The Naked Ape (20 page)

All this face-making we share with the monkeys, a fact that is worth remembering if ever you come face to face with a large baboon, but there are other faces that we have invented culturally, such as sticking out the tongue, puffing out the cheeks, thumbing the nose, and exaggeratedly screwing up the features, that add considerably to our threat repertoire. Most cultures have also added a variety of threatening or insulting gestures employing the rest of the body. Aggressive,, intention movements (‘hopping mad’) have been elaborated into violent war dances, of many different and highly stylised kinds. The function here has become communal arousal and synchronisation of strong aggressive feelings, rather than direct visual display to the enemy.

Because, with the cultural development of lethal artificial weapons, we have become such a potentially dangerous species, it is not surprising to find that we have an extraordinarily wide range of appeasement signals. We share with the other primates the basic submissive response of crouching and screaming. In addition we have formalised a whole variety of subordinating displays. Crouching itself has become extended into grovelling and prostrating. Minor intensities of it are expressed in the form of kneeling, bowing and curtsying. The key signal here is the lowering of the body in relation to the dominant individual. When threatening, we puff ourselves up to our greatest height, making our bodies as tall and as large as possible. Submissive behaviour must therefore take the opposite course and bring the body down as far as possible. Instead of doing this in a random way, we have stylised it at a number of characteristic, fixed stages, each with its own special signal meaning. The act of saluting is interesting in this context, because it shows how far from the original gesture formalisation can carry our cultural signs. At first sight a military salute looks like an aggressive movement. It is similar to the signal version of raising-an-armtostrike-a-blow. The vital difference is that the hand is not clenched and it points towards the cap or hat. It is, of course, a stylised modification of the act of removing the hat, which itself was originally part of the procedure of lowering the height of the body.

The distillation of the bowing movement from the original, crude, primate crouch is also interesting. The key feature here is the lowering of the eyes. A direct stare is typical of the most out-and-out aggression. It is part of the fiercest facial expressions and accompanies all the most belligerent gestures. (This is why the children’s game of ‘stare you out’ is so difficult to perform and why the simple curiosity staring of a young child—‘It’s rude to stare’—is so condemned.) No matter how reduced in extent the bow becomes by social custom, it always retains the face-lowering element. Male members of a royal court, for example, who, through constant repetition, have modified their bowing reactions, still lower the face, but instead of bending from the waist they now bow stiffly from the neck, lowering only the head region.

On less formal occasions the anti-stare response is given by simple looking-away movements, or a ‘shifty-eyed’ expression. Only a truly aggressive individual can fix you in the eye for any length of time. During ordinary face-to-face conversations we typically look away from our companions when we are talking, then glance back at them at the end of each sentence, or ‘paragraph’, to check their response to what we have said. A professional lecturer takes some time to train himself to look directly at the members of his audience, instead of over their heads, down at his rostrum, or out towards the side or back of the hall. Even thought he is in such a dominant position, there are so many of them, all staring (from the safety of their seats) at him, that he experiences a basic and initially uncontrollable fear of them. Only after agr eat deal of practice can he overcome this. The simple, aggressive, physical act of being stared at by a large group of people is also the cause of the fluttering ‘butterflies’ in the actor’s stomach before he makes his entrance on to the stage. He has all his intellectual worries about the qualities of his performance and its reception, of course, but the massed threat-stare is an additional and more fundamental hazard for him. (This is again a case of the curiosity stare being confused at an unconscious level with the threat-stare.) The wearing of spectacles and sunglasses makes the face appear more aggressive because it artificially and accidentally enlarges the pattern of the stare. If we are looked at by someone wearing glasses, we are being given a super-stare. Mild-mannered individuals tend to select thin-rimmed or rimless spectacles (probably without realising why they do so), because this enables them to see better with the minimum of stare exaggeration. In this way they avoid arousing counter-aggression.

A more intense form of anti-stare is covering the eyes with the hands, or burying the face in the crook of the elbow. The simple act of closing the eyes also cuts off the stare, and it is intriguing that certain individuals compulsively and repeatedly shut their eyes briefly whilst facing and talking to strangers. It is as though their normal blinking responses have become lengthened into extended eye-masking moments. The response vanishes when they are conversing with close friends in a situation where they feel at ease. Whether they are trying to shut off the ‘threatening’ presence of the stranger, or whether they are attempting to reduce their staring rate, or both, is not always clear.

Because of their powerful intimidating affect, many species have evolved staring eyespots as self-defence mechanisms. Many moths have a pair of startling eye markings on their wings. These lie concealed until the creatures are attacked by predators. The wings then open and flash the bright eye-spots in the face of the enemy. It has been proved experimentally that this exerts a valuable intimidating influence on the wouldbe killers, who frequently flee and leave the insects unmolested. Many fish and some species of birds and even mammals have adopted this technique. In our own species, commercial products have sometimes used the same device (perhaps knowingly, perhaps not). Motor car designers employ headlamps in this way and frequently add to the overall aggressive impression by sculpturing the line of the front of the bonnet into the shape of a frown. In addition they add ‘bared teeth’ in the form of a metal grille between the ‘eye-spots’. As the roads have become increasingly crowded and driving an increasingly belligerent activity, the threat-faces of cars have become progressively improved and refined, imparting to their drivers a more and more aggressive image. On a smaller scale certain products have been given threat-face brand names, such as OXO, OMO, OZO, and OVO. Fortunately for the manufacturers, these do not repel customers: on the contrary, they catch the eye and, having caught it, reveal themselves to be no more than harmless cardboard boxes. But the impact has already been drawn to that product rather than to its rivals.

I mentioned earlier that chimpanzees appease by holding out a limp hand towards the dominant individual. We share this gesture with them, in the form of the typical begging or imploring posture. We have also adapted it as a widespread greeting gesture in the shape of the friendly handshake. Friendly gestures often grow out of submissive ones. We saw earlier how this happened with the smiling and laughing responses (both of which, incidentally, still appear in appeasing situations as the timid smile and the nervous titter). Handshaking occurs as a mutual ceremony between individuals of more or less equal rank, but is transformed into bowing to kiss the held hand when there is strong inequality between the ranks. (With increasing ‘equality’ between the sexes and the various classes, this latter refinement is now becoming rarer, but still persists in certain specialised spheres where formal dominance hierarchies are rigidly adhered to, as in the case of the Church.) In certain instances handshaking has become modified into self-shaking or hand-wringing. In some cultures this is the standard greeting appeasement, in others it is performed only in more extreme ‘imploring’ contexts.

There are many other cultural specialities in the realm of submissive behaviour, such as throwing in the towel or showing the white flag, but these need not concern us here. One or two of the simpler re-motivating devices do, however, deserve a mention, if only because they bear an interesting relationship to similar patterns in other species. You will recall that certain juvenile, sexual or grooming patterns were performed towards aggressive or potentially aggressive individuals as a method of arousing non aggressive feelings that competed with the more violent ones and suppressed them. In our own species, juvenile behaviour on the part of submissive adults is particularly common during courtship. The courting pair often adopt ‘babytalk’, not because they are heading towards parentalism themselves, but because it arouses tender, protective maternal or paternal feelings in the partner and thereby suppresses more aggressive feelings (or, for that matter, more fearful ones). It is amusing, when thinking back to the development of this pattern into courtship-feeding in birds, to notice the extraordinary increase in mutual feeding that goes on in our own courtship phase. At no other time in our lives do we devote so much effort to popping tasty morsels into one another’s mouths, or offering one another boxes of chocolates.

As regards re-motivation in a sexual direction, this occurs wherever a subordinate (male or female) adopts a generalised attitude of ‘femininity’ towards a dominant individual (male or female) in an aggressive rather than a truly sexual context. This is widespread, but the more specific case of the adoption of the female sexual rumppresentation posture as an appeasement gesture has virtually vanished, along with the disappearance of the original sexual posture itself. It is largely confined now to a form of schoolboy punishment, with rhythmic whipping replacing the rhythmic pelvic thrusts of the dominant male. It is doubtful whether schoolmasters would persist in this practice if they fully appreciated the fact that, in reality, they were performing an ancient primate form of ritual copulation with their pupils. They could just as well inflict pain on their victims without forcing them to adopt the bent-over submissive female posture. (It is significant that schoolgirls are rarely, if ever, beaten in this way—the sexual origins of the act would then become too obvious.) It has been imaginatively suggested by one authority that the reason for sometimes forcing schoolboys to lower their trousers for the administration of the punishment is not related to increasing the pain, but rather to enabling the dominant male to witness the reddening of the buttocks as the beating proceeds, which so vividly recalls the flushing of the primate female hindquarters when in full sexual condition. Whether this is so or not, one thing is certain about this extraordinary ritual, namely that as a re-motivating appeasement device it is a dismal failure. The more the unfortunate schoolboy stimulates the dominant male crypto-sexually, the more likely he is to perpetuate the ritual and, because the rhythmic pelvic thrusts have become symbolically modified into rhythmic blows of the cane, the victim is right back where he started. He has managed to switch a direct attack into a sexual one, but has then been double-crossed by the symbolic conversion of this sexual one back into another aggressive pattern.

The third re-motivating device, that of grooming, plays a minor, but useful role in our species. We frequently employ stroking and patting movements to soothe an agitated individual, and many of the more dominant members of society spend long hours having themselves groomed and fussed over by subordinates. But we shall return to this subject in another chapter.

Displacement activities also play a part in our aggressive encounters, appearing in almost any situation of stress or tension. We differ from other animals, however, in that we do not restrict ourselves to a few species-typical displacement patterns. We make use of virtually any trivial actions as outlets for our pent up feelings. In an agitated state of conflict we may arrange ornaments, light a cigarette, clean our spectacles, glance at a wrist-watch, pour a drink, or nibble a piece of food. Any of these actions may, of course, be performed for normal functional reasons, but in their displacement activity roles they no longer serve these functions. The ornaments that are rearranged were already adequately displayed. They were not in a muddle and may, indeed, be in a worse state after their agitated rearrangement. The cigarette that is lit in a tense moment may be started when a perfectly good and unfinished one has just been nervously stubbed out. Also, the rate of smoking during tension bears no relation to the physiological addictive nicotine demands of the system. The spectacles that are so laboriously polished are already clean. The watch that is wound up so vigorously does not need winding, and when we glance at it our eyes do not even register what times it tells. When we sip a displacement drink it is not because we are thirsty. When we nibble displacement food it is not because we are hungry. All these actions are performed, not for the normal rewards they bring, but simply for the sake of doing something in an attempt to relieve the tension. They occur with particularly high frequency during the initial stages of social encounters, where hidden feats and aggressions are lurking just below the surface. At a dinner party, or any small social gathering, as soon as the mutual appeasement ceremonies of hand-shaking and smiling are over, displacement cigarettes, displacement drinks and displacement food snacks are immediately offered. Even at large-scale entertainments such as the theatre and cinema the flow of events is deliberately broken up by short intervals when the audience can indulge in brief bouts of their favourite displacement activities.

When we are in more intense moments of aggressive tension, we tend to revert to displacement activities of a kind that we share with other primate species, and our outlets become more primitive. A chimpanzee in such a situation can be seen to perform repeated and agitated scratching movements, which are of a rather special kind and different from the normal response to an itch. It is confined largely to the head region, or sometimes the arms. The movements themselves are rather stylised. We behave in much the same way, performing stilted displacement grooming actions. We scratch our heads, bite our nails, ‘wash’ our faces with our hands, tug at our beards or moustaches if we have them, or adjust our coiffure, rub, pick, sniff or blow our noses, stroke our ear-lobes, clean our ear-passages, rub our chins, lick our lips, or rub our hands together in a rinsing action. If moments of great conflict are studied carefully, it can be observed that these activities are all carried out in a ritual fashion without the careful localised adjustments of the true cleaning actions. The displacement head-scratch of one individual may differ markedly from its equivalent in another, but each scratcher develops his own rather fixed and characteristic way of doing it. As real cleaning is not involved, it is of little importance that one region gets all the attention while others are ignored. In any social interaction between a small group of individuals the subordinate members of the group can easily be identified by the higher frequency of their displacement self-grooming activities. The truly dominant individual can be recognised by the almost complete absence of such actions. If the ostensibly dominant member of the group does, in fact, perform a larger number of small displacement activities, then this means that his official dominance is being threatened in some way by the other individuals present.