Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

Many of the protective ditches, moats, and minefields painstakingly dug to separate us from the other animals have now been bridged or flanked. Those driven to preserve for us some unique, unambiguous, defining characteristic are tempted to shift the definitions once again and erect a final line of defense around our thoughts. If chimpanzee and bonobo language is limited, we cannot tell much about what they think or feel, what meaning, if any, they give to their lives. They have authored, at least so far, no autobiographies, reflective essays, confessions, self-analyses, or philosophical memoirs. If we can choose particular ideas and feelings to define ourselves, no chimp can contradict us. For example, we might point to our knowledge that all of us will someday die, or that sex is the cause of babies—matters widely understood among humans, although sometimes denied. Perhaps no ape has ever glimpsed these important truths. Perhaps some have. We do not know.² But standing alone on such homiletic pinnacles is a hollow victory for the human species. These occasional insights are minor matters compared to the vaunted distinctions of humanity that have crumbled into dust as we have learned more about the other animals. At so fine a level of detail, the motives of those who would define us by this or that idea seem suspect, the human chauvinism manifest.

To compare humans with other animals in regard to behavior amenable to observation is just; but unfavorable comparisons on the basis of first-person accounts emanating from within the animals themselves, their reports of their thoughts and insights, are unfair if no channel of communication into their internal lives has yet been opened. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Were we better able to enter into the mind of the ape, might we not find much more there than we guess?—a point made almost three centuries ago by Henry St. John, the first Viscount Bolingbroke:Man is connected by his nature … with the whole tribe of animals, and so closely with some of them, that the distance between his intellectual faculties and their … appears, in many instances, small, and would probably appear still less, if we had the means of knowing their motives, as we have of observing their actions.³

An oft-cited difference purported to exist between human beings and other animals is religion. Only humans, it is said, have religion, and that settles the matter. But what is religion? How could we know whether animals have it? In The Descent of Man

, Darwin cites the comment, “a dog looks on his master as a god.” Ambrose Bierce⁴ defined reverence as “the spiritual attitude of a man to a god and a dog to a man.” The omega looks on the alpha as something like a god, and the depths of his submission and self-abasement are reached in few extant religions. It is hard to know how profoundly dogs or apes feel reverence, how tinged with awe their attitudes are toward a stern “master” or a well-established alpha, whether they have a sense of the sacred, pray for forgiveness, and otherwise seek to placate and influence forces more powerful than they. Animals raised, educated, and disciplined by much stronger and wiser parents, animals spring-loaded to fit into a dominance hierarchy, animals moreover faced with the daunting presence of human beings armed with life-and-death powers and meting out rewards and punishment—such animals may well have feelings akin to what we call religious. Many mammals and all primates satisfy these conditions.

Over the course of human history, some religions, it is true, have become much more than this—at their best transcending intimidation, hierarchy, and bureaucracy, while providing comfort for the powerless. A few, rare, religious teachers have acted as a conscience for our species, have inspired millions by the example of their lives, have helped us to break out of baboonish lockstep. But none of this contradicts the thesis that a generalized religious predisposition, ready to be put to use by the local social structure, may be a commonplace in the kingdom of the animals.

Perhaps, if we were able to peer into the mind of the ape in a state of nature, we would find—among a flurry of other feelings—a sense of satisfaction about its apeness rivaling ours about our humanity. Every species may feel something similar. It would be far more adaptive than its opposite. If anything like this is true, then we would be denied even our self-congratulatory distinction of being the only animal that makes self-congratulatory distinctions.

If we have not much peered into the hearts and minds of other species and have not even studied them carefully, we may impute to them virtues and strengths as well as vices and deficiencies that in fact they lack. Consider this bit of verse by the poet Walt Whitman:I think I could turn and live with animals, they’re so placid and self-contain’d,I stand and look at them long and long.