The closest human counterpart may be the back rub or the body massage, which have been raised to art forms in cultures as diverse as modern Japan and Sweden, Ottoman Turkey and Republican Rome—where, in characteristic human fashion, a specialized tool, the strigil, was employed to rub the back. Gentlemen in Restoration England idled away the hours by collectively combing their wigs. Where body lice are a problem, human parents carefully and routinely go through their children’s hair. The emotional power of being groomed by the alpha male is perhaps akin to the laying-on of hands by shamans, healing ministers, chiropractors, charismatic surgeons, and kings.
Despite the importance of the male dominance hierarchy, it is by no means the only important chimp social structure, as the grooming pairs indicate. A mother and her children, or two grown siblings, have special, lifelong, mutually supportive bonds. A high-ranking son may be to a mother’s social advantage. There are also long-term relationships between unrelated individuals of the same sex that might certainly be called friendships. Largely outside the male hierarchy, there’s an intricate set of female bonds that often depend on the number and status of relatives and friends. These extrahierarchical alliances provide important means of mitigating or reordering a dominance hierarchy: If the alpha male is undefeated in one-on-one confrontation, an alliance of two or three lower-ranking males with supporting females may conceivably put him to flight. High-ranking males are known to establish alliances with promising younger males, perhaps co-opting them to prevent future putsches. Occasionally females will step in to defuse a tense encounter.
Alliances are made and broken. Loyalties shift. There is courage and devotion, perfidy and betrayal. No dedication to liberty and equality is evident in chimpanzee politics, but machinery is purring to soften the more hard-hearted tyrannies: The focus is on the balance of power. Frans de Waal writes:The law of the jungle does not apply to chimpanzees. Their network of coalitions limits the rights of the strongest; everybody pulls strings.4
In this complex, fluid social life great benefits accrue to those skilled in discerning the interests, hopes, fears, and feelings of others. The alliance strategy is opportunistic. Today’s allies may be tomorrow’s adversaries and vice versa. The only constant is ambition and fixity of purpose. Lord Palmerston, the nineteenth-century British Prime Minister—who described his nation’s foreign policy as no permanent national alliances, only permanent national interests—would have been right at home among the chimps.
Males have special reasons to avoid permanent rivalries. In the hunt and in patrols into enemy territory, they rely on one another. Mistrust would endanger their effectiveness. They need alliances to work their way up the promotion ladder or to maintain themselves in power. So, while males are much more aggressive than females, they are also much more highly motivated toward reconciliation.
When Calhoun crowded his rats together he found a wholesale change in their behavior, almost as if their collective strategy was now to kill off enough of themselves and to lower the birth rate enough that the population in the next generation would be reduced to manageable numbers. Given all the chimp propensities that we’ve chronicled (and the fact, described in the next chapter, that baboons can go into a murderous, annihilating group frenzy when packed together), you might expect that chimps behave badly when overcrowded, as in zoos. In close confines a male chimp cannot escape from an attack, cannot lead a female into the bushes away from the controlling gaze of the alpha male, cannot enjoy the excitement of the hunt or the patrol or contact with females from adjacent territories. You might expect frustration levels to rise, and hierarchical encounters now to involve less bluff and more real combat. If you’re not ready for a fight to the death, you’d better, you might think, find some way to mollify, appease, show deference, pay your respects, perform services, be useful—and genuflect at every step so the alpha harbors no possible misgivings about whether you know your place.
Surprisingly, just the opposite is true. In zoo after zoo, males—and especially high-ranking males—exhibit a degree of measured restraint under crowded conditions that would be unthinkable if they were free. Imprisoned chimps are much more likely to share their food. Captivity somehow brings forth a more democratic spirit. When jammed together, chimps make an extra effort to get the social machinery humming. In this remarkable transformation it is the females who are the peacemakers. When, after a fight, two males are studiously ignoring one another—as if they were too proud to apologize or make up—it is often a female who jollies them along and gets them interacting. She clears blocked channels of communication.
At the Arnhem colony in the Netherlands, every adult female was found to play a therapeutic role in communication and mediation among the petulant, rank-conscious, grudge-holding males. When real fights were about to break out and the males began to arm themselves with rocks, the females gently removed the weapons, prying their fingers open. If the males rearmed themselves, the females disarmed them again. In the resolution of disputes and the avoidance of conflict,* females led the way.5
So, it turns out that indeed chimps are not rats: Under crowded conditions they make extraordinary efforts to be more friendly, to be slower to anger, to mediate disputes, to be polite—and the female role in calming the testosterone-besotted males is crucial. This is an important and encouraging lesson about the dangers of extrapolating behavior from one species to another, especially when they are not very closely related. Since humans are much more like chimps than like rats, we can’t help wondering what would happen if women played a role in world politics proportionate to their numbers. (We’re not talking about those occasional women Prime Ministers who have risen to the top by besting the men at their own games, but about proportional representation of women at all levels of government.)
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Students of the chimpanzee call it “courtship.” It’s a set of ritualized gestures by which the male signals to the female his sexual intentions. But in ordinary usage courtship is a word describing a patient human attempt, over long periods of time, and often with great gentleness and subtlety, to build trust and to create the foundations for a long-term relationship. The male chimpanzee’s courtship communication is much briefer and more to the point, much closer to “Let’s fuck.” He may swagger, shake a branch, rustle some leaves, fix her with his stare, and reach out an arm toward her. His hair will be erect. And not just his hair. An erect penis—bright red, contrasting vividly with his black scrotum—is an invariable part of chimpanzee “courtship,” which you might think is a good thing because most of the other symbolic desiderata of courtship are barely distinguishable from those used in intimidating other males. In chimpish, “Let’s fuck” sounds almost exactly like “I’m gonna kill you.” The significance of this similarity has not been lost on the females. They comply. A typical female rejection rate to an unrelated male’s sexual overture is about 3%.
In chimpanzee etiquette, the correct response to the male courtship display is to crouch down on the ground and lift your behind invitingly. If the social niceties should elude you at first, the male will shortly set you straight. Recalcitrant females are attacked. All males in the group expect sexual access to all females, subject to necessary exclusions enforced by jealous, higher-ranking males. (Adolescent females are available for copulation even to infant males, who are sometimes ardent lovers.) Again, a significant exception is mothers and sons; although the son may give it a try, the mother tends to resist vigorously.