This morning’s Thought for the Day was given by the Revd Dr Michael Banner, Dean and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a theologian and ethicist with a gift for making large moral questions feel immediate. He referred to Desmond Morris, who has just died at the age of 98. For many years we heard little of Morris, at least in public discussion, after the furore caused by The Naked Ape (1967). Yet his name still has the power to provoke a large question.
Human beings like to think of themselves as superior to the apes. We flatter ourselves that we are more rational, more moral, more advanced. But what are we especially good at? Creating political dystopias, organising slaughter, poisoning the natural world, and surrounding ourselves with systems of power and self-deception. Banner’s point, as I heard it, was that what we most lack is humility — and humility comes from humus, the ground.
That raises an old question in a new form: are we “fallen angels” or “risen devils”? The older religious imagination tended to see man as a being who had fallen from grace. The modern scientific imagination often prefers to see him as an animal who has risen. But if so, risen into what? The apes, for all their limits, seem at least to live within nature. We dominate, consume, mechanise, and despoil it, while congratulating ourselves on our superiority.
That passing reference to Desmond Morris sent my thoughts back to the end of the Second World War as a cultural watershed. In the decades that followed, a whole series of writers began to challenge old assumptions about religion, science, sex, sanity, authority, technology, and even human nature itself. Some did so bleakly, others more hopefully; some stripped man of his halo, while others tried to recover a more humane vision of what he might still become.
As a preface to that thought, here is a select list of postwar books that helped to unsettle or reframe the modern understanding of the human condition.
- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
- David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney, The Lonely Crowd (1950)
- Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (1955)
- R. D. Laing, The Divided Self (1960)
- Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962)
- Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
- John A. T. Robinson, Honest to God (1963)
- Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963)
- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964)
- Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape (1967)
- Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine (1967)
- Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (1971)
- E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful (1973)
- Ivan Illich, Medical Nemesis (1975)
- Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (1979)
- Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (1981)
- Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985)
- Neil Postman, Technopoly (1992)
- Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone (2000)
- Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens (2011)
- Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus (2015)
- Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation (2024)
