Friday, March 28, 2003

Chimpanzee Vision

In times of terrible conflict, we look especially hard for alternative visions. In my case, I have looked to children, and to chimpanzees. Specifically, I have been watching with interest the way our young Girl Scout troop has met – uneasily – the challenge of cooperation while our troop does volunteer work for the Potawatomi Zoo’s “Celebrate Chimps” Project. The Zoo, inspired both by Chicago’s cow statues and the famously artistic nature of their chimpanzee, Sammy, is working with lucky volunteer artists and groups within the community, including our Brownie troop, to decorate large fiberglass chimps that will be on display throughout South Bend. (Many are already out there, and visitors to the South Bend Public Libraries have come face to face with the whimsical “Stud Monkey,” “Ivanna Brushalot,” “Monkey See Monkey Blue” and others.) The fabulous fiberglass chimps will eventually be auctioned in order to raise money for Zoo renovation on this, its 100th anniversary. A worthy cooperative project for our community, and a worthy animal, the chimp – differing from humans only by a little over one percent of our DNA. Look how much trouble we’ve gotten ourselves into with that one percent.

With the tragic failure of cooperation on an international level as a backdrop, I have tried to learn from our girls’s local struggle, as they work through competing visions of this major art project. Central to Scouting is the practice of “Girl Planning” – giving the girls the responsibility and support to problem-solve on their own. It has not always been pretty. At ages 7, 8 and 9, the girls in our large troop are complicated and deep-feeling beings, emotions shadowing across their faces like weather systems in time-lapse photography. Alliances form and reform from breath to breath, testing the limits of the Girl Scout Law they’ve pledged to uphold – to “be a sister to every Girl Scout.” One says definitively, “The chimp should have a bow.” “No, a beanie,” another counters. “And a Brownie vest.” “The vest should be stained from lunch, like mine.” “No, clean, like mine.” “I want it to wear earrings, like me.” “But I don’t wear earrings!” And on and on. At the height of the discord, though, all it takes is for one or two girls to offer an imaginative compromise, and then others can follow the model until anger melts into compassion. “Ok – we’ll use your idea of the vest, but not the beanie, so we can have both the bow AND the earrings.” Children know the importance of “winning the peace”; they have to sit in a Brownie ring with these people week after week, and the quarters are too close for unresolved resentment.

By the time our Scouts are finished enthusiastically plastering every cultural symbol of human femininity on this chimp, it will no doubt put the late great Divine to shame, but it will represent what the girls think of as their better selves. Beyond the bows and Scouting paraphernalia, there will be representations of community values, leadership, and national and international citizenship, a reminder that Girl Scouting is a world wide activity – an international family of girls dedicated to improving themselves and their environments. I am ready to vote them all into public office.

I hope the compliment is clear when I say I saw the best of chimpanzee behavior in these young Scouts, in their struggles to be imaginative in their difficult production of a shared vision. Chimpanzees seem to me to be the selves we always could be, if we were brave enough to go out in the world as we really are, naked and hairy. No makeup, no padded shouldered suits or power ties, no masks. A chimp wears its heart on its sleeve (or it would, if it had one). A chimp tells the truth, grooming those they love, as our grade-school girls absent-mindedly braid one another’s hair while sitting and talking. Chimps honestly flash either their bared teeth or their pink bottoms at those who appall or appeal to them. Chimpanzee expert Jane Goodall cautions against romanticizing chimps, noting that they can, if pressed, be violent in self-defense. But unlike humans, she says, they do not act out of deliberate cruelty. The small acts of self-interested emotional violence children can sometimes exact upon one another escalate too readily into self-interested international violence on a horrifying scale if we do not remember our better natures. As grown ups, we seem to have forgotten them.

Skeptics of evolutionary theory sometimes point out (I hope not entirely in earnest), “If evolution really happened and we evolved from monkeys, why are the monkeys still here?” I can’t help but think that the chimpanzees must be scratching their heads, wondering the same thing about us. If there’s such a thing as evolution, what are all these people still doing here?

What are we doing here? I cannot explain it to children who have the imagination and compassion to solve problems better than grown-ups. What are we doing here?

Broadcast by April Lidinsky on March 28, 2003
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