Dr. Pierce Reviews Robert Ardrey's Trilogy

Ardrey Books Pack Ideological Punch

by Dr. William L. Pierce

African Genesis, Robert Ardrey (pictured), 380 pages, softback.
The Territorial Imperative, Robert Ardrey, 390 pages, softback.
The Social Contract, Robert Ardrey, 405 pages, softback.

ROBERT ARDREY’S TRILOGY can without exaggeration be described as the most important piece of popular writing of the last few decades. These books pose such a deadly threat to the reigning orthodoxy that it is almost incredible that they have not only gone through dozens of printings by major publishers during the past 13 years, but that for a while they were actually sold openly in paperback editions at newsstands all over the country.

All three of Ardrey’s books deal with the same basic subject, although each emphasizes different aspects. That subject is animal behavior, studied for the sake of the light it throws on human nature.

Although Ardrey is extraordinarily well-informed on his chosen topic, he is not a scientist himself; prior to African Genesis he was a professional playwright. All the scientific results he reports are the work of others; Ardrey’s great contribution is his enormously effective popularization of research which otherwise might have remained accessible only to scholars.

Beyond this, Ardrey has dared to draw certain profoundly important implications about human nature from the animal studies he has reported.

In African Genesis, the first book of his trilogy, Ardrey presents a convincing case for the animal origins of man’s instinctual drives for territory and dominance. He describes the evidence which indicates man’s descent from a weapon-using, carnivorous predator, Australopithecus africanus, and he relates this to human aggression and man’s instinctive attachment to offensive weapons.

In The Territorial Imperative he greatly expands his thesis of the animal origins of human territoriality.

The Social Contract focuses on certain aspects of group evolution which have important implications for understanding human social behavior.

Ardrey’s books strike a heavy blow at the humanistic basis of neo-liberalism, i.e., at the doctrine of man as the center of the universe, occupying a special and separate position in Nature, independent of the laws governing the rest of God’s creatures.

The liberal has invented a special category, a mental box, called humanity, and anything that is allowed inside acquires thereby an exalted status. It is bestowed with “human dignity.” It is no longer a part of Nature, and a great gulf separates it from all other animate beings.

The liberal has used certain pseudo-scientific arguments to assure himself that this gulf is bottomless: only man, and no other creatures, can use or make tools, the liberal has falsely asserted. Only man, and no other creatures, can use language for communication. Only man, and no other creatures, can reason.

Viewed in the perspective of this practically infinite height of man above other creatures, the difference in human quality, in worth, between a philosopher-king and a slobbering cretin seems small in comparison.

A Newton, a Shakespeare, a Beethoven is, from this viewpoint, essentially on a level with any African Negro. The one might be a trifle smarter than the other, but what is that in the light of the fact that they both have “human dignity”? Thus, the liberals’ obstinate belief in the essential equality of all men.

Now Ardrey has come along and filled up the gulf between man and the rest of Nature. Now we can see man, not as a separate being high on a plateau above other beings, but as a part of Nature’s continuum.

Once we have recognized this continuum, and discarded the notion of a huge quantum difference between man and non-man, the scales fall from our eyes and we can see that the various races of man occupy separate levels in Nature’s hierarchy, just as do the various subhuman species. This hierarchy extends from the protozoon of the primal slime up through more and more complex non-human life forms, through the lower primates to the manlike apes, from the apes to the more primitive and less-evolved races of man, and finally to the higher human races.

Consequently, the concept of human dignity becomes a relative thing instead of an absolute, while “equality” becomes an absurdity.

Carleton Coon

This is entirely in accord with the evidence assembled by others which establishes the separate evolution of the various human races, with the crossing of the subhuman-human threshold occurring at different times. Carleton Coon presents the evidence in his monumental Origin of Races, for example, that the primitive Australoid and Congoid (Negro) races did not cross this threshold until hundreds of thousands of years after the more highly developed Caucasoid (White) and Mongoloid races.

Ardrey’s books greatly enhance the impact of books like Coon’s by forcefully reminding us just how close are the myriad evolutionary roots in the animal kingdom of man’s instinctive individual and social behavior. They thus bridge the animal-human gap and throw human racial differences into proper perspective. Moreover, they accentuate for us the concept of ongoing evolutionary development.

We can more readily see man, and especially Aryan man, not so much as a final end in himself but more as Nature’s highest achievement so far in an unending development toward higher levels of existence, levels which will eventually surpass man’s present state—provided the White race does not manage to commit suicide first.

Ardrey has not only simplified and made available to the general public the findings of the animal behaviorists and other scientists, but he has done it in a way which goes right around a number of mental roadblocks set up by the equalitarian brainwashers.

William Shockley

Dr. William Shockley can explain his evidence of the genetic basis of Negro mental inferiority until he’s blue in the face, and no matter how simple he makes it the boobs won’t get the picture. They know he’s a “racist.”

They’ve been warned to watch out for him. He’s trying to prove Blacks are inferior, and every right-thinking product of the American educational system knows that couldn’t possibly be.

So, if they don’t curse him and try to shout him down, they smile tolerantly while he preaches his “racism,” thus showing that they ‘re liberal enough to let even a crackpot have freedom of speech. But their minds remain closed as tight as a clam. Heresy shall not prevail!

But a nice, liberal boy like Ardrey has no such problems. Promoting “racism”? Why, nothing could be farther from his intentions! He abhors racists.

He circulates easily in the company of Jews, Blacks, homosexuals, communists, and the degenerates of the New York “art” world. This is implicit in all three of his books. He even mentions it explicitly in a couple of places.

And so, while the mind-molders of media, church, and school zealously guard the front door of ideological orthodoxy, guns at the ready and wary eyes peering through chinks in the shutters, Ardrey calmly sails in the back door and mows them all down.

A large part of the effectiveness of his work lies in the fact that he has not really told his readers where all the things he is teaching them are leading. He has not explicitly drawn the ultimate conclusions. He has simply started the reader on the right path and depended on Nature to take its course.

The only reason so many have been willing to start out on Ardrey’s path is that they have not been told where it ends. If they had, they couldn’t be dragged onto it.

The way Ardrey has done it, it all seems so harmless. He is a charming writer, his subject is one of great popular interest, and it is easy to set out for a nice, Sunday stroll with him, learning a bit about the birds and the bees and why they behave the way they do.

When the stroll is over, the entire foundation of the neoliberal worldview has been expertly undermined. It only waits a spark set to the powder Ardrey has packed in there to blow the entire liberal ideology to dust.

For many readers, of course, the spark of understanding never comes. But for enough others it does so that Ardrey’s three books are unsurpassed in their effectiveness at countering the lunatic propaganda which has pushed the White race so close to the brink of oblivion.

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From Attack! No. 28, 1974

transcribed by Vanessa Neubauer from the book The Best of Attack! and National Vanguard, edited by Kevin Alfred Strom. Source: http://nationalvanguard.org/2014/01/ardrey-books-pack-ideological-punch/