People told me that a trip to Africa would be life changing. I ignored those people for two reasons. First, I don’t need my life changed. I’m very happy with the way it is. And second, everyone returns from their trips with exaggerated evaluations of what they saw. When was the last time a returning traveler told you, “Oh, the Acropolis sucks the big one.”
So now it is me who has just returned from Africa and I’m not saying that it was life changing – not even close. But I am glad I did it. I’m glad because it was a lot of fun, but also because it clarified something for me, something I thought I understood but what I was shown by Africa that I really didn’t appreciate. It was made clear to me in living color that in at least one way, we still really live in a jungle.
Oh, as a political science major in college, I read Hobbes. He was the guy who told us about the state of nature. He famously said that life in that state was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” But for me, a somewhat privileged suburban kid, those were just words. As I grew older and lived a little, those words took some added meaning. The trip to Africa, however, brought them alive.
In the jungle, I saw an ecosystem where the only priority is survival. Those animals weren’t worried about the price of gas. None of them were upset because they couldn’t find the TV remote. Their lives revolve around one thing and one thing only – whether they will find food or whether they will be food. There are no rules. Nothing stops any animal in the jungle from doing anything that it’s instincts tell it to do. Fairness is never a consideration. Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.
And I saw that an essential way that those animals instinctively try to protect themselves is by marking their territory. They preserve their area for their own kind. And this clarified to me what it is about human nature that clings to this animal instinct and insists on separating ourselves from “others.” That instinct is often called “tribal”, but it seemed to me in Africa to go beyond that. In the jungle it is not just that “others” may have dissimilar rules or languages or cultures. In the jungle “others” are out to eat you.
So, is it any wonder why we continue to feel uncomfortable when people different from ourselves seek to mix with us? Isn’t it simply a function of our genetic connection to life in the state of nature? In the jungle?
I don’t pretend that this is any great revelation by me. Nor is it even a revelation to me. But Africa really drove it home.
We have many lingering instincts that emanate from primitive life. For example, we continue to eat other living things. We cook them first, but does that really make it any different from the leopard I saw gnawing on the insides of a zebra it had just slaughtered? Why is it illegal to fuck a sheep but not illegal to eat it? But these are issues for another day. Let’s get back to the territorial question.
As a proud possessor of Trump Derangement Syndrome, this need for dominion over territory, of course, reminded me of our Orange Leader. In his unevolved brain, he intensely feels that territorial instinct and has loosened it in many other similarly primitive minds. Hence his immigration policy. Hence ICE.
At one point, our guide pointed out how some of the animals mark their territory by urinating on it. It occurred to me that this, too, is a trait shared by our President. Except he doesn’t urinate on what he considers his world, he shits all over it.
