If we look closely at monkeys’ behavior, we’ll learn about ourselves

A devout cowboy loses his beloved Bible out on the range — so the story goes.

A few weeks later, a chimpanzee shows up with the treasured book under his arm. The cowboy can't believe it. He takes the book from the chimp, raises his eyes to heaven and shouts: “It’s a miracle! A miracle!”

“Not really,” the chimp says. “Your name is written inside the cover.”

It’s an Aesop’s fable of sorts but I keep wondering what drove the monkey to show up. Did he know what it felt like to lose something and wanted to save someone grief? Do monkeys see the world that way?

Why didn’t he throw the book away? Was he devout too? And where’d he get the address! How’d he get there, Uber? Can a monkey be in charge of his own destiny?

These are all questions of political economy — the energy a person uses to manage his life — and are based in how a monkey feels about things and acts accordingly. It always includes a sense of justice.

I can say something intelligent about these things now because I just finished reading (studying) Frans de Waal’s new extraordinary book “Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves.” It just came out in March (W.W. Norton).

If someone asked me to describe the book in a sentence, I’d say it’s about the inner life of animals: how they feel about themselves and others, the pains they suffer and those they inflict, as they negotiate their needs in life in a community of others seeking the same thing.

I started reading de Waal 30 years ago, impressed with his desire to understand the psycho-social life of animals — especially chimps, bonobos, and capuchins — and how his findings always wind up pointing a finger at the human race.

“Mama’s Last Hug,” which has gotten rave reviews, is about the last days of an agèd chimp, Mama, who was once a major player in the community in which she lived. At the very end, she tenderly rubs the face of her friend (and collaborating-researcher of 40 years), Jan van Hooff, with her old wrinkled hand. Jan had come to see her off; she was a relative.

I get the sense Mama could feel the loss her friend would feel when she was gone — like a cherished Bible.

Mama’s, and all the other stories de Waal has told in his decades-long exposé of justice among animals, are always about the animals but, again, the morals of their stories keep pointing at us.

One of the reasons I liked de Waal in the beginning was that he had tapped into the work of the great Russian/World Citizen, Geographer/Gandhi-like anarchist and social theorist, Peter Kropotkin, especially his landmark “Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution,” which appeared in 1902.

As a young man, Kropotkin, assigned to Siberia in government service, set out to test Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” principle only to discover that living beings embraced another ethic — mutual aid — when members of a community gather around those in need to alleviate their suffering. Those who are best at it look for nothing in return.

Kropotkin saw that, when mutual aid was practiced, the persons and groups involved stood a greater chance of making it to the future as well as enjoying quality-of-life now. Win-win for everyone.

That’s all I’ll say about Kropotkin except to add that every high school student in America who takes Biology or Earth Science — or whatever their current versions are — should be required to read (and be able to discuss intelligently) the basic tenets of “Mutual Aid,” clarifying, for example, how Kropotkin and Darwin converged or differed on the chances of a society making it to the future.

I might add that Darwin was perplexed by the mutual aid thing: Why would anyone live for the benefit of another? And would a chimp return a Bible to a fellow chimp just like he did for the cowboy?

De Waal and his colleague Sarah Brosnan homed in on these questions by asking members of their capuchin monkey community how they felt when someone treated them unjustly — being defined as less and being paid less in return.

Political scientists would call it the unjust distribution of resources (rewards, compensations), when one gets less for doing the very same thing someone else did, and under the same conditions.

De Waal and Brosnan situated two capuchins, who are ace barterers, in side-by-side cages so that each could see what was going on with the other.

A pebble was thrown into the cage of monkey A — let’s call him Arthur — to retrieve. He easily did and was given a cucumber slice as a reward.

The researchers then threw a pebble in the cage of monkey B — we’ll call him Bob — and Bob retrieved the pebble and got a cucumber slice just like Arthur. Things were going well.

Then the researchers repeated the experiment but with a hitch: This time, when Arthur retrieved the pebble, he was given a big fat juicy grape, a lot better than a cucumber chip.

But when Bob performed the same task, he got the usual cucumber chip. He got worked up: Cucumber? Where’s the grape! Arthur got a grape!

Bob, no pun intended, had gone ape.

The experiment was conducted with many groups of monkeys over time. Those who got the short end of the stick, the lesser-prized rewards, generally got testy; some hurled the pebble back at the researcher; some whipped the cucumber at him: How dare you!

Such anger grows out of a sense of being defined as inferior: doing the same thing as someone else and getting less for it. We look at what the other got and are wounded.

It’s like when Thanksgiving rolls around — maybe it’s just the kids — and the slices of pie are meted out; we look around and see we got the smallest. The feeling is always: Why do I get the short end of the stick? Where’s my grape!

This kind of reactive anger and resentment exists in all social institutions in the United States today. A lot of people see what a lot of other people are getting and get fired up with injustice. They start flinging their cucumber chips back at society and the more-crazed do it with a spray of an AK-47.

I sometimes talk to these fired-up souls — with a sympathetic and open mind, I really want to know — and have discovered that, after a sentence or two of outrage, they are unable to describe what’s going on in the feeling department.

They’re can’t articulate envy, jealousy, and the injustice they’re feeling: analytically and therapeutically.

A few weeks ago, Congresswoman Katie Porter from California, quizzed Jamie Dimon, chairman and chief executive officer of JPMorgan, during his appearance at the House Financial Services Committee.

Dimon had just received a $31 million juicy grape from his company’s reward-distribution center, called a bonus.

Porter greeted Dimon cordially but then homed in on why some monkeys he worked with got cucumber chips of $16.50 an hour while he got his $31 million carload of  grapes.

Porter asked: Are you aware that, when the resource-distribution-center in your company offers many of your monkey-colleagues cucumber chips worth $16.50 an hour, they are barely able to survive? That they are flooded with constant anxiety over how to make ends meet?

Watch Dimon’s response on Youtube: he mumbles, he homina-homina-homina’s like Ralph Kramdem.

If a consulting monkey was called in to set that reward-distribution system straight, he’d say: The great big fat unequal grape-cucumber chip compensation system — $31 million versus $16.50 an hour — is flooding society with hordes of short-stick-enders who, filled with anger and rage, go rogue, and sometimes in beastly ways.

But, as we know, when some monkeys hear the words “equal distribution of resources,” they go ape and, quite strangely, among them are those trapped in a $16.50 an hour cucumber-chip existence.

That is one reason America is not happy these days. Would taking the blindfold off the eyes of Justice be a first step toward healing?