The murder of Cecil and the ghost in the machine

Aug 02, 2015 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

It was Mark Twain who once wrote that man is the only animal that inflicts pain for the pleasure of it. But it was the philosopher Arthur Koestler who best explained the theory that human kind or Homo sapiens is the cruelest, most selfish, and most violent animal that ever evolved.
Koestler is one of my favourite philosophers and he has been on my reading list for each of the twenty-six years that I taught philosophy at UG.
I would say I put more energy into explaining Koestler to my students than any other philosopher I taught, including Jean Paul Sartre and Sigmund Freud. If you ever meet a UG graduate who did philosophy with me and you ask them which philosopher Mr. Kissoon was hooked on in the classroom, he will immediately tell you, Arthur Koestler.
I think Koestler had a colossal influence on my interpretation of the Human Condition and the nature of Homo sapiens. In his fantastic 1967 work, “The Ghost in the Machine” Koestler, in rather difficult language, explains the evolutionary mistake of Homo sapiens making the human an inherently flawed animal that would forever engage in extreme acts of violent cruelty.
Combining evolutionary biology, neuroscience and philosophy in “The Ghost in the Machine” Koestler argues that as evolution continued and Homo sapiens emerged, line faults occurred, meaning then that Homo sapiens has inbuilt mechanism that did not evolve properly. Man then is a biological error (the famous psychiatrist, Robert Jay Lifton in reviewing Koestler’s book used the term, “biological freak’) and the mistake cannot be corrected, simply because the brain has evolved into what it is inside of us.
Koestler explains that in the evolution of the brain the stages were not sequential. Homo sapiens has three types of brains in the skull and there is no elegant coordination between the three. The three function autonomously. What happens then is that Homo sapiens lives different lives at the same time.
Koestler describes the stages of the brain’s evolution beginning with its reptilian section. Then the part that came from lower mammals and the newest part that was human. In technical language, Koestler says the human part of the brain evolved with a greater speed and ended up superimposing itself on the older sections. The older two brains are referred to as emotional.
The human part of the brain is the intellectual compartment. The human being is a biological freak because the brain cannot coordinate the older dimensions and its newer parts.
From this understanding of Homo sapiens, Koestler went into an elaborate description of why the human being is more violent than all other animals and why the human being is a killing machine. Of course Koestler wrote his book in 1967 and since then his theories have been attacked, especially his concept of three autonomous brains.
Neurosurgeons and evolutionary biologists say that the newest brain is capable of more human functions than Koestler thought. For example, evolutionary biologists speak of an altruism gene. But as more discoveries are made about the brains and the genes, we are still to explain why Homo sapiens is the cruelest, least loving and most violent than any other animal species.
The above has been a long diversion from the main topic of this column – the murder of one of the world’s most iconic lions and Africa’s most beloved lion – Cecil. A middle class man from the United States went to Zimbabwe and lured Cecil away from his park where he roamed freely and played with visitors. He then killed Cecil, skinned and beheaded him. It took a member of the Homo sapiens species to have done that. This middle class man then boasted to the world of how he killed Cecil.
What was shocking is that this man didn’t pursue a wild animal running madly in the jungle. He knew Cecil was a tamed lion who was in his a zoological park with a tracking collar on him. He paid two park officials to help get Cecil away from the lion’s home. Cecil was bleeding for hours before the hunter shot him. It was a cruel death perpetrated by a biological freak that Arthur Koestler so graphically described in ‘the Ghost in the Machine” as long ago as 1967.
The world’s eyes are on the United States. Zimbabwe wants the US to extradite this freak, this biological mistake we call human being. It would be interesting to see what reasons the US offers for not handing over this sadistic hunter. At the moment, the hunter has gone into hiding. The hunter has become the hunted. I hope he is found and jailed for life.

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