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Nonfiction

Lessons from the Human Zoo

By Bettina Suleiman
Translated from German by Katy Derbyshire
Bettina Suleiman links primate and human activities in this essay on rest and reward.

In the 1950s, the behavioral scientist Desmond Morris carried out art experiments with the chimpanzee Congo. What began with a hesitant pencil line drawn by Congo soon led to expressive, powerful, abstract compositions. Julian Huxley and Pablo Picasso were among those who bought the work.

Congo painted with a passion but he wasn’t interested in “impact.” He felt no need to display his pictures. In fact, he liked to tear them up as soon as they were finished. Morris had to go to some lengths to get hold of the painting at the critical moment when the ape had already finished it—attempts to take it away from him sooner could end badly—but had not yet begun to destroy it.

The chimpanzee needed no motivation to paint. Quite the opposite—when Morris experimented with giving him a treat for every finished picture, his interest in painting was significantly reduced. He began to splash his works onto canvas as quickly as possible, listless and uninspired, so as to concentrate on the reward afterward.

While working on Auswilderung, my first novel, I was often asked how much longer it would take. It’ll take as long as it takes, I said. I’m working on a book, not on a parade ground. But did I even have a publisher, an agent? Creating a product with no prospect of consumers for it—wasn’t that naïve? Maybe it is, I thought, and went back to working on the text.

What if someone had given me a handful of peanuts for every page I finished? What if someone had guaranteed publication, and impact—to be liked, to inspire, to provoke, which is how the zoologist Frans de Waal defines the intentions of human art? What if I’d known that others, particularly members of the opposite sex, would be impressed by my work—which is what the evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller suspects to be the purpose of human art—would that have raised my output and lowered my interest? Would the same text have come out?

Literary readers are on a quest for the “nonconformist,” we’re told, and apparently it’s increasingly hard to find. The more interesting of my writer friends include personalities like Congo, and it may well be worth the effort of getting their manuscripts out of their hands before they rip them to shreds.

In 1931 the psychologist Winthrop Kellogg, his wife, and their ten-month-old son, Donald, tried out living as a family with a seven-and-a-half-month female chimpanzee. The title and aim of the experiment was “Humanizing the Ape.” If “wolf children” behaved like wolves, shouldn’t Gua then develop like a human child? The experiment was set up so that Gua was always to be treated like a human and never like an animal or a pet. Donald and Gua were dressed in matching outfits, fed in a high chair, bathed together, and so on.

In actual fact, Gua did learn to walk upright, eat with a spoon, and even understand human language. However, Kellogg’s hope that she would begin to speak was not fulfilled. Donald was a better learner in that respect. Like Gua, he soon relinquished language and expressed his needs in screams, grunts, and barks. He also liked crawling on all fours and chewing on shoes. Kellogg broke off the experiment after ten months.

Do apes have their own culture? There are numerous observations of apes and other animals passing on newly learned or invented cultural techniques to the next generation. Nevertheless, chimpanzees are comparatively indifferent to how others do something, as long as they get what they want. In terms of imitation, the “herd animal man” (Friedrich Nietzsche) has nothing to learn from apes.

We don’t seem to be overly proud of this peculiarity. We talk about “aping” others, not of “humaning” them. Imitation is considered primitive, a behavior common to animals, children, or “savages.” Of the latter, Darwin commented, “Apes are much given to imitation, as are savages.”

We understand “culture” to be what we ourselves create or recreate. If animals create more and imitate less than humans, then why is the existence of an animal culture so frequently denied? Perhaps because we humans are at an advantage when it comes to distributing cultural achievements. Yet is this advantage also an asset? Dawkins used Beethoven’s symphonies to explain his coining of the word “memes,” cultural variants of “genes.” Some forty years later, the term “memes” summons up cultural bodies of a very different shape and size.

If you want to write a book and not talk only about Grumpy Cat and MH 370, all influences have to have the same chance to step into the foreground, and to do so they first have to be present in the background. As we can’t stop ourselves from imitating, it’s advisable to exercise restraint in consuming culture. Or we could take Nietzsche’s advice occasionally and opt for “free, willful, light loneliness.”

How many werewolves have there been since 1850? In one study, Jan Dirk Blom, a lecturer in psychiatry in Groningen, Netherlands, counted thirteen cases of “lycanthropy,” a subform of “zooanthropism” or the delusion of mutating into an animal. People who believe they are werewolves hallucinate claws, fur, and fangs. Their language skills decline. They howl at the moon, live outside, and eat raw meat. The cause is a dysfunction in the parts of the brain responsible for our physical perception of the self.

I like to sum up my novel like this: it’s about a woman who wants to be a gorilla. No one wants to be a gorilla, people respond. I do, I say, but hardly anyone believes me. A gorilla can’t write books, they tell me. A minority does admit to envying apes in the forest their lifestyle, like I do. Or cows in the meadow.

If I were a gorilla, I like to imagine, I’d be allowed to live in the open air, barefoot and swaddled in warm fur. Food would be available in abundance and wouldn’t have to be prepared. No moral or social norms would stop me from displaying my affection or dislike. My main interest would be satisfying the demands of the moment. The only threats would be specific and never abstract—poachers, not tax inspectors. And I wouldn’t have ever to think about accumulating anything, “building something up.”

Being a werewolf—I imagine that would be great. Not least because as a wolf, I wouldn’t be part of the master species that has “made this planet a human theme park,” as Jonathan Franzen puts it. His character Walter Berglund, in Freedom, is concerned, he says, that nothing else is left, that there is only us. If I can’t even escape from human beings in a forest or a desert for all the joggers and tourists, I’d at least like not to be part of the problem.

Ted Kaczynski set out on a walk in the summer of 1983. “There were too many people around my cabin so I decided I needed some peace,” he later said. He found his favorite spot ruined by a new road. Then he started building bombs. Does that mean environmentalists are misanthropists? Charles Manson, or the leader of ATWA (Air, Trees, Water, Animals), Pentti Linkola, with his calls for a two-child policy and enforced sterilizations? By no means, if we believe Linkola: If a lifeboat is full, he writes, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot.

“I decided to live like an animal,” is how the geologist Michel Siffre explains what gave him the idea of spending two months in a cave in 1962, “in the dark, without knowing the time.” With no idea of when it was time to sleep, time to get up, time to work, what would happen to nine-to-five? In his first experiment, Siffre’s days expanded by only one hour. In his subsequent trials on himself and others, however, all the test persons developed a 48-hour rhythm, with active phases of around 36 and sleep phases of about 12 hours.

I’m writing this at two in the afternoon. I sat down at my desk at around ten. My work started just before eleven. Young writers are often very interested in their fellow authors’ routines. Thank goodness for dailyroutines.com. Wannabe Hemingways can read there that they can knock off work with a clear conscience around noon, after some six hours at the typewriter. Günter Grass, by contrast (10 a.m. to 7 p.m., with two breaks for breakfast and coffee), almost notched up a 39-hour week. Compared to Isaac Asimov (7:30 a.m. to 10 p.m.), he was still a lazy so-and-so.

In Sven Regener’s novel Berlin Blues, the protagonist Herr Lehmann is woken by his mother’s boastful phone call: “It’s a quarter after ten, no one’s asleep at this time of day; I’ve been up and about since seven.” My own parents will mercilessly tease anyone who’s not at the breakfast table by eight at the latest. We wouldn’t dream of morally judging any other animal for the rhythm of its sleeping and active hours. Perhaps because we’re the only animal that can interfere with that rhythm—or wants to.

Europe’s thirty-five-hour workweek is by no means an achievement. Hunters and gatherers worked three to four hours a day. Some indigenous cultures believe it’s bad luck to work two days in a row. Daniel Quinn is right to present the development of agriculture as a story of decline. Having to earn our daily bread by the sweat of our brow is a punishment. Who wouldn’t rather live on nature’s generosity? There are legends about the orangutans on Borneo and the lemurs on Madagascar that say that they can actually speak but are wise enough not to let humans know. Otherwise, they’d have to work.

When are we allowed to follow the findings of scientists like Siffre and sit with our hands in our laps with a clear conscience? The ideal daily routine from a chrono-biological perspective plans for very little activity from midday on, aside from eating, a siesta, a little exercise, and a short productive phase between three and four. In my case, production stops at four-thirty, and I close up shop.

The over-justification effect is proved as follows: Take a crowd of test persons, give them an amusing task—jigsaw puzzles, for example—and measure how long they do it of their own accord. In a second phase, you reward the test persons for the time spent doing the jigsaw. Finally you cut out the rewards again. The result is that the test persons now spend less time doing jigsaw puzzles than previously, when they were rewarded for the activity. No great surprise there.

The joke is, in the end—and for the rest of their lives—the test persons spend less time doing jigsaw puzzles than at the very beginning, when they did it voluntarily. That’s the over-justification effect. If we reward humans for their behavior, their inner drive decreases. It’s just that we don’t normally see that from the outside, because the inner incentive has been replaced by an external one, the reward.

“Choose a job you love, and you’ll never have to work a day in your life,” Confucius said, allegedly. Had he been familiar with the over-justification effect he would have said, “Make a job out of your hobby and you soon won’t enjoy it any more.” To play on Kierkegaard: Either you choose a job you love, or you choose one you hate; in the end you’ll hate it either way.

What’s the way out? Quite simply, we mustn’t let ourselves be rewarded for things we like doing. Here, too, looking at science can help us understand—take for example the world of the hard-pressed junior academic. Employed on fixed-term contracts, job shares, poorly paid, not to mention no work-life balance. An email has been making the rounds of the Internet, in which American astrophysics professors answer graduate students’ questions about appropriate working hours with “80–100 hours a week.”

When they were in graduate school, the professors wrote, they were almost always at the office, even at nights and on weekends. No one asked them to work that much—they simply enjoyed it, they claim. The implication is that they work less now, and enjoy it less, too. No wonder, what with lifetime tenure, regular working hours, and good pay.

A 2005 auction of three works painted by Congo the chimpanzee brought in $26,250. The artist himself was not paid at all to start with and later palmed off with treats. Morris had no reason to invest in incentives as long as Congo painted voluntarily. Should we accuse him of exploiting the ape, or the ape of exploiting himself? Should young academics start a boycott, go on application strike, fight for better working conditions? If what they’re interested in is raking in a handful of peanuts after hastily and listlessly completing their work, then yes. But if they want to continue to carry out their jobs with joy and love, they’d be making monkeys of themselves. If their passion were better paid, it would degenerate to mere work. 

 

“Lehren aus dem Menschenzoo” © Bettina Suleiman. By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2015 by Katy Derbyshire. All rights reserved.  

English German (Original)

In the 1950s, the behavioral scientist Desmond Morris carried out art experiments with the chimpanzee Congo. What began with a hesitant pencil line drawn by Congo soon led to expressive, powerful, abstract compositions. Julian Huxley and Pablo Picasso were among those who bought the work.

Congo painted with a passion but he wasn’t interested in “impact.” He felt no need to display his pictures. In fact, he liked to tear them up as soon as they were finished. Morris had to go to some lengths to get hold of the painting at the critical moment when the ape had already finished it—attempts to take it away from him sooner could end badly—but had not yet begun to destroy it.

The chimpanzee needed no motivation to paint. Quite the opposite—when Morris experimented with giving him a treat for every finished picture, his interest in painting was significantly reduced. He began to splash his works onto canvas as quickly as possible, listless and uninspired, so as to concentrate on the reward afterward.

While working on Auswilderung, my first novel, I was often asked how much longer it would take. It’ll take as long as it takes, I said. I’m working on a book, not on a parade ground. But did I even have a publisher, an agent? Creating a product with no prospect of consumers for it—wasn’t that naïve? Maybe it is, I thought, and went back to working on the text.

What if someone had given me a handful of peanuts for every page I finished? What if someone had guaranteed publication, and impact—to be liked, to inspire, to provoke, which is how the zoologist Frans de Waal defines the intentions of human art? What if I’d known that others, particularly members of the opposite sex, would be impressed by my work—which is what the evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller suspects to be the purpose of human art—would that have raised my output and lowered my interest? Would the same text have come out?

Literary readers are on a quest for the “nonconformist,” we’re told, and apparently it’s increasingly hard to find. The more interesting of my writer friends include personalities like Congo, and it may well be worth the effort of getting their manuscripts out of their hands before they rip them to shreds.

In 1931 the psychologist Winthrop Kellogg, his wife, and their ten-month-old son, Donald, tried out living as a family with a seven-and-a-half-month female chimpanzee. The title and aim of the experiment was “Humanizing the Ape.” If “wolf children” behaved like wolves, shouldn’t Gua then develop like a human child? The experiment was set up so that Gua was always to be treated like a human and never like an animal or a pet. Donald and Gua were dressed in matching outfits, fed in a high chair, bathed together, and so on.

In actual fact, Gua did learn to walk upright, eat with a spoon, and even understand human language. However, Kellogg’s hope that she would begin to speak was not fulfilled. Donald was a better learner in that respect. Like Gua, he soon relinquished language and expressed his needs in screams, grunts, and barks. He also liked crawling on all fours and chewing on shoes. Kellogg broke off the experiment after ten months.

Do apes have their own culture? There are numerous observations of apes and other animals passing on newly learned or invented cultural techniques to the next generation. Nevertheless, chimpanzees are comparatively indifferent to how others do something, as long as they get what they want. In terms of imitation, the “herd animal man” (Friedrich Nietzsche) has nothing to learn from apes.

We don’t seem to be overly proud of this peculiarity. We talk about “aping” others, not of “humaning” them. Imitation is considered primitive, a behavior common to animals, children, or “savages.” Of the latter, Darwin commented, “Apes are much given to imitation, as are savages.”

We understand “culture” to be what we ourselves create or recreate. If animals create more and imitate less than humans, then why is the existence of an animal culture so frequently denied? Perhaps because we humans are at an advantage when it comes to distributing cultural achievements. Yet is this advantage also an asset? Dawkins used Beethoven’s symphonies to explain his coining of the word “memes,” cultural variants of “genes.” Some forty years later, the term “memes” summons up cultural bodies of a very different shape and size.

If you want to write a book and not talk only about Grumpy Cat and MH 370, all influences have to have the same chance to step into the foreground, and to do so they first have to be present in the background. As we can’t stop ourselves from imitating, it’s advisable to exercise restraint in consuming culture. Or we could take Nietzsche’s advice occasionally and opt for “free, willful, light loneliness.”

How many werewolves have there been since 1850? In one study, Jan Dirk Blom, a lecturer in psychiatry in Groningen, Netherlands, counted thirteen cases of “lycanthropy,” a subform of “zooanthropism” or the delusion of mutating into an animal. People who believe they are werewolves hallucinate claws, fur, and fangs. Their language skills decline. They howl at the moon, live outside, and eat raw meat. The cause is a dysfunction in the parts of the brain responsible for our physical perception of the self.

I like to sum up my novel like this: it’s about a woman who wants to be a gorilla. No one wants to be a gorilla, people respond. I do, I say, but hardly anyone believes me. A gorilla can’t write books, they tell me. A minority does admit to envying apes in the forest their lifestyle, like I do. Or cows in the meadow.

If I were a gorilla, I like to imagine, I’d be allowed to live in the open air, barefoot and swaddled in warm fur. Food would be available in abundance and wouldn’t have to be prepared. No moral or social norms would stop me from displaying my affection or dislike. My main interest would be satisfying the demands of the moment. The only threats would be specific and never abstract—poachers, not tax inspectors. And I wouldn’t have ever to think about accumulating anything, “building something up.”

Being a werewolf—I imagine that would be great. Not least because as a wolf, I wouldn’t be part of the master species that has “made this planet a human theme park,” as Jonathan Franzen puts it. His character Walter Berglund, in Freedom, is concerned, he says, that nothing else is left, that there is only us. If I can’t even escape from human beings in a forest or a desert for all the joggers and tourists, I’d at least like not to be part of the problem.

Ted Kaczynski set out on a walk in the summer of 1983. “There were too many people around my cabin so I decided I needed some peace,” he later said. He found his favorite spot ruined by a new road. Then he started building bombs. Does that mean environmentalists are misanthropists? Charles Manson, or the leader of ATWA (Air, Trees, Water, Animals), Pentti Linkola, with his calls for a two-child policy and enforced sterilizations? By no means, if we believe Linkola: If a lifeboat is full, he writes, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot.

“I decided to live like an animal,” is how the geologist Michel Siffre explains what gave him the idea of spending two months in a cave in 1962, “in the dark, without knowing the time.” With no idea of when it was time to sleep, time to get up, time to work, what would happen to nine-to-five? In his first experiment, Siffre’s days expanded by only one hour. In his subsequent trials on himself and others, however, all the test persons developed a 48-hour rhythm, with active phases of around 36 and sleep phases of about 12 hours.

I’m writing this at two in the afternoon. I sat down at my desk at around ten. My work started just before eleven. Young writers are often very interested in their fellow authors’ routines. Thank goodness for dailyroutines.com. Wannabe Hemingways can read there that they can knock off work with a clear conscience around noon, after some six hours at the typewriter. Günter Grass, by contrast (10 a.m. to 7 p.m., with two breaks for breakfast and coffee), almost notched up a 39-hour week. Compared to Isaac Asimov (7:30 a.m. to 10 p.m.), he was still a lazy so-and-so.

In Sven Regener’s novel Berlin Blues, the protagonist Herr Lehmann is woken by his mother’s boastful phone call: “It’s a quarter after ten, no one’s asleep at this time of day; I’ve been up and about since seven.” My own parents will mercilessly tease anyone who’s not at the breakfast table by eight at the latest. We wouldn’t dream of morally judging any other animal for the rhythm of its sleeping and active hours. Perhaps because we’re the only animal that can interfere with that rhythm—or wants to.

Europe’s thirty-five-hour workweek is by no means an achievement. Hunters and gatherers worked three to four hours a day. Some indigenous cultures believe it’s bad luck to work two days in a row. Daniel Quinn is right to present the development of agriculture as a story of decline. Having to earn our daily bread by the sweat of our brow is a punishment. Who wouldn’t rather live on nature’s generosity? There are legends about the orangutans on Borneo and the lemurs on Madagascar that say that they can actually speak but are wise enough not to let humans know. Otherwise, they’d have to work.

When are we allowed to follow the findings of scientists like Siffre and sit with our hands in our laps with a clear conscience? The ideal daily routine from a chrono-biological perspective plans for very little activity from midday on, aside from eating, a siesta, a little exercise, and a short productive phase between three and four. In my case, production stops at four-thirty, and I close up shop.

The over-justification effect is proved as follows: Take a crowd of test persons, give them an amusing task—jigsaw puzzles, for example—and measure how long they do it of their own accord. In a second phase, you reward the test persons for the time spent doing the jigsaw. Finally you cut out the rewards again. The result is that the test persons now spend less time doing jigsaw puzzles than previously, when they were rewarded for the activity. No great surprise there.

The joke is, in the end—and for the rest of their lives—the test persons spend less time doing jigsaw puzzles than at the very beginning, when they did it voluntarily. That’s the over-justification effect. If we reward humans for their behavior, their inner drive decreases. It’s just that we don’t normally see that from the outside, because the inner incentive has been replaced by an external one, the reward.

“Choose a job you love, and you’ll never have to work a day in your life,” Confucius said, allegedly. Had he been familiar with the over-justification effect he would have said, “Make a job out of your hobby and you soon won’t enjoy it any more.” To play on Kierkegaard: Either you choose a job you love, or you choose one you hate; in the end you’ll hate it either way.

What’s the way out? Quite simply, we mustn’t let ourselves be rewarded for things we like doing. Here, too, looking at science can help us understand—take for example the world of the hard-pressed junior academic. Employed on fixed-term contracts, job shares, poorly paid, not to mention no work-life balance. An email has been making the rounds of the Internet, in which American astrophysics professors answer graduate students’ questions about appropriate working hours with “80–100 hours a week.”

When they were in graduate school, the professors wrote, they were almost always at the office, even at nights and on weekends. No one asked them to work that much—they simply enjoyed it, they claim. The implication is that they work less now, and enjoy it less, too. No wonder, what with lifetime tenure, regular working hours, and good pay.

A 2005 auction of three works painted by Congo the chimpanzee brought in $26,250. The artist himself was not paid at all to start with and later palmed off with treats. Morris had no reason to invest in incentives as long as Congo painted voluntarily. Should we accuse him of exploiting the ape, or the ape of exploiting himself? Should young academics start a boycott, go on application strike, fight for better working conditions? If what they’re interested in is raking in a handful of peanuts after hastily and listlessly completing their work, then yes. But if they want to continue to carry out their jobs with joy and love, they’d be making monkeys of themselves. If their passion were better paid, it would degenerate to mere work. 

 

“Lehren aus dem Menschenzoo” © Bettina Suleiman. By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2015 by Katy Derbyshire. All rights reserved.  

Lehren aus dem Menschenzoo

In den 1950er Jahren führte der Verhaltensforscher Desmond Morris Kunstversuche mit dem Schimpansen Congo durch. Was mit einer zögerlichen Bleistiftlinie Congos begann, führte bald zu ausdrucksstarken, kraftvollen abstrakten Kompositionen. Julian Huxley und Pablo Picasso zählten zu ihren Käufern.

Congo malte mit Leidenschaft, aber “Wirkung” interessierte ihn nicht. Er hatte kein Bedürfnis, seine Bilder zu zeigen. Vielmehr zerriss er sie gern, sobald sie fertig waren. Morris musste sich anstrengen, die Gemälde in jenem kritischen Moment in seinen Besitz zu bringen, in dem der Affe das Werk bereits vollendet – Versuche, es ihm vorher zu entreißen, konnten böse enden -, mit seiner Vernichtung aber noch nicht begonnen hatte.

Der Schimpanse musste zum Malen nicht motiviert werden. Im Gegenteil: Als Morris ihm versuchsweise für jedes fertige Bild einen Leckerbissen zusteckte, sank sein Interesse am Malen deutlich. Jetzt klatschte er seine Werke so schnell wie möglich auf die Leinwand, lustlos und uninspiriert, um sich dann eilig den Belohnungen zu widmen.

 

Während ich Auswilderung schrieb, meinen ersten Roman, wurde ich oft gefragt, wie lange es noch dauere. Es dauert, so lange es dauert, sagte ich. Ich arbeite an einem Buch, nicht auf dem Truppenübungsplatz. Aber ob ich denn überhaupt einen Verlag, eine Agentur hätte? Ein Produkt anzufertigen, ganz ohne Aussicht auf Abnehmer – sei das nicht naiv? Kann schon sein, dachte ich mir und widmete mich wieder der Arbeit am Text.

Was, wenn man mir für jede fertige Seite eine Handvoll Erdnüsse zugesteckt hätte? Wenn man mir die Veröffentlichung garantiert hätte, und Wirkung – zu gefallen, zu inspirieren, zu provozieren, was der Zoologe Frans de Waal für die Absichten von Menschenkunst hält? Wenn ich gewusst hätte, dass andere, vor allem Angehörige des anderen Geschlechts, von meinem Werk beeindruckt sein würden – worin der Evolutionspsychologe Geoffrey Miller den Zweck menschlicher Kunst vermutet: Hätte sich mein Ausstoß erhöht und mein Interesse vermindert? Wäre derselbe Text herausgekommen?

Die literarische Öffentlichkeit befindet sich auf der Suche nach dem, so hört man, zunehmend schwerer zu findenden “Unangepassten”. Zu den interessanteren meiner Autorenfreunde zählen Persönlichkeiten wie Congo, und es mag die Mühe wert sein, ihnen ihre Manuskripte zu entwinden, ehe sie sie in Stücke reißen.

 

***

1931 erprobten der Psychologe Winthrop Kellogg, seine Frau und sein zehn Monate alter Sohn Donald das Zusammenleben mit einer siebeneinhalb Monate alten Schimpansin. Titel und Ziel des Experiments: “Humanizing the Ape”. Wenn “Wolfskinder” sich wie Wölfe verhielten, musste Gua sich dann nicht wie ein Menschenkind entwickeln? Der Versuchsaufbau schrieb vor, dass Gua stets wie ein Mensch und nie wie ein Tier oder gar Haustier zu behandeln sei. Donald und Gua wurden im Partnerlook gekleidet, im Kinderstuhl gefüttert, gebadet und so weiter.

In der Tat: Gua lernte, aufrecht zu gehen, mit dem Löffel zu essen und sogar, menschliche Sprache zu verstehen. Allein Kelloggs Hoffnung, dass sie auch zu sprechen begänne, erfüllte sich nicht. Donald war in dieser Hinsicht lernfähiger. Wie Gua verzichtete er bald auf Sprache und brachte seine Bedürfnisse kreischend, grunzend und bellend zum Ausdruck. Auch ging er gern auf allen Vieren und kaute an Schuhen. Kellogg brach das Experiment nach zehn Monaten ab.

Haben Affen Kultur? Es gibt zahlreiche Beobachtungen, wie Affen und andere Tiere neu erlernte oder selbst erfundene Kulturtechniken an die nächste Generation weitergeben. Einem Schimpansen ist es trotzdem vergleichsweise egal, wie die anderen etwas machen – solange er nur ebenfalls an sein Ziel kommt. In Sachen Nachahmung macht dem “Herdentier Mensch” (Friedrich Nietzsche) kein Affe etwas vor.

Übermäßig stolz scheinen wir auf diese Besonderheit nicht zu sein. Wir sprechen von “Nachäffen”, nicht von “Nachmenschen”. Imitiation gilt als primitiv, als Verhaltensweise von Tieren, Kindern oder eben “Wilden”. Über Letztere sagte Darwin, dass sie alle “im ungewöhnlichen Maße die Fähigkeit zur Nachahmung zu besitzen scheinen”.

Unter “Kultur” verstehen wir das von uns selbst Gestaltete und Umgestaltete. Wenn Tiere mehr gestalten und weniger imitieren als der Mensch: Warum wird die Existenz einer Tierkultur dann so häufig bestritten? Vielleicht, weil wir Menschen im Vorteil sind, was die Verbreitung kultureller Leistungen angeht. Ist dieser Vorteil aber auch ein Vorzug? Dawkins nutzte Beethovens Symphonien, um seine Wortschöpfung der “Meme” zu erklären, kulturelle Varianten von “Genen”. Knapp vierzig Jahre später drängen sich zum Stichwort “Meme” Kulturkörperchen ganz anderer Couleur auf.

Will man ein Buch schreiben und nicht nur von Grumpy Cat und MH 370 erzählen, müssen alle Einflüsse die gleichen Chancen haben, nach vorn zu treten, und dazu müssen sie sich erst mal im Hintergrund befinden. Da wir das Imitieren nicht lassen können, ist Sorgfalt beim Kulturkonsum ratsam. Oder man folgt zuweilen Nietzsches Rat und wählt “die freie muthwillige leichte Einsamkeit”.

 

***

Wie viele Werwölfe gab es seit 1850? Jan Dirk Blom, Dozent für Psychiatrie in Groningen, hat in einer Studie 13 Fälle von “Lykanthropie” gezählt, einer Unterform von “Zooanthropismus”, also der Wahnvorstellung, sich in ein Tier zu verwandeln. Eingebildete Werwölfe halluzinieren Klauen, Fell und Reißzähne. Ihre Sprache verkümmert. Sie heulen den Mond an, leben im Freien und ernähren sich von rohem Fleisch. Ursache ist eine Fehlfunktion der für die körperliche Selbstwahrnehmung zuständigen Gehirnareale.

Den Inhalt von Auswilderung, meinem ersten Roman, fasse ich gern so zusammen: Es geht um eine Frau, die ein Gorilla sein will. Kein Mensch wolle ein Gorilla sein, entgegnet man mir dann. Ich schon, sage ich, aber das glaubt mir kaum einer. Ein Gorilla könne schließlich keine Bücher schreiben. Eine Minderheit allerdings gibt zu, die Affen im Wald wie ich um ihren Lifestyle zu beneiden. Oder die Kühe auf der Weide.

Als Gorilla, stelle ich mir vor, dürfte ich im Freien leben, barfuß und in wärmendes Fell gehüllt. Nahrung wäre im Überfluss vorhanden und müsste nicht zubereitet werden. Keine Moral und keine gesellschaftlichen Normen hielten mich davon ab, meine Zuneigung oder meine Feindschaft zu zeigen. Die Befriedigung meiner aktuellen Bedürfnisse wäre mein Hauptinteresse. Bedrohungen wären nur konkret und nie abstrakt: Wilderer statt Finanzamt. Auch müsste ich nicht daran denken, irgendwas anzusammeln, mir etwas “aufzubauen”.

Ein Werwolf sein – ich stelle es mir schön vor. Nicht zuletzt, weil ich als Wolf nicht zu jener Herrenspezies gehörte, die den Planeten “in einen menschlichen Themenpark verwandelt”, wie Jonathan Franzen sagt: Seine Romanfigur Walter Berglund sorge, dass nichts anderes mehr übrig sei, es nur noch uns gebe. Kann ich Menschen nicht einmal im Wald oder in der Wüste entrinnen ob all der Jogger und Touristen, dann möchte ich wenigstens nicht Teil des Problems sein.

Ted Kaczynski brach im Sommer 1983 zu einer Wanderung auf. “Es waren zu viele Leute in der Nähe meiner Hütte, und ich brauchte meinen Frieden”, erklärt er. Seinen Lieblingsplatz fand er von einer Straße verschandelt vor. Dann fing er mit dem Bombenbauen an. Sind Ökos also Misanthropen? Charles Manson, Anführer von ATWA – Air, Trees, Water, Animals – Pentti Linkola mit seinem Plädoyer für eine Zwei-Kind-Politik und Zwangssterilisationen? Keineswegs, so Linkola: Sei ein Rettungsboot überfüllt, hasse der das Leben, der nicht verhindere, dass alle zusammen untergehen.

 

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“Ich beschloss, wie ein Tier zu leben”, so erklärt der Geologe Michel Siffre, was ihn 1962 auf die Idee brachte, zwei Monate in einer Höhle zu verbringen, “in der Dunkelheit, ohne die Uhrzeit zu kennen”. Ahnungslos, wann es Zeit zu schlafen, aufzustehen, zu arbeiten wäre – was würde aus nine-to-five? Im ersten Selbstexperiment dehnten Siffres Tage sich nur um eine Stunde aus. Bei seinen folgenden Versuchen an sich selbst und anderen aber entwickelten alle Probanden einen 48-Stunden-Rhythmus, mit Aktivitätsphasen von etwa 36 und Schlafphasen von etwa 12 Stunden.

Ich schreibe dies um zwei Uhr nachmittags. An meinem Schreibtisch saß ich gegen zehn. Arbeitsbeginn war gegen elf. Junge Autoren haben oft ein ausgeprägtes Interesse an den Routinen ihrer Berufsgenossen. Zum Glück gibt es dailyroutines.com. Wer Hemingway nacheifert, liest man dort, darf nach etwa sechs Stunden Arbeit mit gutem Gewissen gegen Mittag Feierabend machen. Günter Grass dagegen (10 Uhr bis 19 Uhr, mit Frühstücks- und Kaffeepause) schafft schon fast die 39-Stunden-Woche. Verglichen mit Isaac Asimov (7:30 Uhr bis 22 Uhr) ist er trotzdem ein fauler Sack.

Sven Regener lässt Herrn Lehmanns Mutter auftrumpfend erklären: “Schon Viertel nach zehn, da schläft man doch nicht mehr, ich bin schon seit sieben auf den Beinen.” Von meinen Eltern muss sich hänseln lassen, wer nicht spätestens um acht am Frühstückstisch sitzt. Bei keinem anderen Tier kämen wir auf die Idee, den Rhythmus von Schlaf- und Aktivitätszeiten moralisch zu bewerten. Vielleicht, weil nur wir in ihn eingreifen können – oder wollen.

 

Die 35-Stunden-Woche ist mitnichten eine Errungenschaft. Jäger und Sammler arbeiten drei bis vier Stunden täglich. Manche Naturvölker glauben, es bringe Unglück, zwei Tage am Stück zu arbeiten. Daniel Quinn erzählt die Entwicklung der Landwirtschaft zu Recht als Verfallsgeschichte. Sein Brot im Schweiße seines Angesichts verdienen zu müssen, ist eine Strafe. Wer wollte nicht lieber von der Großzügigkeit der Natur leben? Über die Orang-Utans auf Borneo und die Lemuren auf Madagaskar erzählt man Legenden, dass sie sprechen können, es aber in ihrer Weisheit den Menschen nicht verraten. Sonst müssten sie ja arbeiten.

Wann dürfen wir, den Erkenntnissen von Wissenschaftlern wie Siffre folgend, mit gutem Gewissen die Hände in den Schoß legen? Der chronobiologisch ideale Tagesablauf sieht ab Mittag außer Essen, Siesta und ein bisschen Sport nicht mehr viel vor, von einem produktiven Höhepunkt zwischen 15 und 16 Uhr mal abgesehen. Bei mir ist es halb fünf. Feierabend.

 

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Den Korrumpierungseffekt weist man wie folgt nach: Man nimmt eine Schar Probanden, gibt ihnen eine amüsante Aufgabe – Puzzeln zum Beispiel – und misst, wie lange sie sich dieser aus freien Stücken widmen. In einer zweiten Phase belohnt man die Probanden für die mit Puzzeln verbrachte Zeit. Zuletzt stellt man das Belohnen wieder ein. Man wird feststellen, dass die Probanden jetzt weniger puzzeln als zuvor, als sie noch dafür belohnt wurden. Keine Überraschung.

Der Witz ist: Die Probanden puzzeln am Ende – und ab jetzt ihr Leben lang – weniger als ganz am Anfang, als sie es noch freiwillig taten. Das ist der Korrumpierungseffekt. Belohnt man einen Menschen für ein Verhalten, verringert sich sein innerer Antrieb. Nur sieht man von außen normalerweise nichts davon, da der innere durch einen äußeren Anreiz, eben die Belohnung, ersetzt wurde.

“Wähle einen Beruf, den du liebst, und du musst nie im Leben arbeiten”, sagte angeblich Konfuzius. Hätte er den Korrumpierungseffekt gekannt, er hätte gesagt: “Mache dein Hobby zum Beruf, und es wird dir bald keinen Spaß mehr machen.” Frei nach Kierkegaard: Entweder du wählst einen Beruf, den du liebst, oder du wählst einen, den du hasst; du wirst ihn am Ende so oder so hassen.

Wo ist der Ausweg? Man darf sich, ganz einfach, nicht belohnen lassen für das, was man gerne macht. Auch hier hilft ein Blick auf die Wissenschaft, genauer: den gebeutelten wissenschaftllichen Nachwuchs. Beschäftigt in befristeten Verträgen, auf halben Stellen, schlecht bezahlt, von Work-Life- Balance ganz zu schweigen. Im Internet kursiert eine Rundmail, in der amerikanische Astrophysik- Professoren die Frage ihrer Graduiertenstudenten nach der angemessenen Wochenarbeitszeit mit “80 bis 100 Stunden” beantworten.

Damals im Graduiertenstudium, so die Professoren, seien sie selbst fast immer im Büro gewesen, auch nachts und am Wochenende. Niemand habe von ihnen verlangt, soviel zu ackern – die Arbeit habe ihnen eben Freude gemacht. Das impliziert: Heute arbeiten sie weniger, und die Freude ist auch geschrumpft. Kein Wunder bei einer Anstellung auf Lebenszeit, geregelten Arbeitszeiten und guter Bezahlung.

Eine Versteigerung von drei Werken des malenden Schimpansen Congo im Jahr 2005 erbrachte  26 250 Dollar. Der Künstler selbst wurde zunächst gar nicht entlohnt und später mit Leckerbissen abgespeist. Morris hatte keinen Grund, in Anreize zu investieren, solange Congo aus freien Stücken malte. Soll man ihm vorwerfen, den Affen ausgebeutet zu haben, oder dem Affen, sich selbst ausgebeutet zu haben? Sollten die jungen Wissenschaftler sich verweigern, in den Bewerber-Streik treten, für bessere Arbeitsbedingungen kämpfen?  Falls es ihnen darum geht, nach hastiger und lustloser Vollendung ihres Werkes eine Handvoll Erdnüsse einheimsen zu dürfen – dann ja. Doch falls sie ihren Beruf weiter mit Lust und Liebe ausüben wollen, erwiesen sie sich damit einen Bärendienst. Honorierte man ihre Leidenschaft besser – sie würde zu bloßer Arbeit verkommen.

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