Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey

by Jane Goodall

How we humans came to be the way we are is far less important than how we should act now to get out of the mess we have made for ourselves.

And then there was Jubilee, bought for me as a present by my father (Mortimer “Mort” Goodall), when I was just over one year old. Jubilee was a large, stuffed chimpanzee toy, created to celebrate the birth of Jubilee, the first chimpanzee infant ever born at the London Zoo. My mother’s friends were horrified by this toy, thinking it would frighten me and give me nightmares. But Jubilee instantly became my most cherished possession and accompanied me on nearly all my childhood adventures.

By the time I was seven I was used to news of battles, of defeats and of victories. Knowledge of man’s inhumanity to man became more real as the newspapers and radio hinted at unspeakable horrors perpetrated on the Jews of Europe and the cruelties of Hitler’s Nazi regime. Although my own life was still filled with love and security, I was slowly becoming aware of another kind of world altogether, a harsh and bitter world of pain and death and human cruelty.

All the evil aspects of human nature had been given free rein, all the values I had been taught—the values of kindness and decency and love—had been disregarded. I can remember wondering if it was really true—how could human beings do such unspeakable things to other human beings?

I have wondered a lot about that hunt. The very fact that I, an animal lover, had wanted to take part seems extraordinary now. What if I hadn’t seen the fox at all? Would I have wanted to go again? What if we had lived in the country, and had horses of our own, and I had been expected to go hunting from an early age? Would I have grown up accepting that this was the thing to do?

Is this how it happens? We do what our friends do in order to be one of the group, to be accepted? Of course there are always some strong-minded individuals who have the courage of their convictions, who stand out against the group’s accepted norms of behavior. But it is probably the case that inappropriate or morally wrong behaviors are more often changed by the influence of outsiders, looking with different eyes, from different backgrounds.

It was daydreaming about life in the forest with Tarzan that led to my determination to go to Africa, to live with animals and write books about them.

The horror of the war days, the Holocaust, the dropping of the atomic bombs had affected me deeply. I could not reconcile such evil with the existence of an all-good, all-powerful God, and so I had pushed religion out of my mind. I found more nourishment for my soul in nature than on the occasions—increasingly rare—when I went to church on Sundays. Then, suddenly, everything changed.

To paraphrase what Eleanor Roosevelt once said: people are like tea bags; you never know how strong they are until you dump them in boiling water.

And so I came to realize that my belief in God and in Christ had its own meaning for me, personally, outside the words of the Bible; which, for the very devout, is tantamount to heresy. I once read that Thomas Jefferson came to the conclusion that the Bible was simply a compilation of the memories and thoughts of any number of people, some of whom had far more knowledge and far more wisdom than others. So he excerpted from the four Gospels all those passages he considered to be the most worthy and compelling, and used this considerably shortened version for his inspiration.

Like so many other German cities it had been destroyed by the heavy bombing of the Allied forces during the war. As I gazed, horrified, at the ruins, I suddenly saw the great spire of Cologne Cathedral rising undamaged from the rubble of the surrounding buildings. To me it was a message symbolizing the ultimate power of good over evil. At the same time, the once beautiful city, reduced to ruins because one man’s lust for power had plunged Europe into a brutal war, was a compelling reminder of human evil.

Looking back, I see clearly that my own personal philosophy was gradually molded during those first two decades by my family, my schooling, my living through the war, my years of listening to extremely powerful sermons; also by the books I read, the hours I spent outside in the natural world, and by the animals who shared our house. Now the Kenya Castle was carrying me forward into a new world, where the lessons would be taught by life itself in all its wonderful, sometimes tragic, often harsh, inconsistencies and surprises. And I could move into this new era without fear, for I was equipped, by my family and by my education, with sound moral values and an independent, free-thinking mind.

I remember, too, rounding the Cape of Good Hope and pulling into the harbor at Cape Town. This is one of the most beautiful cities on earth, but it is not the beauty that I remember; it is the shock of my first encounter with apartheid. Everywhere I went were grim reminders of the deliberate denigration of one group of human beings by another. SLEGS BLANCS was written in bold letters on notices pinned to shops, benches, buses, lavatories, parks, beaches, hotels: slegs blancs is Afrikaans for whites only, and the signs were everywhere.

I spent a day with Peter, and his stories of apartheid in action took me straight back to the horrors of Nazi Germany, the dehumanization of one race by another.

I turned to find a young male lion about forty feet away. He gazed at us with great interest. Gillian wanted to hide from him in the thick undergrowth at the bottom of the gorge, but I felt that we should climb up onto the plains, keeping in the open. Carefully we backed away from the lion, then turned and walked slowly to the side of the gorge. The lion was about two years old, with a mane starting to sprout in wispy clumps from his shoulders. Lions are intensely curious at this age and almost certainly this one had seen nothing like Gillian and me in his entire life. He followed us for at least a hundred meters, then watched as we climbed up the side of the gorge onto the plains. Later, Louis told us it was lucky we hadn’t run—very likely he would have given chase, unable to resist hunting us in play, like a kitten after a ball of wool.

Louis never understood why so many people felt that science and religion were incompatible. I have never understood that either and it is surprising to me that so many scientists are atheists or agnostics.

It was bigotry that was the greatest evil, Louis believed. I suppose he had loved his father, but he had hated his narrow-minded Scottish Presbyterian outlook.

But behavior does not fossilize. Louis reasoned that any behavior common to chimpanzees and humans today might well have been present in the apelike humanlike common ancestor which we shared, he believed, several million years ago. And if this was so, then those same behaviors were probably present also in the earliest true humans. This line of reasoning, new at that time, is widely accepted today, particularly as the geneticists tell us that our genetic material, our DNA, differs from that of chimpanzees by only a little over 1 percent.

I remember wondering what kind of scientist he would find for such a herculean task.

But why was it necessary to have so many specimens of the same species of bird or rodent or butterfly? Look in the back rooms of any natural history museum—there are drawers and drawers full of stuffed birds and small mammals and literally thousands of insects of all kinds. It represents a horrifying slaughter of the innocents.

But Louis didn’t care about academic credentials. In fact, he told me, he preferred that his chosen researcher should go into the field with a mind unbiased by scientific theory. What he had been looking for was someone with an open mind, with a passion for knowledge, with a love of animals, and with monumental patience. Someone, moreover, who was hardworking and would be able to stay long periods away from civilization, for he believed the study would take several years. When he put it like that, of course, I had to admit that I was the perfect choice!

Meanwhile Louis was struggling to overcome the prejudices of the time. Who would finance a study that most people believed was doomed to failure? Leakey must be out of his mind, they said, else how could he think of sending a young untrained girl to undertake such a potentially dangerous project. It was amoral. Luckily Louis never cared what anyone thought.

When I telegrammed the news to Louis Leakey, he responded with the now-famous remark: “Ah! We must now redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as human!” My observations at Gombe challenged human uniqueness, and whenever that happens there is always a violent scientific and theological uproar. On this occasion there were some who tried to discredit my observations because I was untrained, and therefore could not possibly produce reliable information. But the photographs that I eventually obtained proved the truth. Some scientists then actually suggested I must have taught the chimps to fish for termites! The result of it all, however, was that it was deemed necessary to redefine man in a more complex manner than before—heaven forbid that we should lose any aspect of our human uniqueness! I was unaware of all the controversy and speculation that was going on, as I was just living my simple life and continuing to learn more about the chimpanzees.

She was always there when I got down from my days in the mountains, eager to hear what I had been up to. We talked around the campfire, exchanging our news. She told me about her day. She described the fishermen who had come to the little clinic she had set up under a thatched roof where she dispensed the medicines provided by Uncle Eric, and demonstrated how a simple saline drip, regularly administered, could cure even the most ghastly tropical ulcer. In fact, as I learned many years later, she had been known as White Witchdoctor—and people had traveled long distances for the aspirins, Epsom salts, and such like that she had brought. I owe her a huge debt, not only for daring to venture into the wilderness with me, but also for the wonderful relations she established with the local people, relations that I and my staff and students have built on and developed ever since.

I had no idea that this, according to the ethological discipline of the early 1960s, was inappropriate—I should have given them more objective numbers. I also described their vivid personalities—another sin: only humans had personalities. It was an even worse crime to attribute humanlike emotions to the chimpanzees. And in those days it was held (at least by many scientists, philosophers, and theologians) that only humans had minds, only humans were capable of rational thought. Fortunately I had not been to university, and I did not know these things. And when I did find out, I just thought it was silly and paid no attention.

How right Louis had been to send someone to the field with a mind uncluttered by the theory of reductionist, oversimplistic, mechanistic science.

In order to collect good, scientific data, one is told, it is necessary to be coldly objective. You record accurately what you see and, above all, you do not permit yourself to have any empathy with your subjects. Fortunately I did not know that during the early months at Gombe. A great deal of my understanding of these intelligent beings was built up just because I felt such empathy with them. Once you know why something happens, you can test your interpretation as rigorously as you like. There are still scientists around nowadays who will raise supercilious eyebrows if you talk of empathy with animals, but attitudes are beginning to soften. At any rate, I felt very much as though I was learning about fellow beings in those early days—animal beings who bridged the supposed gap between human beings and the rest of the animal kingdom.

Once we have labeled the things around us we do not bother to look at them so carefully. Words are part of our rational selves, and to abandon them for a while is to give freer reign to our intuitive selves.

And as I sat there, keeping vigil, I thought, as I have thought so often since, what an amazing privilege it was—to be utterly accepted thus by a wild, free animal. It is a privilege I shall never take for granted.

Most primates interpret a direct gaze as a threat; it is not so with chimpanzees. David had taught me that so long as I looked into his eyes without arrogance, without any request, he did not mind.

For we are human-bound, imprisoned within our human perspective, our human view of the world. Indeed, it is even hard for us to see the world from the perspective of cultures other than our own, or from the point of view of a member of the opposite sex.

Gombe gave me similar feelings of peace to those that I had sometimes found in an ancient cathedral during those days when I lived in the bustling world of civilization.

After months in Gombe I saw the “civilized” world that we have created with new eyes: the world of bricks and mortar, cities and buildings, roads and cars and machines. Nature was almost always so beautiful and so spiritually enriching; the man-made world seemed so often horribly ugly and spiritually impoverished. This contrast between the two worlds struck me, with increasing sadness, every time I arrived back in England from Gombe. Instead of the peace of the timeless forest and the simple, purposeful lives of its inhabitants I was plunged into the materialistic, wasteful—terribly, terribly wasteful—rat race of Western society.

President John F. Kennedy had formed a committee to investigate these allegations, which were confirmed: as a result DDT and some other pesticides had been banned by 1968 (but continued to be donated to developing countries in bulk, for many years).

People have assumed that, because I stayed on at Gombe, having a child made little difference: “How lucky that you could raise a child and carry on with your work at the same time.” It was not so. I stopped following the chimps—the students and field staff did that. I merely administered the research station. And spent time being a mother. There were times when I felt a deep sadness and sense of loss for those days when I roamed the forests, alone with the chimpanzees.

There is no doubt that my observation of the chimpanzees helped me to be a better mother, but I found also that the experience of being myself a mother helped me better understand chimpanzee maternal behavior: it is hard to empathize with or understand emotions we ourselves have not experienced.

And this highly developed intellect means, surely, that we have a responsibility toward the other life-forms of our planet whose continued existence is threatened by the thoughtless behavior of our own human species—quite regardless of whether or not we believe in God. Indeed, those who acknowledge no God, but are convinced that we are in this world as an evolutionary accident, may well be more active in environmental responsibility—for if there is no God, then, obviously, it is entirely up to us to put things right. On the other hand, I have encountered a number of people with a strong faith in God who shrug off their own human responsibilities, believing that everything is safely “in God’s hands.” I was brought up to believe that “God helps those who help themselves.” We should all take responsibility, all play our part in helping to clean up and heal the planet that, in so many ways, we have desecrated.

Finally the ransom was paid—money which, it now transpires, was to fund the revolutionary movement of Laurent Kabila, who, twenty years later, would defeat President Mobutu, take over Zaire, and rename it the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

After the incident Gombe was considered a “sensitive” area for many months, and we required special government permission for every visit. Without Derek, and the high regard in which he was held by the Tanzanian government, the kidnapping would have spelled the end of the Gombe research.

Rumors had been spread. It was suggested that I should leave Stanford, after just two weeks. It might be better that way, I was told, “until things die down.” Most of the rumors were about Derek. It was true that he had hoped the students’ release might be secured without payment—just because of the precedent that would be set. But the idea that their death would have been a preferable alternative was absurd. He had even been in negotiations to see if his friends in the SAS could rescue them. There were tales also about my lack of responsibility: Why hadn’t I given myself up in place of the students that night? The fact that I had not even known what was going on until after the students had been kidnapped was not taken into consideration.

In addition to feeling distressed by what was going on, I was also puzzled, until I was interviewed by a man who was investigating twelve major kidnappings that had recently taken place in different parts of the world, one of them the famous Patty Hearst case. I shall never forget what he said at the end of our meeting. “Jane, I know you think that your situation is unfair and shocking. Unfortunately in every case that I have investigated when large sums of money were handed over, there was a breakdown in relationships. Friendship and trust turned to hostility and bitterness. In every case.” What a horrible commentary on human nature. Just when people are hurting and vulnerable, trying to pick up the threads of their lives, friendships disintegrate into feelings of hostility and bitterness.

It is all long ago now, and I seldom think of those days. I only mention it here because it was so devastating at the time, and because it taught me so much about human nature. Many people I had thought to be true friends turned out to be fair-weather friends.

For a couple of years after the kidnapping, however, there were no foreign students at Gombe. Indeed, for the first few months, I was not allowed to visit myself for more than a couple of days at a time. Gradually, though, everything relaxed and I was permitted to stay for a week or two.

Indeed, Louis Leakey had, unknowingly, chosen the most politically stable of all the twenty-one African countries where chimpanzees are still found; during all my forty-odd years in Tanzania there has never been rioting or rebellion, thanks largely to Baba ya Taifa, the Father of the Nation, Julius Nyerere. But Gombe was only twenty-two miles from the border with Burundi in the north, and periodically we were aware of the tense situation in that little country as conflicts between the Tutsi and the Hutu peoples flared up, each time resulting in the brutal killing of thousands of innocent men, women, and children.

And I thought how sad it was that, for all our sophisticated intellect, for all our noble aspirations, our aggressive behavior was not just similar in many ways to that of the chimpanzees—it was even worse. Worse because human beings have the potential to rise above their baser instincts, whereas chimpanzees probably do not.

Farsighted genius that he was, he told me he thought my work would take at least ten years to complete, and this at a time when studies of just one year were almost unheard of. Of course, when I set out I had no plan to remain at Gombe for ten years. It seemed a whole lifetime when I was twenty-six years old. Yet had I stopped after only ten years, I should have continued to believe that chimpanzees, though very like us in behavior, were rather nicer.

Sadly, the “noble ape” was as mythical as the “noble savage”; we would witness many more incidents of brutal intercommunity aggression,

Then suddenly we found that chimpanzees could be brutal—that they, like us, had a dark side to their nature.

When I published the first observations of intercommunity killing at Gombe I came in for a good deal of criticism from certain scientists. Some critics said that the observations were merely “anecdotal” and should therefore be disregarded. This was patently absurd.

Even among scientists who accepted the Gombe data, there were those who believed that it had been a mistake to publish the facts; they thought that I should play down the aggressiveness whenever possible. Why this strong resistance? It was my first experience with the politics of science, the pressure to publish or not to publish for political, religious, or social reasons. One colleague said, after I had told him about the violence among the chimps, “You should never publish this because it will give irresponsible scientists and writers the data they need to ‘prove’ that our human tendency to engage in conflict is innate, that war is, therefore, inevitable—an unfortunate and regrettable legacy from our brutal apelike ancestors.”