How are you handling your inner chimp?
An African-British woman who claimed her company’s CEO was engaging in a racial slur when he asked her at a workshop about her ‘inner chimp’ has lost her case with the UK’s Employment Tribunal. The tribunal concluded that the comment related to a ‘mind management’ theory which “divides inner feelings into the rational (human) and irrational (chimp)”. It aims to help people “understand and manage their emotions and thoughts” and is widely credited with “helping [UK] Olympic gold medallists Victoria Pendleton and Sir Chris Hoy to victory on the cycling track”.
While the CEO’s comment seems unrelated to race in this instance, Africans are used to evolution-related derogatory comments. For example, black footballers commonly experience ‘monkey chants’ when one of them has the ball. With evolution increasingly dominating the culture, this is no surprise. Darwin himself wrote of darker-skinned groups as less evolved. The corollary to this is that they are supposedly closer to our alleged ape ancestors than other humans are.
The notion that human behaviour involves some irrational acts and impulses, and that there might be ways to better control these, is hardly revolutionary. Nor is it hard to understand biblically. Labelling such things as ‘chimp-derived’ is one more fact-free homage to evolution. It seems tailor-made to provide a convenient excuse for bad behaviour—‘evolution made me do it’.
In any case, it’s likely the British Olympians owe their cycling victory less to ‘chimp’ mind-control speculations than to the revolutionary new engineering design of their cycles. Ironically, perhaps, one of the leaders of the team that developed this much-lauded technology was design expert (and committed creationist) Prof. Stuart Burgess (creation.com/burgess).
- Duell, M., HR manager loses race discrimination case over ‘inner chimp’ comment, Daily Mail on msn.com, 14 Feb 2022.
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