You can break a monkey very easily if you have the right equipment. Specifically, you need an item called the Pit of Despair. The Pit comes in two sizes — baby and adult — but both share the same basic design, summarised by inventor Harry Harlow like this: “troughs constructed of stainless steel, open at the top, with sides that slope inward to a rounded bottom that forms one-half of a cylinder.” Once your monkey is contained in its Pit, it cannot escape. It is the ultimate in solitary confinement.
The effects of the Pit are profound, and lasting. “You could take a perfectly happy monkey, drop it into the chamber, and bring out a perfectly hopeless animal within half a week,” explained one historian of Harlow’s work. But while you can’t fault the efficiency of the Pit, you might still be wondering about its utility. Why, exactly, would anyone want to go around psychologically destroying monkeys? And Harlow didn’t stop with the Pit of Despair: his creations also include the Tunnel of Terror, the Wire Mother and the Rape Rack.
The primate experiments Harlow did in the mid-twentieth century are painful to read about, and more painful to watch, if you search for the footage on YouTube. His aim, he said, was “to facilitate production of depression or other emotionally abnormal behaviours” in order to study them, but that barely describes the total dysfunction he created: monkeys raised in this kind of deprivation were so socially incompetent, they didn’t even know how to mate (hence the Rape Rack, since this was before artificial insemination was an option). When females had babies, they either neglected or — in some cases — attacked them.
One way to understand Harlow’s work is that he was interested in love. He studied it by removing it entirely from the lives of his monkeys. He forced them to be absolutely individual, entirely alone, and in this condition they ceased to be anything like their natural selves. Without other monkeys, there could effectively be no singular monkey. Even at the remove of all these decades, there’s something shocking about this insight — about what it means for humans, as well as the monstrous way Harlow came to it.
As primates go, humans are bigger and smarter than Harlow’s monkeys, but still primates. We still need other humans more than we need almost anything else. As a species, we can survive in the most inhospitable conditions. We’ve colonised blazing deserts and sub-zero wastelands. We can even live in space, albeit for short stretches. But what we can’t do is live on our own. Isolation is, simply, dehumanising. Even Ayn Rand, empress of individualism, needed to surround herself with acolytes to really feel that she was Ayn Rand.
When it’s done to prisoners, it drives them to self-harm and suicide. Eventually, they experience “social atrophy”, and like Harlow’s monkeys, lose the ability to interact with other people at all. In the considerably less horrific privations of lockdown, people have still felt the lack of casual contact as a debilitating loss — the absence of those seemingly trivial “weak tie” connections with people you know a bit but not all that well, the lack of occasion for smalltalk with a stranger. Those who seek solitude would still prefer someone to share it with: monasteries began when all the hermits in the desert started coming together to pray.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe