As far back as I can remember I’ve believed that there was a little something wrong with my psychological make-up. My mind constantly wanders towards behavior that I always thought most people would think was deviant or depraved. I began feeling jaded and resentful of many of the strangers around me at a very young age and I always felt that this wasn’t the way I was supposed to operate. I often felt isolated and closed off from the world despite the fact that I grew up in the city of Chicago and was literally surrounded by millions. I just couldn’t shake the idea that my world was so small no matter how hard I tried. I became convinced at a very young age (somewhere around 10 or 11) that I was slowly turning quite insane. I talked about it pretty freely with my teachers and my family and I think I freaked them out a bit. But I couldn’t let it go… I couldn’t convince myself that the way I was feeling, the way I was viewing the world, was in any way the normal behavior for a human to display in this hyper-tribal environment. It would appear that harmony and cooperation is the only way to make this machine run smoothly, but I just couldn’t buy in.
In those pre-teen years I became obsessed with the written word as, I believe, a form of escape from the craziness I saw all around me and felt bubbling up inside. My first real love affair was with William Shakespeare immediately upon reading Macbeth. It was the most beautiful and compelling piece of fiction I had read to date and its first reading was immediately followed by a headfirst dive into Shakespeare’s world as I swallowed all I could. Everything else failed in comparison. I had always liked reading up to that point, but now it was securely a part of my life. The only problem with Shakespeare was that he kind of ruined me for other fiction. There is no such thing as a writer that writes better, more compelling, fiction then Billy Shakes (see: A Midsummer Nights Dream, The Tempest, and A Winters Tale to name some favorites). The positive result of being so spoiled by The Bard was that I began reading a great deal of non-fiction. I was always required to read poorly written history textbooks in school, but now I was doing my OWN homework (as opposed to the homework assigned by teachers, which I NEVER did). I began doing my own research on whatever topics sparked my interest at any given point. Most of these inquiries began with the encyclopedia that lived in our living room and resulted in a trip to my dad’s bookshelf or to the city library.
One of the things I became fascinated with right away was the lives of the Native Americans. The idea that the Europeans came here and changed the native’s entire way of life seemed so bizarre to me. I wanted to know everything about their culture and their day-to-day behaviors. The tribal mentality seemed appealing to me and I was very interested in how it worked and where it came from. And the more I learned about those lifestyles, the more I became aware that those cultures actually were the successors of other, even older cultures. It was chain of change that led all the way backwards to the Cradle of Life, the literal Garden of Eden, in the heart of Africa. I discovered that my new obsession had a name, and it was called Anthropology… the study of humanity.
When I talked to my dad about all of this (I believe it was around 1995… which makes me 15), he turned me on to a book called “The Naked Ape” by Desmond Morris. That summer I read that book cover to cover… twice… in immediate succession. Written from a zoologist perspective and reading as a biological analysis, the book is a behavioral dissection of the human animal and separates the human being from the ego and from society and simply holds it up to the light. It’s brilliant and eye opening. It’s a must read for anyone even remotely curious about any other animal on the planet. How can you understand or relate to anything before you relate to yourself?
Fast forward a few years, and a moment of fate occurred in a Village Discount thrift store on Chicago’s North Side. It was the end of the first year of the new millennium and I was home from college on what would end up being my final winter break. I was probably looking for records or a sassy jacket or something when I remember stopping to look at the books. There was a very colorful block-work cover that jumped out to me so I picked it up to see what it was. It was a book by Desmond Morris called “The Human Zoo”. Just seeing his name brought up so many questions that I had been pondering over the last five years. I instantly recalled how his other book had brought me down a path of knowledge that seemed never ending, as it left me wanting to know so much more about this animal that we all are. I left the Village that day excited and optimistic about the future.
It would be almost two years before I got around to reading it.
For two years it sat around… waiting for me. It was added to a growing collection of wonderful books that I was actually reading. I couldn’t tell you why I didn’t pick up “The Human Zoo” for so long, but I can tell you that it came at the perfect time. I had just ended a very, very long and unbalanced relationship and had made a conscious decision for the first time in years that I was going to stay single for quite some time. For the first time in since my early high school years I was not filling my headspace with thoughts if other people and how to make two peoples lives work together. I was only thinking about me and how I wasn’t making my life work for itself. There needed to be much change because I simply wasn’t satisfied.
So for whatever reason, I finally cracked open the other Desmond Morris book in the fall of 2002, and life hasn’t been the same since. Just like in 1995, I read this new book twice in a row, and in no way by choice. I felt as though I had to. I felt as though there were so many answers in those pages.
What Morris discusses in “The Human Zoo” is the nature of the human animal within the confines of the hyper-urbanized, overcrowded, techno-crazy super civilization we live in now. And he does not do it in a very happy light. He points out how there are very chaotic, aggressive and mindless behaviors and complicated, deadly diseases that animals never display or contract in the wild and how all these same maladies exist with these same animals in the confines of zoos. He draws parallels between these occurrences and the occurrence of similar situations in modern man. And thus, in this relation, the modern society becomes the Human Zoo.
The focus of the book is how modern man cannot avoid the insanity that it feels because we have over-civilized. We have gone to far from what we, as members of the animal kingdom, were designed to be. The isolation and frustration and drive to fend for ourselves, rather then the group, is a direct product of the environment that we have created around us. And there’s no regression in our future… in fact there is nothing but rapid and mind-numbing progression.
I finally got it! I finally understood why I had been feeling so insane and so misplaced for years… I WAS misplaced! And I no longer felt alone because I finally understood that everyone around me felt in some way similar, even if they didn’t acknowledge it. I began to embrace my insanity and love it for what it was. I grew an even stronger love for the urban environment that had shaped me and became obsessed with observing it. I wanted to understand every facet and the mentality that had gotten us to this point. The mental struggles and hurdles that we deal with on a daily basis are not unique unto our personal experience, but rather a shared collective struggle to deal with a society that has grown beyond our means of comprehension and control. So much of what happens in our lives is completely out of our hands… this is what I walked away with and it will stay with me forever.
Recently I discovered that this book was written in 1969. Don’t ask me why I never bothered to look until recently, but I never would have guessed. The book seems like it was completely crafted and designed for today’s over the top, technology driven world. I feel like this book, as long as our society drifts further and further toward the absurd, will be timeless. I’m sure that 1969 was a pretty scary place for someone that was apprehensive to embrace technology and isolated, urbanized society, but 2010 has taken it to the next level. The applications of this book ring so true in this time that I can imagine that Desmond Morris saw it coming. Just imagine how this book will read in 2035… I shudder at the thought.
I passed my copy on to a friend several years ago with the hopes that he would get it the way I did, and I think he did. I hope that someday he passes it on as well, as this is what you do with knowledge.
Man, I should read that book again…
