Animal Stories, Part 1: Older Than God

January 14, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER

We pray from within our human condition, wanting some help in getting it together. We have done things we should not have done, as we have left undone things we should have done. We are capable of more compassion and courage than we often show.

We come to be opened by visions that can enlist us in larger causes and more caring actions. We come to hear stories that might take us into a deeper kind of integrity and reconnect us with the better angels of our nature.

They are simple dreams, yet they seem forever beyond us, for we do this week after week, and still we are not there.

And so once more, we pray that we may listen for – and perhaps even hear – words, stories and images of the kind of wholeness and authenticity we seek. For the fact that we know to seek it tells us we are capable of becoming that which we seek, of being who we want and need to be, and of treating others in ways that make us a blessing to our world, each in our own way.

It would seem so little that we seek. Yet it is so very much. And so we seek this warmer fullness with all our heart, mind and soul. Amen.

SERMON

we’re living in a time when popular religion has become too degraded to trust. Don’t take my word for it. Ask people like Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong, or Bill Moyers, or others who have always been friendly to religion but now have almost nothing good to say about it. They ask why sermons are so trivial, why the pulpits are so silent about our slide into fascism, the removal of laws like the Writ of Habeas Corpus or the suspension of the Posse Comitatus Act, the “signing statements” that let a president simply ignore any laws he doesn’t like, the illegal invasion of Iraq about which the media still mislead us by calling it a war, and a dozen other things that healthy religion should protest loudly and without ceasing. But the healthy fire is gone from the religions, it seems. They have too easily and eagerly sold out to power, or silenced themselves so as not to disturb anyone.

A whole host of critics are saying that the “God” of our Western religions has too often become little more than a mute hand puppet of the worst religious, political and military leaders among us. This includes not only Christian evangelical support of the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, or the predicted coming nuclear attacks on Iran. It also includes Israel’s murderous actions toward Palestinians and Muslims, and fundamentalist Islam’s sanctioning the murders of innocent people. There isn’t a God in any of these pictures worth worshiping. Too often today, religions call us to our lowest selves rather than helping us reach our higher possibilities.

While any religion, at its best, can be a positive personal and social force, many people feel that we’ve passed a point of no return with the popular Western religions. Christianity is virtually dead throughout Europe because once people saw how easily the churches sold out to the fascisms of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco, they never again trusted those who controlled the religious symbols. I think that will happen here. I also think the current vulgar rise of the religious right is a sunset that some have mistaken for a sunrise.

Books by Sam Harris (The End of Faith), Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Bishop Richard Holloway (Godless Morality: Keeping Religion Out of Ethics) are unanimous in their condemnation of the worst of religious delusions and hypocrisies, and these are always important critiques. Harris and Dawkins seem to think a shallow rationalism or scientism will meet the needs of humans, and it’s hard for me to understand their naivete. Bishop Holloway just argues that ethics should be a secular issue, and religion should be kept out of it because religious posturings spread heat but not light.

But it’s easier to criticize than it is to suggest a legitimate heir to these religions and their dangerous little gods.

We have been taught for centuries that religion offers the only adequate foundation for ethics, morality, and our sense of who we are and how we should live. How could we invent a new foundation to take their place? How could we invent a way to understand who we are and how we are to live that is more honest, more broad and deep, more empowering and more apt to point us in noble directions than the parodies of religion parading around today?

We seem to think, Well, here we are, and we need to know how to live, how to treat ourselves and others. So we look to philosophy, theology, psychology, law or great literature because they are, we think, our best sources of wisdom. I don’t think they are.

During November I visited the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, and visited with Frans de Waal, the primatologist who heads the center. I had read all of his books, and wanted to talk with him about animal behavior, morality and religion. During our talks, he said It isn’t possible that religion, philosophy, anthropology, psychology and the rest of our intellectual disciplines could tell us much that’s very deep or profound about who we are. They’re simply too new! (Frans de Waal) we’re not used to thinking of traditions that are two to four thousand years old as being “new,” but they are.

Think of it this way. If the time since the Big Bang is condensed into one year, then Cro Magnon – the first recognized human – has been here about one minute. One minute out of the 525,960 minutes in a year (365.25 days). And the 4,000 years of our recorded history, including the birth of all our existing religions and the invention of their gods, go back just one one-millionth of the way to the origins of life four billion years ago. Why would we think that stories invented in the last one-millionth of the year of Life could know or tell us much about who we are, how we came to be this way and how we should live? Four thousand years is only about two hundred generations. Yet “A hundred thousand generations ago our ancestors were still recognizably human, and ages of geological time stretch back before them.” (Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, 1992, p. 5) There is obviously a lot that was written in nature before we appeared.

We are all descended from that first life form, four billion years ago. We are all related. And we know the fact that we are all related has implications, has shaped much of who we are and how we think and desire and behave, because we can see them all around us. Some of these animal stories may sound pretty trivial, like knowing that thumb-sucking is a universal primate behavior around weaning time (Frans de Waal, Bonobo: the Forgotten Ape, p. 155). Or that some apes (bonobos), like humans, are overwhelmingly right-handed. Or think about territoriality by realizing that the dog that barks at you from behind its owners” fence is barking for the same reason the owners built the fence. OK, some of these are sort of Oprah-style stories.

But other animal stories seem to call us by name:

Snakes, for instance, are separated from us by about150 million years of evolution. Yet even among snakes there is a core of basic behavior – including dominance, territoriality, and sexual jealousy – that we have no trouble recognizing. (Carl Sagan & Anne Druyan Shadows for Forgotten Ancestors,1992, p. 204)

We recognize courtship rituals, male posturing, defense of territory, aggression and maternal instincts in thousands of species because we share them. Unless all these behaviors evolved independently and coincidentally a million times, we are all related, and our similar behaviors come through the same process as the fact that the wings of a bat, flippers of a whale and human hands have similar bone structures.

We all know instinctively to play much more gently with young children, but so do our family pets. But so do rats. People who study rats playing – there are a lot of jobs out there you never really thought of, aren’t there? – have said that when larger rats play-wrestle with smaller rats, they let the small rats win about half the time. And we’re not surprised to learn that among dogs, wolves, chimpanzees, monkeys and many other species, the adults have a different and gentler set of rules for playing with their young than they do when playing or fighting with older animals. We all seem to know the difference between “play time” and “real time.”

Some of our tenderest behaviors can be found in other animals that have been here practically forever. Crocodiles evolved during the age of the dinosaurs, about 200 million years ago, before monkeys or apes existed, even before mammals existed. A crocodile’s jaw muscles are very strong, its snout is long, and it can make a lunch of us in a minute. Yet we read about a crocodile mother taking all the newly-hatched little crocodiles into her mouth and carrying them to protect them – her babies looking out at the world through the spaces between her long teeth, and we know what she is doing and why she is doing it. She is caring for the life for which she feels a responsibility, just as we do. That reverence for life, that gentleness with the vulnerable ones for whom we feel responsible – these things are all older than the gods, older than mammals, older than we have time to count. And we are part of that grand panorama of life. We aren’t so much “children of God” – that’s awfully new and young – but we’re children of this world, of Life, with behaviors, wants, feelings, fears and yearnings that connect us with almost all other life on earth. That’s a pretty strong foundation.

This isn’t to say it’s all like Disneyworld. Nature, including human nature, isn’t all sweetness and light. Biologists have observed forcible rape not only in our species, but also in orangutans, dolphins, seals, bighorn sheep, wild horses, and some birds (ducks). (When Elephants Weep, p. 140)

And like boys throwing rocks at ducks in a pond, apes sometimes inflict pain for fun. In one game, juvenile laboratory chimpanzees enticed chickens behind a fence with bread crumbs. Each time the gullible chickens approached, the chimps hit them with a stick or poked them with a sharp piece of wire. The chimps invented this game to fight boredom. They refined it to the point that one ape would be the enticer, another the hit man. (Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape, p. 5)

But it’s worth noting that they did this out of sight of the adult chimps, who would have stopped it. Even the juveniles knew this was wrong, according to the moral boundaries of their troop. It was something they would not do in front of the adults.

So it isn’t all Disneyworld. But the dark sides of animal behavior can also show us important things about our own dark sides. For example, can we learn something from knowing that the only two species which routinely expand their territory by killing the males in their target territories are chimpanzees and humans? And what happens when we combine this with the fact that chimpanzees are our closest living relatives, sharing more than 98% of our DNA? We pretend we kill for freedom, democracy or the American Way, but the chimps do the same things, without pretending to such high ideals. It looks more like we use language to help us rationalize doing the same selfish and vicious behaviors which we would think brutish and beneath us if we saw chimpanzees doing them.

All of this is part of the picture of who and what we are: the emotional structure and behavioral habits that show our profound kinship with more animal species than we can name.

In this extended series of sermons on Animal Stories, I want to sketch that bigger story of who we are and how we came to be this way. That story is grounded in hundreds of millions of years of evolution still shaping us, and it can offer some insights not from religion but from life, in response to our deepest and most enduring questions about our meaning and purpose.

The primatologist Frans de Waal is clearly right: morality, or an adequate understanding of who we are and how we should live, is not likely to come from religion – it’s just too new. Religions and gods arose as vehicles for carrying our hopes and fears forward in our culture. And when we study the origins of gods, they didn’t have very elegant births. Yahweh, the main deity in the Hebrew Scriptures (aka the “Old Testament”) was modeled on a tribal chief, and given the tasks of a tribal chief: prescribing behaviors, demanding obedience, rewarding those who served him and punishing or killing those who didn’t. That kind of a god isn’t likely to lead us toward very high places, then or now. Today, the question is whether religions are very good vehicles for leading us to our highest possibilities. Often, They’re not. Often, they teach irrelevant trivialities grounded in fear, while all around us, there are stories that can move us more deeply and show us more clearly who we are and how we should and shouldn’t live.

For a simple example, scientists have learned that rats are reluctant to press a lever to get food if doing so will also deliver an electric shock to a companion. They will invariably press the lever that will not deliver the shock, and some will even forgo food rather than hurt their friends. (Jeffrey M. Masson, Dogs never Lie, p. 95). Similar experiments with rhesus monkeys had even more dramatic results. One monkey stopped pulling the lever for five days, and another one for twelve days after witnessing shock delivery to a companion. These monkeys were literally starving themselves to avoid inflicting pain upon another. (Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers, p. 29, from Masserman et al. 1964) They felt an identity with that other life, and automatically volunteered for discomfort or danger to protect it.

Think of the similarities here to the story in the news last week about Wesley Autrey, the man who dove between the tracks of a New York subway, risking his life to save the life of a stranger. Doesn’t it share the same feeling for life similar to ours, the same instinctive drive to protect it? Mr. Autrey was treated like a hero, but what he said was, “I don’t feel like I did something spectacular; I just saw someone who needed help. I did what I felt was right.” (NY Times, 3 January 2007)

And how different is this from the story some of you will remember from 1996, when a gorilla in Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo saved a 3-year-old boy who fell into the gorilla enclosure? That gorilla made the cover of Time magazine that year as one of Time’s “People of the Year.” It was ironic. On the one hand, we celebrated this gorilla mother because we identified her compassion with the highest of human behaviors, the kind to which we aspire. On the other hand, her behavior seemed to set her apart from the 250 million Americans who didn’t make the cover of Time for our behaviors. And as one gorilla expert said, her behavior could only surprise people who didn’t know a thing about gorillas. (Swiss gorilla expert Jurg Hess, quoted by Frans de Waal in The Ape and the Sushi Master, p. 79)

It wasn’t high human behavior; it wasn’t religious behavior; it was compassionate animal behavior. And compare the gorilla’s behavior with some of our own society’s behavior that year. In 1996, our sanctions against Iraq caused the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi children, our economic policies made beggars and prostitutes of children in third-world countries, and the hateful voices of religious charlatans again called for the persecution of gays, lesbians, infidels, and pretty much every other group not in their clubs. Who would you want your children influenced by: a million religious bigots, politicians, economists and corporations turning the world’s children into beggars, prostitutes and corpses, or a gorilla who, with her own baby on her back, saved the baby of parents from another species because, I suspect, she simply felt it was the right thing to do? No wonder she made the cover of Time.

In some ways, this may seem an unusual sermon series. I”m not interested in leading you to God here – or any of the gods. I”m interested in leading us back to a much older, deeper and nobler place: the place within us that has created all the gods of history, to put us in touch with that spirit of life that can trump every little god, every self-serving religious or political ideology, that we have created. I want us to see far older and more empowering connections to all of life, the life coursing through us and the life sometimes carrying us and sometimes battering us and the kind of life we could have – not with more money or power, but with more integrity and authenticity, more caring and courage.

It is about opening us to an emotional awareness of life: ours and others. We’ll see, in these animal stories, the whole range of human behaviors shared by thousands of animals. We’ll find many stories of empathy, some of which will take your breath away. We’ll identify with chimpanzees, whose social expectations are constantly undermining the tyranny that the alpha males and their helpers are always trying to inflict. In some important ways, our species, like the chimpanzees, has a deeply subversive streak – the streak in which you find most of our liberals. We’ll see that creativity extends far beyond our species, to chimpanzees, dolphins and others. We’ll hear of pigeons who can identify Impressionistic or Cubist painters better than most of us can. We’ll see that chimpanzee politics is so identical to human politics that we won’t be surprised to learn that when the Republicans took over Congress in 1994, Newt Gingrich assigned a book on Chimpanzee Politics to all new congressional representatives, so they could understand the nature of politics. And always the lessons will be religious, in search of better answers to the questions of what kind of a moral order we are part of, and how we should behave. Those lessons can come from many places, including thousands of animal stories. Here’s a final story.

During his final years in exile, Napoleon Bonaparte wrote about how, at the end of the Italian campaign, a dog sat beside the body of his fallen master, licking his hand. Napoleon could never get this out of his mind, and at the end of his days wrote this:

Perhaps it was the spirit of the time and the place that affected me. But I assure you no occurrence of any of my other battlefields impressed me so keenly. I halted on my tour to gaze on the spectacle, and to reflect on its meaning.

This soldier, I realized, must have had friends at home and in his regiment; yet he lay there deserted by all except his dog”. I had looked on, unmoved, at battles which decided the future of nations. Tearless, I had given orders which brought death to thousands. Yet, here I was stirred, profoundly stirred, stirred to tears. And by what? By the grief of one dog. (Jeffrey M. Masson, Dogs never Lie, pp. 165-166, from Lemish’s War Dogs, p. 4)

I”m appealing to those parts of us that reacted immediately and emotionally to this story and others like it. That part of us that can get choked up and inspired by Napoleon’s tears, gorillas saving humans or humans saving humans. That compassionate potential has been in us for tens of millions of years, and we share it with ten thousand other species.

The Romans used to say that noble humans lived as though they were living “under the gaze of eternity,” by which they meant that we should live as though all the noblest and most sensitive people who ever lived were watching us, then do only what we would do in front of that audience. I want to expand the circle to include many, many animals whose stories you’ll be hearing. Those animals are also part of that gaze of eternity. We should act in ways that are worthy of them, too – especially if we’re going to have the conceit of calling them “lower” animals!

Just listen to these words from Napoleon’s story again, as he stood looking at the fallen soldier:

Those tears over the grief of one dog put Napoleon in closer touch with his noblest traits than causing the deaths of thousands. The empathy and compassion that can reconnect all of us with our larger selves are far older than God. Many of them are as old as life itself. And they call to us, they call us back to our best selves and back to life. Let us pray that we can learn to hear their calls.