Jane Goodall

by William H. Benson

April 21, 2016

     The adventure writer Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote some eighty novels based upon two characters: Tarzan and John Carter. Tarzan lived among the apes in Africa, and John Carter transported himself from Earth to Mars, where he fought and conquered the Martians. In my younger years, I read several of Burroughs’s books, as did thousands of other American kids of the twentieth century.

     The science fiction writer, Ray Bradbury, said this of Burroughs, “I have been astonished to discover how often a leading biochemist or archaeologist, or astronaut when asked, ‘what happened to you when you were ten years old?’ replied, ‘Tarzan,’ ‘John Carter,’ or ‘Mr. Burroughs of course.’”

     Bradbury also said, “By giving romance and adventure to a whole generation of boys, Burroughs caused them to go out and decide to become special.”

     But it was not only American boys whom Burroughs influenced. There was an English girl named Jane Goodall who also read the Tarzan stories and fell in love with Africa and its wildlife and longed to live there. Jane identified with the English girl, Jane Porter, Tarzan’s wife in Burroughs’s first Tarzan adventure novel, Tarzan of the Apes, that he published in 1912.

     Unable to afford college tuition, Jane Goodall worked as a secretary and hotel waitress long enough to save her money to buy a ticket to Mombassa, Kenya. The year was 1958, and she was twenty-three. Once there, she arranged a meeting with Dr. Louis Leakey, who invited her to join him and his wife, Mary, at an archaeological dig at the Olduvai Gorge.

     Leakey then suggested that Jane should move to the forested mountains on Lake Tanganyika’s western shore in Tanzania to study the chimpanzees in their native habitat, because he understood that there was a scarcity of information about the chimp’s social habits and behavior.

     Jane, with her mother Vanne, arrived at the Gombe National Park in the summer of 1960, and there the two English ladies camped in a tent, surrounded by African fishermen, as well as bushpigs, tsetse flys, shrews, red colobus monkeys, baboons, mongooses, leopards, buffaloes, cobras, and chimpanzees.

      Daily she climbed alone to what she called, “her Peak,” a rocky outcrop that permitted her a panoramic view above and below, and with her binoculars she watched and waited. The chimpanzees though were fearful and held their distance from this strange white hairless female ape. Six months passed, and she confessed to Dr. Leakey that she had learned very little.

     Yet, she started to recognize the chimps as individuals, and she gave them names. One day in October of 1960, she observed David Greybeard insert a long piece of grass into a termite hole in order to extract termites, that he then feasted upon. This, she claimed, was evidence that chimpanzees can fashion a rudimentary tool, a skill that anthropologists had reserved only for human beings. 

     It was bananas though that won the chimpanzees’ trust in Jane. She would leave them around her and then watch as they approached. She soon met Goliath, Flo, Mike, Fifi, and Flint. She counted about fifty in the troop: fourteen males, as many females, and also the infants and adolescents.  At night, beside her campfire, she recorded into her journal all that she had observed that day.

     She noted the chimps’ dark side, their aggression. They would snatch a monkey or baboon, kill it, and eat it. They would go to war and attack a neighboring chimpanzee troop and kill all its members except the adolescent females, whom they then adopted. Then, if given a chance the male chimps would kill their own females’ infants.

     Jane wrote to Dr. Louis Leakey, and he sent a Dutch photographer named Hugo van Lawick, to capture on film her chimpanzees. Leakey told Vanne Goodall that “he had found someone just right as a husband for Jane!” Jane and Hugo did marry in 1964, and they had a single son, also named Hugo.

     In the August 1963 edition of National Geographic, one can read Jane’s article, “My Life Among Wild Chimpanzees,” and two years later National Geographic televised a documentary on Jane’s work.

     Over the years since then, she has published many books, and numerous anthropologists have joined her to observe the chimpanzees at the Gombe Stream Research Center. In 1977, she established the Jane Goodall Institute, and dedicated one program, “Roots and Shoots,” to reforesting barren lands.    

     Jane and Hugo divorced in 1974, and her second husband died of cancer in 1975. She is still thin. Her once blond hair has now grayed, but she still pulls it back into her distinctive ponytail. She travels and speaks 300 days out of the year.

     On April 3 this year, on her 82^nd birthday, she spoke at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and she mentioned her worn copy of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s book, Africa’s animals, Tarzan, and Jane Porter. She said, “And that is how the magic of my life unfolded.”

     Friday, April 22, 2016, we mark the 46^th Earth Day. Early on Jane Goodall recognized the premier importance that both animals and plants play in our planet’s existence. So we celebrate Earth Day. We can plant a tree, or we can liberate a captive chimpanzee, if not on Earth, perhaps someday on Mars. Edgar Rice Burroughs would be pleased. 

Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing

by William H. Benson

April 7, 2016

     On August 22, 1939, Nazi Germany’s troops, tanks, and aircraft stood poised and prepared to attack Poland, its neighbor to the east, and on that day the Nazi’s dictator, Adolf Hitler, spoke.

     “Our strength,” he said, “consists in our speed and in our brutality.” Already he had instructed his generals “to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language.” And the reason for his assault upon the Polish people? “Only then,” he said, “shall we gain the living space (Lebensraum) which we need.”

     Tyrants will excuse their brutality because of their citizen’s supposed need for more territory. There is some truth in that excuse, but then there is the tyrant’s overpowering internal drive to vanquish and crush other people, those whom he considers weak and inferior, who stand in his way, who dare to oppose him, or who refuse to follow his lead. In a word, his “victims.”

     Hitler ended his Obersalzberg speech with an oft-quoted remark, actually a rhetorical question. He asked, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”

     On April 24, 1915, 101 years ago, leaders of the failing Ottoman Empire launched a vicious attack upon the Armenian people, mainly Christian people who lived within the Empire’s borders, in the eastern third of modern-day Turkey. In the National Geographic this month, the reporter Paul Salopek described the awful events.

     “Some Ottoman leaders decide to resolve this ‘Armenian problem’ through extermination and deportation. Soldiers and local Kurdish militias shoot Armenian men. There are mass rapes of women. Armenian villages and city neighborhoods are looted, appropriated. The dead clog the rivers and wells. Cities stink of rot.”

     The result: the Armenian population drops from two million to 500,000, and now, “Today just three million Armenians live in Armenia; eight to ten million are scattered in a diaspora.” Historians now call this “the modern world’s first true genocide.”

     Henry Morgenthau, Sr., the U.S. Ambassador to Constantinople at the time, said, “The great massacres and persecutions of the past seem almost insignificant when compared with the sufferings of the Armenian race in 1915.”

     The pattern was set early in the twentieth century, and the world’s tyrants since then have copied it. After the Nazi war machine crossed into Poland on September 10,1939, World War II began, and it was then that Hitler turned upon Europe’s Jewish population. The Nazis murdered six million innocent people, an incredible statistic that dwarfs even the Armenian genocide.

      Then, there was the Soviet Union’s tyrant Joseph Stalin, and also Cambodia’s Pol Pot, and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, and the genocide in Rwanda twenty-two years ago, when the Hutus decided upon “a final solution to the Tutsi problem.” Beginning on April 6, 1994, they set up road blocks and barricades and then with machetes, they began to exterminate the Tutsis.

     Many fled to neighboring countries, some hid in homes and waited for the frenzy to pass, and by July it did, but by then an estimated 800,000 people lay in their graves.

     It is a fact of human behavior that certain people, when pushed and prodded, will sign up for a campaign to rid the world of other people. William Shakespeare recognized this phenomenon in his play, Julius Caesar. His character Marc Anthony shouts, “Cry Havoc, and let slip the dogs of war.”

     Often, it is one demented person who incites the attacks, but then it is thousands of servile minions who complete his ghastly deeds, because the tyrant compels and bullies.

     On April 27, 1945, American soldiers liberated a Nazi prison camp near Dachau, and Viktor Frankl experienced sudden freedom. In his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl described the scene.

     “With tired steps we prisoners dragged ourselves to the camp gates. We looked around and glanced at each other. Then we ventured a few steps out of camp. This time no orders were shouted at us, nor was there any need to duck to avoid a blow or kick. Oh no! This time the guards offered us cigarettes! We hardly recognized them at first; they had changed into civilian clothes.”

     From oppressor to friend the guards transformed themselves in an instant. They took off their uniforms. The frenzy subsided. Peace and order and sanity returned. The dogs of war were restrained. Prisoners walked through the prison gates, free at last.

     Genocide, ethnic cleansing, or mass murder. No matter the name, it is an ugly and horrific business, a blot upon the human species. Let each of us find and swallow that pill that would restrain within us forever those snarling dogs of war.

March Madness

by William H. Benson

March 24, 2016

     The NCAA basketball games are upon us, and March Madness has arrived. The team to watch in recent years has been the University of Connecticut, where basketball is king. The men won their last national championship, their fourth, in 2014, but the women point with pride to their ten national championships, the most recent one last year, in 2015.

     In first round play this year, the Uconn women decimated the Robert Morris Colonials 101 to 49, and played Duquesne on Sunday, March 21. Uconn’s men defeated Colorado University’s Buffaloes 74-67, in first round play, a heartbreak to CU fans, but then the Kansas Jayhawks defeated Uconn’s men in the second game.

     Sports writer, Nick Kosmider, at the Denver Post, said, “For all the sheer excitement the NCAA Tournament provides, it also dishes out the hurt of cold, abrupt endings in equal measure.” Both Uconn and CU men’s teams saw their seasons end near the tournament’s beginning, not what they wanted.

     Is it ironic, or just random coincidence, that James Naismith, the father of basketball, invented the game at Springfield, Massachusetts, less than fifty miles from University of Connecticut’s campus?

     In December of 1891, the Canadian James Naismith found himself in a job where he was expected to teach physical education to a class of rowdy students at the local YMCA. The students griped about the endless calisthenics, the gymnastics, and the routine exercises in the gym, and that it was too cold to play tennis outside. Two previous instructors had tried to tame the students, and both resigned.

     Naismith said, “These boys would not play ‘Drop the handkerchief.’”

     Naismith’s supervisor suggested that he make up an indoor game that did not require much room, help the students get into shape, and “make it fair for all players, and not too rough.”

     Jim nailed a peach basket on the wall, ten feet high, at both ends of the gym, and asked the students to try to put a soccer ball into the basket. He wrote thirteen rules, and the last was, “The side making the most points in that time is declared the winner.” To say the game caught on is an understatement.

     The game’s purpose still remains the same: give the students a game to play indoors during the winter. Basketball equals winter; both begin in November and end in March. It occupies young people’s time, diverts their thoughts away from misbehavior or crime, provides them great exercise, and the spectators are thrilled to watch and cheer.

     Too many young people, with too much time on their hands, with too little freedoms, create conditions ripe for a revolution. In ages past, the more perceptive kings would round them up on occasion, and march them off to fight and die in a foreign war, or the tyrants would expect them to devote countless hours training for the next attack upon their country.

     In 1497, King James II banned golf because he considered it an unwelcome distraction to archery, a more useful military skill. I say it is far better to shoot baskets, rather than bows and arrows or guns.

     After Naismith earned a medical degree in Denver, he accepted a job at the University of Kansas as the physical education instructor, and there he coached basketball, the first coach ever for the Jayhawks, and the University’s only basketball coach with a losing record, 55 and 60.

     During World War II, Naismith served as an army chaplain, and he introduced basketball to the soldiers under his command, because, he believed, it “controls their excess energy, increases morale, and even lowers the rate of disciplinary actions among soldiers.”

     America has exported basketball to the world. Although only eight million people reside in Israel, it boasts of a professional basketball league. In the New York Times sports section, two weeks ago, there was a full article on Karam Mashour, a native of Nazareth, who now plays for the Israeli team, the Bnei Herzilya. “In a league full of Israeli Jews, top Europeans, and talented Americans, Mashour is the only player of Arab heritage.”

     This is unusual in the Middle East, where winter temperatures are mild, and there is little reason to play inside. “Everyone here plays football,” Mashour said, referring to soccer. “When my brother and I told people we wanted to play basketball, they said, ‘Why?’”

     Long ago the world decided that Western Civilization created the best opportunities for common individuals. Along with the arts and humanities, the Judeo-Christian faith, and the rule of law in a democratic society, Western Civilization has also enjoyed a long association with professional sports.

     The ancient Greeks formed city leagues and held championship games at the first Olympics, and the ancient Romans competed in coliseums. Hollywood is now remaking the movie Ben-Hur, and it promises a chariot race, as did the 1959 movie starring Charleton Heston as Prince Judah Ben-Hur.

     Tomorrow is Good Friday, Sunday is Easter. Enjoy the weekend.

     March Madness will end in April, and the champions, the last team to win, will receive trophies. 

Thoughts on Campaign 2016

by William H. Benson

March 10, 2016

     The United States has had two father-son presidencies. The first was John Adams and his son, John Quincy Adams, and the second was George Bush and his son, George W. Bush. Because Jeb Bush withdrew from the current race three weeks ago, we will not have a third, anytime soon. The Bush dynasty has ended, at least for the next four years.

     “The man responsible for Jeb’s demise” is Donald Trump. A journalist said, “From the moment he entered the race, the real estate mogul made Jeb his primary target, gleefully dismissing the youngest Bush scion as ‘low energy,’ mocking his polling numbers, and relentlessly trolling him on Twitter.” Trump, “the playground bully, viciously pummeled him and his elitist family again and again.”

     Yes, Trump crushed Jeb, but, according to The Washington Post, Jeb was “never, ever going to win in a year like this one.” He was, according to another journalist, “a lousy candidate, bland, dull. There was no juice, no fire.” He fumbled the most predictable of questions: “Do you think your brother’s Iraq War was a mistake?”

     The United States has never had a husband-wife presidency. The closest was Woodrow Wilson’s second wife, Edith Bolling Galt Wilson. After Wilson suffered a stroke in October 1919, he lay in his bed incapacitated for months while she ran interference for him. She determined who would see him, if anyone, and it is possible she may have signed his name on public documents. She ran the executive branch until he left the White House in March of 1921.

     A week ago a writer in The Economist wrote, “Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee; the man most likely to face her in November on the Republican ticket is Donald Trump. The prospect of Trump vs. Clinton is grim,” as in a fearful future.

     As for the Democrats, the voters in the United States are not ready to elect an avowed socialist, such as Bernie Sanders and his “voodoo” economics, for their president, but I would think they are ready to elect a woman president. I just wonder if it is Hillary.

     As for the Republicans, one must wonder about the voters who have voted for Donald Trump. The previous forty-four presidents brought to the office at least a modicum of governing experience, either as a Senator, a Congressman, a vice-president, a governor, or a war-time general, but Trump has never held public office. His learning curve would have to ascend sharply to the right.

     But then he acts as if no one should teach him anything or that he wants to learn anything.

     The New York Times commentator, Nicholas Kristof, said that to understand Trump, “a starting point is Trump’s remarkable ignorance about international affairs.” Kristof then asked an important question, “Why, at a moment when the country desperately needs our A-team, would we send in the clowns?” 

     Another New York Times commentator, Ross Douthat, said it best, “Trump is a reality TV demagogue leading a populist, nationalist revolt.” Douthat also said that Trump “is showing us something different, something that less fortunate countries know all too well: how authoritarianism works, how it seduces, and how it wins.”

     Juan Linz, a Yale political scientist, said the same in his remarkable 1990 essay, “The Perils of Presidentialism.” He pointed out that in certain Latin American countries who have tried to elect a president, a struggle erupts between Congress and the president. Both sides say that they alone represent the people’s will, but then both sides commit humanitarian abuses against the other.

     “A coup or civil war can ensue, with democracy giving way to Latin American authoritarianism,” in order to re-establish the peace. William Falk, The Week‘s editor, said, “We are not yet Argentina or Chile, but our democracy is headed toward a dangerous place.”

     It is important to remember that there is no limit to what people will do to seize power, and what they will do to retain it, once they possess it.

     One wonders about the Republican party’s future? Only a few party officials have stepped forward to endorse Donald Trump: one lone Senator, Jeff Sessions of Alabama; a few Congressman; New Jersey’s governor, Chris Christie; Alaska’s former governor, Sarah Palin; and Arizona’s former governor, Jan Brewer. The party’s officials are feeling frantic, as they fear their power may slip away.

     If Trump wins the nomination, it is not preposterous to imagine the Republican party splitting apart. Nebraska’s Senator, Ben Sasse, said he will not vote for Trump, but when a Political Action Committee asked Sasse to run as a third-party candidate against Clinton and Trump, he vetoed the idea.       

     Interesting times we live in. There are no easy solutions. In November, we will know the end of this year’s business.

“Feelings in History”

by William H. Benson

February 25, 2016

     Scientists want to quantify. First, they observe a phenomenon, record their observations, arrive at a set of numbers, and then build a hypothesis. This procedure—the scientific method—works well in the sciences, such as in chemistry, biology, and physics, but is less certain in the arts, such as in history.

     A writer who wishes to quantify events from the past calls herself or himself a “social scientist,” rather than a historian. This type of scientist observes a population’s demographics, or he or she counts immigration numbers, casualties in a battle, dollars spent, racial percentages, rates of inflation, a disease’s victims, land prices, or effects of a cold winter upon food production. The social scientist feels a frantic desire to number, discover a pattern, and reach a conclusion.

     Ramsay McMullen, a Yale historian, observed this wish to quantify in his remarkable book, “Feelings in History.” He pointed out, “Even matters quite of the spirit can be counted at least indirectly: religiosity, through bequests to pay for remembrance in masses.”

     Ramsay argues that history built around the scientific procedure excludes the more essential elements in history: the human interest stories, the motivations behind people’s choices, and the force of people’s feelings when they experienced them.

      How does one measure another person’s feelings? How does one build a scale to weigh grief, curiosity, anger, envy, ambition, boredom, love, disgust, contentment, loyalty, appreciation, religious devotion, pain, competitiveness, or inspiration? The answer is, “By only by the most general of terms.” People say, “That person has some anger issues,” or “she is jealous,” or “he has very little ambition.”

     McMullen said that we fail to quantify the emotions because often we do not know. “The cause lies in the very thing that confronts us in our daily lives: the difficulty, not to call it impossibility, of knowing what goes on in the recesses of another person’s mind, or even of our own.”

     For an example, Marc Bloch, wrote. “Accustomed to danger, the knight found in war yet another attraction: it offered a remedy for boredom. [E]veryday life [had] easily slipped into a grey monotony. Thus was born an appetite for diversions, . . . [and they] sought satisfaction in distant lands.”

     McMullen points out that Bloch’s “interpretation sounds perfectly acceptable. It helps to explain things. But just how does the writer know what he tells us? In arriving at what may be judged a valuable insight, he uses no science, only imagination.”

     One wonders, “what were that knight’s true feelings and motivation?” Perhaps the knight may have fought in a foreign war because he was drafted, or he was promised land or money, or he was starving and was given food. Boredom many not have motivated him at all, but how would anyone know?

     Human beings can act in rational and reasonable ways, but they can act in irrational and unreasonable ways, in ways that the social scientists cannot measure or predict.

      It is convenient to separate the mind from the feelings and to focus only upon the mind, and yet to be a human is to experience both the intellect and the emotions together, at the same time. The heart and the head are co-joined, and they work in tandem. This is especially true in the young. Remember our junior high days, when our emotions were raw and exposed, and easily bruised.

     McMullen says, “The materials of mind, intellect, [and] reason are wrapped in . . . feelings; and necessarily so, for the survival of the species.”

     What motivated the French citizens to act with as much unregulated passion as they did during the French Revolution, when both men and women marched in Paris’s streets carrying pitchforks and shovels, and when they soaked the guillotine in their victims’ blood? One historian stated, “The history of the [French] Revolution cannot be understood without an adequate theory of emotions.”

     In our own country’s history, we can read John C. Calhoun’s reasonable and intellectual words, his formidable defense of slavery, but when we see and feel the enflamed passion that the abolitionists exhibited, we feel shocked. Someone asked the abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison, “Why are you all on fire?” He replied, “I have need to be all on fire, for I have mountains of ice about me to melt.”

     Such human interest stories cause people to stop and think, and then act, for they are a fundamental engine of motivation. Ever since humanity began in a remote corner in Africa, stories, rumors, and even gossip have propelled people forward, to act in irrational and unpredictable ways. Today’s readers will read those historians who can disentangle people’s emotions from their actions.

     Ramsay McMullen said, “History is feeling. It is feelings that make us do what we do; and feelings can in fact be read. But the reading of them requires writers and readers to join their minds in ways that have long been out of fashion among students of history.”