Craig Bennett Asks: Are We Living in a Zoo?

by Craig Bennett*

One of the things that has made my life somewhat less than blissfully ideal has been a chronic dissatisfaction with having to live in the society we’ve created for ourselves in this country, the Western world in general, and, for that matter, the entire planet Earth. At the foundation of this dissatisfaction is a formidable, comprehensive, and apparently innate love of the natural world. Yet it’s not simply the systematic elimination of the natural world and everything associated with it that I find disturbing; it’s the very way of life that we have constructed and arranged for ourselves that now usually demands more of our time, energy, finances, and other resources than we have to give.

Author Christopher Ryan offers perceptive insight into this in Civilized to Death: the price of progress. He recognizes the “Narrative of Perpetual Progress” that has shaped our civilization and our way of life to an ever-increasing extent over the last few centuries. Unfortunately, we allow this to happen mostly without foresight, due consideration, or control simply because, as he observes, “any system predicated upon incessant growth will insist on defining all movement as movement forward…” And heaven knows, as I pointed out in Nights on the Mountain, it is absolutely imperative that businesses and the economy in general should continue to “grow, grow, grow…until what?”

Ryan conceived of the general idea behind his book as the result of visiting a couple of very different zoos. He tells, first of all, of visiting a zoo on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. This consisted of “nothing more than… concrete cages in which a few doomed orangutans languished.” He writes that the look in their eyes begged for “release, contact, death… anything but more of the same.” He was so deeply affected by the depressed and helpless state of the animals, so painfully obvious in their almost human eyes and faces, that he never entered a zoo again for many years.

But eventually a friend convinced him that he should visit the bonobos in the San Diego Zoo. This zoo was different, his friend told him; and indeed it was. To the zoo’s inestimable credit, it did its best to recreate for each animal it held in captivity an environment as close as possible to the one in which its species had evolved. The bonobos, closer relatives of us human beings than even chimpanzees or orangutans, seemed quite at home. Within their community they were going about precisely the kinds of activities in which they would have been engaged in the wild: playing, grooming one another, searching for food (or a snack between feedings)… and engaging in that activity intended to produce more bonobos. They seemed quite contented and showed none of the hopelessness and despair that Ryan had seen in the orangutans on Sumatra.

As a result, he experienced a revelation: “We are the only species that lives in zoos of our own design.” And when you read or listen to the news—full of mass shootings, suicides, and drug busts; protests against poverty, racism, sexism, and for LGBT rights; wars of all sorts here and there throughout the globe, and immigrants from Third-World countries overwhelming the abilities of the First-World countries to which they’re fleeing to deal with them—it seems as if the zoo we’ve created for ourselves and keep creating every day is a good deal more like the Sumatran zoo than the one in San Diego. Why?

What I found especially interesting about Ryan’s book is that he incorporates into his argument so much information that I’ve encountered before in books on much different topics. He reminds us that members of our species lived for close to a million years as foragers with essentially the same brain that we have in our own heads today, yet they never developed (or perhaps never sought to develop) what we blandly refer to as “civilization.” They certainly should have been capable of such a feat, but they apparently never made any serious attempt until just a few thousand years ago. Why?

One familiar clue that Ryan offers is that explorers, adventurers, missionaries, and anthropologists “have been consistently confused and disappointed by indigenous people’s rejection of the comforts and constraints of civilization.” Benjamin Franklin expressed a certain degree of puzzlement over the fact that Native Americans “have never shown any inclination to change their manner of life for ours.” He goes on to note how white people who have spent some time in captivity among the Indians have often returned to live with the tribe that captured them. But, as I’ve also read elsewhere, there is essentially no record of any Indian voluntarily leaving his tribe to live with the white people.

Other individuals from indigenous cultures who were brought to Europe for exhibit to the king or queen during the Age of Exploration were not only glad to return to their people, but they suggested to their tribal rulers the adoption of nothing that they had observed in Spain, France, England, or the leading colonial powers of the time. And there seems to be little or no evidence for the existence among such people of the kind of crime, mental illness, social disorder, and other ills that beset our current, civilized societies.

Ryan does not suggest that we return to being foragers, abandoning our flat-screen TV’s, huge SUV’s, smart phones, McMansions, big-box department stores, designer fashions, and all the other nifty things that we hope will provide some meaning to our vapid lives in modern times. He simply implies that we ought to look carefully at the social, economic, and environmental cost of such things before we travel much farther down the same road that got us here. Even though our twenty-first century brains are not very different (if at all) from the ones our homo Sapiens ancestors had a few hundred thousand years ago, we ought to be able to come up with a better zoo for all of us to live in than the one we’ve got.

* Craig H. Bennett, author of Nights on the Mountain, and More Things in Heven and Earth, available at amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, and the Firefly Bookstore in Kutztown, PA

Source: Ryan, Christopher, Civilized to Death. Avid Reader Press. 2019

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