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.

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.

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.

PRAYER: “The Mountain Woman,” by DuBose Heyward

          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”:

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?