James Baldwin wrote:
“If you can’t love anybody, you’re dangerous. You have no way of learning humility, no way of learning that other people suffer…”
If you can’t love anybody, you’re dangerous.
“One month before Mama turned 59 and two-months before Jan van Hooff’s eightieth birthday, these two elderly hominids had an emotional reunion. Mama, emaciated and near death, was among the world’s oldest zoo chimpanzees. Jan…was a biology professor who had studied and communicated with Mama for over 40 years.
…on her straw mat, Mama didn’t even look up when Jan, who had boldly entered her night cage, approached. …When [she] finally awoke …she expressed immense joy at seeing Jan up close… her face changing into an expansive grin.
Chimpanzees are immensely strong, much stronger than humans, and quite capable of attack when threatened. The only humans who would normally be safe are individuals who have raised from birth the specific chimpanzee in question. But Mama’s weakness had changed the equation for the biologist.
Mama gave a soft, high pitched sound of emotion and pleasure. She reached for Jan’s head while he bent down. She gently stroked his hair, then draped one of her long arms around his neck to pull him closer. During this embrace, her fingers rhythmically patted the back of his head and neck in a comforting gesture that chimpanzees also use to quiet a whimpering infant.”
Frans de Waal, author of Mama’s Last Hug, writes: “This encounter was an absolute first. Even though in their 40 year relationship, Jan and Mama had had countless grooming sessions through the bars, no human in their right mind would walk into a cage with an adult chimpanzee.”
They are just too strong and too aggressive.
This sermon was won in last spring’s auction. For it, I was asked to read Mama’s Last Hug and to preach with a series of questions in mind.
How much of what we believe to be uniquely human is really behavior shared with our animal relatives?
Is our tribalism…so problematic and so clear in our politics right now…inherent in our animal ancestry?
Does the hierarchical nature of other primate social behavior…enforced by size and strength…mean that our default system of social organization is authoritarian?
Is liberal democracy a short-lived attempt to hold that authoritarianism at bay?
And, what does our animal ancestry say to liberal religious folks who try to believe in love…and even try to believe that love will win? Are we really free to choose love?
That is a lot to question in a 20 minute sermon.
I have learned quite a bit in preparing and I know that I have only skimmed the surface.
To begin, we…human beings…are part of a grouping of primates called hominids. At the DNA level there is very little that distinguishes the various members of the hominid family. Only a percent…two at the most… of our DNA varies at all.
Science keeps redefining the hominid group…but it can be described as including all the “great apes” …including you and me.
Also orangutans, gorillas and our closest cousins, the chimpanzee and the bonobo.
Imagine a branching of the huge tree of life…some 6 million years ago… before mitochondrial Eve became the mother of all the human families…imagine that there was an ancestor to all the varieties of the great apes that we know today and to all the genetic dead ends that have not survived.
We all come from that same stock…and we have all been evolving on our separate branches ever since.
Among our closest cousins, the chimpanzee has been studied the most…many of us have learned that chimpanzees are hierarchical, competitive, highly social but aggressive…even violent. Makes you wonder about us.
But the Bonobo, our other closest cousin, has been called the empathetic ape. They are sensitive and gentle…rather than aggressive, collaborative rather than hierarchical. They share food and resources as a priority.
Bonobos use sex to diffuse tensions…some call them the “Make Love, Not War” primates. That, too, perhaps makes you wonder.
These descriptions, though, are too sharply drawn. Because chimpanzees are not aggressive all the time. And bonobos are not “warm and fuzzy” all the time either. Each of them have a repertoire of behavior…a variety of behaviors… from which they choose…
As a person with some hope for all of us great apes that make up the human community, I want so much to say that we have that choice, too…because the full range of those behaviors is available to us…that we exist somewhere in a space between the chimpanzee and the bonobo…
But that is getting ahead of the story.
We make fun of animal behavior and even use it to demean those humans who look or move differently.
There is a moving U-Tube video, called What Can a Body Do, which records Sunaura Taylor taking a walk with philosopher Judith Butler. Sunaura Taylor is an artist, writer and activist who now “walks” using a motorized chair. Disease has fused her joints and shortened her limbs.
Before she had to begin using that chair, she recounts one walk when she was critiqued by a passerby: “You walk like a monkey.”
What she heard in that comment was that her disability made her like an animal and, therefore, less than human.
Taylor argues that the person who hurled that slur had everything backward…that we are all first and foremost animals and that able-bodiedness is a temporary condition for us all.
“You walk like a monkey.”
The comment was aggressive and the question of aggression is an important one. How deep in our nature is the capacity…or the inclination…toward aggression? Is empathy a late and much shallower addition to our repertoire?
Frans de Waal suggests that part of the problem we face in understanding ourselves is the story we tell about where we come from. Our narrative doesn’t fit the facts. He writes:
“Because of interdependencies between groups with scarce resources, our ancestors probably never waged war on a grand scale until they settled down and began to accumulate wealth by means of agriculture…which made attacks on other groups more profitable.”
Instead of being the product of some innate aggressive drive, war may be much more about profit. And therefore…not inevitable.
Polly Wiessner, an American anthropologist, studied the Bushman of the Kalihari, the same Bushman who still heard the singing of the stars in our reading. She described the intricate negotiations used to share resources:
“In the 1970’s, the average Bushman spent over three months a year away from home. Visitors and hosts engaged in a greeting ritual to seek permission to stay. The visiting party sat under a shade tree at the periphery of the camp. After a few hours, the hosts would come to greet them. The visitors would tell about their people and conditions at home. The host would then typically complain of food shortage, but the visitor could read how serious this was. If it was serious, the visitors would say that they could only stay for a few days. But if the host did not stress the shortages…, they knew they could stay longer. The visitors were then invited into camp where they distributed gifts… subtly and with great modesty so as not to arouse jealousy.”
It may be that we western, “civilized” humans have forgotten more than how to hear the stars…
Empathy…collaboration…these ways of being may be just as possible…given our DNA…as aggression.
Decision making is often where our default settings…our impulse to hierarchy or collaboration…show themselves most clearly.
Elizabeth Preston, wrote in the NY Times just last week, in an article entitled, How Animals Vote:
Researchers placed GPS locators on 25 members of a troop of Baboons in Kenya. “…any Baboon might start moving away from the others as if to draw them on a new course—male or female, dominant or subordinate. (Any one could try to lead) When multiple baboons moved in the same direction, others were even more likely to come along. (Organizing helps) When there was disagreement, with trailblazing baboons moving in totally different directions, others would eventually follow the majority. (Majority rule…good) But if two would-be leaders were tugging in directions less than 90 degrees apart, followers would compromise on a middle path. (Beware Bernie and Biden). No matter what, the whole group ended up together.”
I apologize for the political references. But this sermon is being given with politics much on most of our minds.
An intimate encounter with another species can be physically dangerous. It can also be very moving for us. But the dangers of misunderstanding are also real.
One journalist was so enamored of a male chimpanzee in a sanctuary that when he looked into the ape’s eyes, he questioned his own identity: he felt like he was staring straight into his lost evolutionary past.
What he forgot is that today’s apes are “not merely time machines to show us our evolutionary origins.”
The journalist’s philosophical reverie was misplaced and ultimately condescending. Though it is true that we share an ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos, that ancestor lived about 6 million years ago and its progeny went through countless evolutionary changes before dying out and giving rise to the three survivors that are around today. Chimpanzees, bonobos and humans have all been around for the same evolutionary time and are all equally “evolved.”
As deWaal writes: “…looking at an ape reveals our shared history not only to us, but also to the ape. … If they are time machines for us, then we are the same for them.”
I do not pretend to have become an expert primatologist. What I have read, though, does seem to confirm what I want to believe…that we have within us the possibility of a range of behavior…that our DNA does not predestine us to aggression and greed.
I want to believe that whatever tendencies toward aggression we may have inherited…along with our intelligence and our opposable thumbs….that those tendencies do not preclude our choosing collaboration and a love for the world and all its creatures…
But I’m now shifting the focus toward the theological questions where I have more experience and other things to say.
First, we humans, especially we westernized humans, are not good at either acknowledging that we are animals, nor at extending empathy toward other members of the animal kingdom. We have bought into the idea of our superiority and differentness too completely. We view animals as here for our use…our dominion to quote the King James Bible…
We tend to be much more invested in affirming the inherent worth and dignity of every person than in exploring the interdependent web of existence of which we, and our great ape cousins, are only one small part.
I acknowledge that I have more to learn and more to change in my own life that stems from the attitude.
Most of us and many religious liberals have moved beyond the dominant Christian world view of the battle between good and evil and the final victory of God in history. That is too linear a view, most of us find. We are more comfortable in a world understood as process.
The intricacies of process theology, however, can be very complex. Alfred North Whitehead, who developed the original concepts—well, his work is almost impossible to read….with new terms galore and new definitions for exiting terms that confuse and contradict what we thing we know…
But toward the end of his life, Whitehead did offer some more poetic language to describe the intimate and relational spirit his rigorous philosophy attempted to capture:
“God (many of us would say Spirit of Life)…God is in the world, or nowhere, creating continually in us and around us. The creative principle is everywhere, in animate and so-called inanimate matter, in the ether, water, earth, human hearts (we would add the hearts of animals, too).
Creation is a creative process, and “the process is itself the actuality.”
The true destiny of [human beings] is as co-creators of the universe.”
But because the creative principle is everywhere and in everything…not only are the other great apes also co-creators but so is every living thing. In fact, for Whitehead…so is everything.
God is everywhere…that is the title of the mosaic created by the children of this congregation some 50 years ago that now stands in the courtyard of the Buchan Building next door.
We have not improved on that theology…much at all since then.
God is everywhere. And in everything.
That process of creation embraces both the aggression of the chimpanzee and the sharing of the bonobo…and it embraces our questioning of what we have received in our DNA. That Spirit of Life, that process of love, also embraces our hopes and our commitment to be about the building of Beloved Community.
There is a universe of experience for us to draw on.
May our contribution to the process of creation…which is where God lives…may our contribution help point us and our world toward love.
Topics: Humility