Desmond Morris on
The Naked Eye
at Edinburgh International Book Festival
15th August 2000

Ravi Bali

The latest book from Desmond Morris, The Naked Eye: Travels in Search of the Human Species, is part autobiography, part travelogue and part presentation on aspects of his theory.

A charming man, Morris spent most of the hour relating anecdotes from his travels around the world, including memories of his friends Anthony Burgess and David Attenborough. The stories amused the audience and raised a few laughs. One aspect of what he said relating to his theories interested me particularly. When he started out using zoological techniques to observe human beings, many people were critical of his trying to understand humans in the same terms as other animals. His first bestselling book, The Naked Ape, was written with the belief that precisely by applying these methods to human behaviour we could gain some interesting insights into ourselves.

One audience member asked Morris whether he thought the initial outrage that he should insult humanity by treating them as animals has today been reversed, so that we are now seen as inferior to beasts. He agreed that there had been a disenchantment with humanity so that any comparison with the rest of nature emphasises our destructiveness while downplaying our creative acheivements and potential. He misunderstood the tone of the question, to say he did agree and would like to think that he had played some small part in undermining man's arrogance towards the rest of the animal kingdom.

He spoke very positively of the emergence of ecology, whilst going on to say he was very optimistic about man's tremendous ingenuity to work out ways to minimise our impact on the planet. This is a positive vision in form only, because underneath it lies the assumption shared with enviromentalists that humans are not special except inasmuch as they create problems for everything else around us. He may be positive about our capabilities, but Morris is still no humanist; that would require a human-centred approach that sets us above mere beasts. It was interesting to see that the question posed by The Institute of Ideas debate, What is it to be Human?, emerging as a theme, if only by implication, in other Edinburgh International Book Festival talks.