Animal Stories, Part 8- Our Subversive Streak of Hope

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© Davidson Loehr

March 18, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

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PRAYER:

We pray not to something,

but from something,

to which we must give voice;

not to escape from our life, but to focus it;

not to relinquish our mind, but to replenish our soul.

We pray that we may live with honesty:

that we can accept who we are, and admit who we are not;

that we don’t become so deafened by pride and fear

that we ignore the still small voices within us,

that could lead us out of darkness. We pray that we can live with trust and openness:

to those people,

those experiences,

and those transformations that can save us from narrowness and despair.

And we pray on behalf of these hopes with an open heart, an honest soul,

and a grateful reverence for the life which has been given to us.

AMEN.

SERMON: Animal Stories, Part 8: Our Subversive Streak of Hope

The abiding religious questions are Who am I really? and How should I live? All religions have tried to express profound answers to these two questions that define us in grand, even mythic, terms. We have a Buddha-seed within us that wants to grow. We are children of God, the latest reincarnation of Life’s longing for itself, the sons and daughters of the universe, made of stardust, and so on. In other words, we are fundamentally precious, part of an infinite reality, embraced by symbols like the Buddha, God, Life and the universe.

And the way we should live follows from that. Religions teach that we should live in ways that are worthy of our most deep and noble identity. We should see ourselves as integral parts of all life, and walk in paths of compassion, love for all, gratitude for being here, and all the rest of the lovely poetry long used to welcome us into a larger identity, into the hopefully useful and even necessary story of whatever religious community we have claimed.

The argument behind this series of sermons on “animal stories” is that in some ways, religions are just too new to offer many deep or accurate pictures of who we really are or how we should live. The gods involved in today’s world religions were only created a few thousand years ago. The deeper story is the story of life itself, the life that produced us along with millions of other species, the life that links us biologically, genetically, and emotionally.

And we are deeply related to other life. We share traits like our territoriality, desire for dominance and sexual jealousy with snakes, separated from us by 150 million years of evolution. We share the tender care of our young with crocodiles, who were here 200 million years ago – over 125 million years before mammals even evolved. And we show other fundamental traits like empathy, compassion, and a sense of fairness with other species covering over a hundred million years of evolutionary time in the story of life.

That reverence for life, that gentleness with the vulnerable ones for whom we feel responsible – these things are older than the gods. We are on an evolutionary continuum with other animals, and they share so many of our most fundamental traits.

Like us, for example, other animals express joy in play. One author writes of how he once saw a young elk in Rocky Mountain National Park running across a snow field, jumping and twisting, stopping to catch his breath, then repeating the whole exercise with boundless energy. And buffaloes have been known to rush onto ice fields and slide, like children on icy sidewalks, bellowing with the simple fun of it. (Mark Bekoff, The Smile of a Dolphin, p. 114) Others have observed ravens flying to the top of a snowy hill, sliding down it on their bellies, then flying up and doing it again. And penguins have been filmed sliding down snowy hills on their bellies, then waddling up to the top, and standing in line to wait their turn to slide down again.

Even rats love to be tickled at the nape of their neck, and become especially fond of hands that tickled them, but not particularly interested in hands that just pet them. (Mark Bekoff, The Smile of a Dolphin, p. 146) Running, leaping, wrestling, chasing objects or one another or their own tails, animals at play are the very symbols of the unfettered joy of life. (Mark Bekoff, The Smile of a Dolphin, p. 114)

Those studying animals have said for many years that chimpanzees are our closest relative, and the most like us. When it comes to how they practice politics, that’s true, as I tried to show last week.

But recently, scientists who study the behavior of animals including us have said that we are equally closely related to the lesser-known ape the bonobo. And we may be closer than that. It has now been found that a particular piece of DNA that is involved in social affiliation and bonding is present in humans, and is present in bonobos, but it’s absent in the chimpanzee. So we share a particularly important piece of DNA with the bonobo that the chimp doesn’t have, which may indicate the bonobo is more similar to the common ancestor we share with both chimpanzees and bonobos, six to eight million years ago. (Frans de Waal, “The Last Great Ape,” PBS airdate 13 February 2007)

While bonobos and chimps look a lot alike to those unfamiliar with them, they are also deeply different.

As Frans de Waal, one of the foremost experts on chimps and bonobos, has said, “I do not wish to offend any chimpanzees, but bonobos do have more style.” (Frans de Waal, Peacemaking Among Primates, p. 175)

In everything they do, they resemble us. A complaining youngster will pout his lips like an unhappy child or stretch out an open hand to beg for food. In the midst of their lovemaking, a female may squeal with pleasure. And at play, bonobos utter coarse laughs when their partners tickle their bellies or armpits. “There is no escape, we are looking at an animal so akin to ourselves that the dividing line is seriously blurred.” (Frans de Waal, Bonobo: the Forgotten Ape, p. 1)

In some ways, they even seem more advanced. Among bonobos, there’s no deadly warfare, little hunting, no male dominance, and enormous amounts of sex. If the chimpanzee is our demonic face, the bonobo must be our angelic one. Bonobos make love, not war. They’re the hippies of the primate world. (Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape, p. 30) The French call them “Left Bank Chimps.” And some scientists who work with them have been overheard leaving work on Friday saying, “we’re gonna bonobo tonight!”

While male chimpanzees sometimes inflict serious or even fatal injuries on a female, for a male bonobo to bite a female is just not done. (Bonobo, p. 41) When the alpha male charges at the alpha female, she usually completely ignores him. (Frans de Waal, Bonobo: the Forgotten Ape, p. 60) This could be unthinkably dangerous or suicidal in chimpanzees. And she is dominant when it comes to food. They even fight differently than chimps. Whereas chimps fight by pulling an opponent close and biting him, bonobos tend to fight with well-placed kicks. Kung fu apes.

Chimpanzees would not hesitate to tear monkeys apart and eat them. Bonobos have actually been groomed by monkeys, and bonobos don’t consider them prey – though they do sometimes treat them as toys, tossing them. (Frans de Waal, Bonobo: the Forgotten Ape, p. 65)

Whereas male chimpanzees will sometimes kill the infants of other chimpanzee males and even eat them, there is no recorded infanticide or cannibalism in bonobos. (Frans de Waal, Bonobo: the Forgotten Ape, p. 121)

If there is such a thing as bonobo politics, it more than likely revolves as much around females as around males. (Frans de Waal, Bonobo: the Forgotten Ape, p. 74)

Bonobos don’t even kiss like chimps. A new zookeeper, unfamiliar with sexual encounters of the bonobo kind, once accepted a kiss from a bonobo male named Kevin. (Chimpanzees will often give you lip smacks on your face.) Suddenly, he felt Kevin’s tongue in his mouth! The habit of French-kissing is one of the striking differences between the bonobo’s impassioned eroticism and the somewhat boring, functional sex of the chimpanzee. Chimpanzees show few variations in the act, and most of their adult sex is connected with reproduction. Bonobos perform every conceivable variation with both the same and opposite sex, as if following the Kama Sutra. Their sex life is mostly for pleasure and bonding, largely divorced from reproduction. (Frans de Waal, Peacemaking Among Primates, p. 199)

To oversimplify, chimpanzees and bonobos are like the two wolves I talked about earlier. We have these two wolves inside of us, both fighting to control us. One says, “Fight, Hurt, Take!” The other wolf says, “Help, Care, Love!” Both the tendencies of chimpanzees and bonobos are inside of us, part of our deep evolutionary heritage. They are like the angels of our better and worse natures, or the picture of an angel standing by one ear and a devil standing by the other, each – like the two wolves – trying to control us. And the one that wins is the one we feed, the one we listen to.

There are ways in which bonobos embody some of our highest ideals of egalitarianism, peace and an unfettered enjoyment of life’s pleasures better than any human society in history has ever done. One of the traits present in chimpanzees that bonobos have raised to a very high level is social expectations.

This business of social expectations is one of our most subversive and hopeful streaks, and you can trace its growth very neatly through rhesus monkeys, chimpanzees, bonobos, and our own species.

With rhesus monkeys, there is an absolute rigid hierarchy. When there is food, the alpha male feeds first, and no one else eats until he approves. There are almost no social expectations that can subvert the powerful hierarchy – though again, rhesus monkeys are considered the nastiest of all 200 species of primates. In chimpanzees, the alpha male also controls food, but nowhere nearly as well because many others expect a fair share. And in bonobos, the females control the food, and share with everyone – except, sometimes, the alpha males.

Scientists measure dominance through access to food, because food is the “currency” of most animals, what matters most. In our species, food has been replaced by money, the symbolic paper we use to store the potential for buying food and other things.

Human history shows that we’re like the chimps, and in bad times more like the rhesus monkeys, in the selfishness and ruthlessness with which our alpha people – usually males – control access to money and food. Unlike the rhesus and chimps who use physical violence, we enslave our most powerless people through measures like tax breaks for the rich, laws preventing relief of debts through bankruptcy, U.S. workers made to compete with 3rd world workers, corporate lobbyists owning shares in politicians, and so forth.

This isn’t evolution; it’s devolution, with a selfishness more like rhesus monkeys than even chimpanzees. Our use of language and mass media have let the strong and clever disempower and control the weak on a far greater scale than in any ape species, as I tried to show a few weeks ago in the story of “My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean.”

I could go on with this picture, fleshing it out in a dozen directions, but you see the general outlines, and can flesh it out for yourselves. we’re a mixed bag, born with all it takes to become either good or evil, free, enslaving or enslaved. So really, just what can we do?

First, we need to be realistic. We need to stop mesmerizing ourselves with words like peace and justice, as though we will ever live in a world defined by them. Both human history and animal biology teach us that politics are controlled by the power and alliances that characterize both chimpanzee politics and our own. Words like peace and justice are the anesthetic lullabies sung by politicians the world over to numb us to the way the world is really being run. If real peace is to exist, it must exist along with our ambitions, greed, pride, and our hatreds. (Frans de Waal, Peacemaking Among Primates, p. 22) There won’t be peace until a power structure is established, and it will only last until new alliances can challenge that power structure. Carrying ourselves away with utopian visions of perfect peace and justice can make the “perfect” the enemy of the possible. And the possible states of peace and justice, always imperfect and transient, can happen only through having the skill to form alliances with enough power to subvert whatever alpha structure happens to be in place.

And while some people love the vague idea of ‘speaking truth to power,” it seems clear from the study of both chimpanzee and human politics that those with power simply believe that power can trump truth, as it also trumps fairness and justice. we’re better off speaking our truths to the powerless, in the hope they can make a foundation our of them on which to stand and act.

But what can we hope for, in our lives and in our world, and why?

This list could also be very long, but I’ll limit it to just a few ideas.

Framing ourselves in an evolutionary context is helpful because we’re now at a stage where our cultural changes happen far too fast for evolution to react to. From here on out, we will have to help complete our evolution from apes to truly wise and humane people through the education of our minds and – especially – our hearts. The real bases of empathy, compassion, justice and peace are primarily emotional, not rational.

We can do this as we always have, through educating ourselves through the high ideals we have exalted in the best myths, fairy tales, admonitory stories, religions, or some of the animal stories I’ve shared with you. These teachings are the means by which we complete our evolution. We are such a transitional creature. we’re not a very good ape, and not terribly humane or wise either. If a truly sapient and humane species is to evolve from us, we will have to help it through shaping our education, behavior and culture in ways that honor the best of our animal history and our human aspirations.

But can education really reshape who we are and how we behave? Can thinking differently change the brain? It sounds like really foofy New Age hokum. But here’s where animal stories and modern neuroscience may be joining hands to say, Yes: foofy or not, it looks scientifically true.

Frans de Waal tells of an experiment he did where he put a community of stump-tail monkeys in with a community of rhesus monkeys.

Not only are stump-tails a slightly larger species, they are very tough beneath their gentle temperament; the rhesus must have sensed this fact. So, with the rhesus clinging in a fearful huddle to the ceiling of the room, the stump-tails calmly inspected their new environment. After a couple of minutes some rhesus dared to threaten the stump-tails with harsh grunts. If it was a test, they were in for a surprise. Whereas a rhesus would have fought or fled, the stump-tails simply ignored them. They did not even look up. For the rhesus, this was perhaps their first experience with dominant companions who did not react with physical threats or violence. In the course of the experiment the rhesus learned this lesson a thousand times over. Whereas mild aggression was common, physical violence and injuries were virtually absent; friendly contact and play soon became the dominant activities in this mixed group of monkeys. Not only that; after having lived with stump-tails, the rhesus reconciled more easily. Initially, they made up after fights as seldom as is typical of their species; but gradually they approached the high rate of their tutors, until they reconciled exactly as often as the stump-tails. Even after the stump-tails had been removed and the rhesus were left to interact among themselves, they maintained this newly acquired pacifism. [And they taught it to the next generation of their offspring.] Like chemists altering the properties of a solution, we had infused a group of monkeys of one species with the ‘social culture” of another. (Frans de Waal, Good-Natured, pp. 179-180)

Rather than a blind process, primate reconciliation is a learned social skill, sensitive to the social setting, and used as an instrument to preserve precious ties. (Frans de Waal, Good-Natured, p. 181)

This is a remarkable experiment, using monkey culture to change natural and innate behavior.

And another recent series of experiments seem to offer even stronger hope. These were done both with monkeys and monks. Buddhist monks.

The Wall Street Journal recently ran an essay by Sharon Begley, condensed from her new book Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain (2007). Thirty years ago, what she is saying would really have been considered the flakiest of New Age hooey. But now some of the sciences have caught up, and it can be presented as cutting-edge neuroscience.

The gist of this is that there are some well-controlled scientific experiments to show that learning to think differently changes some structures and active circuits in our brain.

First, she cites an experiment with monkeys in 1993. “Scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, rigged up a device that tapped monkeys” fingers 100 minutes a day every day. As this bizarre dance was playing on their fingers, the monkeys heard sounds through headphones. Some of the monkeys were taught: to Ignore the sounds and pay attention to what you feel on your fingers, because when you tell us it changes we’ll reward you with a sip of juice. Other monkeys were taught: Pay attention to the sound, and if you indicate when it changes you’ll get juice.

“After six weeks, the scientists compared the monkeys” brains. Usually, when a spot on the skin receives unusual amounts of stimulation, the amount of cortex that processes touch expands. That was what the scientists found in the monkeys that paid attention to the taps: The somatosensory region that processes information from the fingers doubled or tripled. But when the monkeys paid attention to the sounds, there was no such expansion. Instead, the region of their auditory cortex that processes the frequency they heard increased.

“Through attention, UCSF’s Michael Merzenich and a colleague wrote, “We choose and sculpt how our ever-changing minds will work, we choose who we will be the next moment in a very real sense, and these choices are left embossed in physical form on our material selves.””

“The discovery that neuroplasticity cannot occur without attention has important implications. If a skill becomes so routine you can do it on autopilot, practicing it will no longer change the brain. And if you take up mental exercises to keep your brain young, they will not be as effective if you become able to do them without paying much attention. (Sharon Begley, Wall Street Journal, Jan 19, 2007: p. B1)

The experiments with monks were even more interesting. The Dalai Lama, who has been interested in their area for over fifteen years, provided eight Buddhist monks who each had done over 10,000 hours of meditation, and a group of novices who had had just a crash course in meditating. One by one, they went to the laboratory set up at the University of Wisconsin, got their heads wired up to record all the different brain waves they were generating, and they began a form of meditation where they focused on unlimited compassion and loving kindness toward all living beings.

As they began meditating, the level of gamma waves rose. These are associated with perception, problem-solving and an inclusive kind of consciousness: in a word, compassion. The monks” gamma waves were much stronger than those of the beginners, as you might expect.

But the surprise came when they stopped meditating. Among the monks, there was no drop in the gamma waves. Their brains remained attuned to inclusive and compassionate attitudes toward all living things. And the more hours of meditation a monk had had, the stronger and more enduring were the gamma waves.

Thinking can change the structure and circuitry of the brain.

A lot of this is saying what liberals have been saying for a long time: that educating ourselves with high ideals can shape or reshape our character. That’s what the Greeks said 2500 years ago, and their insights founded the whole history of humanities and liberal arts education in Western civilization. What biology adds is that we’re not swimming upstream. These nobler traits of empathy, compassion and justice are also hard-wired in us, and we share them with apes, wolves, dolphins, elephants and a thousand other species. Our nature is or can be fundamentally good, and some of its roots go a hundred million or more years deep.

That’s what we have always used our best myths, folk tales and religious teachings for. Today, when just over 20% of our society attends any religious services regularly, a growing number of people don’t have the time or interest to get a deep education in the best of the world’s mythology. But without using any myths at all, simply understanding our place in the animal stories that are part of the story of life can educate us to our larger identity and larger responsibility, probably better than any religion ever has.

So one real-world answer to what we can do comes from remembering what the liberal style of Western civilization has been saying for 2500 years, since the Greeks first taught that to make noble people we must mold them in the form of our very highest, most inclusive and empathic values – much like the monks have done.

We find them in religions of deeds, not creeds, behavior, not belief. And the quality of our vision is to be judged by how we treat “the least among us,” as Jesus said. I could end with those words attributed to Jesus, but when he said that, he only meant humans, and that is not a big enough vision any more. We need a bigger connection to a bigger and more inclusive picture of life.

So instead I’ll end with the much larger vision of Hinduism’s Mahabharata. The Mahabharata, which may have been composed as early as 2,500 to 3,000 years ago, is about twelve times as long as the bible. It, combined with another book called the Ramayana, contains the stories that are at the core of Hinduism.

And the final story, the very last words of the giant Mahabharata, is a story about a dog, which seems a fitting end to a sermon series on animal stories.

A great emperor, at the end of his reign, has set off on a final trek north, toward the Himalayas. He is accompanied by four people. A small pariah dog attaches himself to the group as well. Slowly, every member of this royal troupe dies along the way. The emperor and the dog continue their journey alone. Eventually they reach the end of their voyage, and are at the gates of heaven. Indra, the King of the Gods, comes to greet the emperor in a golden chariot. He invites him to climb into the chariot and accompany him in regal and godly splendor into heaven.

The emperor replies: “This dog, O Lord of the Past and the Present, has been a constant and faithful companion to me. He should go with me. My heart is full of compassion for him.”

The King of Gods says to him: “Immortality equal to mine, O King, prosperity extending over all the earth, renown and all the joys of heaven have you won today. Leave the dog. There is nothing cruel in this.”

The emperor says: “O God of a thousand eyes, O you of righteous behavior, I have always behaved righteously. It is hard now to perpetrate an act that is unrighteous. I do not wish for wealth for whose sake I must abandon one that is devoted to me.”

Indra says: “There is no place in heaven for persons with dogs. Besides, the gods take away all the merits of such persons. Think about this, O King of the righteous. Abandon the dog. It is not cruelty.” (205)

The emperor tells the King of the Gods: “I will in no circumstances abandon this dog now to achieve happiness for myself.”

The King of the Gods tries to convince him one last time: “If you give up the dog, you will acquire the world of heaven. You have obtained heaven through your very own deeds. You have already abandoned everything else. How can you be so confused as not to give up a mere dog?”

The emperor still refuses, saying he will not abandon this dog, this mutt, this pariah mongrel who has remained faithful to him.

At that point, the dog reveals himself to be none other than the God of Righteousness himself, an incarnation of the great god Vishnu. At last, the emperor has passed the final test and is admitted into the company of the gods. (Jeffrey M. Masson, Dogs Never Lie About Love, p. 206-207)

He was admitted into the company of the gods, which means he achieved his own most divine nature, by hearing the voices of the angels of his better nature, brought alive in him by a dog, by feeding the right wolf, by rising to the heights of human nature rather than sinking into its depths.

The point of all these animal stories is the same as the point of the best religious myths and folk tales: that we are inherently good enough to become the kind of people and create the kind of world of which we and the people we most admire can be proud. We don’t need anything added to us to do this. We have what we need within us, if we will be open to being transformed by it.

Once in awhile, this truth even comes through in Western religion, as in this passage from the book of Deuteronomy:

“Surely, this commandment that I am commanding you today is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. It is not in heaven, that you should say, “Who will go up to heaven for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?” Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, “Who will cross to the other side of the sea for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?” No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe.” (Deuteronomy 30:11-14, New Revised Standard Version)

The words are in our hearts as they are in the heart of a gorilla who saves a 3-year-old boy who fell into her enclosure; or a bonobo who saved a bird, a hippo who saved a small antelope or all the other animal stories we”ve heard. The message to love one another, to reach out and make a positive difference in the world around us, is almost infinitely older than the gods. It is a call that comes from the heart of life itself, and from the yearnings of our own hearts.

We have a call waiting. It’s our move.

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This version has been expanded by about 1400 words from the version delivered in the sermon on 18 March 2007, including an extra story or two, and longer more detailed versions of other stories.