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Rooting for the Apes

In the movie Planet of the Apes (1968), the chimp-archeologist Cornelius in quoting from the sacred scrolls of the apes:


Those familiar with the the Planet of the Apes series know that the action moves back and forth between a distant future, when apes inherit the world, and a not-so-distant human Apocalypse, genetically engineered apes rising against the cruelty of their masters.

When I watched the latest reboot, Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), I surprised myself rooting for the apes. A casual search on the Internet convinced me that I was not an exception. Tired of human cynicism and decomposing ideals, the public was ready to embrace primate liberation as a cause worth the demise of humanity. The reaction is catalyzed by a subtle racial/political subtext.  The rising apes are perceived as racial stereotypes.The pandemonium is a cartoon of white fear. The uprising stands for the  emancipation of the third world.

Let’s go briefly over the movie. A young scientist, Will Rodman, works in a biotechnology lab. The research team is looking for a retro-viral drug to enhance mental capacity and cure brain disease. Rodman has a special interest in this work, as his father had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. The drug is tested on a female chimp named Bright Eyes, increasing her mental power. Without them knowing, Bright Eyes gives birth to a baby chimp who has inherited her almost human intelligence. As she perceives him to be in danger, Bright Eyes turns violent and is killed. The project is terminated and the chimps are ordered to be euthanized. Will takes the baby-chimp home, determined to continue the project by himself. His father calls the baby-chimp Caesar.

As Will continues to medicate Caesar with the mind enhancing drug, the chimp grows as a frustrated would-be human. For all reassurances, Caesar realises that he is  just a pet. The hysterical reaction of their obnoxious neighbour reinforces his doubts. Eventually, Caesar has a confrontation with the bad neighbour and ends up in a primate shelter. Here he discovers his own species. Caesar is disappointed by their stupidity and cruelty, but is more repelled by human insensitivity toward animals.

In the meanwhile, Will develops an improved version of the mind-enhancing drug. Caesar steals it and medicates his tribe. He organizes an escape. The rebel apes confront humans successfully on the Golden Gate Bridge and escape into the forest. Therewith the retrovirus created by Will turns lethal to humans and spreads through airlines. Man’s rule on earth comes to an end.

As Caesar is moving center-stage during the movie, the spectator begins to identify with his cause. It seems like there’s a deep self-hate in humanity feeding archetypal fantasies about hell and the Apocalypse. The retroviral pandemic at the end of the movie is received like an act of biblical justice. On the other hand, Caesar has been identified with liberation icons, like Mandela Gandhi, Malcolm X, even Obama. All these are beside the point. Caesar stands for Mao-zeDong.

Why Mao? After all Caesar is against unnecessary violence. However, Caesar is Mao, because he merges the struggle against the West and the dethronement of man, in one and the same cause.

Says Mao:

The life of dialectics is the continuous movement toward opposites. Mankind will also finally meet its doom. When the theologians talk about doomsday, they are pessimistic and terrify people. We say the end of mankind is something which will produce something more advanced than mankind. Mankind is still in its infancy…  In the future, animals will continue to develop… And can it be, moreover, that of all the monkeys only one species can evolve, and all the others are incapable of evolving?

This is exactly the point in the Planet of Apes. The movie is more than an allegory of racial/political liberation. It is Maoist dialectics. Toppling western imperialism is the first step in toppling humanity: “Can it be, moreover, that of all the monkeys only one species can evolve”? Forget class struggle, forget racism, forget Western dominance and Third World emancipation. The true oppressor  is humanity.

One can only understand the subtle chemistry of postmodern academics toward Mao. He walked the walk where they only talk the talk (killing means business). Google yields 82,600,000 results for “human race is a cancer of the earth”, and 38,700,000 results for “white race is the cancer of human history”. If humanity is cancer, the West is metastasis.  So, what is the point?

The point is that the West stands for the concept that a human being is defined by something which is universally true, rather than by culture and blood. I don’t mean that this has been an exclusive prerogative of the West, or that universal humanity has been historically embodied in it. My point is that the West has aimed for universality, and that anti-western sentiments are rooted in the absoluteness of culture and tribal identity.  When science and reason are denounced as forms of cultural imperialism, a process of infinite regression is set in motion. One ends up rooting for the apes.


Dreaming of truth in America

Alexis de Tocqueville noticed that America is “one of the countries where the precepts of Descartes are least studied and are best applied”. He finds explanation in the peculiarities of democracy. Philosophy is for aristocrats. America is egalitarian. Yet egalitarianism encourages also intellectual self-reliance. So it is that doubting authority comes rather naturally to Americans.

I will argue that the philosopher whose precepts are “best applied” in America is not Descartes but Nietzsche. What distinguishes the latter is the concept that mind is a battlefield rather than a serene throne. I will quote from aphorism 333 in Gay Science.

What does Knowing Mean? “Non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari (do not laugh, do not mourn, nor to curse), sed intelligere!” (but understand) says Spinoza, so simply and sublimely, as is his wont. Nevertheless, what else is this “intelligere” ultimately, but just the form in which the three other things become perceptible to us all at once? A result of the diverging and opposite impulses of desiring to deride, lament and execrate? Before knowledge is possible each of these impulses must first have brought forward its one-sided view of the object or event. The struggle of these one-sided views occurs afterwards, and out of it there occasionally arises a compromise, a pacification, a recognition of rights on all three sides, a sort of justice and agreement: for in virtue of the justice and agreement all those impulses can maintain themselves in existence and retain their mutual rights. We, to whose consciousness only the closing reconciliation scenes and final settling of accounts of these long processes manifest themselves, think on that account that “intelligere” is something conciliating, just and good, something essentially antithetical to the impulses; whereas it is only a certain relation of the impulses to one another.

Nietzsche was the first to realise the abyssal origin of our thoughts. Descartes’ thinking self is the triple product of instinctual vectors rather than a metaphysical substance. It is something reminiscent of a Western movie, where three gunslingers confront one another in Mexican standoff. The finale truel in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is the classic example. The camera moves back and forth between the contenders, capturing the mounting tension. The graves of Civil War soldiers flung all around, reminding the viewer that the world is a deadly battlefield. The soundtrack plays a sinister note, disrupted occasionally by the croaking ravens.This is exactly the kind of situation that, according to  Nietzsche, takes place in our unconscious, as laughing, mourning and coursing keep one another in Mexican standoff. Rational knowledge breaks the deadlock by a truce.

More than elsewhere, in America the game is played through socio-political proxies. It is what Michel Foucault has called the “external history of truth”.


The American “external history of truth” involves such games and places as the court of justice, the cinema, the media, the pulpit, the political discourse, the street protest, the talk-show, the blogosphere. It is here that “the precepts of Descartes… are best applied”. America has offered the best opportunity for the truth-seeker by letting everything happen and clash in those places.

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

The ultimate meaning of Emma Lazarus’ lines, graven on pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, is the promise that truth will make us free. Or is it?

Says Tocqueville:

In the United States… Christianity itself is an established and irresistible fact, which no one undertakes either to attack or to defend. The Americans, having admitted the principal doctrines of the Christian religion without inquiry… the activity of individual analysis is restrained within narrow limits, and many of the most important of human opinions are removed from its influence… In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them.

Religion has become less powerful in our day. Yet expert opinion has become as much an “established and irresistible fact”, as Christianity was when the French writer travelled to America. The assertions of  doctors, psychiatrists, behavioral scientists, and so on, assume the guise of what Kant has called “the public use of reason”. Their lack of self-restraint betrays rather “the private use of reason”, wherein the Enlightenment has confined religion. What distinguishes each other is exactly what Tocqueville called “the precepts of Descartes, i.e. the exercise of philosophical doubt. An assumption that refuses to be questioned does not belong to the public square.

One might subsume political correctness under the same category. The difference from outspoken faith lies in the absence of the “wall of separation”. As such, it not only influences the public to raise “formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion “, but informs policy making as well. The perverse reversion of this invasion of the public space by expert opinion is the privatization of truth. The history of Galileo’s trial is repeating itself in gag orders and government/corporate restrictions of public information. Going public with common-interest knowledge might throw one into a Kafkaesque maze of legal problems.

In this context, the untutored Cartesianism mentioned by Tocqueville manifests itself as common-sense doubt regarding expert opinion, and  blasphemy against political correctness. It is a new form of the proverbial impiety of the common people. And it is, ironically, the left which is trying to suppress these heresies from its alleged base.

Hegel anticipated the postmodern sterilization of thought as he wrote about the “customary tenderness for things, whose only care is that they shall not contradict one another”. Of which Lenin comments: “This irony is exquisite! ‘Tenderness’ for nature and history (among the philistines)—the endeavor to cleanse them from contradictions and struggle”. What Hegel and Lenin called philistine and reactionary, the cleansing of society from contradictions and struggles, has come to be called “progressive”.

Tocqueville’s “formidable barriers” surrounding  liberty of opinion, are not truly barriers, but tectonic fault lines of the “external history of truth”. They are places where the instincts predating knowledge, recast as social tectonics, clash and unwind, shaping the ever-changing landscape of truth. Volcanoes and earthquakes are deadly phenomenon, but they make possible for a planet to be alive by recycling the elements of life. Similarly, ideas are alive on a dynamic infrastructure and are energized by eruptions of political passion. Logical truth comes only as a final compromise.

One cannot help noticing how old Europe is becoming more and more like Mars with its dead geology. No plate tectonics, no earthquakes, no fire from the depth, no life. Dreaming of truth is still possible in America.

Open sea

Friedrich Nietzsche defined modernity in one short sentence: God is dead. Widely misunderstood as a profession of atheism, what the German philosopher meant was a mere statement of fact that “ belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable”. What makes belief unbelievable?

We should note that what has become unglaubwürdig – unbelievable, is not the Christian God as such, but rather “belief in the Christian God”. Nietzsche is too good a theologian to assume that God needs to be believable. Faith has never depended on reason. It is reason that used to depend on faith. From classical Greece through the Age of Enlightenment, one could not trust human reason without believing in a rational God that makes reason believable.

This relationship was first stated by Plato and reaffirmed, in a different form, at the beginning of modernity, by Descartes. Put shortly, it purports that timeless truth dwells in a timeless mind. God is implied here as an ontological axiom for both.

It is exactly this alleged timelessness of either mind or truth that had become unbelievable when Nietzsche wrote that God was dead. Take for instance Darwin’s comment on Plato:

Plato says in Phaedo that our ‘imaginary ideas’ arise from the preexistence of the soul, and are not derivable from experience—read monkeys for preexistence.

The most severe implication of evolution here is not its rebuttal of Genesis literalism – liberal theology has already done it – but its redefinition of mind as a mere biological adaptation. Moreover, if our “imaginary ideas” are biological, the “real” ones are historical. Transcendental truth is an illusion.

Thus the Gordian Knot of metaphysics was cut, and the ontological argument was rendered obsolete. The God who died was the God of philosophers.

Personal faith is, of course, hardly affected by this, because personal faith does not have to be believable. Therefore: “ the event itself is far too great, too distant, too remote from the multitude’s capacity for comprehension”. What has to be believable is only belief as the foundation of sociopolitical institutions “for example, the whole of our European morality”. It is here that Nietzsche anticipates the chill of the “eclipse of the sun whose like has probably never yet occurred on earth”. Mankind will have to navigate through the night without stars. There will be no more eternal verities and moral absolutes to guide our sociopolitical institutions.

Yet Nietzsche is not in a gloomy mode. He salutes the dead of God as mankind’s ultimate adventure in knowledge. It is because the illusion of eternal truth obfuscates perennial truth – science versus metaphysics, experience versus Platonic contemplation, that th dead of God opens such an unprecedented opportunity:


The question is if we truly want to navigate these dangerous waters, to inhabit such a meaningless universe, to dare into most fantastic science and heart-stopping growth without God, any god to turn our eyes on? The content of the last two centuries has been that of desperately searching for a new god.

American freedom: Plato or Hegel?

The Declaration of Independence is a revolutionary manifesto framed in Platonic language.


The argument begs the question of “why are these truths self-evident” and the answer is “because they looked self-evident to the Founding Fathers”. Then the question arises “what else looked self-evident to them”? The answer would be: “that the Rights women, children and non-Europeans are not as ‘unalienable’ as those of ‘all men’”.

The revolutionary shows up in the next paragraph.


Should the Founding Fathers be viewed as philosophers in Plato’s Republic, leading by their ability to discern timeless Truth from the shadows of history?  Or they rather be Hegelian heroes, leading in change by their ability to discern the Zeitgeist and seize historical momentum?

Two examples, one from the civil war, the other from the civil-rights movement, will help define the question. “Reverend Devereux Jarrati, an Anglican priest, represented the widespread view that slaves… were born to a certain station and role in life by God’s design”1. Devereux’ God was the God of the Declaration of Independence, because he was “the God of nature”2 who gave all men the Right to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. Slavery was the natural state of blacks, just as liberty was the natural state of “all men”. It was their own way in the pursuit of happiness.

Moreover, as the “God of nature” was the watchmaker of Newton and Paley, and nature itself was understood as an intricately perfect mechanism, any change in the natural order, slavery included, was harmful to humanity and rebellious toward the Creator.

Lincoln, on the other hand, issued the Proclamation of Emancipation with a note at the God of history. “God has decided this question in favor of the slave”3. He did not infer timeless truth from the unchanging ways of nature. His was the argument of the prophets in Israel: God speaks through war. History was to Lincoln what nature had been to Jefferson: the milieu of truth. Yet this time truth was not self-evident unless brought home by canons and blood.

It is noteworthy that Charles Darwin published his findings about the same time. He put an end not only to the concept of timeless nature, but also to that of timeless truth. “Read monkey for preexistence” was his answer to Plato. Lincoln did not probably have time to read the Origins of Species, but he certainly captured the Zeitgeist.

The conflicting views will persist through the civil rights movement, one century later. Reverend Jerry Falwell brought the constitutional separation of Church and State as an argument against the clergy being involved in the civil rights movement4. His entering the political fray in the post Roe era was not a matter of inconsistency. In both cases, Falwell abode by the letter of the Constitution, which he deemed as inerrant and timeless as that of the King James Bible. On the other hand, Martin Luther King, who followed Hegel and Gandhi rather than the Bible, turned to the “God (read the dialectics) of history”5 for new truths and rights, not embedded in the old letter. There was no self-evident truth about voting rights to the Founding Fathers. Moreover, there’s no Platonic truth about minimum wage. Yet King’s universe was no longer the perfect clock of the pre-Darwinian era. He wanted to change the world.

1Mecham 124

2ibid. 74

3ibid. 117

4 ibid. 199

5ibid. 203

6Wilson 5

7ibid. 15-23

Works cited

“The Declaration of Independence”. The Charters of Freedom. Apr 10, 2013. Web.

Mechan, John. American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers and the making of a nation. New York: Random House, 2007. Print.


Morgan, Edmund. American Slavery, American Freedom. New York: Norton, 1975. Print.

Wilson, William Julius. More than a race: being black and poor in the inner city. New York: Norton, 2010. Print.