Books: Bridge to Adventure

THE TERRITORIAL IMPERATIVE by Robert Ardrey. 390 pages. Atheneum. $6.95.

Robert Ardrey is a playwright and film writer (Khartoum) who has taken up anthropology at the top of his voice. Audibility can make for large audiences, and Ardrey has enjoyed them since publication of African Genesis (TIME, Dec. 15, 1961), his first solo expedition into man’s past. In that book, on evidence that would arch any cautious anthropologist’s eyebrow, Ardrey proved to his own satisfaction that man is a born killer. He toyed with some other revolutionary evolutionary notions too, but he lacked either the time or the background to push them with suitable evangelical zeal. That required another book, and this is it.

The Territorial Imperative advances the proposition that real estate is more important to man than anything, including sex. The proposition is not new. Biology has long investigated and debated the acute animal sense of property rights that causes the wolf, for example, to urinate along the boundaries of its hunting preserve. It is the lupine way of warning off trespassers.

Ardrey wants to adjourn the biological debate by accepting the territorial principle as a key to the understanding of man and as a solution to all his behavior problems. Why does the Russian collective farmer only listlessly till state soil? Because, says Ardrey, the dispossessed planarian worm lost his zest for life and slipped this attitude into the evolutionary stream untold millions of years ago.

Why does man go to war? For a variety of reasons, says Ardrey, but none more compelling than his fierce atavistic desire to regain or to defend ground that he considers his own. “The principal cause of modern warfare,” writes Ardrey, “arises from the failure of an intruding power correctly to estimate the defensive resources of a territorial defender.” This is the same as saying that Japan would not have attacked the U.S. had it known it would lose—and that is precisely what Ardrey does say. He says many other things equally indigestible and undemonstrable: that the lower animals have as sophisticated a morality as man and can practice the principle of the greatest good for the greatest number; that victory in the jungle goes to the righteous rather than to the strong (the territorial defender almost without exception vanquishes the attacker); that the boxer obsessively dabbing at his nose may be doing so in an unconscious effort to avoid killing his opponent.

Search for First Causes. Ardrey is undeniably an exciting writer, with a very excitable mind. He has the playwright’s flair for the dramatic, for the hyperbole that embroiders truth. That does not mean that his books should be swallowed whole. He will never win his spurs in the scientific community, which stands aghast at his unscientific methodology. The true scientist strives to make a theory stick by marshaling all the conceivable evidence against it. Ardrey vaults to a theory over the obstacles of rebutting fact.

Still, there is plenty to think about in The Territorial Imperative, for the search for first causes is an exhilarating adventure. Ardrey can serve as a valuable if treacherous bridge for the stimulated reader who wants to gain more reliable anthropological ground. And if serious anthropologists persist in complaining that Ardrey is trespassing on their territory, let them consider the wolf.