// Super tribes: The Human Zoo // 14.10.08
When the pressures of modern life become heavy, the harassed city-dweller often refers to his teeming world as a concrete jungle, but anyone who has studied wild animals in their natural habitat will confirm that this is grossly inaccurate. Other animals do not feel stress, depression, commit murder, mutilate themselves or become fetishists, unless confined in unnatural conditions of captivity. Zoo animals exhibit all these peculiarities, and so the concrete jungle could more accurately described as the human zoo.
We had many thousands of years to evolve into tribes people, but only 2,500 to become super tribes people. The modern human animal is no longer living in conditions natural to his species. As a species we are not biologically equipped to cope with a mass of strangers masquerading as our tribe. As the crowds become denser, the frustration and stresses of city life become greater.
It was only when the tribes expanded into impersonal super tribes that the code of conduct began to break down and it became necessary to introduce artificial laws and codes of conduct to hold the bulging communities together. If a member of the super tribe is under pressure, and most people in his super tribe are strangers to him, the typical thief believes he is not stealing from one of his own companions so is not breaking the old, biological tribal code. To counteract this a super tribal law had to be imposed.
There is another type of law that attempts to bring cohesion to a super tribe - religion. Its value lies in the fact that it is shared by all members of one community, and indeed distinguishes them collectively from the members of another.
Although we marvel at the variety of social customs, traditions and ceremonies and their various patterns, we often overlook their fundamental similarities.
In addition to law, custom and religion, there is another cohesive force that helps bind the members of a super tribe, and that is war. Nothing helps a leader like a good war. He can introduce the most ruthless forms and controls and send thousands of his followers to their deaths and still be hailed as a great protector.
For the modern leader, going to war has many advantages that the stone age leader did not enjoy. To start with, he doesn't have to risk getting his own face bloody. Nor are the men he sends to their death personal acquaintances of his. They are specialists, trouble-makers spoiling for a fight (because of the super tribal pressure they have been subjected to) who can have one without directing it at the super tribe itself.
Nothing ties in-group bonds tighter than an out-group threat.
It is a marvel that the human co-operative urge reasserts itself so strongly and so repeatedly. If we did not carry within us the basic urge to co-operate with our fellow man we would never have survived as a species. If our hunting ancestors had been ruthless greedy tyrants, the human success story would have petered out long ago. Compassion, kindness, mutual assistance and a fundamental urge to co-operate within the tribe must have been the pattern for early groups to survive within their precarious environment.
In more recent times it has become the practice to allow the people to have their say in the election of a new leader. This political device has in itself been a cohesive force, giving the super tribes people a sense of belonging to their groups, and having some control over it. Once elected, it soon becomes clear that their influence is little more than slight, but at the time of election a sense of a social identity runs through the community." - Desmond Morris
When the pressures of modern life become heavy, the harassed city-dweller often refers to his teeming world as a concrete jungle, but anyone who has studied wild animals in their natural habitat will confirm that this is grossly inaccurate. Other animals do not feel stress, depression, commit murder, mutilate themselves or become fetishists, unless confined in unnatural conditions of captivity. Zoo animals exhibit all these peculiarities, and so the concrete jungle could more accurately described as the human zoo.
We had many thousands of years to evolve into tribes people, but only 2,500 to become super tribes people. The modern human animal is no longer living in conditions natural to his species. As a species we are not biologically equipped to cope with a mass of strangers masquerading as our tribe. As the crowds become denser, the frustration and stresses of city life become greater.
It was only when the tribes expanded into impersonal super tribes that the code of conduct began to break down and it became necessary to introduce artificial laws and codes of conduct to hold the bulging communities together. If a member of the super tribe is under pressure, and most people in his super tribe are strangers to him, the typical thief believes he is not stealing from one of his own companions so is not breaking the old, biological tribal code. To counteract this a super tribal law had to be imposed.
There is another type of law that attempts to bring cohesion to a super tribe - religion. Its value lies in the fact that it is shared by all members of one community, and indeed distinguishes them collectively from the members of another.
Although we marvel at the variety of social customs, traditions and ceremonies and their various patterns, we often overlook their fundamental similarities.
In addition to law, custom and religion, there is another cohesive force that helps bind the members of a super tribe, and that is war. Nothing helps a leader like a good war. He can introduce the most ruthless forms and controls and send thousands of his followers to their deaths and still be hailed as a great protector.
For the modern leader, going to war has many advantages that the stone age leader did not enjoy. To start with, he doesn't have to risk getting his own face bloody. Nor are the men he sends to their death personal acquaintances of his. They are specialists, trouble-makers spoiling for a fight (because of the super tribal pressure they have been subjected to) who can have one without directing it at the super tribe itself.
Nothing ties in-group bonds tighter than an out-group threat.
It is a marvel that the human co-operative urge reasserts itself so strongly and so repeatedly. If we did not carry within us the basic urge to co-operate with our fellow man we would never have survived as a species. If our hunting ancestors had been ruthless greedy tyrants, the human success story would have petered out long ago. Compassion, kindness, mutual assistance and a fundamental urge to co-operate within the tribe must have been the pattern for early groups to survive within their precarious environment.
In more recent times it has become the practice to allow the people to have their say in the election of a new leader. This political device has in itself been a cohesive force, giving the super tribes people a sense of belonging to their groups, and having some control over it. Once elected, it soon becomes clear that their influence is little more than slight, but at the time of election a sense of a social identity runs through the community." - Desmond Morris
