"I viewed my fellow man not as a fallen angel, but as a risen ape"
About this Quote
Desmond Morris flips the moral script with a zoologist's smirk. Calling humans a "risen ape" punctures the comforting, self-flattering story that we're basically angels who've misplaced our halos. It's a line designed to make human exceptionalism feel parochial, even a little embarrassing. The provocation isn't just anti-religious; it's anti-sentimental. If you start from "fallen angel", you end up reading aggression, lust, vanity, and tribalism as corruptions of an intended purity. Start from "risen ape", and those same traits become legible as adaptations - ancient tools repurposed for modern life.
The subtext is a corrective to the mid-century habit of explaining human behavior as ideology first, biology last. Morris, writing in the era that produced The Naked Ape, aimed to drag the human animal back into the frame of ethology: status games, mating displays, coalition-building. "Risen" is the key word. He's not reducing people to brute instinct; he's insisting that our complexity is an evolutionary achievement rather than a spiritual downgrade. That reframes guilt into curiosity and moral panic into analysis.
It also carries a cultural jab. In the postwar West, buoyed by technological triumph and scarred by mechanized atrocity, the question was whether progress made us better or simply more efficient at being ourselves. Morris suggests the latter: civilization is an upgrade in tools, not a rewrite of the operating system.
The subtext is a corrective to the mid-century habit of explaining human behavior as ideology first, biology last. Morris, writing in the era that produced The Naked Ape, aimed to drag the human animal back into the frame of ethology: status games, mating displays, coalition-building. "Risen" is the key word. He's not reducing people to brute instinct; he's insisting that our complexity is an evolutionary achievement rather than a spiritual downgrade. That reframes guilt into curiosity and moral panic into analysis.
It also carries a cultural jab. In the postwar West, buoyed by technological triumph and scarred by mechanized atrocity, the question was whether progress made us better or simply more efficient at being ourselves. Morris suggests the latter: civilization is an upgrade in tools, not a rewrite of the operating system.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
|---|---|
| Source | Quote commonly attributed to Desmond Morris; listed on his Wikiquote page (Desmond Morris). |
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