrimination\u00a0in the United States and many other countries, and the religious bigotry now fomenting such violence in the Middle East, although it is hardly unique to that region of the world, will begin to make a lot more sense to you.\u00a0 One would think that the innumerable irrational and devastating wars that have been such a constant and persistent phenomenon in human history would have tipped us off by now when it comes to this aspect of our nature.\u00a0 It seems that, when it comes to understanding ourselves, we are remarkably slow learners.<\/p>\n
The Amity\/Enmity Complex as an aspect of human moral behavior and most of the other ideas Ardrey presented weren’t really original.\u00a0 He made that clear himself.\u00a0 In addition to his other talents, he had a rare grasp of history, and was well able to follow the intellectual paths leading from his own theories back to their sources.\u00a0 His books were very popular at the time they were published, and enlightened many.\u00a0 They also made him many enemies, because his theories flew in the face of cherished ideological certainties posing as science.\u00a0 Those enemies reacted with a vehemence and bitterness that had little to do with disinterested logic, but which I’m sure Ardrey understood very well himself. One can still trace the effects of their malice on the web today, where Ardrey’s “biographers” continue to bowdlerize his thought as “The Killer Ape Theory<\/a>.” \u00a0 Ironically, they proved his point.\u00a0 By threatening the shibboleths\u00a0that made up the\u00a0ideological boxes they lived in, Ardrey put himself squarely in their “out-groups,” and elicited all the rage that he himself had so clearly described and predicted.\u00a0<\/p>\n Writing in 1966, Ardrey described the Amity-Enmity Complex as “the resolution of a paradox posed by Darwin<\/a>, solved by Wallace<\/a>, explored by Spencer<\/a> and Sumner<\/a>, revived and extended by Keith<\/a>, and for the last twenty years cast aside under the pretense it does not exist.\u00a0 The paradox may be simply stated:\u00a0 If the evolutionary process is a merciless struggle among individuals to survive, with natural selection determining the fittest, then how could such human qualities as altruism, loyalty, charity, and mercy have ever come into existence?\u00a0 If Darwinian evolution presents a picture of dog eat dog, then how did dogs ever get together?”<\/p>\n