Man's Place in the Food Chain
As tribute to the Hegelian school of thought, and Schopenhauer, I present a parable of our humble origins in Africa:
I had not been to the Lincoln Park Zoo, in Chicago, since I was a child. At the time, I was planning to leave town for a change, and, while awaiting my departure date, made of it an opportunity to re-visit the zoo. By luck, I was present at feeding time for the big cats.
At the approach of feeding time the lions growl, but I noticed that it's not a roar, or even threatening-sounding. It's a soft sound, akin to a cat's purr. What I cannot help but project of my own self into the sound is an attitude of insouciance, even yawning, bored as they must be with the effortlessness of filling their bellies. It's too easy.
To me, however, it is terrifying. My throat constricts, as when one deliberately chokes back tears, but this throttling of emotion is involuntarily. I think of the Christians who were sacrificed to the lions in the Roman coliseum. The fear of big cats is hard-wired into our brain stem. I feel it now, "in this very room." It is of remnant of our survival as a species. I depart, humble, cognizant of my place somewhat lower than the top of the food chain.
Anthropologists have recently revised the characterization of our hominid ancestors as essentially warlike. It is only a hypothesis, but they were probably not the vicious marauders portrayed in the opening scene of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. When a hominid lost a member of the social group to one of the big cats it felt the loss, physically felt it, in the throat, as I did at the lion house.
Fossil human remains were discovered in caves unsuitable for human habitation and formerly presumed, by archaeologists, to be burial caves. The bones are violently lacerated, which, on the face of it, powered the theory that hominids were vicious. A perceptive researcher noticed that the injury to one such skull resembled the bite inflicted by a carnivore. The puncture pattern fit the bite of the leopard.
It is the instinct of leopards to drag killed prey into trees or, significantly, caves, where they devour the kill at leisure. Dangerous to humans and big animals-the leopard's usual prey-they are outmatched by the king of the jungle, the lion. When devouring its kill, carrion birds, jackals and other scavengers are only a nuisance to the leopard, while the lion may (with insouciance), claim the leopard's kill at his royal discretion to devour at his royal leisure. And the leopard, needless to say, can't do anything about it.
The lion doesn't exhibit the dragging behavior of leopards. A lion may be too big, and too slow, to catch suitable prey, but a leopard is no match for a lion in a contest over the kill. A leopard can't drag the carcass of a big animal, not far, anyway. This is fortuitous for other fauna, as a large carcass will feed both leopard, lion, and the rest of the bottom feeders in turn.
Not, however, humans, and the stray human is likely to be leopard's prey. I'd give the leopard a one-in-seven chance against a lion, but a human gets zero odds in an encounter with any big cat. The human body and, specifically, the hominid which was diminutive compared to moderns, would be easy for the leopard to haul away to some crack in the ground, where it could be devoured at leisure by the leopard, the bones left undisturbed for ages.
This presents a dilemma. It is symbiosis, the way of the wild, and yet being human, and, naturally, predisposed to sympathy, I am struck by my own reflex sympathy for the leopard as exploited, even the victim. How can the lion be so unfair? The leopard did the work (of killing, granted), while the lion appropriates it unjustly. It sounds like Marxist social criticism given to animals. Oppressed of the world rise up, including leopards, in this instance. How ludicrous!
And, yet, it parallels the human condition. Laborers do the hard jobs that capitalists are incapable of doing, not jobs that they won't do. It underlies the contempt the masses have for the elite. I'm not a laborer, but, frankly, I would be ashamed of exemption from hard work because of certified physical incapacity, analogous to exemption from combat duty in wartime. Those who don't make the cut go into support roles, such as field hospital interns, chaplains, and clerks.
The balance side of the analogy is the novel notion of capitalists as support personnel, analogous to field nurses, etc., and of the factory as a field hospital. The worker is thus a victim of the class war. The role of the capitalist, as top of the food chain, is to simply divide the spoils among the workers, as salary. It all adds up to socialism, the survival strategy of the species.
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