Chimp Lessons, part 2

To part 1

Chimps certainly communicate a lot, mostly with signs though they can be taught to use a few symbols. They certainly don’t have the human facility for complex symbol use including abstract nouns, and past tense and future tense verbs – not to mention conditional perfect or future subjunctive or modal verbs. But remember what Talleyrand, the 18th century French clergyman and diplomat, told us about language. Talleyrand said:

“God gave humans language so they could conceal their thoughts from one another.”

In fact, we got so good at hiding our thoughts and intentions from one another that it became useful to have indicators of our feelings that are hard to fake. We might find ourselves smiling, giggling, or crying when we don't want to. These are signals of our feelings that are hard to fake but not terribly hard.

The hardest feeling-signal to fake is the blush. Neither chimps nor bonobos – nor, as far as we have yet to discover, any nonhuman species – blush. And blushing is very hard to fake. Actors who can easily cry tears upon command find blushing much harder, and usually rely on make-up if a scene calls for a blush.

Blushing remains an evolutionary mystery, but one theory is that with all that dissembling and disguising of our thinking made possible by complex symbolic language, it was actually helpful to have some signals that can't be controlled – a way to let others know, even if we might not want to, that our embarrassment or strong feeling is genuine. So Mark Twain’s quip – that “Man is the only animal that blushes – or needs to” – may have been true in ways he didn't imagine.

Our fancy words, of course, disguise ourselves not only from others, but from ourselves. We fabricate accounts of what we’re doing and what we intend, and then we believe our fabrication. It’s not that chimps can’t intentionally deceive each other and humans -- but the study of other hominins does give us some glimpse into part of what may be going on with humans behind our more elaborate linguistic constructs and conceits. When Frans de Waal began his chimpanzee studies as a young graduate student it was the flower-power era of the 1970s. What he saw in these other hominins, he began to see in humans. He writes:

“My generation was anarchistic and fiercely democratic, didn’t trust the authorities that ran the university, viewed sexual jealousy as antiquated, and felt that any kind of ambition was suspect. The chimpanzee colony that I watched day in and day out, on the other hand, showed all those ‘reactionary’ tendencies in spades: power, ambition, and jealousy. Sitting there with my shoulder-length hair, nourished by saccharine songs such as ‘Strawberry Fields Forever,’ and ‘Good Vibrations,’ I went through a truly eye-opening period. Right away, as a human being, I was struck by the similarities between us and our closest relative....I had to come to grips with behavior that my generation roundly denounced but that was common in [these other] apes....I began to better understand my own kind. I started to notice rampant jockeying for position, coalition formation, currying of favors, and political opportunism – in my own environment. And I don’t mean just among the older generation. The student movement had its own alpha males, power struggles, groupies, and jealousies. In fact, the more promiscuous we became, the more sexual jealousy reared its ugly head. My ape study gave me the right distance to analyze these patterns, which were plain as day if you looked for them. Student leaders ridiculed and isolated potential challengers and stole everybody’s girlfriend while at the same time preaching the wonders of egalitarianism and tolerance. There was an enormous mismatch between what my generation wanted to be, as expressed in our passionate political oratory, and how we actually behaved.” (Mama's Last Hug, 26-7)

Writing now almost 5 decades of study later, de Waal finds:

“Human hierarchies can be quite apparent, but we don’t always recognize them as such, and academics often act as if they don’t exist. I have sat through entire conferences on adolescent human behavior without ever hearing the words power and sex, even though to me they are what teen life is all about. When I bring it up, usually everyone nods and thinks it’s marvelously refreshing how a primatologist looks at the world, then continue on their merry way focusing on self-esteem, body image, emotion regulation, risk-taking, and so on....Yet among teens, there is nothing more obvious than the exploration of sex, the testing of power, and the seeking of structure.” (31)

Example after example, study after study, has chipped away at notions of human exceptionalism in the emotional and social realm.

Consider, to select almost randomly, one example: triadic awareness -- i.e., awareness of not only your relationship with B and your relationship with C, but also the relationship of B with C.

“Many animals obviously know whom they dominate, or whom their own family and friends are, but chimps go one step further by realizing who around them dominates whom and who is friends with whom. Individual A is aware not only of his own relationships with B and C but also of the B-C relationship. Her knowledge covers the entire triad. Triadic awareness may even extend outside the group, as shown by Mama’s reaction to the zoo director. She had little direct contact with him, yet she must have picked up on how jumpy and deferential the caretakers acted whenever he stopped by. [Other] apes observe and learn, just as [humans] do when we understand who is married to whom or to which family a child belongs....Triadic awareness is not limited to ape – it has also been found in monkeys and ravens.” (30)

We learn a lot about B by watching how B is with C – and we are far from the only species who does that.

“Scientists at the University of Kyoto tested how capuchin monkeys reacted to a scene in which a person pretended to have trouble opening a plastic container and asked a human experimenter for help. The experimenter kindly gave the help. In the next scene, the person asked a different experimenter for help – one who turned away and ignored the request. Would the monkeys like the good guy or the selfish jerk? Mind you, this was about how the experimenter treated not the monkeys but another person. After watching the scenes enacted in front of them, the monkeys refused to have anything to do with the despicable experimenter, turned off by her poor level of cooperation.” (164)

They’re watching – just as Mama was watching in order to pick up on the authority that the zoo director had. And the level of political intrigue in a chimp colony comes pretty close to our own. De Waal describes the case of Nikkie.

“After Nikkie became the new alpha male in the chimpanzee colony of Burgers Zoo, he regularly practiced strategic retaliation. His dominance was not yet fully acknowledged, and subordinates would often pressure him, banding together and chasing him around, leaving him panting and licking his wounds. But Nikkie did not give up, and a few hours later he’d regain his composure. The rest of the day he’d go around the large island to single out members of the resistance, visiting them one by one while they were sitting alone minding their own business. He’d intimidate them or give them a beating, which likely made them think twice before opposing him again.”

You may have noticed that presidents seem to age faster – that Obama, for instance, looked a lot more than 8 years older at the end of his presidency than he had at the beginning of it. In chimps, too, “alpha males live under constant pressure and can get stressed out.” An alpha male at the Yerkes Field station had a rival who never let up and provoked him every day. A photo of the chimp seems to show the constant worry reflected in his eyes.

Our own species is remarkably plastic. And those linguistic constructs that conceal our thoughts also allow humans to build civilization far beyond what other apes can do (which, itself, is a good news, bad news story). The chimp lessons – toward which I have but gestured – teach us what we may have hidden from ourselves. Power and sex dynamics continue to be huge drivers of our behavior, howsoever our conceptualizing may disguise and dress them up.

The moral here, I take it, is not that since the drives for power and sex are only natural, we should drop our inhibitions and subterfuge and more baldly and aggressively assert these drives. Rather, my teaching today, as it often is, is: pay attention. Notice. It’s when we don’t notice the operations of power and sex drives that they most control our lives. By paying attention to the arising of these drives – in ourselves and in others – and only by doing so – we gain some freedom to decide for ourselves what to do about them.

Let us not deny what we are. Let us not or repress, or suppress – except maybe temporarily as a particular situation may require. Over the long haul, it’s not repression that we seek. Rather, we seek grounding in a clear awareness of what we are, as reading up on the behavior of our fellow hominins helps provide. We may then channel what we are into what we yet may be. May that be so.

Amen.

To part 1

Chimp Lessons, part 1

To part 2

Let us begin with a recitation of the litany of "us":

• 13.8 billion years ago the universe began.
• 4.6 billion years ago, in the last third of the universe’s lifespan, our sun formed, and within about 60 million years, the Earth.
• 3.5 billion years ago, a billion years after our Earth formed, life on Earth began.
• 2 billion years ago, after a billion and a half years of prokaryotic life, eukaryotes (cells with a distinct nucleus) appeared when symbiotically linked prokaryotic cells fused into one organism.
• 800 million years ago, some eukaryotes developed into the first animal.
• 535 million years ago, within the last 4 percent of the age of the universe, some animals developed into the first vertebrates.
• 200 million years ago, some vertebrates developed into the first mammals.
• 60 million years ago, some mammals developed into the first primates.
• 25 million years ago, some primates developed into the first hominoids (apes).
• 20 million years ago, the hominoids split into the hominids (great apes) and the gibbons.
• 17 million years ago, the hominids split into the homininae and the ponginae (orangutans).
• 10 million years ago, the homininae split into the hominins and the gorillins (gorillas).
• 6 million years ago, the hominins split into the australopithecines and the panina (chimps and bonobos).
• About 2 million years ago, some australopithecines developed into the first homo genus. There have been 8 or 10 species of homo, many of them on earth at the same time.
• 200,000 to 300,000 years ago, one of those homo species became the one called sapiens.
• 40,000 years ago, homo neanderthalensis, the last non-sapiens homo, went extinct -- though not before interbreeding with homo sapiens enough that today the average human's DNA is 2% neanderthal.

I love recounting this litany of our place in the family of life. I have to re-look-up the numbers every time I assemble this litany. I don't retain all the numbers in memory -- and, besides, the numbers keep getting tweaked as more of the fossil record is revealed, and interpretations of that record rise or fall among scientists. Maybe you won’t remember any of those numbers, but just to hear them and hold them for a moment offers a chance for awe, both humbling and glorifying at the same time. How small we are – and yet how grand the long story that brought us into being.

Consider the period since vertebrate life first appeared on earth – not life, not eukaryotes, not animals, but just the time since vertebrate animals appeared. If we expressed those 535 million years as a single year -- with the first vertebrate animal life appearing the moment of the new year on January 1, and right now being the ball dropping on the end of that year – then the first mammals didn’t appear until August 17 of that year. The first primates weren’t here until November 21. The hominids (the great apes) got here on December 18. The last common ancestor of humans and chimps lived and died on December 27. And humans didn’t show up until about 8:30pm on December 31. That’s us, on the time scale of vertebrate life.

Early homo sapiens probably played a role in the extinction of other homo species, but two other hominin species have, so far, survived humans: chimpanzees and bonobos, both of the genus pan. Outside the regions of the African habitats of chimps and bonobos, human civilization in Europe, Asia, and the Americas unfolded unaware of our closest relatives. Up until the 19th century, Westerners never saw live apes other than humans. As Frans de Waal tells it:

“When the first [nonhuman] apes went on display, no one could believe their eyes. In 1835 a male chimpanzee arrived at London Zoo and was exhibited while clothed in a sailor suit. He was followed by a female orangutan who was put in a dress. Queen Victoria saw the exhibit and was appalled. She couldn’t stand the sight of the[se] apes, calling them painfully and disagreeably human.” (Mama's Last Hug, 17-18)

Charles Darwin also saw the exhibit and also found these apes strikingly human-like, but he was not repulsed by this. “He felt that anyone convinced of human superiority ought to come take a look” (18).

Earlier, I referred to the long story that brought “us” into being, and subsequently said, “that’s us, on the time scale of vertebrate life.” But who is this “us”? That litany of life I conducted offers concentric circles of “us” – us humans, us hominins, us hominids, us hominoids, us primates, us mammals, us vertebrates, us animals, us Terran life forms. It’s all “us.” Sometimes we need a little help remembering that all homo sapiens are us – whatever their class, or color, or gender identity or affectional orientation. Sometimes we need a little help remembering that not only homo sapiens are us.

I trust this will not come to you as painful and disagreeable as it was to Queen Victoria – whose brief observation of Tommy the chimpanzee revealed only a tiny sliver of what we now understand about chimps, yet revealed more than she was comfortable knowing. I get how being disabused of human specialness can be disconcerting – but it can also be, as it was for Charles Darwin, exhilarating. It offers us new possibilities for connection, opens a door for a larger love – while at the same time, because there are important ways that we hominins differ from each other, offering us lessons in respecting people and beings that aren’t like us.

To accept and embrace kinship while respecting difference – this is the project of making community within our species, and it is the project of making community within our genus (if there were any other extant homo species), within our hominin tribe, our hominid family, our primate order, our mammal class, and our chordate phylum.

Part of respecting differences is knowing that chimps can be dangerous. Frans de Waal writes that

“no human in his right mind would walk into a cage with an adult chimpanzee. Chimpanzees don’t seem large to us, but their muscle strength far exceed ours, and reports of horrific attacks are plentiful.” (14-15)

So the story de Waal tells of two elderly hominins is all the more remarkable. One of them was dutch biologist Jan van Hooff nearly 80 years old. The other was Mama, a female chimp at the Arnhem Zoo Chimpanzee Community, a month shy of 59. The two of them had known each other for over 40 years, but hadn’t seen each other recently when Jan came to visit the dying matriarch of the Arnhem Chimp colony.

“Curled up in a fetal position in her straw nest, Mama doesn’t even look up when Jan, who has boldly entered her night cage, approaches with a few friendly grunts. Those of us who work with [nonhuman] apes, often mimic their typical sounds and gestures: soft grunts are reassuring. When Mama finally does wake up from her slumber, it takes her a second to realize what is going on. But then she expresses immense joy at seeing Jan up close and in the flesh. Her face changes into an ecstatic grin, a much more expansive one than is typical of our species....Half of Mama’s face is a huge smile while she yelps – a soft, high-pitched sound for moments of high emotion. In this case, the emotion is clearly positive because she reaches for Jan’s head while he bends down. She gently strokes his hair, then drapes one of her long arms around his neck to pull him closer. During this embrace, her fingers rhythmically pat the back of his head and neck in a comforting gesture that chimpanzees also use to quiet a whimpering infant. This was typically Mama: she must have sensed Jan’s trepidation about invading her domain, and she was letting him know not to worry. She was happy to see him.” (13-14)

The video of Mama’s last hug is here. Let me know if you get through it with dry eyes. I did not.



If Queen Victoria was disturbed to see Tommy in a sailor suit, what could she have made of this tender encounter?

To part 2

We Don't Have to Choose

On Being Animal, part 3

The rise of grain-based agriculture made taxation systems functional on a large scale, which allowed for centralized power. Thus were born the relations of domination that have become so familiar in so many ways. Jared Diamond (noted in the previous post) called this "the worst mistake in human history." Chellis Glendinning describes it this way:

“The small-scale, nomadic life that had endured through more than a million years and thirty-five thousand generations was irreparably altered. The human relationship with the natural world was gradually changed from one of respect for and participation in its elliptical wholeness to one of detachment, management, control, and finally domination. The social, cultural, and ecological foundations that had previously served the development of a healthy primal matrix were undermined, and the human psyche came to develop and maintain itself in a state of chronic traumatic stress.” (My Name is Chellis and I'm in Recovery from Western Civilization, 1994)

The dominance mentality gave us slavery and colonization and continues to give us large-scale oppression. The agricultural revolution created a dominant class, and put us all in service to whatever was hierarchically above us. Women are to serve men, the poor are to serve the rich, people of color are to serve whites, and nonhuman animals are to serve human animals.

I think – I hope – that we human animals are beginning to figure a way out of the dominance orientation that came over us 12,000 years ago. I hope we can keep the agriculture and cities and civilization while also providing more contact with nature and ending the dominance that agriculture and civilization made possible. Whether the problem is racism, sexism, homophobia, or speciesism, its all really one problem: hierarchies of dominance through which we commit the fundamental immorality Immanuel Kant called treating others as a means only and not as ends in themselves.

So if the question is, "should we worry about nonhuman animals when there are so many human animals suffering?" the answer is: "worry about nonhuman animals" means striving to dismantle the domination paradigm -- and dismantling that paradigm is also the only way to alleviate human suffering. As long as we think it's OK to subjugate any being, then our brains are primed to think its OK to subjugate humans. Conversely, if we learn concern and respect for other species, we will be less able to allow oppression of humans.

A study published 2018 Jan in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology assessed how speciesist respondents were. A sample item would ask, for instance, how strongly they agreed or disagreed with the statement, “humans have the right to use animals however they want to.” Follow-up questionnaires established that the attitudes were stable. Participants were then measured for biases based on ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation. The researchers wrote:

“We found significant positive correlations of speciesism with racism, sexism, and homophobia.”

The study also included further tests that suggested speciesism, racism, sexism, and homophobia all have the same psychological roots in

“a tendency to embrace hierarchy and rationalize existing social orders.”

There appears to be, wrote the researchers,

“a common component of generalized prejudice that drives different types of specific prejudicial attitudes.” (Caviola et al., “The Moral Standing of Animals: Towards a Psychology of Speciesism.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2018. Qtd in Brandon Keim, "What Racism, Sexism and a Belief in Human Superiority Have in Common," Anthropocene, 2018 Feb 21)

The task before us is not to choose whether race oppression, class oppression, gender oppression, species oppression, or oppression of our environment is really the biggest problem. They all come from the same acceptance of domination. The task before us is to replace domination with compassion, with concern and respect. Becoming more compassionate people in any area helps us become more compassionate people in all areas.

I do regard the suffering of human animals as more important than the suffering of nonhuman animals. If I had to choose between getting a human child or a pig out of a tiny crate into which they’d been stuffed, of course I’d choose the human child. I'd choose freeing the human over freeing 50 pigs. But we don’t have to choose. We don't have to choose.

Caring about any suffering improves our capacity to care about all suffering. I believe that truly dismantling racism will entail a shift in thinking and that shift will also increase the number of vegetarians – because kindness begets kindness. And from the other direction, attention to animal cruelty facilitates attention to cruelties to humans, whether based on race, gender, class, or LGBTQ status -- because care for the well-being of the other – whether the other is another species or another human – engenders more care for the well-being of all others. "Love is love is love is love."

It doesn’t come all at once. Your door in to the path of compassion might be race issues or climate change issues or species extinction issues or factory farm atrocities. But all the doors eventually lead to the same place: the replacing of all relations of dominance with relations of respect, concern, care, and compassion.

Here at Community Unitarian Universalist Congregation, our mission -- the reason for our existence as a congregation -- is, in part, to foster compassion and understanding. We gather for that purpose: to help each other be ever more compassionate and understanding. This congregation -- every member, friend, and visitor who walks through our door -- helps foster my compassion and understanding. I hope these words have helped foster yours.

* * *
This is part 3 of 3 of "On Being Animal"
See also
Part 1: Our Animal Condition
Part 2: The Greatest Cruelty on the Planet and the Worst Mistake in History

Text has been adapted from this sermon:

The Greatest Cruelty on the Planet and the Worst Mistake in History

On Being Animal, part 2

Closer contact with, and awareness of, the animal in me -- "the soft animal of [my] body, lov[ing] what it loves" -- engenders a greater respect for my fellow beings who, with me, share the burdens and the glories of "the mammal condition," "the warm-blooded condition," or "the vertebrate condition." Heightened self-awareness leads to greater respect for my fellow vertebrates, and greater respect for my fellow vertebrates heightens my self-awareness.

Where will deepened awareness of our animality take us? There is an emerging theology of nature that seeks to honor wildness as sacred – to connects in wonder to the aliveness of the world, from the enchantment of birdsong to the marvel of the moon. To consciously cultivate self-awareness of animality is to become more present, to become more attuned to the nuances of the unexpected.

Inner tensions and cognitive dissonance characterize much of human relationships to other species. We treasure wildlife, yet almost all of us, me included, find it really hard to stop the sort of spending habits that we know are causing a wave of extinctions. Many of us are outraged by abuses of dogs and cats, yet we eat food that comes from an industry that keeps equally sensitive and intelligent animals crowded in atrocious confinement. The meat industry, in the US alone, each year, slaughters 35 million cows, 105 million pigs, and almost 9 billion chickens.

People of good will have different opinions about this, different strategies for dealing with the cognitive dissonance. The view I have come to is that the slaughtering is not the problem. Putting them out of the unremitting misery and pain to which factory farms consign these animals for all or most of their lives is the kindest thing we do for them. It’s not that they die that is the issue. We all die. It’s the life that matters. What those numbers mean to me is that every year the US meat industry is bringing 35 million more cows, 105 million more pigs, 9 billion more chickens into lives of constant agony.

We know enough about cow and pig and chicken physiology to know that what is going on in them parallels what goes on in humans under conditions of great pain and stress. The conditions at factory farms constitute the biggest, harshest, most painful ongoing cruelty on the planet. The intensity of the suffering and the vast, vast scale of it can bring me to weep – when I’m not pushing it out of my mind.

My concern with the life rather than the death has a parallel in Unitarian theology and history. Four hundred years ago, Unitarians turned away from the prevailing European emphasis on Jesus’ death as the atonement for our sins. Sixteenth-century Unitarian theologian Faustus Socinus settled among our early Polish churches. His extensive works laid out a theology that told us, look to Jesus’ life, what he did, what he taught. It is the quality of his living that needs our attention, not his death.

For the factory farmed animals today, I believe, it is the quality of their lives that needs our attention, not the fact of their death. For me, then, deciding to be vegetarian has been a path toward greater self-awareness. When I no longer had to push certain knowledge out of my mind just in order to have lunch, then I was just a little bit more available to love and respect the creatures of my world. When my food choices no longer supported the harshest ongoing cruelty on the planet, then I was a tiny bit better able to respect and honor my whole self -- including the parts of me that are just like them: the pain receptors; the adrenaline, fear, and stress; the creature comforts, if they could get them -- they all work in me as they do in them.

Thus I was better able to be present to all the animal that I am.

Should we worry about nonhuman animals when there are so many human animals suffering – when human trafficking, starvation, oppression calls for our attention? I believe there is just one evil: call it dominance. Call it the social disease of hierarchy. Let's look at some human history to see how this came about.

Our forebears for 95 percent of human history were hunter-gatherers. I don't want to romanticize these ancestors: hunter-gatherer life was often difficult, and sometimes violent as tribes went to war against each other. As for their basic arrangements of governance, though, it was not such a bad deal. Hunter-gatherers had leaders, but those leaders had to be in a caring and accountable relationship with those they led.

Then, about 12,000 years ago, that changed. The rise of agriculture was a package deal that included domestication of such animals as the cow and the pig and some others, along with the cultivation of crops, most importantly grains: wheat, barley, rice, and maize. Only with the rise of agriculture did the centralized state become possible. Only grain crops have a set annual harvest time and are “visible, divisible, assessable, storable, transportable, and ‘rationable’.” (James C. Scott, qtd in John Lanchester, "How Civilization Started," New Yorker, 2017 Sep 18) Thus reliance on grains made a workable taxation system possible. “The taxman can come, assess the fields, set a level of tax, then come back and make sure he’s got his share of the harvest.”

That’s what led to the birth of the state: “complex societies with hierarchies, division of labor, specialist jobs (soldier, priest, servant, administrator), and an élite presiding over them.” (New Yorker)

This system required huge amounts of manual labor, which was often forced. With agriculture came the first slavery. Agriculture allowed support of large standing armies, transforming war from feuds between clans into mass slaughter. Jared Diamond called the Neolithic Revolution “the worst mistake in human history.”

NEXT: We don't have to choose which oppression/injustice to pay attention to. They ALL come from the dominance mindset.
* * *
This is part 2 of 3 of "On Being Animal"
See also
Part 1: Our Animal Condition
Part 3: We Don't Have to Choose

Text has been adapted from this sermon:

Our Animal Condition

On Being Animal, part 1

What does it mean that we are human?

We’ve been asking what it means to be human for millennia. But lately we’ve been learning that a better question to investigate, if we want to understand ourselves, might be: what does it mean that we are animal?

Poets, philosophers, and scientists have long explored “the human condition.” What about the mammal condition? The warm-blooded condition? The vertebrate condition? It's a worthy and important question, What are the distinctive attributes of our species? But to understand what it means to be the sort of being that we are requires equal attention to other questions: What are the distinctive attributes of our genus? What are the distinctive attributes of our order? Of our class? Of our phylum?

Our animality is more important than our humanity. By that I mean: the parts of ourselves that we have in common with other species tells us more about what we are than the thin sliver of our genome that distinguishes homo sapiens from its near relatives.

Research has been closing the perceived gap between human animals and other animals -- and that gap has been closing from both directions. We've learned a lot in the last fifty years about primates, mammals, birds, reptiles, and all vertebrates. So far we've found that the most unequivocal test of self-consciousness has been passed by humans, chimps, bonobos, orangutans, gorillas, rhesus macaques, bottlenose dolphins, orca whales, elephants, and European magpies. But all vertebrates, at least, think, solve problems, learn, and feel. They all experience fear and gladness, anxiety and comfort. Mammals and birds are particularly complex and nuanced in the ways that they exhibit these qualities, but all animals want to live, and to flourish. It's worth looking into these findings and what we've been learning about a great many animals. I shall focus today, however, not on how we've closed the gap by learning more about nonhuman animals, but how we've closed the gap by learning more about human animals.

In particular, we now know: intentions don’t cause our action. Brain processes outside of your control or awareness already decided what you were going to do BEFORE the conscious intention formed. You think you do things because you meant to. Actually, that feeling of “meaning to” is an after-the-fact illusion. Neural signals for motion precede the conscious awareness of intention to move by 300 to 500 milliseconds (.3 to .5 seconds).

Why do our brains create this illusion of conscious intentional control? The brain’s decision-making circuitry, unconscious and out of your control as it is, does learn and change from experience and in order to do that, it needs to distinguish between actions that are “mine” and those that just happen. That feeling of conscious intent you have is just your brain putting an “I did that” stamp on its memory of an episode – so that it can learn from its experience.

We can no longer plausibly claim, “We humans are in control of ourselves while nonhuman animals are machinelike bundles of conditioned responses.” Either they are not machines, or, if they are, so are we.

Michael Gazzaniga’s split-brain experiments further confirm that the story we tell ourselves about who we are and what we are doing is an after-the-fact fabrication. The right brain can process input and arrive at decisions that we carry out – but only the left brain has language centers. When Gazzaniga flashed the word "walk" to just the right hemisphere, many subjects stood and walked away. When asked why they were getting up, subjects had no problem giving a reason. "I’m going to get a Coke," they might say. Our inner interpreter module is good at making up explanations, but not at knowing it has done so.

My language centers and neocortex notice my behavior, and they make up a story about this character named “Meredith” who is heroic, yet with certain endearing foibles. At each moment of the day this “Meredith” can be found deliberately and intentionally acting. Whatever it is he’s doing is a reasonable part of his pursuit of reasonable purposes. This is an after-the-fact story. The behavior came first, we now know. My story about myself as intentional, purposeful, and rational is fabricated later to rationalize that behavior. Yet my brain makes it seem to me that everything I did was just what I “meant” to do. That’s the delusion we live in.

Knowing about the ways we are fooled, and how our fundamental animal nature is at work, can help us begin to befriend our animality, our selves. We were made, as a number of species have been, to walk the savannas and woodlands of this wild earth. It is where deep parts of ourselves find their greatest comfort and ease.

Today, many of us, like me, find ourselves sitting indoors in front of a computer for hours at a time. If I am in touch with all of myself, then I feel those other parts biding their time, quietly yearning for their element.

David Abram writes of “becoming more deeply human by acknowledging, affirming, and growing into our animality.”

Mary Oliver tells us we find our truest place in and through the sounds – and sights and smell and feel – of animals and the wild: “You do not have to be good,” she says. “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

I do not disparage the fine things my neocortex can do, nor the level of detail of envisioning the future that my more developed forebrain can do, nor the wonders of abstract and symbolic language produced and comprehended by my human versions of Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas. These functions are great. But, a couple things about that:

Number 1, these features that are more developed in a human brain are only a small part of who I am.

Number 2, great as they are, those functions cause problems – aside from the delusion of intentional control. The forebrain that envisions the future is prone to obsessive worrying about that future. Recalling and reconnecting with our animality can help with that anxiety. It can bring us what Wendell Berry called the "peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief."

* * *
This is part 1 of 3 of "On Being Animal"
See also
Part 2: The Greatest Cruelty on the Planet and the Worst Mistake in History
Part 3: We Don't Have to Choose



Text has been adapted from this sermon: