Animal Stories, Part 5: I'll Have What She's Having

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February 18, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

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PRAYER:

Let us listen for the right voices.

There are so many voices around and within us, it’s hard to know which ones to listen to.

The strong and loud sounds are voices of authority, voices of power, telling us who to be and what to do, and expecting obedience. These voices come from everywhere – the political and military war cries, the voices of our worst religious leaders parroting those war cries, or voices of friends who are too certain to be right. Jesus was right when he said the road that leads to the destruction of our souls is broad, and many take it.

But there are always other voices, as well. The still, small voices of those better angels of our nature who counsel us toward compassion and justice. This is the narrow path that leads to our authentic selves and a compassionate world, and few ever follow the narrow path.

Let us be among those on the narrow road to understanding rather than condemnation, love rather than bigotry and hate.

Those voices of the better angels of our nature who call us are few in number. But let us listen to them, and let us join them. Let us too become angels of our better nature.

Amen.

SERMON: I’ll Have What She’s Having

The purpose of this series of animal stories is to do two things. First is to say that our evolutionary story as animals, related to all other life on earth, is the oldest, deepest and most adequate framework for understanding who we are, both good and bad. The second purpose is to say that we can also find in this story better clues than we can find through religion, philosophy, psychology or any other cultural creation on how we should live, what we owe to other life and to the future. I’m suggesting that we can answer the two most basic religious questions – Who are we, and How should we live – in empowering and challenging ways from within the oldest life story of all: the story of life on earth, of which we are a part but not the pinnacle.

In the first four parts, I’ve shared animal stories showing that many of our higher moral abilities have roots millions of years old. Our need for connection with others, our empathy, our ability to care for other life – all this can be found, to small or large extent, in species going back a hundred million years or more.

So why, if we’re so great, is the world in such a mess? And why are we still trying to figure out who we are and how we should live? The next few weeks we’ll look at this from a few different angles. Today I want to go back to some of the roots of our empathy to find that those roots contain both what is most promising and what is most problematic. We are born both good and evil, capable of being either a brave blessing or a cowardly curse to others. Not all of it is good, but it’s all natural.

One of the things that can either help us or hurt us is the effect of the cultures we have created. A couple centuries ago, the philosopher Rousseau said we’re born good and pure, but made bad by culture. I’m not saying that. I’m saying we’re born with the whole range of possibilities, but culture seems to strengthen the worst of our abilities, as much or more than it strengthens the best of them.

Last week I talked about the experiment in which people were asked to watch photographs of facial expressions, and involuntarily copied the expressions they saw. They did so even if the photos were shown subliminally, for only a few milliseconds. Even though we’re not aware of having seen the facial expression, our facial muscles nevertheless echo it instantly, without our even being aware of it. (Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape, p. 177) This is a measure of how deep the roots of our empathy go into the past.

We are social animals, which means we are not isolated, not individual. In balancing our need for personal integrity with our need for social acceptance, the latter wins most of the time: in dress, speech, behavior, etc. For social animals, our social identity is part of our identity, and we conform far more than not.

So we have empathy, but it starts with caring what others think, feel and do, and that is the catch-22.

There are stories showing this from animals separated from us by millions and millions of years of evolution.

For instance, an experiment was done with female guppies on the “I’ll have what sHe’s having” theme. They put two males into the tank of female guppy #1, and she prefers bachelor #1. Then they take the same two males and put them into the adjoining tank with a second female, while the first female watches. The second female (who didn’t see the first part of the experiment) prefers bachelor #2. Then they put these same two males back in the tank with the first female – and now she also prefers bachelor #2. So the I-want-what-she-wants principle had the power of reversing a female’s independent preferences known from earlier tests. (Frans de Waal, Good-Natured, p. 71) The fish who really liked Bachelor #1 chose #2 because it’s what her friend was having.

This reliance on the opinion of others is hard-wired. It is nature, not culture. It’s biology, rather than the local variations on our biological tendencies that make up our many different cultures and subcultures.

In a similar experiment, two Italian scientists trained an octopus to attack either a red or a white ball. After the training, another octopus was allowed to watch four demonstrations from an adjoining tank. The second octopus closely watched the actions of the first one with head and eye movements. When the same balls were dropped in the second animal’s tank, he attacked the ball of the same color as the first octopus. (Frans de Waal, Good-Natured, p. 71)

What both experiments show us is that even animals with minuscule brains compared to primates notice how members of their own species relate to the environment. The octopus identified with the other octopus and the female guppy with the other female guppy, both letting their counterpart influence their behavior. (Frans de Waal, Good-Natured, p. 71) It’s important to remember that the first guppy and the first octopus weren’t right. They didn’t know which was the better mate or the better enemy. They were certain, but they weren’t right. Choosing what she is having comes from a drive to conform that goes so far back in the evolutionary time line that it includes not only us, apes, monkeys and most mammals, but even guppies and octopuses. We imitate. We want to fit in. We want what has been established in our little culture as the norm, for better and worse.

You all know the saying “Monkey see, monkey do.” When we apply it to humans, we mean they are following low, kind of primitive, rules, just aping others, as though that’s behavior that stops with the monkeys. In fact, we ape others better than perhaps any other animal. There was an experiment done in the 1930s, one of the very first where humans tried to raise a chimpanzee as a human. A family (the Kelloggs) had a baby boy, and a young chimpanzee. They thought that raising them together would give the chimpanzee a chance to sort of leap ahead on the evolutionary scale by using their “monkey see monkey do” tendencies to copy the behaviors and styles of the more advanced animal represented by their son. But they had to cancel the experiment because their son was aping the chimp rather than the other way around. He was making chimpanzee pant-hoots and food calls, and when meal time came around they found they were beginning to have two chimpanzees at the table. We ape apes better than they ape us. Human see, human do. I’ll have what sHe’s having.

This tendency to care what others think, want and do carries over into many areas of our lives. In a very interesting and revealing test of other animals – this time human animals – volunteers were tested on a mental-rotation task. These people were asked to decide whether certain three-dimensional objects, when differently rotated, were the same or different. These can be hard to figure out, if you’ve tried one of these tests. In the study, the volunteers were informed of the answer selected by four other participants. These other participants, though, were really actors. Before actual testing began, the volunteers and the actors were put together for a kind of social hour, to get to know each other a little, and establish a little social bonding. During the testing phase, the actors offered false answers half the time. Scientists expected that at least some of the volunteers would go along with the actors” incorrect choices. But instead they found that people went along with the group of actors feeding them wrong answers 41% of the time, far more than when computers instead of live actors were giving them the wrong answers. The volunteers were swayed by what their human companions had to say, although they had just met these people a short while before! (Barbara J. King, Evolving God, pp. 171-172) How much more powerful is the group’s preferences when we know them well? Ask anyone who has ever been in a family, a sorority or fraternity, a club, a church, a political party or a business. Even when They’re wrong, we’ll often have what They’re having.

But this test of people being misled by actors had another finding, just as important. Not everyone conformed. About 59% of the people did not follow the wrong answers suggested to them by the actors. Yet what happened to these nonconformists is fascinating: their brains got emotional. That is, the brain activity of these independent thinkers reflected emotional stress. This is a red-letter finding, because it says that such independence is linked to an “emotional load associated with standing up for one’s belief,” as the scientists put it. Social involvement may alter a person’s perception of the world, and it may be emotionally costly for humans to go against the crowd. (Barbara J. King, Evolving God, p. 172)

Or to put it more simply, you pay an emotional price for not going along with the crowd, as every one of you knows from your own experience. And no matter how proud we may be of our independent actions, the emotional stress hurts more than most of us want to admit. Those who make their living by molding public opinion know this, which is why marketing campaigns and political ads make such a point of showing that the people who use their product or vote for their candidate are always happy, healthy, attractive and thin people: just like we”d like to be. Advertising and other efforts to shape our opinion, to make us want what they want us to want, are now spending about a trillion dollars a year, much of it tax-deductible, so they have not only won in influencing what we’ll buy and often who we’ll vote for, but have figured out how to make us pay for it!

It’s important to remember the fact that a whole culture does something does not mean it’s good. Some cultural innovations are useless, even inane. An American who has worked for twenty years on a mountain overlooking Kyoto, tells of the curious habit of Japanese macaques of rubbing stones together. The monkeys often come down from the mountain to a flat, open area where they receive food from park wardens and tourists. Every day, they collect handfuls of pebbles or small rocks. They carry these to a quiet spot, where they rub or strike them together or spread them out in front of them, scattering them, gathering them up again, and so on”. Young monkeys learn this totally useless activity from peers, siblings, and their mothers, resulting in a widespread tradition within this particular troop”. This behavior is transmitted from generation to generation through education, which is one definition of what a “culture” is. Part of the culture of this particular troop of monkeys is the useless but apparently enjoyable activity of playing with stones. (Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master, p. 230)

You can make your own mental list of things we do that are entertaining or familiar but useless, but you might be surprised how long the list becomes.

I’d put this in theological terms, too, by saying that it’s worth asking what our actions serve. Do they only serve the strange habits of our social group? Are we just conforming without thinking, having what our kind of people have? Because it matters what we are serving with our behaviors, especially in human societies.

It may be easier to see in animal stories, so let’s look at chimpanzees. We hear stories of male chimpanzees doing terrible violence to one another, sometimes killing rival males. Male chimps have been observed testing a series of rocks or big sticks to find the one that could make the best weapon, then hiding it behind their backs, going up to a rival male and using the weapon to attack or kill him.

And females are routinely seen going up to the males and taking their weapons away from them. One observer watched a female disarm a male six times in a row (Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics, p. 23).

We hear these stories, and we react differently to them. The story of males with weapons is frightening, unpleasant, and of course hits close to home when we consider the violence of our own species – whether in gang fights or the armed invasion of whatever country has the oil or strategic location we want.

But we react differently to the stories of females disarming the warriors. Here is non-violent behavior in animals separated from us by about three million years, giving us a sense of how deep these more compassionate strains run in us.

These stories are about serving two different things. The males are serving the power of those alpha creatures who are claiming to have the power, and willing to inflict it on anyone who gets in their way. The females are serving not only peace, but also the health and stability of the whole group, rather than the entitlements of those claiming power. The females are smaller than the males and could easily be beaten or killed by them, though that doesn’t seem to happen when They’re disarming males or stopping fights. The females – and it seems that even the males recognize this – are serving what we would call a higher authority: that of health, harmony and peace for the majority rather than the whims of the powerful minority. This looks like the beginnings of a kind of proto-democracy.

But we must always deal with our dual nature here. We have – or at least some in our species have – these deep senses of empathy and compassion, and when we act out of them we can change the course of history for the better, bending it toward the more compassionate. But we do it, often, at an emotional price. And the reason is that the drive to serve those higher and more compassionate ideals is usually weaker than the drive to fit in. That’s why our moral and ethical heroes are so celebrated – because they are also so rare. We are better at imitating than at innovating; better at conforming than at raising the standards that others don’t want raised.

The fact is that in social animals like our species, the pull of social conformity is one of the strongest pulls we have – usually far more powerful than our sense that we should do the right thing when it means going against the crowd. The pull of a social network is the single strongest factor in why people convert to a new religion or join an established religious group. People become attached to those who already belong, and are drawn in. This social pull far exceeds the lure of doctrine or ideology. As a sociologist who has been doing this research for a long time (Rodney Stark) says, “When people retrospectively describe their conversions, they tend to put the stress on theology”. [But] we [researchers] could remember when most of them regarded the religious beliefs of their new set of friends as quite odd.” (Barbara J. King, Evolving God, p. 174)

Conformity often trumps truth in the sciences as it also does in politics and religion. When the medical school at the University of Michigan changed from homeopathic to allopathic medicine a century ago (from about 1875 to 1922), neither homeopaths nor their spouses were invited to social events as the allopaths gained control. While both models still claim millions of cures, the “I’ll have what sHe’s having” syndrome operated there, as it does in many scientific disciplines. There is a dominant paradigm, the expectation to conform with it, and both exclusion and an emotional price to pay for not doing so. From within the paradigm, it seems like a victory for truth or science; from outside, it is seen only as a victory for conformity. Around the world, after all, more people have their symptoms relieved by homeopathic medicine than by western allopathic models.

This same pressure to conform exists in every human activity from politics and religion to fashion and music. We are as hard-wired as the guppies to notice and care about the tastes of others, and there is a strong and deep urge to conform, to want what They’re having, because that’s the way we fit in. Jesus urged people to take the narrow path, the harder path that almost nobody takes, and he knew it was unlikely that many people would do it.

So one answer to why we aren’t as empathic and compassionate as some of the stories of animals we”ve heard, or the stories of our greatest saints and heroes, is because we are a species that wants to fit in, wants to conform, that gets emotionally stressed when we don’t fit in, and so the biases of the lowest common denominator of our groups often restrict our compassion to the lowest level of the group’s compassion.

Caring what others feel and need is a double-edged sword. If we follow the biases of the majority, it will often cut through our sense of empathy and compassion, and reduce us to the lowest common denominator of caring. That’s almost never very attractive or good.

But it can also cut through the urge to conform, and let us be guided by our nobler nature, like the female chimps disarming the males. We can serve the privileges of the powerful, or the needs of the many, the weak. Here is one of the tensions of all human history.

So what can we do? We know better, but we don’t always do better. How can we use some of the insights that these animal stories show us to help answer the question of who we are and how we should live? We are born a mixture of good and evil, selfless and selfish, courageous and cowardly. And we can ignore both paths, and just choose to do things that are entertaining but useless, like rubbing stones together. But almost every religion and philosophy says our life will be more fulfilling if we work toward the light, work toward acting out of compassion.

Abraham Lincoln used to say we need to listen to the “better angels of our nature” rather than the worse ones. Listen to the inner voices counseling disarmament, justice, empathy and compassion. Don’t follow the crowd, don’t have what sHe’s having without first asking whether she is someone you could be proud to follow, or whether she will lead you astray, into serving low and transient ideals rather than high ones.

There’s an old story about wolves that says this differently. These aren’t real wolves, but story wolves, metaphorical wolves.

In one version, an Indian boy went to his grandfather for advice. The boy was big for his age, and stronger than his friends. He said sometimes, he just wants to use his strength to take whatever the others have that he wants. It’s wrong, but he knows he can get away with it. But sometimes, he thinks he should use his strength to help weaker people rather than taking from them. Either feeling can be persuasive, he says, and he wonders if his grandfather has any wisdom on this.

Ah yes, the grandfather says, he knows these feelings very well from his own life. It is like having two wolves fighting within him, he says. One wolf says, “Fight. Hurt. Take.” The other wolf says, “Help. Care. Love.” These wolves are fighting against each other always, as far back as he can remember they are inside of him, fighting to control him.

The boy recognizes this as just what is going on inside of him too. “But grandfather,” he says, “which wolf wins?”

His grandfather puts his arm around the boy and says, “The wolf that I feed, my beloved boy, the wolf that I feed.”

And so it also is with us.