Yesterday, I got in a little hot water for posting a link, in a Boing Boing comments thread about the riot video, to a YouTube Doubler mashup featuring the riot and a famous scene from a movie. A few people accused me and David Pescovitz, a Boing Boing blogger who reposted my link to the front page, of being racist. The first comment in the new thread reads, "Wait, you're really going to post a video showing civic violence in a mostly latino neighborhood side by side with a bunch of actors in ape suits, and compare the rioters to "subhuman primates" in as many words? Do you not think about racial implications at all before you post?" This is obviously ridiculous, and not just because there are members of several races present. The comparison is not disrespectful to anyone, aside from the specific people captured on film (coincidentally, members of several races) whose actions resemble those of chimpanzees and monkeys to an uncomfortable degree.
Seeing this riot video brought to my mind a question I have been struggling with for some time. How far have we actually come since our ancestors were discovering how to crush animal skulls with femurs? The fact that a group of humans in 2010, with all the benefits of millions of years of evolution and millennia of human culture, behave in such a similar fashion to "lesser" primates seems to indicate that the answer is, "Not much." In the video, they circle the car, every moment of inaction increasing the tension until one member of the group darts forward, accompanied by the same shrill shouts of encouragement and fear that could have been heard on the savannah hundreds of thousands years ago, to kick a headlight or slash a tire, before quickly retreating back to the safe anonymity of the group. As the group gains confidence, the individuals move in closer and displays of bravado and aggression become more frequent, until the sound of an approaching predator sends them scattering, shrieking warnings to each other. Obvious monkey behaviour. On the other hand, half of the people in the video are filming or taking pictures of the proceedings on extremely high tech pocket tools. How do we reconcile the behaviour with the technological heights humans have reached?
I'm beginning to suspect that, as a species, we are only intermittently self-aware. It seems to me that if even a small segment of the population operated on pure primate instinct all of the time, it would be impossible for a civilization to cohere. If it dominated the life of any individual, it would be extremely difficult for that person to hold down a job or perform any functions that required higher order thinking or analysis. At the same time, even the most intelligent and successful people exhibit absurdly irrational behaviour occasionally. If this is the case, it's possible that what we think of as "intelligence" is simply the ability to maintain self-aware control over our instinctive behaviour, and those who can do it more consistently or for longer durations benefit from this talent.
Our species has somehow always managed to contain both individuals who are capable of monumental feats of engineering, and those whose greatest contribution to culture is scrawling their names on the side of those monuments the way our ancestors might have scrawled their names on cave walls. It should not be surprising to us when we see a video of people behaving badly; what is surprising is that we have so risen above our natures that these events are notable when they occur. If you look for it, you can see the primate dynamics playing out just under the surface in any large group of people. And in that light, I think that we are doing fairly well.
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