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© Davidson Loehr

March 18, 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 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.

—————-

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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

May 11, 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:

Help us to love ourselves, and to love people and causes outside of ourselves, that we may be enlarged to include them.

SERMON: Animal Stories, Part 7: Chimpanzee Politics

We are hard-wired to conform, follow others, and defer to authority, even illegal authority, to be emotionally stressed when we don’t follow others. But there is more to us than this.

It’s a story about our other closest relatives, bonobos, and about girl power, the role that social expectations play in chimps, bonobos and us, and about some new and exciting findings of neuroscience in studies of animals, including the human animal. Most of all, it’s about those “better angels of our nature,” how we can hear them, and how, together, we can transform our lives, our relationships, and our world. And it’s a story we’ll tell next week, in the final installment of these animal stories. See you in church!

Four hundred thousand years ago in Germany, our ancestors created wooden spears about six feet long that were clearly used as hunting weapons. The spears were found at a site called Schoningen, among stone tools and animal bones” Just last month, chimpanzees were observed making spears and using them to kill Bush babies for food in the wild. (Barbara J. King, Evolving God, p. 113)

So in the art of hunting with weapons we made, we have now discovered we have a lot in common with chimpanzees. But without going to the drama of hunting with weapons, we share even more similarities with chimpanzees when it comes to the conduct of our politics.

Frans de Waal, who has studied chimps for over thirty-five years, wrote a book on this in 1982, which has become a classic in its field. Called Chimpanzee Politics, it’s based on thousands of hours of observations of a chimpanzee colony in the Arnhem Zoo in the Netherlands, where De Waal first began studying one of our two closest relatives.

The philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) described chimpanzee politics over 350 years ago, as “a general inclination of all [mankind], a perpetual and restless desire of Power after Power, that ceases only in Death.” He was actually speaking of human politics, but his words describe male chimpanzee politics perfectly. (Chapter 4 in Hobbes’ 1651 book Leviathan)

When De Waal wrote his book, he was accused of anthropomorphizing chimpanzees: projecting human motives onto them. But he said it actually worked in reverse. After studying chimpanzee politics, he began to see human politics in a fundamentally different way. That’s what happened to me, too: I’ve come out of this with very different, and much lower, expectations for human politics.

Chimpanzee politics is all about getting and keeping power, by the few over the many, and by any means necessary. Alpha males form alliances with influential males and females – or subordinate males form coalitions to overpower the alpha male, and then consolidate their power by forming alliances with influential females. Males seldom maintain the alpha rank for more than four years. Then there’s another round of opportunistic alliances and vicious fighting to crown a new leader – or as we call them, elections.

The two mottoes of chimpanzee politics are “One good turn deserves another,” and “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” (Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics, p. 202)

And the male political alliances are not personal, but functional – not with friends, but with those who can, at the moment, be useful. Yesterday’s enemy may be today’s ally, and we may attack today’s friend tomorrow.

Adult male chimpanzees live in a hierarchical world with replaceable coalition partners and a single permanent goal: power. Adult females, in contrast, live in a horizontal world of social connections, where power and influence are bestowed by others on the basis of their character, not their physical strength. We know from psychological experiments with human subjects that in Western cultures men and women show similar differences. (Frans de Waal, Peacemaking Among Primates, p. 51)

Tancredo Neves, the briefly-elected president of Brazil (January 15, 1985), neatly summed up the male attitude in this arena: “I have never made a friend from whom I could not separate and I have never made an enemy that I could not approach.” (Frans de Waal, Peacemaking Among Primates, p. 51) Neves had been a powerful critic of the government, and just a few days after he was elected, he mysteriously died – so maybe his alliances weren’t quite the right ones.

If presidential candidates take a sudden interest in women, listen to their problems, and hug their children, there are parallels in chimpanzee males who groom females and play gently with infants, especially during periods of status struggle. (Frans de Waal, Peacemaking Among Primates, p. 49)

Yet strength is weakness: an alpha presence automatically generates alliances among weaker males to see if they can topple the power structure. Only very shrewd chimpanzees can maintain power in the face of younger and stronger males.

But to see how chimpanzee politics works, let’s look at a story of three successive political revolutions within a single community of chimps.

It took place in the chimpanzee colony in the Arnhem Zoo in the Netherlands, and involved four males named Yeroen, Luit, Nikkie and Dandy.

Yeroen was a shrewd older chimpanzee, and had ruled the group for some years, when a younger and stronger male named Luit challenged him for power, and after humiliating him in two violent fights, dethroned him. I’ll come back to what this loss of power did to Yeroen, which is a revealing story in its own right.

But Luit was alpha for only ten weeks. Wily old Yeroen, who Frans de Waal described as the shrewdest politician He’s seen, formed an alliance with a strong young male named Nikkie during those ten weeks. And one night, when the chimps were put into their separate male and female night quarters, Yeroen and Nikkie attacked Luit and killed him. De Waal says he could never again look at old Yeroen without seeing a murderer.

The following day, they released Nikkie and Yeroen into the group. Immediately a dominant female attacked Nikkie fiercely, chasing him up a tree. She kept him there for ten minutes by screaming and charging each time he tried to come down. She had always been Luit’s main ally among the females, and must have watched the murder from her night cage. (Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics, p. 211-212)

But a few hours after her solitary outburst, the other chimps gathered around the killers, grooming them and accepting them as the new leaders. And the very next day, a new triangle emerged. Another young male named Dandy began making overtures to old Yeroen, grooming him and beginning to form an alliance with him against Nikkie. (Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics, p. 212) When Yeroen and the new young male named Dandy finally got enough power to confront Nikkie, he ran out into the water-filled moat and drowned, and another revolution had taken place. Yesterday’s allies are today’s enemies and vice versa, when it suits the pursuit of power. And that process will not end, because it is the plot of chimpanzee politics.

Not only does the process of gaining political power among chimps sound and feel familiar, but so do the effects of losing power once a male is dethroned. So I want to go back to what losing power did to old Yeroen for the ten weeks he was without power.

The first time Luit gained the upper hand – marking the end of Yeroen’s ancient regime – he reacted in completely uncharacteristic ways, surprising the scientists who had studied him for several years. Normally a dignified character, Yeroen became unrecognizable. In the midst of a confrontation, he would drop out of a tree like a dead man, writhing on the ground, screaming pitifully, and waiting to be comforted by the rest of the group. He acted much like a juvenile ape being weaned by his mother. And like a juvenile who during tantrums keeps an eye on mom for signs of softening, Yeroen always noted who approached him. If the group around him was big and powerful enough, and especially if it included the alpha female, he would gain instant courage. With his supporters in tow, he would renew the confrontation with his rival. So his tantrums were another example of his shrewd manipulation. The parallels with infantile attachment in our own species were fascinating, reminding us of expressions like “clinging to power” and “being weaned from power.” Knocking a male chimpanzee off his pedestal gets the same reaction as yanking the security blanket away from a baby.

When even those tactics didn’t work, and Yeroen finally lost his top spot, he would often sit staring into the distance, an empty expression on his face. He was oblivious to the social activity around him and refused food for weeks. They thought he was sick, but the veterinarian found nothing wrong. Yeroen seemed a mere ghost of the impressive big shot he had been. When power was lost, the lights in him went out.

This sounds so familiar; it’s worth a couple animal stories from our species. Professor De Waal mentioned two similar cases of the behavior of an alpha male who has lost power.

One involved a senior professor, a colleague of De Waal’s on a university faculty, with great prestige and ego. He ran the department, but had failed to notice a budding conspiracy. Some young faculty members disagreed with him on a politically sensitive issue. Quietly, they formed alliances and successfully rallied a vote against him at a faculty meeting. The professor was blissfully unaware of this political coup, partly because up until then nobody had ever had the guts to go head-to-head with him. Support for the alternative proposal had been cultivated behind his back by some of his own proteges. Following the fatal vote, which must have come out of the blue, given his expression of disbelief, all color drained from the professor’s face. Looking ten years older, he had the same empty, ghostlike appearance Yeroen had after he had lost his top spot. For the professor, this was about much more than the issue at hand; it was about who ran the department. In the weeks and months following the meeting, his entire demeanor changed as he strode the corridors. Instead of saying “I am in charge,” his body language now said, “Leave me alone.”

Another example of the behavior of a fallen alpha male involves someone much more famous. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s book The Final Days describes President Richard Nixon’s breakdown after it became obvious that he would have to resign, “Between sobs, Nixon was plaintive. How had a simple burglary – done all this? – Nixon got down on his knees”. [He] leaned over and struck his fist on the carpet, crying, “What have I done? What has happened?”” Henry Kissinger, his secretary of state, reportedly comforted the dethroned leader like a child. He consoled him, literally holding Nixon in his arms, reciting all of his great accomplishments over and over until the president finally calmed down. (Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape, p. 50-51) This is chimpanzee politics, from start to finish.

Staying on top is a balancing act between forcefully asserting dominance, keeping supporters happy, and avoiding mass revolt. If this sounds familiar, it’s because human politics works exactly the same. (Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape, p. 43)

Power is an aphrodisiac, as Henry Kissinger once said, but it is also charismatic, and hypnotic, drawing subordinate males and females compliantly behind the powerful leader.

This is a really dark side to both chimpanzee and human politics. When the chimpanzee leader was murdered, there was a brief outrage against the murder. But within hours, the group gathered around the murderers, now the new leaders, and began grooming them. They accepted the violence, got over their anger, and helped the new leaders provide stability. “The king is dead; long live the king.” The two males sought power over fairness or justice. The rest sought stability and peace over fairness or justice. For all of them, fairness and justice weren’t a priority.

There are so many instances of this in our own history. It will resonate with some of you in personal relationships, or the silence in families surrounding the sexual abuse of children. But we do it as a society too. Think of the American public’s acceptance of two stolen presidential elections, and the dishonest and illegal invasion of Iraq, and probably soon Iran, with the tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths these illegal actions have caused. This compliant trait of ours is what gives savvy rulers confidence that we can easily be tricked and trained. We support the powerful, no matter how they got their power, if we think they can bring us stability and peace.

And so we say, “Don’t make waves, go along to get along” – or in a more stringent Japanese saying, “The nail that sticks out gets hammered.”

Just this week, for instance, I read an essay by a social critic named Sheila Samples, called “Lost in the Lust of Werewolves.” She reminded me of that chimpanzee female who protested the murders. See how this excerpt from it strikes you:

“I wonder why so many denizens of this Christian nation seem unable or unwilling to wrap their minds around the reality that Iraqi people are human beings just as they themselves are – not rabid dogs to be hunted down and slaughtered.

“They don’t want to know what it’s like for families to cower in terror as their doors are kicked in, mothers and daughters raped, fathers and sons dragged off, never to be seen again. They don’t want to know about prisoners being humiliated and tortured, secretly “rendered” to countries for more torture, held captive for endless years without charges, without hope, without life. They don’t want to know about Iraq’s rich culture, its secular society, its formidable institutions of learning. – All of this, along with Iraq’s long-suffering people were made invisible, the better to smash the country as if it were only a den of thieves and murderers.” (Al-Ahram Weekly, 24-30 April 2003) (From “Lost in the Lust of Werewolves by Sheila Samples, www.dissidentvoice.org, March 8, 2007)

But, as almost always, after a few righteous outbursts, we go along.

By now, you can probably understand why Newt Gingrich put the book Chimpanzee Politics (1982) on the recommended reading list for freshmen representatives, in 1994. (Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master, p. 307)

If you’ve heard enough about chimpanzees for one day, there is a story about ravens that I’ve wanted to share with you for over two months.

Ravens are like very big crows, weighing four or five pounds, and seem to be regarded as the smartest of all birds. They are carnivores, and have hunted with wolves for hundreds of thousands of years, as well as with other large predators.

They have been the subject of myths throughout human history, sometimes pictured with wolves, and sometimes just exalted by themselves as wise and mystical birds.

I read a book called Mind of the Raven, by perhaps the world’s leading authority on them, a professor of ethology from Vermont named Berndt Heinrich. He has studied ravens for decades, and traveled the world to observe these magnificent birds. But even he was surprised by some of the stories he heard about ravens.

One was a news story about a woman near Boulder, Colorado. She was working out in the woods behind her cabin, when she was annoyed by a raven making so much noise it was irritating, cackling like crazy and diving low over her head. She had never heard a raven make this much noise, and wondered if it was trying to communicate with her. When it passed over her head again then flew up, she looked up. That’s when she saw the cougar about twenty feet away, crouching and ready to pounce. She weighed only about 98 pounds, so was a good target. But she called her 300-lb. husband, who chased the cougar away.

In the newspaper, she said, “The lion moved his head just a little bit as the raven flew over it. That’s when I saw him. I never would have seen him otherwise. He was going to jump me. That raven saved my life.” The event was described as a miracle in the news. (Berndt Heinrich, Mind of the Raven, p. 193. The event happened September 7, 1997.)

And up in Alaska, a man who had killed a deer came face to face with a bear who also wanted to claim the meat. Wisely, he backed away, leaving the deer for the bear. He said “Ravens were following me and squealing. I thought they were guiding me and telling me that the bear was still following me.” (Berndt Heinrich, Mind of the Raven, p. 194. Event was reported in the Anchorage Daily News, December 29, 1998.)

Pretty impressive and heartwarming stories. But the raven expert said no, that’s not what was really going on. The ravens were making noise to identify the location of prey. The ravens were hunting with the cougar and the bear, and the only thing they were trying to save the humans for was dinner!

Those two people’s reactions to the raven’s actions, like most of our reactions to the story as we hear it, are telling. We tend to assume that the ravens were there to serve us, never thinking that they may instead be there to serve their fellow hunters, hoping to make a meal of us. we’re not special to ravens; when They’re hungry, we’re just meat.

Like chimpanzees, we react to politics this way, too. We assume those in power are going to use the power to serve us, to serve our best interests. We don’t like to think of the fact that they may instead have formed alliances with the influential people who got them in power, and are hunting with them – a hunt in which we are often the victims. When political lobbyists buy politicians in order to get them to remove restrictions on what corporations can do in pursuit of profit, for instance, the bills they pass are given a spin as though They’re somehow for the benefit of the “We the People.” But when the bills they buy also remove bankruptcy protection from workers, remove the ability to sue pharmaceutical companies over faulty vaccines, transfer hundreds of billions of dollars from social services and health care to tax cuts for the rich and huge defense contracts, then we are out in the wilderness with the cougars, the bears, and the ravens, and if we don’t watch out we’ll be dinner.

No, it doesn’t always happen that way. Yes, there certainly are people elected to power who try to serve the interests of regular old powerless common folk. But the temptation is there, and is often strong, to support those whose money and influence got them in office in the first place – to honor the reciprocal nature of the political alliances that brought them into power. But if we’re not rich or influential enough to seek out as allies in the hunt for power, we may just be meat. Any hungry raven or power-hungry chimpanzee would understand this immediately.

We pray to the angels of our better nature and the still small voice that can speak to us when we feel safe enough to listen.

Help us remember that we are never as alone or as powerless as we think.

Help us remember that we can, if we will, invest ourselves in relationships, institutions and causes that transcend and expand us.

Help us guard our hearts against those relationships and activities that diminish us and weaken our life force.

And help us give our hearts to those relationships and institutions that might, with our help, expand our souls and our worlds.

We know that every day both life and death are set before us. Let us have the faith and courage to choose those involvements that can lead us to ward life, toward life more abundant.

And help us find the will to serve those life-giving involvements with our heart, our mind and our spirit.

We ask that we may see more clearly in these matters, and that we have the will to hold to those relationships that demand, and cherish, the very best in us. Just that, just those.

Amen.

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© Davidson Loehr

February 25, 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:

Let us not be merely spectators at our own lives, but also those who are really living them.

It is so easy to let others live important parts of our lives for us, to leave us living second-hand lives. If they give us our beliefs, our values, our ambitions, our duties, we may be living their lives. Then who will live ours?

We play many of life’s games by others” rules, because we are a social species, and must learn to play well with others.

But in other areas, where our integrity and authenticity are involved, we need to honor our own higher values, for no one else is likely to do that. Allegiance to our highest values is what we have to offer to our world, what we bring to the table.

Let us be sure that our commitments and allegiances are to people, relationships and causes that are worthy of the best in us. We must care that the laws and customs of our country serve us, serve the needs of most of our brothers and sisters, rather than just the few who have fought or bought their way into making our rules.

Life is a game of give and take, cooperation and compassion, and it is seldom meant to be about us. Yet we too are among the players. And sometimes, the ball is in our court, and then it is our move. Let us find the will and the courage to make that move. Amen.

SERMON:

The word “seduction” is an interesting word. Most people are surprised to learn that it has the same root as the word “education,” as well as induction, deduction, conduction and abduction. The root, “-duc,” means “to lead.” The prefixes tell you how and where You’re being led. So education means to be led out of yourself and brought up into something bigger. Induction is to be led into something – like the Hall of Fame, or the Army. Conduction means to be led through something, like electricity through a wire, and so on. And seduction means to be led astray: led astray to be used for someone else’s agenda, at your expense. It’s an especially tacky form of deception.

There are tons of stories of seduction and deception. They’re some of our favorite plots. Think of the Trojan Horse, where the Greeks gave the Trojans the gift of this big carved wooden horse. But after the Trojans brought it into the walled city, at night a bunch of armed soldiers climbed down from inside the horse and destroyed the city. That’s what seduction is like. You’re taken in thinking you’ll get something you want, then learn too late that you were just taken to the cleaners, used, robbed or worse.

But it’s one of our favorite stories, in its perverse way. I can name a few examples, and you’ll be able to think of a dozen more:

“Will you walk into my parlor, said a spider to a fly”.”

The spider in this poem from 1829 (by Mary Howitt) lured the gullible fly into its web by flattering it, then ate it – and the moral of the poem was about the fly’s foolishness.

Or these famous six lines:

“The time has come,” the Walrus said,

“To talk of many things:

Of shoes and ships and sealing-wax

Of cabbages and kings

And why the sea is boiling hot

And whether pigs have wings.”

If you know this poem from Lewis Carroll’s book Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, you know that the walrus’s words had nothing at all to do with what was really going on. The words came at that moment when the game of Bait-and-Switch turned from “Bait” to “Switch.” They had lured a bunch of oysters to join them for a long walk on the beach. The oysters were looking for fun and adventure, the walrus and the carpenter were looking for supper. The walk on the beach was the advertising brochure; the reality was that the oysters were dead meat.

You could say this was about the oysters” foolishness, but haven’t we all been deceived or seduced by someone in the past – week?

People who play the spider, or the walrus and the carpenter, can use language to cast a spell, or set up an alternate reality, and we are drawn in as easily as flies and oysters. It’s not the way we’re used to thinking about language. we’re used to hearing people talk about language as the pride of our species, what sets us apart from other animals, the key to culture, and so on. But if we think of human language as just one means of communicating, and at culture as a non-genetic way of shaping the social world we live in, it’s clear that most animals have cultures – especially social animals – and all animals have means of communicating.

There is a nice, and somewhat seductive, story about using language. It’s about a chimpanzee named Nim Chimpsky, who communicated with humans through American Sign Language. Sometimes, he used signs in creative ways. At least one of them – the sign for BITE – seemed to take the place of actually biting when he was angry. Nim learned the signs BITE and ANGRY from a picture book showing Zero Mostel biting a hand and exhibiting an angry face. A little later, Amy, his trainer, began the process of transferring him to his new trainer Laura. But Nim didn’t want to leave Amy and tried to drive Laura away. When Laura kept trying to pick him up, the chimpanzee acted as if he were going to bite her. His mouth was pulled back over his bare teeth, and he approached Laura with his hair raised. But instead of biting, he repeatedly made the BITE sign near her face with a fierce expression on his face. After making this sign, he seemed to relax. A few minutes later he transferred to Laura without any sign of aggression. On other occasions, Nim was observed to sign both BITE and ANGRY as a warning. (Jeffrey M. Masson, When Elephants Weep, p. 233)

This is pretty remarkable. Nim Chimpsky made, in a small way, the transition we have made through our language: substituting the word for the real thing: using language rather than actions to express strong emotions. We hear this, and think Well, that’s a good thing that he could just tell her he wanted to bite her, without actually biting her. Especially since a chimpanzee’s canine teeth are as dangerous as a panther’s.

In our own species, we can also use words to replace actions. “Talking things out,” using diplomacy instead of war, and so on. Most psychotherapy is about getting clients out of their heads and into incorporating their feelings.

Language can create an alternate world and seduce us into it, often triggering powerful emotions in us. After all, it’s what comics, novels, movies, television shows, political rallies and religious gatherings are about. When someone can be brought to tears by watching a movie or reading a novel, you see the power of language, not only to create another world, but to draw us into it effortlessly.

We can cry at the story of a spider dying in “Charlotte’s Web,” or be emotionally drawn into stories like “Babe,” “Schreck,” “Jungle Book,” “Bambi,” as well as comic or tragic movies. You can probably think of a hundred. Language, especially in stories, advertisements and propaganda, has an amazing power to seduce us into an imaginary world and play with our emotions, completely bypassing the part of our brain that knows it’s just a story. Just a few minutes ago, we all seemed to buy the idea of spiders, flies and walruses that talk, and oysters that take a walk along the beach.

Sixteen years ago, I had a powerful experience of just how easily and quickly this works, at a two-hour program I’ll never forget. I was in Michigan, but the program was done by an anthropologist named Robbie Davis-Floyd, who was from Austin.

Her program was called “A User’s Guide to Ritual.” She said ritual has two parts, the vehicle and the loading. The vehicle is neutral, and the loading usually carries an agenda. Unless we can tell them apart, we’ll be easy to manipulate by those who control stories and rituals. She was marvelous at controlling the audience of about seventy professors, ministers and chaplains, repeatedly saying she could tell us a story that would take half of us to tears, even though we knew full well there wasn’t a word of truth to it, and how all our graduate degrees couldn’t stop her from doing it. After a few minutes of this baiting – and she was very good at it – the level of anger in the room was palpable, and someone finally said, between clenched teeth, “Then do it!”

She laughed, and said well, she couldn’t do it in this atmosphere. First, we’d need to clear our emotional palates, get rid of this angry mood and get back to a neutral place. She said we needed a mindless activity, something we could do without thinking, that might be fun or at least goofy. She proposed that we all sing a song together, one to which we would already know all the words, and she asked for suggestions.

If you think about it, there really aren’t that many songs that a roomful of people might know the words to, and only a few were suggested. Finally, we decided on “My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean,” and she had us sing it. It was certainly a goofy thing to hear seventy people do. After we’d sung it, she asked if anybody felt anything, and got some laughs. Somebody said, “Nausea,” someone else said “A desperate need for voice lessons.”

But the trap had been set. “My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean” was the vehicle, and she then took thirty seconds to add the loading. This was April 1991, just a few months after the first Gulf War. She said, “Your daughter, your wife, your beloved, Bonny, is in the US Army in Iraq. Three days ago her platoon was captured. You cannot get any information from the Army because they don’t have any information. You don’t know whether she has been raped, mutilated, killed, or all three. You haven’t slept in three days, and have never been so scared in your life.” She paused for about five seconds, then said, “Let’s sing the song.” We sang very slowly and quietly, and there was audible sobbing in the room. We all knew it was a complete fiction, but everyone in the room was emotionally affected as we sang the words, “Bring back, bring back, oh bring back my Bonny to me.”

Her point was that all it takes to seduce us is a story that hooks us, and we can be hooked by amazingly simple stories. Truth has nothing to do with it. Dogs, birds, chimpanzees and other animals can trick each other. But it seems that, through our language, we alone can be taken into make-believe worlds this easily and powerfully. We are a propagandist’s dream.

I remember a wonderful old professor 25 years ago who met with students to play “Dungeons and Dragons.” This very professorial man would dress up in what looked like a medieval monk’s robe with a hood – his wife made it for him. He would join the students, in their costumes, and pass through an imaginative doorway into the world of Dungeons and Dragons every Sunday night. Was the Dungeons & Dragons world real? Well, it was certainly real to him! He was no longer a quiet little man, hard of hearing and with a speech impediment: he was the Dungeon Master! It was “real” – but of course not really.

It is this disconnection from the real world around us, which lets others manipulate our fantasy worlds to lead us astray. Because, seductive as they are, the imaginative worlds have left out something important.

There is a metaphor invented by the philosopher I did my dissertation on, Ludwig Wittgenstein, that captures some of what is going on here, and why it’s potentially so misleading.

“Imagine this game”I call it “tennis without a ball”: The players move around on a tennis court just as in tennis, and they even have rackets, but no ball. Each one reacts to his partner’s stroke as if, or more or less as if, a ball had caused his reaction. (Maneuvers.) The umpire, who must have an “eye” for the game, decides in questionable cases whether a ball has gone into the net, etc., etc. This game is obviously quite similar to tennis and yet, on the other hand, it is fundamentally different!” (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, p. 110)

It is fundamentally different because without a real ball, without real-world constraints on our imaginations, our movements just aren’t what they seem to be.

The “My Bonny” experience is what lets us get hooked by seeing a photo of a starving child, hearing stories of disasters like Katrina. We enter into the story’s world, respond emotionally, and that can drive our behavior. We send money or offer to help. When that happens, we think it’s a good thing that we can be moved so easily.

But those who make their living influencing us through stories, ads and political rhetoric know they can play bait-and-switch just as easily, and more profitably.

The game of bait-and-switch isn’t a human invention. You can find examples of it in the animal world, too. Think of Angler Fish – those big ugly fish that look like a rough pile of rocks (though they probably don’t see themselves as ugly) who have this thing dangling in front of their snout that kind of looks like a worm. Fish come close, swim up to snatch the bait, and then the Angler Fish opens its mouth and eats them. It’s a fish version of the spider luring the fly into its parlor.

And earlier in this sermon series, I told you the story about adolescent chimpanzees who would lure a chicken behind a wall with food, then once the chicken has come after the food, they beat it with sticks. It’s a game they seem to have invented to fight boredom. This is a story of chimps playing bait-and-switch with a chicken. The bait is, “we’re going to feed you!” And the real story is, “we’re going to beat you!”

The fact that this game happens so often shows that it’s as much a part of our nature as it is part of the nature of angler fish, chimpanzees, and ten thousand other species.

But we can even fool ourselves. I once had a professor, a theologian, whose excellent lectures were filled with lessons about how the God of the bible was above all else a God of radical love. Pretty words. But in his treatment of some of his students, one of whom I knew well, he could be a petty and vindictive man. In his mind, he was an agent of his God of radical love. In his behavior, some of us just saw a mean and hateful little man. He had used religious language to pull the wool over his own eyes – but not over the eyes of many others.

In religion, this has been the key difference between prophets and priests for thousands of years. Priests call us to believe as we are told, to recite the creeds or repeat the rituals we are taught. Prophets and sages say it doesn’t much matter what we believe or what rituals we practice, but only how we treat one another.

We use words to create imaginary worlds, where we can see the world made small, and can find an imaginative place that gives us meaning and purpose. But the farther we get drawn into the story world and drawn away from the awareness of what our behaviors are doing to ourselves and others, the more easily we can be led astray through the bait-and-switch tactics of those who know how to use language to control us. The chaos of life is given form by virtue of what we choose to omit. Language often omits the cost of what we have excluded, including the effect of our actions on ourselves or others.

Then we are in the land of seduction, where those who create the stories can demand and get obedience, where chimps lure chickens to their doom, where the language of the walrus and the carpenter has no connection at all to their actions, intended only to trick and trap. And all this can happen because language is often like a game of tennis without a ball, without emotional connections to actual people or the environment around us.

Using language of high ideals and emotional stories to cover over actions that are greedy, imperialistic, murderous, bigoted and hateful is playing bait-and-switch. Wrapping low motives in high phrases, covering nastiness with nationalism or ungodly actions in godly chatter, covering recklessness with rhetoric – these are examples of the seduction of language, of how easily and effectively we can be taken in. That’s how language can be like a Trojan Horse.

Of course, the language we use to build character, to raise our sights, the language we use in education and religion, the language I’m using here every Sunday, is also trying to take us in, also trying to lead us somewhere.

All the best religious stories are trying to educate us, to lead us into bigger selves, and to counter all the other stories that have taken us in, those stories playing tennis without a ball, which have misdirected us to avoid looking at the terrible costs of some of the greed and brutality that have taken over so much of our society and our world.

For example, we’re seduced by a phrase like “freedom and democracy” but not shown the actions we’re taking in Iraq under that high-sounding banner: selling off their assets, taking control of their oil, invading the country based on complete lies about Weapons of Mass Destruction, killing over perhaps 650,000 of their men, women and children, losing over 3,100 of our soldiers killed, and over 20,000 who have been wounded. That’s the picture from inside the spider’s parlor, the picture of this game of bloody tennis played with the ball, and it has nothing at all to do with freedom or democracy. That’s how we’re seduced by language.

Another fine-sounding phrase is “free-market economy.” It sounds good. We believe in freedom, after all. But behind the rhetoric, we have found a brutalizing economy of corporate greed that moves to limit our economy to policies, trade and tax structures that benefit them at our expense. That economy isn’t free; it’s imprisoned in corporate headquarters.

Here’s another seductive phrase: the “clear skies act” of 2003. It sounds good; we certainly all want clear skies! But inside that spider’s parlor, we see companies polluting our skies with abandon, while seducing us with clever language.

And recently in the news, we have our governor saying he believes with all his heart that he should insist that all sixth-grade girls in Texas be forced to be vaccinated with a drug made by the Merck Pharmaceutical Company. Meanwhile, on the pages of other newspapers, we”ve been reading for a week that the Merck company has agreed to stop paying lobbyists to pressure or bribe state officials to stick young girls with their vaccine. The language of vaccinating girls to protect them from cancer sounds noble, until you realize that our governor and others are apparently saying it because they have been rewarded for doing so, or promised future rewards, by Merck, the company that manufactures the drug and stands to make a killing in the eighteen to twenty states where it has planted its lobbyists in the fertile soil of our worst politicians.

We need to have a healthy suspicion of people who wrap their messages in idealistic language. We need to be very wary of abstractions and the appeal to high ideals until we see what behaviors are hiding behind them: where the “ball” is.

It’s good to have leaders, depending on where They’re leading us. But what we want and what we need is to educate ourselves into a more aware and compassionate perspective, to induct one another into the company of those better angels of our nature, to conduct ourselves and our nation according to behaviors that treat others as we would want to be treated, to resist being abducted by alien agendas into blind alleys that will leave us, in the end, with nothing but our regrets, our tears, and perhaps the compromise of our very souls. For that’s what can happen.

Just yesterday I read Maureen Dowd’s editorial in the New York Times, where she chastises John McCain for being so eagerly seduced by anything and anyone who might get him more votes. Her final line, her punch line, was, “Sometimes I miss John McCain, even when I’m with him.” (From Maureen Dowd’s “A Cat Without Whiskers,” published 24 February 2007 in NY Times)

That’s what we don’t want: to miss ourselves, even when we’re alone. We don’t want to miss the richness of our relationships, even when we’re together. We don’t want to miss what’s noblest about America, while we’re in it. And we don’t want to miss the chance for an empowered and authentic life, even while we’re living it.

I think I’ve found that ball, that ball missing from these games, the ball that brings the games into the real world, where we have a say about who gets to hit it, and how.

That ball, as almost always, is in our court.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

February 18, 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:

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.

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© Davidson Loehr

February 11, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

The sermon today is on empathy, on that essential quality of being able to feel another’s pain, and the hope that if we can feel for them we will care for them, and their fragile hopes and dreams will be safe with us. Against that background, I’ve chosen to share a poem with you as our prayer. It is not about empathy, unless a tale of murder can be said to be about life. I think you’ll find that it needs the silence following it. DuBose Heyward wrote it in 1924. He was the Southern white man who in the same year wrote the novel “Porgy,” from which George Gershwin’s folk opera “Porgy and Bess” was derived eleven years later. This poem has the same poignancy, and is named “The Mountain Woman”:

PRAYER:

“The Mountain Woman,”

by DuBose Heyward

Among the sullen peaks she stood at bay

and paid life’s hard account from her small store.

Knowing the code of mountain wives, she bore

the burden of the days without a sigh;

and, sharp against the somber winter sky,

I saw her drive her steers afield that day.

Hers was the hand that sunk the furrows deep

across the rocky, grudging south slope.

At first youth left her face, and later hope;

yet through each mocking spring and barren fall,

she reared her lusty brood, and gave them all

that gladder wives and mothers love to keep.

And when the sheriff shot her eldest son

beside his still, so well she knew her part,

she gave no healing tears to ease her heart;

but took the blow upstanding, with her eyes

as drear and bitter as the winter skies.

Seeing her then, I thought that she had won.

But yesterday her man returned too soon

and found her tending, with reverent touch,

one scarlet bloom; and, having drunk too much,

he snatched its flame and quenched it in the dirt.

Then, like a creature with a mortal hurt,

she fell, and wept away the afternoon.

– DuBose Heyward

SERMON

The ability to sense another’s feelings, needs, fears, and act on them is the greatest blessing we can offer to life. And when we hear of someone who seems to lack that ability to sense another’s hurt, or to care – as in that poem about the Mountain Woman – it is almost an affront to humanity. How could “her man” not tell that flower, that little piece of living, fragile beauty was her umbilical cord to beauty and what was left of hope?

Sometimes I think that if you can just respond to natural beauty, there is greatness about you.

I read of a young man who was working in Africa with chimpanzees, as part of Jane Goodall’s efforts there. One afternoon he took a break and climbed to the top of a ridge to watch a spectacular sunset over Lake Tanganyika. As the student watched, he noticed first one and then a second chimpanzee climbing up toward him. The two adult males were not together and saw each other only when they reached the top of the ridge. They did not see the student. The apes greeted each other with pants, clasping hands, and sat down together. In silence and awe, the human and the chimpanzees watched the sun set and twilight fall. (Jeffrey M. Masson, When Elephants Weep, p. 192)

Some who have observed bears in the wild speak of them sitting on their haunches at sunset, gazing at it, seemingly lost in meditation. (Jeffrey M. Masson, When Elephants Weep, p. 193)

We live in troubled and quite brutal times, but I want to see us as part of an ancient and noble heritage of life that cares about and responds to the feelings, fears and needs of other life. I want to remind us of our deep animal heritage, and to empower us by giving us some animal stories to take with us.

Most of those who work with and write about other animals have a particular concern over the way we treat animals in biomedical research and on the factory farms that produce most of the meat for our species. For over three hundred years at least, we have conducted many scientific experiments on animals, or on other humans, that are far worse than the mountain man’s drunken insensitivity. Some scientists still scoff at the suggestion that animals even have feelings. This seems to have come from the philosopher Descartes (1596-1650) who said, more than three centuries ago, that animals had no feelings, no intentions, but were like machines. This may sound like harmless silliness, but it’s not harmless. A century and a half ago, Charles Darwin wrote about one of these experiments, in a passage that has been quoted hundreds of times:

“” Every one has heard of the dog suffering under vivisection, who licked the hand of the operator; this man, unless the operation was fully justified by an increase of our knowledge, or unless he had a heart of stone, must have felt remorse to the last hour of his life.” (Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, p. 48)

The neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp from Bowling Green State University writes, “There is overwhelming evidence that other mammals have many of the same basic emotional circuits that we do” At the basic emotional level, all mammals are remarkably similar.” (Jeffrey M. Masson, The Pig Who Sang to the Moon, p. 106)

Our sensitivity to others runs so deep even modern brain scans show it to be an absolutely archaic part of us, which means we would have to share this sensitivity with tens of thousands of other species.

Neuroimaging shows that making moral judgments involves a wide variety of brain areas, some extremely ancient (Greene and Haidt 2002, from Frans de Waal’s Primates and Philosophers, pp. 56-57).

Asked to watch photographs of facial expressions, we involuntarily copy the expressions seen. We do so even if the photo is shown subliminally, that is, if it appears for only a few milliseconds. Unaware of the expression, our facial muscles nevertheless echo it. (Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape, p. 177)

New research shows that when someone we love feels physical pain, our brain responds as if we felt it. (Barbara J. King, Evolving God, p. 170)

Yet the kind of experiments Darwin mentioned still go on, whether to test cosmetics, drugs, or scientific and medical curiosities.

In one set of tests on monkeys, the animals had been subjected to lethal doses of radiation and then forced by electric shock to run on a treadmill until they collapsed. Before dying, the unanesthetized monkeys suffered the predictable effects of excessive radiation, including vomiting and diarrhea. After acknowledging all this, a DNA [Defense Nuclear Agency] spokesman commented: “To the best of our knowledge, the animals experience no pain.” (Marc Bekoff, Minding Animals, p. 140) The willful blindness in that statement is just incredible. It’s something the Mountain Man might have said, but he was drunk.

And we are often just as insensitive to the feelings of our fellow human animals, aren’t we? Think of Abu Graib, Guantanemo, or the 650,000 Iraqi citizens we have killed since illegally invading and occupying their country, or the million of them whose deaths we caused in the 1990s through Bill Clinton’s sanctions. I remember Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeline Albright being asked to respond to Amnesty International’s estimate that the sanctions had caused the deaths of over 500,000 Iraqi children, when she said, “We think it’s worth it.” Or think of living in the country where over 40% of our citizens have no health coverage – the largest percentage in the civilized world. We routinely dehumanize people in wars to kill them, and Clinton, Albright and the Bush administration have dehumanized over a million and a half Iraqis to remain oblivious to the fact that we caused their deaths. But we have also dehumanized tens of millions of our own citizens, haven’t we?

What is so puzzling and frustrating is that empathy in the 200 species of primates is such a rich area that one researcher analyzed, in an unpublished work, over one thousand examples of empathic behavior in monkeys and apes. So empathy is an ancient and deep part of us, and if it seems rare today, it may be because something else is getting in the way – things I’ll talk about in the next two sermons in this series.

But for now, let me share just a few stories about empathy in other animals, so you can get a feel for how ordinary it is, and how easy it is for you to make a very good guess about what these animals felt, needed, and intended to do through their behaviors.

During one winter at the Arnhem Zoo in the Netherlands, after cleaning the hall and before releasing the chimps, the keepers hosed out all rubber tires in the enclosure and hung them one by one on a horizontal log extending from the climbing frame. Most of the tires had tears or holes in them, and the water leaked out. But one tire was in good shape, and remained full of fresh water. A female chimpanzee named Krom wanted to get this tire down. Unfortunately, the tire was at the end of the row, with six or more heavy tires hanging in front of it. Krom was slightly crippled, and also deaf. She had never mated, but had helped raise many of the young chimps, acting as a kind of aunt. She pulled and pulled at the tire she wanted but couldn’t remove it from the log. She pushed the tire backward, but there it hit the climbing frame and couldn’t be removed either. Krom worked in vain on this problem for over ten minutes, ignored by everyone, except Jakie, a seven-year-old Krom had taken care of as a juvenile.

Immediately after Krom gave up and walked away, Jakie approached the scene. Without hesitation he pushed the tires one by one off the log, beginning with the front one, followed by the second in the row, and so on, as any sensible chimp would do. When he reached the last tire, he carefully removed it so that no water was lost, carrying it straight to his aunt, placing it upright in front of her. Krom began scooping up the water with her hands. (Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers, pp. 31-32)

Jeffrey M. Masson, who has written two wonderful books of animal stories, writes that in some extraordinary wildlife footage he got to watch, a small impala antelope in Africa raced away from a pack of wild dogs into a river where she was immediately seized by a large crocodile. In the world of antelopes, this is known as a very bad day. Suddenly a hippopotamus rushed to the rescue of the dazed antelope. The crocodile released his prey and the hippo then nudged the small animal up the bank of the river and followed her for a few feet until she dropped from exhaustion. Instead of leaving, the hippo then helped the little creature to her feet and, opening his mouth as wide as possible, breathed warm air onto the stunned antelope. The hippo did this five times before returning to the forest. “There seems to be no possible explanation for this remarkable behavior except compassion.” If this would seem easier to believe if the animal had been a dolphin rather than a hippo, many evolutionary theorists believe that hippos are the closest living relatives to whales, which evolved some 25 to 38 million years ago, and to dolphins, which evolved only 11 million years ago. (Jeffrey M. Masson, Dogs Never Lie, p. 94, and online references about the relationship to whales and dolphins.)

Almost every day, newspapers and TV shows around the country report stories of dogs who have saved people’s lives. The St. Louis Post Dispatch reported on its front page some years ago (in March 1996) the extraordinary story of two stray dogs, a dachshund and an Australian cattle dog, who kept alive a mentally disabled boy when he became lost in the woods for three “bone-chilling” days. The boy’s mother called the dogs “angels from heaven” after ten-year-old Josh Carlisle, who has Down syndrome, was rescued from a dry creek in Montana by a searcher on horseback. In temperatures close to zero, the dogs had played with him and cuddled him to keep him warm at night. Josh hadn’t eaten while he was lost, but the dogs must have led him to water, for he was not fully dehydrated. The boy had mild frostbite on all ten toes, having spent his first night with a light snow dusting the ground. When Josh was carried to the ambulance, the dachshund followed and kept jumping up to see in the window. “I’ll never forget that dog’s face,” said one of the rescuers. Both dogs found a new home with the child’s family, and his mother told reporters, “They fell in love with my son during those three days.” (Frans de Waal, Dogs Never Lie, pp. 97-98)

This is two-way empathy. The mother also felt that she knew how the dogs must have felt in order to help the boy, and to follow him to the ambulance because they”d formed an emotional connection with him. And the boy’s family formed the same connection, and adopted both dogs. When all the species involved care for the life they see in another, everybody wins.

Studying apes brings the familiarity much closer, as they “think” (or “assess”) much like we do. How much?

Allen and Beatrice Gardner, who first obtained the baby Washoe from our Air Force, began teaching her sign language. They, however, were not fluent in it themselves, so their vocabulary was more limited than that of some of Washoe’s later contacts. They taught Washoe to sign “napkin” for “bib” because they didn’t know the sign for bib. Washoe kept wanting to draw the outline of a bib on her chest with her two index fingers, and they kept correcting her. Several months later when a group of human signers at the California School for the Deaf were watching a film of Washoe, they informed the Gardners that the baby chimpanzee was not signing BIB correctly. It should be signed, they told the Gardners, by drawing a bib on the chest with the two index fingers. Washoe had been right all along – and had reasoned just as the humans did who first invented the sign for BIB. (Roger Fouts, Next of Kin, p. 83)

One beautiful moment early on during Project Washoe illustrated the common need of chimps and children to use their signs. The Gardners were in their kitchen entertaining some friends whose toddler happened to be deaf. Washoe was playing outside. Suddenly, the child and Washoe saw one another through the kitchen window. As if on cue, the child signed MONKEY at the same moment Washoe signed BABY. (Roger Fouts, Next of Kin, p. 88) How different do the recognition and thought processes of these individuals from two different species sound?

And Washoe would often sign QUIET to herself as she sneaked into a forbidden room. (Roger Fouts, Next of Kin, p. 72)

There are lots of stories about empathy in chimpanzees and bonobos. Bonobos are apes that look a lot like chimpanzees. Bonobos and chimpanzees are our closest relatives. One story is about the two-year-old daughter of a bonobo named Linda, who whimpered at her mother with pouted lips, which meant that she wanted to nurse. But this infant had been in the San Diego Zoo’s nursery and was returned to the group long after Linda’s milk had dried up. The mother understood, though, and went to the fountain to suck her mouth full of water. She then sat in front of her daughter and puckered her lips so that the infant could drink from them. Linda repeated her trip to the fountain three times until her daughter was satisfied. (Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape, p. 4) So far, she looks more evolved than the mountain man.

Frans de Waal tells another story of how a troop of monkeys treated one of their infants, who was born blind. The infant was born into a free-ranging population of rhesus monkeys released onto a Caribbean island. Apart from being sightless, the infant appeared perfectly normal: he played, for instance, as much as other infants his age. Compared to his peers, he often broke contact with his mother, thereby placing himself in situations that he could not recognize as dangerous. His mother responded by retrieving and restricting him more than other mothers did with their infants. In other studies of blind infant monkeys such infants were never left alone, and specific group members stayed with them whenever the group moved. (Frans de Waal, Good-Natured, pp. 51-52)

Another story shows the strength of the ape’s empathic response. One woman [Ladygina-Kohts] wrote about her young chimpanzee, Joni, saying that the best way to get him off the roof of her house (much better than any reward or threat of punishment) was by arousing his sympathy:

If I pretend to be crying, close my eyes and weep, Joni immediately stops his plays or any other activities, quickly runs over to me, all excited and shagged, from the most remote places in the house, such as the roof or the ceiling of his cage, from where I could not drive him down despite my persistent calls and entreaties. He hastily runs around me, as if looking for the offender; looking at my face, he tenderly takes my chin in his palm, lightly touches my face with his finger, as though trying to understand what is happening, and turns around, clenching his toes into firm fists. (Ladyginia-Kohts, 2002 [1935]: 121) (Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers)

Jane Goodall describes chimp behavior around the body of Tina, a chimp killed by a leopard. Some of the chimpanzees stay with Tina’s body for over six hours without interruption. None licks Tina’s wounds, as these apes sometimes do when a companion is injured but still alive. Some of the males do drag Tina’s body along the ground a short way, while other chimpanzees inspect, smell, or groom it. Brutus, the community’s most powerful or “alpha” male, who had been a close associate of Tina’s, remains at her side for five hours, with a break of only seven minutes. He chases away some chimpanzees who try to come near, allowing only a single infant to approach. This is Tarzan, Tina’s five-year-old brother. Recently, Tina and Tarzan’s mother died. Now, Tarzan grooms his dead sister and pulls gently on her hand quite a few times. (Barbara J. King, Evolving God, p. 10)

Brutus’s behavior toward Tina’s little brother indicates that he, Brutus, knew that Tina and Tarzan meant something special to each other. Taken together with other evidence to be reviewed in this book – this information suggests that Brutus was capable of feeling something like empathy. If so, Brutus was able to project himself into Tarzan’s situation and imagine what Tarzan might experience at the sight of his sister’s dead body. (Barbara J. King, Evolving God, p. 10)

Frans de Waal recorded an incident that occurred at the Wisconsin Primate Center. The adult males in a group of stumptailed monkeys became extremely protective of Wolf, an old, virtually blind female. Whenever the caretakers tried to move the monkeys from the indoor to the outdoor section of the enclosure, the adult males would stand guard at the door between the sections, sometimes holding it open, until Wolf had gone through. (from Good-Natured, p. 52)

Captive Diana monkeys have been observed engaging in behavior that strongly suggests empathy. Individuals were trained to insert a token into a slot to obtain food. The oldest female in the group failed to learn how to do this. Her mate watched her failed attempts, and on three occasions he approached her, picked up the tokens she had dropped, inserted them into the machine, and then allowed her to have the food. The male apparently evaluated the situation, helped his mate only after she failed, and seemed to understand that she wanted food, but could not get it on her own. He could have eaten the food, but he let his mate have it. There was no evidence that the male’s behavior benefited him in any way other than to help his mate. (Marc Bekoff, Minding Animals, p. 102)

Frans de Waal tells two stories of intuitive empathic communication. “In the course of her studies, Amy Parish developed close relations with zoo bonobos, and the females treated her almost as one of their own. On one occasion when the San Diego bonobos were given hearts of celery, which were claimed by the females, Parish gestured to have the apes look her way for a photograph. Louise, who had most of the food, probably thought that she was begging and ignored her for about ten minutes. Then she suddenly stood up, divided her celery, and threw half of it across the moat to this woman who so desperately wanted her attention.” (Frans de Waal, Bonobo: the Forgotten Ape, p. 157)

The female bonobos had bonded with Amy, but not with De Waal: apes make precise gender distinctions among people. Amy later visited these same bonobo friends after a maternity leave. She wanted to show the apes her infant son. The oldest female briefly glanced at the human baby, and then disappeared into an adjacent cage. Amy thought the female was upset, but she had only left to pick up her own newborn. She quickly returned to hold the ape baby up against the glass so that the two infants could look into each other’s eyes. (Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape, p. 156)

Here were two females, both friends and proud mothers, showing off their babies. Emotionally, how different do we seem to be from these apes with whom we share over 98% of our DNA?

Roger Fouts is the man I mentioned last week, who has spent forty years teaching the chimpanzee Washoe to communicate through American Sign Language, and establishing a deep and respectful friendship with her. Once Roger had broken his arm and came with it in a sling, but not in a cast, to contain it until the bones knitted.

The chimpanzees must have seen the pain he was trying to hide, because instead of giving their usual, raucous, pant-hoot morning greeting, they all sat very still and intently watched him. Washoe signed HURT THERE, COME, and Roger approached and knelt down by the group. Washoe gently put her fingers through the wire separating them, and Roger moved closer. She touched him, then kissed his arm. Another chimp also signed HURT and touched him.

What is perhaps most amazing about their reaction was that Washoe’s ten-year-old son Loulis didn’t ask Roger for his usual CHASE game. In fact, he didn’t ask Roger to play his favorite game until several weeks later, when Roger’s arm was on the mend. That’s empathy. I”m betting they would also have understood the Mountain Woman’s love for that little crimson flower. (Deborah and Roger Fouts, “Our Emotional Kin,” in Mark Bekoff, The Smile of a Dolphin, p. 207)

Fouts says that he and his wife Debbi “had never hugged one another or been demonstrative in Washoe’s presence. This precaution went all the way back to the late 1960s when Washoe would sometimes misinterpret physical affection and attack the “offender.” Washoe had rarely been to our house since then. As far as we knew, Washoe thought Debbi and I were friends or coworkers. Out of habit, we kept up this act in Ellensburg (Washington) for the first year, but on one of six-year-old Hillary’s first visits to our lab, Washoe asked to hug her good-bye before she left. After they hugged I asked Washoe, WHO THAT?, pointing to Hillary. Without hesitating, Washoe signed ROGER DEBBI BABY. Nobody reads nonverbal behavior like a chimpanzee. And all those years we thought we had Washoe fooled!” (Roger Fouts, Next of Kin, p. 270)

Other animals also have a sense of “justice,” or at least revenge for behavior that crosses the line – a line we understand immediately when we hear these stories. A few weeks ago, I told you the story of the vengeful camel:

Edward Westermarck (1862″1939), retold the story of a vengeful camel that had been excessively beaten on multiple occasions by a fourteen-year-old boy for loitering or turning the wrong way. The camel passively took the punishment, but a few days later, finding itself unladen and alone on the road with the same conductor, ‘seized the unlucky boy’s head in its monstrous mouth, and lifting him up in the air flung him down again on the earth with the upper part of the skull completely torn off, and his brains scattered on the ground.” (Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master, p. 338)

Here’s another story about an animal sensing behavioral boundaries, and teaching humans a lesson – a less violent lesson – about justice: Ola, a young false killer whale in an oceanarium, was accustomed to a staff of human divers working in his tank. One diver took to teasing Ola surreptitiously. Oceanarium management had their first inkling of this one day when Ola placed his snout on the man’s back, pushed him to the floor of the tank, and held him there. (He was wearing diving gear, so he did not drown.) Seeking to free the diver, trainers gave Ola commands, tried to startle him with loud noises, and offered fish, to no avail. After five minutes Ola released the diver. Subsequent investigation brought out the teasing. (Jeffrey M. Masson, When Elephants Weep, p. 174)

Feelings of all kinds cross over species lines – sometimes with results that can sound funny to members of one species (though probably not members of the other species).

Roger Fouts tells of the time when Washoe developed a head-over-heels crush on Josh (Roger’s son). “It seems that my son’s looks and sexuality had matured just enough that Washoe’s own teenage hormones now began raging at the mere sight of him. Whenever Josh entered the lab, Washoe literally threw herself at his feet and began shrieking like a desperate, lovelorn suitor. It was bad enough, Josh said, that he couldn’t get the girls at school to pay attention to him. To have a female chimpanzee throwing herself at him every day really added insult to injury. After a few months of Washoe’s entreaties, Josh decided to avoid the lab for a while.” (Roger Fouts, Next of Kin, p. 272)

Being able to read us also lets chimps and other apes trick us, which they love to do. When I visited the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta last November, I saw – from a safe distance – a female chimpanzee named Georgia, about whom I had read enough to want to stay away from her. She absolutely loved playing the same trick on visitors every chance she got. When she saw a new face, she would go fill her mouth with water, then saunter back over to the fence and act cute, luring visitors in so she could spit the water all over them, then jump up and down hooting her self-satisfied chimp laugh. And of course we can trick them too, though they don’t like it.

There is also a great story about a young man who worked with chimpanzees in the wild, in the Gombe area in Tanzania as part of Jane Goodall’s group. They weren’t allowed to interact with chimps. But an adolescent female chimp developed a small crush on this young man, and kept coming up to groom him. So he suddenly acted as if he saw something in the distance. He moved his head a little from one side to the other, like owls do. The adoring chimp stopped grooming and looked in the direction he was looking, then made a few steps in the direction of his glance and looked back at him. He kept up his act, and she walked off in that direction and disappeared.

A little later she returned, came straight up to him, and slapped his head, thereafter ignoring him for the rest of the day. He said the slap was probably a punishment after she realized that he had tricked her. I’d say, ask some teen-aged girls how they would feel if they got tricked like that by a boy they had a crush on, and whether they might feel like slapping him in the head then ignoring him. (by Frans X. Plooij, “A Slap in the Face” in Mark Bekoff, The Smile of a Dolphin, p. 88)

Roger Fouts said that it was Washoe who taught him that “human” is only an adjective that describes “being,” and that the essence of who we are is not our humanness but our beingness. There are human beings, chimpanzee beings, cat and dog beings, all kinds of beings. (Roger Fouts, Next of Kin, p. 325)

That’s what I think these animal stories invite us into: the larger view of life in which we human beings have the opportunity to know, and to protect, all the other kinds of beings around us.

In 1993, a book titled The Great Ape Project: Equality Beyond Humanity was published. This important book launched what has become known as the Great Ape Project (GAP). The major goals of the GAP were to admit great apes to the Community of Equals in which the following basic moral rights, enforceable by law, are granted:

(1) the right to life,

(2) the protection of individual liberty, and

(3) the prohibition of torture.

In the Great Ape Project, “equals” does not mean any specific actual likeness but equal moral consideration. (Marc Bekoff, Minding Animals, p. 142-143)

For fourteen years, The Great Ape Project has fought to guard the life and liberty of gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees and bonobos, and to protect them from being tortured by members of our species. Think of that story from the first installment in this sermon series, about the gorilla who saved a three-year-old boy who fell into the gorilla enclosure at Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo in 1996, or today’s story of the hippo saving the antelope, the dogs saving the boy in Montana and some of the others. We respond to these stories because we also have these feelings and this capacity for empathy.

One of the great ironies in studying the natural world and the civilized world is that civilization and the artificial rules of our cultures are so often used to anesthetize the natural caring that animals feel for one another, and to make us more brutal.

One of our greatest dreams must be to find some place between the extremes of nature and civilization where it is possible for us to live without regret. (adapted from Barry Lopez, from Marc Bekoff, Minding Animals, p. 179)

There are more animal stories in this series, but You’re beginning to see, I”m sure, that these aren’t just animal stories. They are snapshots taken from our own family album: the family of all life on earth with the capacity to care for one another.

Marc Bekoff, like many of the people who spend their time with other animals, is a strong opponent of the brutal practices of our factory farms. While there are hundreds of disturbing stories, these three will give some of the sense:

About five million dairy cows are kept in confinement in the US. Female dairy cows are forced to have a calf every year. Their calves are removed from them immediately after birth so they do not drink their mother’s milk. This is extremely demanding on their bodies and on their psychological states. These dairy cows are literally milk machines, and they are not allowed to be mothers, to care for their young. (Marc Bekoff, Minding Animals, p. 151)

Up to about 25 percent of hens sustain broken bones when they are removed from their cages to be transported to a processing plant. Each hen now lays upwards of 300 eggs per year, as compared to 170 in 1925. (Marc Bekoff, Minding Animals, p. 152)

And Bekoff is clear that education makes a difference, and that we can make a difference, when he notes that the production and demand for formula-fed veal has dropped sharply since 1985 and has now stabilized at approximately eight hundred thousand calves per year, a decrease of over 400 percent. Public outrage over how veal calves are treated was the major reason for this decline. (Marc Bekoff, Minding Animals, p. 153)

One last poignant story, a parable of a voice crying in the wilderness:

For twelve years, a deep-sea whale wandered the north Pacific, tracked by scientists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. Traveling all on its own, the whale roamed from the waters off California north to the Aleutians. Using deep-sea microphones borrowed from the U.S. Navy, the scientists eavesdropped as the whale repeatedly called out, trying to contact another of its kind, probably a female. As he matured, his voice deepened, just as an adolescent boy’s does. No response to the whale’s calls was ever heard.

What species of whale this was remains unknown, but the calls heard differed from calls of blue, fin, and humpback whales swimming in the same waters. It is a mystery why this whale received no response. One guess is that some sort of biological miswiring caused his calls to be transmitted on the wrong frequency. Another possibility is that he is a hybrid, the product of a mating between two whales of different species – and thus truly unique, with no others of his kind in the world.

Whatever the explanation, the result makes for a haunting image: a highly social and smart animal, swimming up and down the Pacific Coast for well over a decade, calling into the depths of the sea for a companion who never answered. “He must be very lonely,” said one marine scientist. (Barbara J. King, Evolving God, pp. 164-165. Her footnote says, “Kate Stafford quoted in Andrew C. Revkin, “A Song of Solitude,” New York Times, Dec. 26, 2004)

Some of these animal stories feel like the tale of the lonely whale, but with a twist. The whale, perhaps, really is one of its kind, doomed to a solitary life that may bring forth plaintive cries every day until it dies. We resonate with the story because we too need to have connections with the life around us, and often feel the need for more, and more significant, connections. But we are not alone. We share emotional responses with tens of thousands of species of other animals, if only we would be open to it. Our sin is one of ignorance: we are ignorant of the fact that we are not alone on the earth, that our cries need not be into empty space or onto projected deities created in large part to fill that need for connection (the root meaning of “religion” is “reconnection”).

Perhaps we are broadcasting on the wrong frequency. For centuries, we have judged ourselves – amazingly! – as the world’s only “reasoning” creatures, and to this day, continue to treat animals in experiments and on our factory farms as unthinking, unfeeling brutes.

In 1789, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham spoke to a world already badly misled by Descartes’ silly notion that we alone have a “ghost” in our “machine” placed there by God, enabling us – but no other animals – to reason and to feel. Bentham was concerned, as are many today, about the subject of our treatment of other animals in scientific experiments, and he said, “The question is not, Can they reason? Nor Can they talk? But, Can they suffer?”

Can they suffer? Monkeys dying of radiation poisoning, vivisected dogs, veal calves confined in two-foot wide pens and kept anemic for the duration of their short miserable lives (because whiter veal sells better), chimpanzees who have their teeth knocked out so dentistry students can practice on them – these, and thousands more like them: can they suffer? Could our customary indifference to the suffering of these other animals be related to our national indifference to Iraqi citizens, to the poor and desperate of other countries and the poor and desperate of our own country? Could this learned callousness be crippling our own souls, and making us feel more alone and isolated from the rest of Life’s family than we need to be? If so, how do we differ from the Mountain Man that DuBose Heyward brought to imaginative life over eighty years ago? Is that comfortable? If not, might we expect more of this species that has named itself “the Wise”? What do you think? What do you feel? What do we do?

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This version, like other online versions of this series of animal stories, has been expanded (in this case, by about 3,000 words) from the version delivered as a sermon. Many addition stories have been added back to this version, which has about 6,300 words.

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© Davidson Loehr

January 28, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.

PRAYER

Let us fall into life – kicking, screaming, laughing, loving, let us fall into life.

Comforting the afflicted and afflicting the too comfortable, let us fall into life.

Let us land upright in life and go forward to try and make love more likely, understanding less underrated, peace more possible, violence more rare.

We have a favor to repay. For we have received as a gift of life – everything. Our life, love, hope, compassion, our feeling for those who suffer, the feeling that wants to help, to reweave the torn tapestry of life. All of these come with the gift of life which we have received.

All this and more have we received. And life asks that we return the favor, and give life, hope, love and peace to others, to all others we can reach.

Let us answer by saying, “We are here. We hear you. We feel you coursing through our veins. We feel the love of life; we are the love of life.”

Let us fall into life, fully alive, for more than anything our world needs people who have come alive.

Amen.

SERMON

I want to talk about emotions in us animals today: love, attachment, and grieving, passions from the heart of life. This is an area where it’s easy to find religious stories, fables, myths and children’s stories talking about these things, because They’re so important to us. You think of a saying like “God is Love,” “Love your neighbor as you love yourself,” or Jesus” saying that the quality of your faith is judged by how you treat “the least among you,” whatever group that happens to be for you.

But you almost never hear these sayings applied to animals, just other people – and history shows the religious teachings haven’t done much there either. Just think of our wars, present and past.

Other cultures, formed in part by other religions, have a more natural inclusion of other animals as our kin. In Japan, there is a famous park called the Deer Park of Nara. It was set aside centuries ago as a sanctuary to experience the kinship of all living creatures. In this park, deer walk side by side with people.

In a pond near the Deer Park, Japanese Buddhists buy and release small fish in an ancient ceremony of setting life free. Small children come to the edge of the pond carrying a bowl containing a tiny goldfish. Parents and Grandparents stand by giving their blessings and encouragement as the children gently release the fish into the pond. In a flash of golden light the fish vanish. The children’s faces are full of wonder, for they have given the gift of freedom as the fish swim among their companions in the natural wonder of the pond. (Sharon Callahan, from http://www.anaflora.com/articles/oth-sharon/animal-bud.htm) And when I was in Thailand a few years ago, we visited a temple where people bought birds, in order to let them out of their cages.

But we have been taught that animals have neither intentions nor feelings, and that saying something like “the dog wants to go out,” or – even worse! – “my dog loves me” is committing one of science’s cardinal sins: anthropomorphizing. In other words, it’s ascribing to animals feelings that only humans could possibly have. As silly as this is, it has been with us and in our sciences for a long time. Most people trace it back to Rene Descartes. Animals, declared Descartes, are merely automata, responding mechanically to whatever stimuli confront them. Feelings are no part of the equation. (Humans are different, he said, because of the “ghost in the machine” – a divine inspiration that informs our nature, and ours alone.) (Mark Bekoff, The Smile of a Dolphin, p. 22)

Even today, in biomedical and other experiments done to dogs, monkeys, chimpanzees and other animals, it is easy to find scientists saying They’re sure the animals feel no pain.

Our blindness to our deep kinship with other species lets us treat them in awful ways – and, in the factory farms of cows, calves, chickens and others, in positively vulgar ways. But it also cuts us off from the connection with a larger picture of life that we need. I read part of an interview that Frans de Waal did with the NY Times several years back, and was struck when he said, “Sometimes I read about someone saying with great authority that animals have no intentions and no feelings, and I wonder, “Doesn’t this guy have a dog?”” (Frans de Waal, interview, New York Times, 26 June 2001, from Marc Bekoff, Minding Animals, p. 102)

Do animals really have feelings like ours? Don’t ask a scientist, ask a pet-owner. Ask someone who’s been loved by a dog, and loved it back. Animals love, form attachments, and grieve at the loss of the one they loved, sometimes dying of grief. They can recognize and respond to the distress and loss of others, and seek to comfort them, and welcome reciprocal comfort. This is the Golden Rule in action, tens or hundreds of million years before there were humans.

In the last few years we have learned that there may be more communication between the human fetus and the mother than was previously thought possible. We know that the fetus hears sounds in the womb: similarly, in chickens information is communicated by the embryos inside the egg to the incubating hen. Even before birth the chick is capable of making sounds both of distress and of pleasure, to which the mother hen reacts. A day or so before hatching, the chick often utters distress peeps. The mother hen then moves her body on the eggs or makes a reassuring call to the embryo, which is followed by a pleasure call on the part of the chick. In other words, the bond between the chicks and the mother hen starts before birth. So it makes sense that a chick responds immediately after birth only to the calls of his mother. He recognizes her voice. (Jeffrey M. Masson, The Pig Who Sang to the Moon p. 65)

A mother duck is usually silent while sitting on her eggs. But as soon as her unhatched chick inside the egg begins to peep, she too makes a quiet squeaking noise. Ducklings and mother ducks respond to each other’s calls before the eggs hatch. (Jeffrey M. Masson, The Pig Who Sang to the Moon, p. 189)

And what about the odd fact that a dog only wags his tail for something that has life? (Jeffrey M. Masson, Dogs Never Lie About Love, p. 187) You can have a machine give the dog its food, and the dog will eat the food, but won’t wag its tail at the machine. But it will wag its tail at people, even those who don’t give it food.

People who train dogs to do rescue work, such as finding people buried under an avalanche, or under rubble when a building collapses, say that the dogs need to find a certain number of people alive or they become so disappointed that they refuse to work any longer. After the bombing in Oklahoma City, a rescue worker found that her rescue dogs were becoming depressed at having no success, so she decided to plant a live person in the ruins for her dogs to find. This cheered the dogs up considerably, and they were happy to go back to work. The dogs weren’t doing the work just for treats: they wanted and needed to feel that they were saving live people. (Jeffrey M. Masson, Dogs Never Lie About Love, p. 109)

What about love? It’s hard to say whether animals love, but sometimes it’s even hard to say whether people love. Perhaps the best we have to go on is the behaviors we can see.

Take the matter of long-term loving relationships. More than 90 percent of bird species are monogamous, and in many of them the pairs mate for life”. Fewer mammals are monogamous, and the nonhuman primates appear comparatively callous when it comes to commitment. Chimpanzee males, for example, don’t spend much time courting, mating, or remaining with a female whose young they’ve fathered. And if divorce statistics in our society are any indication (about half the marriages in the US dissolve), we ourselves are hardly role models of committed love. (Mark Bekoff, The Smile of a Dolphin, p. 30)

Some animals are also good at keeping romance alive. In some monogamous species in which the same male and female breed from year to year, courtship is prolonged and vows need to be renewed. In coyotes and wolves, for example, males and females who mated previously may act like strangers the following mating season, and a new round of courtship and companionship is in order before they pair off again, rejecting all other suitors. Once their young are born they stay together, forming a true family unit, until next breeding time. (Mark Bekoff, The Smile of a Dolphin, pp. 30-31) Here, there seems to be an awareness of attraction, mixed with a spark that keeps it alive by insisting on a fresh courtship cycle every year. Sounds pretty advanced!

It’s also hard to imagine anything more tender than the nurturing that many animals lavish on their babies. To begin to grasp the depth of parental love, we need only watch a gorilla mother ceaselessly grooming and cuddling her infant, or a cat bathing her newborn kittens, or whales tirelessly escorting their calves and protecting them from predators. Animal mothers and in some species fathers, older siblings, aunts, uncles, and even cousins will feed youngsters, retrieve them if they stray, patiently teach them the skills they’ll need to survive. Their devotion is selfless and unflagging. (Mark Bekoff, The Smile of a Dolphin, p. 31)

There have also been stories of animal emotions in the popular press. In one story, a troop of about one hundred rhesus monkeys in India, brought traffic to a halt after a baby monkey was hit by a car. The monkeys encircled the injured infant, whose hind legs were crushed and who lay in the road unable to move, and blocked all traffic. A government official reported that the monkeys were angry, and a local shopkeeper was quoted as saying, “It was very emotional – some of them massaged its legs. Finally, they left the scene carrying the injured baby with them.” (Marc Bekoff, “Evolution of animal play” p. 635)

In another incident, baboons in Saudi Arabia waited for three days on the side of a road to take revenge on a driver who had killed a member of their troop. The baboons lay in waiting and ambushed the driver after one baboon screamed when the driver passed by them. The angry baboons threw stones at the car and broke its windshield. (Marc Bekoff, “Evolution of Animal Play,” p. 635)

Did the monkeys love their baby? Did the baboons have a sense of outrage, justice or vengeance against the human who killed one of theirs? Is the Pope Catholic?

And if monkeys, baboons and others show behaviors we would call loving, what about love that extends not only to their kind, but even to other species? That’s going well beyond even the Golden Rule. Here’s a story about Joanne and Lulu. Joanne was a human, and Lulu was her 200 lb. pet Vietnamese pot-bellied pig.

Joanne was in her kitchen one afternoon, feeling unwell, when Lulu charged out of a doggie door made for a 20-pound dog, scraping her sides raw to the point of drawing blood. Running into the street, Lulu proceeded to draw attention by lying down in the middle of the road until a car stopped. Then she led the driver to her owner’s house, where Joanne had suffered a heart attack. She was rushed to the hospital, and the ASPCA awarded Lulu a gold medal for her heroism. Joanne knows in her bones that Lulu’s sixth sense saved her life.” (Jeffrey M. Masson, The Pig Who Sang to the Moon, p. 27)

But was it really heroism? Isn’t it simpler to call it love? That’s what we”d call it if Lulu were a human.

What did it require for Lulu to do what she did for Joanne? Obviously a commitment to her friend, some awareness of how to bring help, the desire to do so, and the ability. It seems unlikely that all this could have happened without conscious awareness of how to bring help, the desire to do so, and the ability. Yet we are unwilling to credit the pig with a thought like: “Oh dear, Joanne is in serious trouble. At whatever cost to my own well-being, I must bring her the kind of help that can save her life.” (Jeffrey M. Masson, The Pig Who Sang to the Moon, p. 27) But her behavior showed that those sensitivities, concerns, motives and abilities existed in her, as they have existed in animals for tens of millions of years before we came along.

And what if Lulu hadn’t been able to save Joanne? Do you think she would have grieved? Of course she would have. Animals have been grieving forever, as farmers and pet-owners have always known.

Konrad Lorenz, the great Austrian naturalist who spent his whole life living with and studying animals, once wrote that you can’t really do a good job of studying an animal unless you love it. He was famous for his experiment on imprinting, where he got a whole batch of baby greylag geese to imprint on him and follow him around as though he were their mother. After years of studying them, he wrote that “A greylag goose that has lost its partner shows all the symptoms that John Bowlby has described in young human children in his famous book Infant Grief”. The eyes sink deep into their sockets, and the individual has an overall drooping experience, literally letting the head hang.” (Marc Bekoff, Minding Animals, p. 113)

There are a lot of stories of animals grieving, and we seem to recognize what They’re feeling immediately.

For example, here’s an interesting paragraph by Alexander Skutch, who at ninety-seven years of age was still conducting field research on birds in Costa Rica. In his book The Minds of Birds, Skutch wrote:

“It is remarkable how often the sounds that birds make suggest the emotions that we might feel in similar circumstances: soft notes like lullabies while calmly warming their eggs or nestlings; mournful cries while helplessly watching an intruder at their nests; harsh or grating sounds while threatening or attacking an enemy”. Birds so frequently respond to events in tones such as we might use that we suspect their emotions are similar to our own.” (Alexander Skutch, The Minds of Birds, 1996, pp. 41-42) from Marc Bekoff, “Evolution of Animal Play“

It’s how it sounds to some who work with birds. In the Rocky Mountains, biologist Marcy Cottrell Houle was observing the eyrie of two peregrine falcons, Arthur and Jenny, as both parents busily fed their five nestlings. One morning only the male falcon visited the nest. Jenny did not appear at all, and Arthur’s behavior changed markedly. When he arrived with food, he waited by the eyrie for as much as an hour before flying off to hunt again, something he had never done before. He called out again and again and listened for his mate’s answer. House struggled not to interpret his behavior as expectation and disappointment. Jenny did not appear the next day or the next. Late on the third day, perched by the eyrie, Arthur uttered an unfamiliar sound, “a cry like the screeching moan of a wounded animal, the cry of a creature in suffering.” The shocked House wrote, “The sadness in the outcry was unmistakable; having heard it, I will never doubt that an animal can suffer emotions that we humans think belong to our species alone.” (Jeffrey M. Masson, When Elephants Weep, p. 91)

Cynthia Moss, who has studied elephants in Africa for over 35 years, describes (in Elephant Memories) the response of elephants in Amboseli National Park when a poacher’s bullet entered the lungs of a young female, Tina. After the herd had escaped from danger, Tina’s knees started to buckle, and the others leaned into her so as to keep her upright. She slipped beneath them nonetheless, and died with a shudder.

Teresia and Trista, her mother and sister, became frantic and knelt down and tried to lift her up. They worked their tusks under her back and under her head. At one point they succeeded in lifting her into a sitting position but her body flopped back down. Her family tried everything to rouse her, kicking and tusking her, and one even went off and collected a trunkful of grass and tried to stuff it into her mouth.

Afterward, the others sprinkled earth over the carcass, then went of into the surrounding bushes to break off branches, which they placed over Tina’s body. By nightfall the corpse was almost completely buried. When the herd moved off next morning, Teresia was the last one to leave. Facing the others with her back to her dead daughter, she reached behind herself and felt Tina’s body with her hind foot several times before she very reluctantly moved off. (Frans de Waal, Good-Natured, pp. 53-54)

Marc Bekoff, another scholar who teaches at the University of Colorado and has lived in Boulder for three decades, works mostly with wolves and coyotes. He wrote about a pair of foxes that lives near him, had been together for several years. One day as he was leaving, he saw that some animal had killed the male fox, and the female was digging dirt on it, to cover it. Several hours later when he returned, she had completely covered the body of her dead mate. It looks like we didn’t invent the idea of burying our dead, doesn’t it?

So elephant mothers and whole communities grieve for the loss of a young one. Orphan elephants who saw their mothers being killed often wake up screaming. (Marc Bekoff, Minding Animals, p. 113)

And perhaps the most important part of this is that the love, attachment, and grieving aren’t restricted to their own species. They seem to happen with whatever we have loved or been loved by. Some of these stories come from animals that bonded with animals of another species – like some of the chimpanzees that were raised by humans back in the 1970s when this was in vogue.

Roger Fouts, the man who began teaching the chimpanzee Washoe American Sign Language in 1967 and is still with her at his university in Washington state, tells several stories of watching young chimpanzees raised by humans dying of grief, or a terminal kind of separation anxiety.

“I had been teaching Maybelle for about nine months when her foster mother, Vera Gatch, decided to leave her chimpanzee daughter for the very first time. Vera was one of Lemmon’s students and a psychotherapist with her own private practice and a teaching post at the university. She had raised Maybelle from infancy and had never left her daughter alone even for one night. Now that Maybelle was four, Vera felt the time was right to attend a conference out of town, and she arranged for someone Maybelle knew to stay with her in her home.

“As soon as Vera was gone a full day, Maybelle went to pieces. She developed terrible diarrhea and a respiratory infection. Those of us who knew Maybelle set up shifts to care for her around the clock. Day after day we sat at her bedside administering fluids and trying to get her fever down, but poor Maybelle was wasting away before my very eyes and I felt utterly powerless to save her. Her diarrhea became dysentery and her lung infection turned to full-blown pneumonia. The doctor came but there was nothing he could do. By the time her mother returned home, Maybelle was dead. (Roger Fouts, Next of Kin, p. 168)

“Nearly two years later I watched my youngest pupil, barely older than a baby, also shrivel up and die in the absence of her human mother. Salome began learning sign language at four months of age, about the same age when deaf children begin signing. Thanks to her precociousness she appeared in the 1972 LIFE magazine spread with Lucy and other famous chimps. Salome was raised by a married human couple. Just when Salome was out of infancy, Susie became pregnant. After the baby was born, the couple decided to take a vacation with their new child, and immediately Salome lapsed into pneumonia and was close to death. Her adoptive human parents rushed home and Salome recovered from her grief-induced illness. Shortly thereafter, they decided to try another vacation. But this time Salome didn’t make it. She died within a few days.” (Roger Fouts, Next of Kin, p. 168) The grief looks like the same grief that Flint showed when his mother Flo died, in that story from Jane Goodall, and we recognize it immediately.

And Jane Goodall, who has been observing wild chimpanzees in Africa for over forty years, has many stories of grief. Here’s one poignant and often-quoted story about an eight-year-old male chimp named Flint, who was thrown into the deepest grief after his mother Flo died:

Never shall I forget watching as, three days after Flo’s death, Flint climbed slowly into a tall tree near the stream. He walked along one of the branches, then stopped and stood motionless, staring down at an empty nest. After about two minutes he turned away and, with the movements of an old man, climbed down, walked a few steps, then lay, wide eyes staring ahead. The nest was one which he and Flo had shared a short while before Flo died”. In the presence of his big brother [Figan], [Flint] had seemed to shake off a little of his depression. But then he suddenly left the group and raced back to the place where Flo had died and there sank into ever-deeper depression”. Flint became increasingly lethargic, refused food and, with his immune system thus weakened, fell sick. The last time I saw him alive, he was hollow-eyed, gaunt and utterly depressed, huddled in the vegetation close to where Flo had died”. The last short journey he made, pausing to rest every few feet, was to the very place where Flo’s body had lain. There he stayed for several hours, sometimes staring and staring into the water. He struggled on a little further, then curled up – and never moved again.

– Jane Goodall, Through a Window

I don’t want you to feel like rescue dogs who aren’t finding any live ones, so here’s one more story about the care of a dying young creature with a happier ending.

Barbara Smuts writes, “Near the research station where I lived, an adult female baboon was found dead in a poacher’s snare. Her baby, cloaked in the velvety black fur of newborns, was still clinging to his mother’s cold body. Another researcher brought the baby home, fed him milk, put him in a cage in a warm room, and then forgot about him. I stumbled over him the next morning.

“He was barely alive. His eyes were cloudy, unfocused, and swollen half shut. His body was cold, his breathing almost undetectable. I removed him from the cage, remembering all I’d learned about how infant primates respond to maternal loss. I held him close, groomed him, and carried him everywhere for the rest of the day. Although I thought he was too ill to make it through the night, I wanted to comfort him during his last hours. That evening he went to sleep lying on my chest, his head against my heart. In the middle of the night I was awakened by a rambunctious baby baboon who wanted to play!

“The next morning, clear-eyed, he stayed close to me, venturing only a few cautious steps away when I sat down. But if I removed him when he was clinging to me, he threw a tantrum, writhing on the ground and screaming, just as baboon infants do with their mothers. And like the baboon mothers, I couldn’t bear his suffering, so I would pick him up again. Immediately calm, he would then gaze at me with utter devotion.

“When we took Hilary (she named him) to the Nairobi drive-in, we had to pay for him. In response to our protests, we were told, “Well, He’s going to watch the movie, isn’t he?” And in fact he did.” (by Barbara Smuts, “Child of Mine,” in Mark Bekoff, The Smile of a Dolphin, pp. 151-152)

Since animals can’t speak English, some people think we can’t ever really know whether they feel as we do. But some of the apes who learned to communicate through sign language or keyboards can communicate directly with us, so we can know.

Roger Fouts tells a story about Washoe, the most famous of the chimps who use sign language – still alive at age 42, which is getting old for a chimpanzee. Fouts required all the volunteers who worked with the chimps to learn sign language, and he told the story of one of them, a woman named Kat, who had worked with Washoe. Kat was pregnant, and Washoe was very interested in the woman’s belly, always asking about her BABY.

Unfortunately, Kat had a miscarriage, and afterwards, she didn’t come in to the lab for several days. When she finally came back Washoe greeted her warmly but then moved away and let Kat know she was upset that she’d been gone. Knowing that Washoe had lost two of her own children, Kat decided to tell her the truth.

MY BABY DIED, Kat signed to her. Washoe looked down to the ground. Then she looked into Kat’s eyes and signed CRY, touching her cheek just below her eye. That single word, CRY, Kat later said, told her more about Washoe than all of her longer, more grammatically perfect sentences. When Kat had to leave that day, Washoe wouldn’t let her go. PLEASE PERSON HUG, she signed. (Roger Fouts, Next of Kin, p. 291)

Reading these animal stories and others like them has convinced me that one of the worst stories ever told about the human condition is that Christian story about all of us being born in a state of original sin: sinners to the core, needing the intervention of the church and its priests. It’s an evil story, and wrong all the way down. It’s a story designed more to ensnare us than to empower us. We need a better and more true story out of which to live.

We are born embedded in a world of living, feeling beings who can feel joy and sorrow, who can love and lose, and who can reach out to others, sometimes with just a single gesture, like CRY, that offers us a reconnection with the force of life itself.

But we have taught ourselves bad stories, unfeeling stories that glorify selfishness, greed, invasion and occupation of another country, stealing their oil and murdering their people. Today, when the cries and screams of agony and grieving arise, they most often arise because of our armies, our economic policies, our official heartlessness.

Think of those little goldfish the children set free in Japan’s Deer Park, or the small birds that Thai Buddhists set free as acts of liberation and piety. Those are messages from the heart of life: life telling us what it needs from us. We too can set life free. Within and around us, we can set life free. Let’s do.

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© Davidson Loehr

January 21, 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 want to reweave the lost connections in our world. Those feelings of warmth and kinship we did have or might have – we want to reweave them.

The gentle feelings that we can feel at times even for strangers, that knowledge beyond all argument that we are one, that we are indeed all in this together, flesh of one flesh and blood of one blood – where do they come from, those gentle feelings, and how can we get them back?

Sometimes we feel a more immediate and warmer compassion for a stray animal we”ve never seen before than we can muster for the other human beings with whom we live. Why is that? Can it really be that familiarity breeds only contempt? It seems so sour a view of closeness, we vote No.

Yet something, over time, seems to breed at least indifference, and the indifference can kill the spirit of life itself, left to fester. Something can seem to die, even in the very relationships we most cherish. How did it happen? And can what seems wounded be brought back to full health?

These questions run through our relationships, our jobs, our families, our nation and our world. Everywhere, so much has come undone. We want to reweave the lost connections in our world. Those feelings of warmth and kinship we did have or might have – we want to reweave them. We will need all the help we can get . Let us seek that help, within and among our selves and our precious relationships with others. Amen.

SERMON

When the foundations of our Western religion were laid, when Yahweh, the main God of the ancient Hebrews, was created a few thousand years ago, he was created specifically to oppose the nature deities of the Canaanite culture in which the ancient Hebrews originated.

The Canaanites saw us as absolutely embedded in nature, because they were farmers. The Hebrews were sheep-herders, and created a religion that pretended we had no deep connection with nature at all, only with their God, who was created as a kind of tribal chief.

Yet we are profoundly children of nature. And that means that some of the biases in our religions have profoundly misidentified us and misled us. The real ground of our being is in our deep relationships with all other life on earth, and with the earth itself, not with authoritative voices from on high, or wishful and distracting poetry.

That’s why I think it’s worth trying to take a more serious look at who we are and where we came from, because Life knows a lot. There are a lot of deep and clear patterns that can help show us who we are, what we need, what we love, and how we can live more fulfilled lives.

So I want to look at some of the things life seems to know, by looking at some animal stories – today, stories from monkeys and the two apes who are our closest relatives: chimpanzees and bonobos, plus a few stories about dogs, elephants, bulls and pigs.

One of the most important things these stories show us is how much other animals can think like us, find the same kind of solution to their problems that we might seek.

Modern study of animals” inventive problem-solving began in 1953, when a Japanese observer studying a troop of Japanese macaque monkeys, noticed that a young female she had named Imo, had suddenly solved a problem the rest of her troop hadn’t been able to solve.

Researchers were giving the monkeys sweet potatoes, which the monkeys liked a lot. But the potatoes were covered in sand and dirt, and you can imagine the feeling of chewing a potato covered in sand and dirt, what would you do? I can tell you what the monkeys did. The one named Imo, just a year and a half old, took her potato into the ocean, and scrubbed the dirt off in the ocean water. Three years later, Imo came up with a second brilliant idea, when she figured out how to separate all the sand from rice they found on the beach. What would you do? Imo solved it by tossing handfuls of the rice and sand mixture into the water, letting the sand sink, and eating the rice that stayed on the surface, now lightly salted by the ocean water.

Before too long, the other monkeys in her community had learned to wash their potatoes and their rice, and now more than a half century later, long after Imo has died, the whole culture of monkeys still does these things, and teaches their children how to do them. Imo’s ideas have become a part of monkey culture.

Chimpanzees have done even more impressive things.

In Africa, they have devised a hammer and anvil technique to break open very hard Coula and Panda nuts. They will carry these nuts to a special tree root or rock with an indentation in it, put the nut in the indentation, then with a heavy stick or rock, crush it enough to get the nut out of the inside. They can get about 3800 calories a day this way, and many have become very good at it. It’s a skill that can take a decade to learn well. Children learn the skill from their elders, and it has been part of their chimpanzee culture for a long time now. (Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, Kanzi, p. 29)

The human natives living in the area also eat those nuts, and have their own hammer and anvil stations in their villages that look like those the chimps have hidden deep in the jungle. So it looks like the chimps and the humans thought alike, and figured out the same solution to the same problem, and we’re always impressed with an animal’s intelligence if they think like we do.

We used chimpanzees in the early years of our space program, in ways many Americans may not know today. In the late 50s, our US Air Force bought about 65 chimps from Africa and began training them to operate the controls inside space capsules. Some of you will remember – from history books if not from newspapers – that the first living things we fired into space were chimpanzees.

They trained the young chimps through a reward and punishment system, giving them banana pellets for correct moves and electric shocks to their feet for wrong moves, because they assumed that chimps could only care about rewards and punishments.

But the second chimp we sent into space showed us something different. His name was Enos, and after his Atlas rocket blasted off in November 1961, the machinery malfunctioned once he got into orbit. A fuel line stuck open, wasting fuel and sending the capsule into a dangerous wobble. He had to correct the wobble, and help bring the thing back to earth. Now remember, this was a five-year-old chimpanzee. It was like sending a 3- or 4-year-old boy into space, and expecting him to help correct the flight of an errant spaceship. Even worse, the reward and punishment system went haywire, and began giving banana pellets for wrong responses, and giving electric shocks for correct moves.

The rocket scientists assumed Enos would begin making wrong moves in order to get his banana pellets. Instead, he did the moves he knew were right, even though he got an electric shock for every right response. (Roger Fouts, Next of Kin, pp. 40-41) We talk of the joy of doing a job well, and the Germans have the term funktionslust, meaning the love of what we can do well. It plays a big role in self-fulfillment for many people. But also for many other animals. Those who work with seeing-eye dogs or rescue dogs talk of the dogs” delight, the dogs” satisfaction, in being good at what they do. It’s the healthy kind of pride, not to be confused with the kind that goes before a fall.

In post-flight tests the scientists could barely match the chimp’s in-flight performance, and none of them were receiving shocks. Thanks to the space exploits of our Astrochimps, NASA made 250 safety and comfort modifications to improve Friendship 7, the spacecraft that would carry John Glenn around the earth three times in February 1962. (Roger Fouts, Next of Kin, p. 42)

But impressive as all this is, there are much more interesting things that other animals have to teach us about life. They’re more about animals showing us what living things need: things that we need too, and which may be some of the fundamental needs of all life, or at least most animals. Today I’ll talk about what life seems to know that it needs – what we can learn from the “mind of Life,” to put it poetically. Next week I’ll focus more on the heart of life: some of the emotional dimensions of life that are clearly recognizable to us even in species separated from us by tens or hundreds of millions of years of evolution.

Today, I want to share some animal stories that show us things we know about ourselves, but may not know are deep parts of what almost all animals need. The stories tell us that life needs

Health or wholeness (one meaning of “salvation”)

Freedom and dignity

A safe place

Fairness, or justice

These are needs that we have encased in our religions and our laws, but they are far older than gods, religions or laws.

1. Life seeks health, wholeness (“salvation”)

Seeking health and wholeness is very close to what is meant by the word “salvation” in Western theology. The word comes from a Latin word for “to save,” but it is also the root of our word “salve.” Salvation is a healthy kind of wholeness, and the desire for it predates the gods by millions of years. And we know, to a small or large extent, what we need to feel healthy and whole.

We all know that dogs and cats will lick their wounds, to clean and heal themselves. And cats will eat grass to help with their digestive system. But you may not have known about the evidence that chimpanzees in the jungle self-medicate. Some self-medication is widespread in all sort of animals, such as the eating of clay, which contains absorbent components resembling Kaopectate, or cats eating grass to aid their digestive system. But apes are also known to chew the bitter pith of certain plants, which cures worm infestations and dysentery. (Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master, p. 254)

Another discovery is that apes do what is called leaf-swallowing. Chimpanzees tend to swallow them in the morning, before foraging for food. They don’t chew them, they carefully fold them over so they can be swallowed whole. The leaves move through their system like brooms, expelling parasites from their intestines. Leaf swallowing has been identified in a lot of chimpanzee populations across Africa, involving over thirty different plant species. (The Ape and the Sushi Master, p. 255)

Some of the human tribes living in those areas use many of the same plants for the same purposes, and Western doctors are now studying the chimpanzee knowledge of natural plant remedies. We seem to think a lot alike.

2. Life needs freedom and dignity

A second need we animals have is the need for freedom and dignity. Nobody likes to be “dissed,” and feeling disrespected has led to many fights and wars. But a lot of animals won’t put up with it.

If you’ve owned a dog, you know that they do not like to be laughed at. They will often look at you and give you that “Rowr-rown-rowr-rowr!” noise, if you tease them. And you know just what they mean: “Stop it! Stop teasing me!” And maybe even, “I’ve got teeth, you know!”

A 19th century writer told a story about his terrier, who loved to snap at flies on the windowpane. When the owner noticed one day that the dog wasn’t actually catching any flies, he began making fun of him, laughing and pointing to the flies. The dog promptly snapped at thin air, pretended to have caught a fly, and chewed the imaginary fly up really good. And then I suspect he snorted and walked away with his head held high. (story from George Romanes in Animal Intelligence, 1886, from Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, Dogs Never Lie About Love: Reflections on the Emotional World of Dogs, p. 105)

Nobody liked to be “dissed.” When I visited the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta last November, I talked with a scientist named Sarah Brosnan who said she could only do behavioral experiments with the chimpanzees when they were in the mood. She said chimps are very smart. They can easily figure out what you are trying to test in your experiments, and if you don’t respect their moods and strong wishes, they will simply sabotage you! She had run many experiments in “match-to-object” tests with an adolescent female chimp named Rita, and Rita always scored about 90% recognition. Then Rita came into estrus, and didn’t want to be taken away from the boys. Sarah persisted, and managed to remove Rita anyway, and take her to the testing room. Suddenly, Rita couldn’t do better than 10% recognition. A few weeks later, when she was through with the boys, she immediately returned to her 90% recognition rate. How much like teen-agers does that sound?

Let’s take a much heavier and more tragic story.

The state of New Hampshire’s motto is “Live free or die,” (the full quote from General Stark in 1809 was “Live free or die! Death is not the worst of evils.”) And we all know Patrick Henry’s famous battle cry, “Give me liberty or give me death!” We may think this shows a life-or-death devotion to abstract ideals like freedom and dignity that only we humans are capable of, because we never hear animals talking about concepts like freedom or dignity. But here too, we only put words to a feeling shared by thousands of animals for millions of years before we came along.

Just this week, one of the scientists with whom I’ve been in e-mail contact (Marc Bekoff, an ethologist from the University of Colorado in Boulder) sent me a story from a newspaper in Thailand, about the training program for the elephants they use to perform for tourists, and take people for elephant rides. The training is more brutal than I had wanted to know. It is called “crushing,” meaning crushing the elephant’s spirit, and about half the elephants die during the training, as They’re chained in small pens and abused.

But some of the elephants, they say, are committing suicide by standing on their own trunks and suffocating themselves, rather than suffer through the abuse. (from a Thai newspaper, reprinted as “Small is Huge” by David Neff in “Christianity Today,” February 2006)

I rode one of those elephants for about three hours, and watched others perform when I was in Thailand several years ago, and learning this has forever changed the feel of that experience.

Living things must have their dignity, their spirit. Techniques that seek to crush it – including a lot of the “breaking” of horses or the Calvinistic child-rearing programs designed to break the child’s spirit, may be deep crimes against the very spirit of life.

3. Living things need a safe space

A third thing all animals seem to need is a safe space. There is a Spanish word, querencia (kuh-den-see-uh), that I first learned in the context of bullfighting. The querencia is that place in the ring where the bull feels most safe. It is a different place for each bull. Online, you can find that the word is also used as the name for all kinds of upscale resorts, offering patrons a safe, comfortable place. Whatever we call it, all life needs this kind of place, this querencia.

Some species, including ours, make their own querencias. Both chimpanzees and bonobos build nests. Bonobos build nests in the trees for the night, but also for resting, grooming, or play in the daytime. These nests represent a private area that cannot be infringed upon, not even by the nest maker’s closest companions. For example, youngsters do not enter their mother’s nest uninvited, but wait at the edge, requesting access by means of facial expressions and distress calls. (Frans de Waal, Bonobo: the Forgotten Ape, p. 158)

Females use the sanctity of their nests to help wean their young, by not giving them permission to enter. Other apes will make quick nests from a couple branches, then sit inside to eat special foods without being disturbed. And sometimes adult males will escape the threatening charge of another male by climbing up a tree and building a nest. In response, the charging males have been observed stopping at the base of the tree and moving away. (Frans de Waal, Bonobo: the Forgotten Ape, p. 158) In our species, we say our home is our castle, and breaking and entering someone’s home is a crime. But the concept and the need are as old as most life.

4. Many animals expect fairness and justice

Sarah Brosnan at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center who I mentioned earlier, conducted a fairly famous experiment with capuchin monkeys which seems to show that they have a very strong sense of fairness, and won’t play a game that isn’t fair to them. Capuchins like cucumbers, but they really like grapes a lot better. Sarah put two capuchins in adjoining cages, led the first one through a task, and gave it a slice of cucumber when it completed the task correctly, while the second capuchin watched. Then she gave the second monkey the same task, and the same reward, a slice of cucumber. All went well until on a new task, she rewarded the first monkey with a grape, but when the second monkey did the same task, she just gave it a cucumber. In test after test, the monkey threw the cucumber down on the floor refused to eat it, and threw a tantrum. It wasn’t fair. (Sarah did point out that each capuchin only seems to be concerned about whether it’s fair to them. None seem upset if they get the grape and the other monkey gets the cucumber.)

There’s another story about a Norwegian farmer who learned an important lesson from his big sow. Extremely fond of people, the pig liked to lie with her head on top of the metal railing around her pen when there were people in the barn. Those passing her would speak kindly to her and pat her head. One day the farmer had to repair a rotten board on the floor of her stall. The pig was curious and kept nudging and poking him as he worked. He got annoyed, and smacked her with his hammer. “I should not have done that,” he said later, “for immediately she took my thigh into her big mouth and locked it completely between her jaws, though she did not bite. She probably only wanted to warn me not to do such a thing to her ever again. She found it intolerable that I would do something unkind to her.” This story shows a sophisticated sensitivity on the part of the pig. She had a sense of justice and of the consequences of breaking certain rules of behavior, but also of making allowance for a slow but otherwise decent human who could not be expected to have mastered all the fine points of fairness. (Jeffrey M. Masson, The Pig Who Sang to the Moon, pp. 29-30)

I’ll close with one more story about how deeply embedded in us is the knowledge that life needs health, respect, and freedom – and that playing fair with others sometimes asks that we figure out how to help them.

It’s the story of a bonobo ape named Kuni, who one day caught a starling who had landed on her island in the Twycross Zoo in England. The bird seemed stunned but otherwise ok, and the trainers tried to get the ape to give them the bird so she wouldn’t hurt it. Instead, Kuni held the starling in her left hand, and climbed up the tallest tree on the island. Then, holding on to the tree with her feet, she carefully took the bird’s wing tips in her hands, spread them out as though the bird were in flight, and tossed the starling high into the air. (Frans de Waal, Bonobo: the Forgotten Ape, p. 156)

This is a much bigger, broader, deeper and more compassionate picture of the human condition than that presented by most religions, especially the three Western religions.

Our minds look at and structure much of life in ways very similar to animals separated from us by millions or tens of millions of years in evolutionary time. Yet here are all the parables we could need of noble, caring, gentle and decent behavior. Something bigger than God is calling to us, and not with a harsh voice. It is the voice of life, speaking through the mind of life, reminding us of who we are, what we’re like, how many living relatives we really have, and what a rich world it can be, if only we’ll remember our true heritage, our breeding.

Some of these stories are as profound as any religious parables I know. Think of how much about dignity, freedom, respect and justice the pig and the bonobos seemed to know intuitively. Then think about us. Do we really want to admit that we will settle for less?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

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:

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.

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.