What Separates Us from the Animals
Reverend Darcey Laine,
Unitarian Universalist
Church of Palo Alto
March 16, 2003
Palo Alto, CA
This page is a copy of the original
at the UUCPA website.
We were standing on the
water line of a nature preserve in North Carolina, 20 other girl
scouts our troop leaders and myself. The guide from the nature
preserve was trying to get us interested in the plants and
animals who inhabited the area, so she and a volunteer took a big
net out a couple of yards, and dragged it back to shore. Tiny
fish and other creatures flopped helplessly on the sand as the
ranger continued her lecture. I started to get increasingly
nervous- surely the fish were very uncomfortable being out of the
water so long, surely they would die if we didn't act quickly.
When I couldn't stand it any longer, I started to say something
to the people around me. No one was listening. No one seemed to
understand what I was saying. I don't remember what I said; only
that I must have been "disruptive" because the Girl
Scout leader led me out of sight and out of earshot of the group
while they continued the lecture. Returning the fish to the water
was never a possibility in the minds of any of the adults or
children gathered on that beach. Nothing I could say or do could
stop the suffering and unthinking death of hundreds of tiny
beings. I felt so angry and so powerless. Even as an adult I
don't understand why a park ranger would illustrate so
graphically to a group of developing minds that life is
disposable, and the suffering of non-humans is irrelevant.
I don't talk about this very often, because somehow living in
this culture at this time, I got the impression that caring
deeply about non-human animals was taboo. Certainly my childhood
experience at the waterfront taught me what kind of response to
the suffering of animals is socially acceptable. Why might an
entire troop, their leaders and a park ranger share a single
expressed attitude? I'd like begin to answer that question on the
level of theology. Most of us are aware that in 1 of the 2 the
traditional Judeo-Christian creation stories- god gave
"man" dominion over the earth and all her creatures.
Many of the church fathers and theologians have interpreted this
to mean that all the other beings on earth are here only because
of the role they play in our salvation story. In this theology
God gives humans life so that they can choose salvation, the path
of return to God. The ancient sequoias then are like the stage
set, the salamanders and moths are like props. In this theology
there is a clear hierarchy, and we are inarguably at the top.
Holders of such a theology were horrified a century or so ago
when evolutionary theory suggested that humans were also animals,
and directly related to primates. This was a major challenge to
our deeply held notion of separateness from the rest of creation.
Though religion and evolutionary science would seem to be
diametrically opposed in this dialogue, science has always
supported the cultural vision of hierarchy. Darwinian evolution
is interpreted to mean that humans are the most advanced, most
powerful, and therefore most important. Moreover, biological
science, in striving for objectivity, and in an effort to limit
assumptions that other animals had an experience identical to our
own, may have swung the pendulum too far in the opposite
direction. We were taught to assume that other animals share
nothing with our own experience, cannot feel emotions, enjoy
relationships, or understand their experience. In our attempt at
objectivity, we literally objectify, that is we turn beings into
objects
Why is that so important to us to know that we are separate
from the other animals? This is in part an evolutionary and
biological drive. To protect our own genetics, we benefit from
protecting and supporting those closest to us genetically, our
children, our siblings, our family group, before our nation, our
species, other mammals, vertebrates… It makes good
evolutionary sense that if I have to save my sister or a lizard
from an oncoming train, that I would save my sister first.
Unfortunately, when the choice is much simpler- save the lizard
or don't save the lizard, I wonder how many people in our culture
would give the lizard a second thought.
This exaggeration of our difference from other animals, our
separateness, our unique special-ness is related to the historic
mind-body duality so pervasive in Judeo-Christian theology. We
talk about our animal nature being base and low, sinful even in
some theologies, and the mind and spirit our refuge from our
lower nature. We have been taught not to trust our animal selves,
our instincts, impulses and physical cravings. We take pride in
our ability to subjugate the body. We take pride in our special
gifts as a species, downplaying the characteristics we share with
other animals. A UU minister once offered from his pulpit that
"what separates us from the animals is that we alone
worship." But can we really make such a statement? I would
argue that even with all we know about how the brain works, I
have heard no research that we have located the worship center of
the brain, and have determined that humans alone possess such a
mechanism. Of all of the sweeping generalizations about what
"separates us from the animals" I wonder which are
based in fact, and which are rooted in our desire to be special,
to be separate.
I was shocked to find out in my college biology class, that as
the human fetus develops it is at first indistinguishable from
other vertebrates, and even longer before it can be distinguished
from other mammals. What makes us unique emerges later in
gestation. Some of the most significant differences between our
biology and that of other, even very closely related animals, is
the biology of our brains. I lived with the misconception for
many years that our brains were larger than other animals, but it
turns out that not only are there are plenty of animals with
larger brains, but brain size is not entirely relevant. Given
current research we know that the brains of other animals,
especially as they are more distantly related to us, are simply
not set up to process information in the way a human brain can.
The main difference between us and other related primates is the
prefrontal cortex, and possibly cortical connectivity. We may
have more cortex proportionally to the rest of the brain than
other animals, but not even that when compared with some apes.
Theologians have dared to answer the question "do animals
have souls" as scientists and philosophers ask, "do
animals have consciousness?" Both questions seem to support
a deeper wondering; "do other animals experience their
reality as I do." If we are more than a collection of
chemical and biological processes, do we alone transcend our
material nature, or do some or all other beings join us. Because
consciousness is such a complex field, and those who study it
can't even seem to agree on a definition, Steve Pinker of MIT
breaks Consciousness down into 3 issues. The first is sentience
or subjective experience. Neuroscience admits that we "are
clueless" about the biology of sentience. As professor David
Premack quipped "I don't know how to do tests on subjective
states " I extrapolate that if we don't understand the
biology of sentience, then we cannot speak with any certainty
about animals subjective experience.
A second issue of consciousness is "access to
information," how information is processed by the nervous
system. Cognitive-Neuroscience has done much substantive work
about how information is processed, Many of our poets and
essayists like to assume that animals process all information
unconsciously, while we do most of our processing consciously. In
fact I was surprised to find what a large part of human
processing happens without our conscious awareness. In a current
text on the topic, Gozyaniga, Ivry and Mangren report that
"The vast staging for our mental activities happens largely
without our monitoring." We do know that we process
information somewhat differently from species to species. But I
didn't come across research about how and whether animals monitor
their mental activities, and it's very hard to determine from
hanging out with my 2 dogs when they act deliberately or out of
instinct.
The final idea we hold under the rubric of consciousness is
"Self-knowledge"-- knowing that it is I Darcey who act,
sense, and process information. Does my dog Sandy know that she
is Sandy? David Premack established a Theory of Mind "which
refers to the ability to represent and infer unobservable mental
states such as desires, intentions, and beliefs from the self and
others " Premack has studied the difference between Theory
of Mind in humans and non-human primates and concludes "Some
nonhuman animals may be aware of the volitional and perceptual
mental states, but none appear aware of the informational or
epistemic ones."
All of this is to say that we still know very little about
consciousness in human beings, and even less about the potential
for consciousness in animals. I perceive a bias in our scientific
method which assumes animals do not have consciousness until we
can prove otherwise. We construct our understanding of our
relationship to other beings by beginning with an assumption of
our superiority and measuring them by that standard. Certainly my
dogs get information from smells, from sounds, from parts of
their environment that I will never have access to just as in
terms of certain kinds of processing and aspects of
consciousness, we have gifts shard by no other form of life on
this planet.
Let's look at this information through the lens of another
theology. Carol Christ, a contemporary eco-feminist, suggests
that "There are no hierarchies among beings on earth. We are
different from swallows who fly in spring, from the many-faceted
stones on the beach, from the redwood tree in the forest. We may
have more capacity to shape our lives than other beings, but you
and I will never fly with the grace of a swallow, live as long as
a redwood tree, nor endure the endless tossing of the sea like a
stone. Each being has its own intrinsic beauty and value" .
Many indigenous cultures hold such a theology. Paula Gunne Allen
of the Keres Pueblo nation writes "…[the] Indian sees
human intelligence as rising out of the very nature of being,
which is of necessity intelligent in and of itself." In
other words, our intelligence does not separate us from other
beings, but is consonant with being, or with the very nature of
life. What under girds this theology is the belief that at the
deepest level we are all one. Any separation, of our selves from
others, of the divine from the world is only illusion. These
theologies may be understood to be "pantheistic" where
the divine is identical to all that is, or panentheistic, in
which all being is a subset of the divine. These ideas are common
among indigenous religions, but make their appearances in Jewish
Kabalistic theology, where fragments of the divine are hidden in
all beings, It connects with the threads in Hinduism since the
divine oneness "Brahman" is the indivisible essence of
all that is. These ideas have taken hold in contemporary
earth-center theologies, which believe that we are not separate
from the earth, nor from the other beings.
For centuries Western intellectual culture has referred to
this as "animism" which is always meant as an insult.
An indwelling sense of the divine-- god as the force of life in
all things, in trees and birds no less than people-- appears in
stark contrast to the transcendent god of a human-centric belief
system in which we and no other are made in god's image. Call it
animism, or pantheism, or deep-ecology, all describe a system in
which we are not at the top of a hierarchical pyramid, but one
strand in an interconnected web. Imagine a world without
separateness, where we are not separate from the other beings,
where god is not an abstract and transcendent force, but the life
which is shared by all things.
How then, might we live if we understood the world in this
way? Albert Schweitzer has said "Ordinary ethics seeks to
find limits within the sphere of human life and relationships.
But the absolute ethics of the will-to-live must reverence every
form of life, seeking so far as possible to refrain from
destroying any life, regardless of its particular time. It says
of no instance of life, 'This has no value.'"
… But life is complex. Some of you will remember that
last Thanksgiving a spate of legislation came out of the White
House that reversed past environmental policy. One was the
beginning of oil drilling in Padre Island National Seashore, home
to 11 endangered or threatened species, including Kemp's Ridley
sea turtles. Oil drilling continues as of last month and paved
roads now carry 16-wheeler trucks down the longest undeveloped
barrier island in the world to reach the well area. Obviously
environmentalists are outraged, but the local paper reports that
drilling rights are part of a deal that was made in 1961 to fund
Texas Schools, which are in fiscal trouble right now. If they
refuse to allow drilling, they stand to loose their funding. The
choice between oil baron and endangered sea turtles seems simple
to me, but when you put school children between the 2, the
complexity of the choices we make about the impact of our own
lives on our animal cousins begins to reveal itself.
Every animal lives off the life of another, whether we eat
chicken or lettuce. Even the Buddhists who sweep the path before
their feet so no ant will be trampled still live at the expense
of others.
Schweitzer continues "True, in practice we are forced to
choose. At times we have to decide arbitrarily which forms of
life, and even which particular individuals, we shall save, and
which we shall destroy. Be the principle of reverence for life is
none the less universal."
The difficulty of the choices we are forced to make drives us
sometimes to bury our heads in the sand, to pretend as if we are
not choosing the lives we take and the lives we save. How much
easier to close our eyes to tiny fish dying on the sand. How much
easier to forget the cows, chickens, insects, and plants that
loose their lives so that we can live. Instead of gratitude for
the gift of our own life, we choose to build a wall, to
enumerates the aspects of our own make up that "separate us
from the animals…"
We are one of the millions of species and varieties of animal
life on this planet. The boundary we have created in our culture
and in our thinking overstates the differences which divide us
from our brothers and sisters, and therefore gives us false
information about the importance of these other beings to our own
survival. The disconnection created by this imaginary barrier
keeps us from noticing not only the waste of life outside our own
species, but the danger to ourselves of destroying any part of
the web which supports our own human life. It's time to wake up
to this interconnection, to expand our awareness beyond our own
species. We must look with new eyes at the frisky lap dog, the
ants that scout across our kitchen floor, the sea turtles that
migrate through oil drilling reserves.
In the words of Meister Eckhart, a 13th century Dominican
mystic:
"Apprehend God in all things,
for God is in all things.
Every single creature is full of God
and is a book about God.
Every creature is a word of God.
If I spent enough time with the tiniest creature-
even a caterpillar-
I would never have to prepare a sermon.
So full of God is every creature."
What is your reaction to this sermon? Please
send comments to Reverend
Darcey Laine
