“Science is like sex. Sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason for doing it.”—Richard Feynman
A recent murder in NYC made me think of Desmond Morris’s famous book The Naked Ape, a popular science study of human beings’ evolution and its consequences. That NYC case puzzled this ex-scientist and current author: A woman killed a mailman during an argument about who put in their sandwich order first at deli! Clearly, this wasn’t really about that deli’s service.
That’s when I remembered The Naked Ape and its descripti0n of the negative effect of crowding on chimp colonies. Yes, those fellows who can make us all laugh at ourselves can become aggressive and attack each other when they feel crowded.
One thing I hate about big cities is crowding; if you’ll pardon the pun, I’m not alone in feeling this way. When I lived in Bogota, Colombia, I really felt it. My Colombian friends tend to be smaller, so they’re more immune to the effects of crowding than I am. (Once while riding on a Bogatano microbus, a woman laughed, smiled at me, and said, “You should take mouse hormones.” Funny but not so polite advice about this big gringo’s size.)
Covid probably made this worse if only because we became use to being alone and therefore more susceptible to crowding after the pandemic ended. (I’m sure there’s some sociological theses lurking here.) While grownups could probably handle this better than children, I can imagine teachers having difficulty when schools started up again. And the homeless crowds of migrants now milling about major cities (NYC in particular) add to the crowding. As I watched the New Year’s Eve celebrations in NYC’s Times Square, I was thrilled that I was not there! As I saw that NOLA terrorist ram through the crowds, I could imagine the crowd density exacerbating the terror, which is why the terrorist picked Bourbon Street, of course. Crowding makes a bad situation even worse!
In brief, I think the explosion of violent altercations in our cities is ultimately due to crowding or is exacerbated by it, as explained in The Naked Ape. Where do the immigrants and migrants go> The cities. Where do people “live” when they’re homeless? The cities. Where do multiple families tend to live altogether in one small residence? The cities!
Birth rates are going down and crowding is going up. How soon people forget authors like Desmond Morris and his warnings? The public’s memory lasts at most two to four years. We’ve already forgotten about the crowds attacking the Capitol in Trump’s failed coup. Mass hysteria and mob mentality are manifestations of crowding in the sense that the latter augments the former. Desmond Morris was a smart guy. He realized that human beings could become a crowd of lemmings mindlessly following their leaders over the cliff. Unfortunately, logic and reason can disappear in a flash, especially when there are crowds involved. At the Capitol, human beings became apes, not naked but heavily armed in many cases. At Charlottesville too.
Civilization and democracy can’t prevail if we become apes.