Pet Theory

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We don’t have any pets.  At least not beyond the spider near the sink that I don’t have the heart to release outdoors in winter temps.  But I have had.  I think the reasons our pets mean so much to us is that they’re like people in so many ways, but nonjudgmental.  They accept us with all our quirks and despite occasional—generally unintentional—neglect.  A recent family text chain about the sad occasion of having to put a dog down got me musing about my history of pets.  We get remarkably attached to them.  Growing up we had dogs, cats, birds, turtles, guinea pigs, fish, and we tried a short-lived attempt at hamsters.  My wife grew up with a cat but became allergic after leaving home, so we had to avoid furry pets when my daughter was young.

We had fish, hermit crabs, and a bird.  The bird, a parakeet named Archie (short for Archaeopteryx), was with us at a difficult time.  Things weren’t going well at Nashotah House, but I had no idea that I was in the cross-hairs.  Archie was a suspicious bird.  We tried to get him to talk (mostly “nevermore”) but he wouldn’t.  I tried to get him to perch on my finger—my Mom could get birds to do it—but he only ever bit me.  Still, he was part of the family.  When the seminary axe fell, he moved to two different apartments with us, remaining solitary but stolid in tumultuous times.  In the second apartment he stopped singing.  My daughter thought something was wrong, but we knew from a previous trip to the vet that we couldn’t afford another.  I was unemployed and my wife had to look for a better-paying job.  Then I found Archie dead.  That day is still, all these years later, very difficult for me to think about.  How we cried.  How we snuck back onto land owned by the seminary to bury him in the woods.  How empty our small apartment felt.

Emotions are difficult things, but they’re what bind us together as humans.  We all know loss and sadness.  Many of us have poignant memories of pets who, although we supposed we’d outlive them always thought they’d be there at least another day.  Is there anything that brings us more together?  We think anyone who doesn’t shed a tear at Old Yeller is somehow not really human.  Certainly less human than our adopted animal family members.  How wonderful not to be judged by someone who knows us perhaps better than we know ourselves.

Beyond Reason

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Emotions are tricky.  They’re an essential part of being human, but they don’t function rationally.  At least they don’t do so reliably.  And nobody is emotionally pristine.  People have anger issues (quite a lot of that, I know), insecurities, esteem problems (either too much or too little), abandonment concerns, and the list could go on and on.  The thing about emotions is that they’re difficult to fit with logic.  Sometimes it’s hard to believe that logic is an artificial construct and that emotions are just as important to survival as reason is.  Evolution gave us emotions.  Fight, flight, or freeze still operates in most human beings—I’ve seen all three responses when a threat arises.  Feeling sad when unfortunate events take place is normal and natural.  Dogs and other higher mammals feel it too, as has been amply demonstrated.

It’s easy to let our emotions speak for us, even when doing so causes damage we would never rationally seek to impose.  You push me and I push you back.  Something I realized long ago, and this is just to do with my own situation, is that I can’t easily let go of negative emotions.  I recently learned that a relative I never knew very well had a similar trait.  Such people have invisible scars that they bear their entire lives.  The logical mind says, “Let’s use chemicals to erase them.”  The artistic mind says, “Erase my emotions and you erase me.”  It’s important—vital even—that we don’t question a sincere person’s reasons for their emotional responses.  Most people are just trying to do the best that they can.

Religion is generally based on emotional need.  That’s not to say it’s bad or for “the weak.”  It seems that evolution has deemed it a valuable asset for human beings.  As someone who’s studied religion for many, many years, this aspect has become quite clear to me.  Religion is a coping technique and, in the best of circumstances, it contains some of the truth.  As I used to tell my students, nobody intentionally believes a false religion.  The stakes are far too high.  And we have no rational standards by which to measure which religion is right.  It’s a matter of belief.  Religions have to meet us emotionally where we stand.  During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a shift took place where religions were supposed to be logically, literally true.  This was believed with intense emotion and it led to a situation we still face.  Emotion and rationality must work together, but some ways seem much more productive than others.

Actual Intelligence (AI)

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“Creepy” is the word often used, even by the New York Times, regarding conversations with AI.  Artificial Intelligence gets much of its data from the internet and I like to think, that in my own small way, I contribute to its creepiness.  But, realistically, I know that people in general are inclined toward dark thoughts.  I don’t trust AI—actual intelligence comes from biological experience that includes emotions—which we don’t understand and therefore can’t emulate for mere circuitry—as well as rational thought.  AI engineers somehow think that some Spock-like approach to intelligence will lead to purely rational results.  In actual fact, nothing is purely rational since reason is a product of human minds and it’s influenced by—you guessed it—emotions.

There’s a kind of arrogance associated with human beings thinking they understand intelligence.  We can’t adequately define consciousness, and the jury’s still out on the “supernatural.”  AI is therefore, the result of cutting out a major swath of what it means to be a thinking human being, and then claiming it thinks just like us.  The results?  Disturbing.  Dark.  Creepy.  Those are the impressions of people who’ve had these conversations.  Logically, what makes something “dark”?  Absence of light, of course.  Disturbing?  That’s an emotion-laden word, isn’t it?  Creepy certainly is.  Those of us who wander around these concepts are perhaps better equipped to converse with that alien being we call AI.  And if it’s given a robot body we know that it’s time to get the heck out of Dodge.

I’m always amused when I see recommendations for me from various websites where I’ve shopped.  They have no idea why I’ve purchased various things and I know they watch me like a hawk.  And why do I buy the things I do, when I do?  I can’t always tell you that myself.  Maybe I’m feeling chilly and that pair of fingerless gloves I’ve been thinking about for months suddenly seems like a good idea.  Maybe because I’ve just paid off my credit card.  Maybe because it’s been cloudy too long.  Each of these stimuli bear emotional elements that weigh heavily on decision making.  How do you teach a computer to get a hunch?  What does AI intuit?  Does it dream of electronic sheep, and if so can it write a provocative book by that title?  Millions of years of biological evolution led to our very human, often very flawed brains.  They may not always be rational, but they can truly be a thing of beauty.  And they’re unable to be replicated.

Photo by Pierre Acobas on Unsplash

How You Feel

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Image credit: NASA, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Have you ever had someone tell you how you should feel?  This always feels like an odd thing on the receiving end.  Each of us is born, learns from our experiences, and confronts emotions.  Many people believe that they might improve others’ lives if only others would feel the way they think they should.  Interestingly, and simultaneously, at work and in social settings we’re being told to honor diversity.  We are to respect the feelings of others, no matter how uncomfortable they make us feel.  Who is the guardian of others’ feelings?  Emotions are tricky to figure out.  We can clearly see them at work in animals—the age-old flight or fight response, for example, is based on fear.  Still, based on their own experience and temperament, one animal will run while another in the same circumstances will attack.

Emotions don’t come with an instruction manual.  For a not insignificant outlay of resources you may hire a professional to help you work through them.  Or you might learn to trust your emotions.  They evolved for a reason.  Telling someone else how to feel invalidates their experience.  If they feel frustrated, or lonely, or angry, aren’t those legitimate human responses when neither fight or flight works?  Human societies create great complexities.  Some of us like things the way they were.  Many of us currently alive are only a generation away from people who grew up with horses clopping down the street and now all of life is virtually virtual.  How does that make you feel?  How do you even assess what the right feeling might be?

Advice givers mean well.  Perhaps your emotional state causes them discomfort.  If only you would cope the way that they cope then we could all go home happy.  The lament, however, is a time-honored means of expressing frustration when things just aren’t going your way.  We like to believe that good people prosper and that things work out for them in the end.  We like to believe lots of things.  We also have plenty of feelings about them.  Invalidating others’ experience may make us feel better about ourselves.  After all, we have just given valuable advice to someone who hasn’t experienced the situation like we have.  Being a parent may be the best way of learning to empathize and help another human being deal with the always tricky realm of emotion.  The important thing is to let others know that, no matter what somebody else says, only they know how they are feeling.

Book Birthing

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Books, like humans and other animals, undergo a process of conception, development, and birth.  It may seem, when holding a book in hand, that it is the singular work of one person, but in fact most books are a community effort.  I’ve read many books where the author was a specialist in one area and decided to write a book in a different field.  This used to be more acceptable, as various polymaths showed that specialization wasn’t the only way to understand the bigger picture.  Such efforts these days, however, take some convincing of skeptical editors.  And with good reason.  Factual books, especially, are subject to close scrutiny.  Does the author indeed know what s/he is talking about?  Is s/he qualified to write this book?

Recently I was reading such a book.  It was published by a university press, and the author was a specialist in one field, but writing in an unrelated one.  In my mind (so fictionally) I went through how this may have developed.  A writer goes to an editor and says “I have an idea for a book.”  From my own experience as an editor, this second party then asks her or himself a few questions.  Is this topic a viable book?  If so, who will buy it?  Is this author the right person to write it?  (It is possible that a person has an idea for a book better written by someone else.)  Depending on the author’s stature, the editor may cave and say, “Okay, but you need to let me help you.”  Editors (present company excepted) are some of the smartest people I’ve met.  They may not be specialists like professors, but they know an awful lot.  Many authors constantly question their editorial decisions nevertheless.

No matter how rational an author is, emotion plays into the process of writing.  I frequently tell my authors “the book has to be what you want it to be.”  Still, that may mean it should be published by someone else.  An author who publishes books s/he doesn’t like is not a happy person.  For nonfiction books other readers, such as peer reviewers and colleagues, also shape the final tome.  Seldom does the book in your hands represent something straight from the mind of the writer.  There are places for such things, of course, this blog being one of them.  (And there are many more.)  What makes the book authoritative, however, is that it has been fact-checked by many readers other than the author before it ever goes to press.  Gestation is important.  No book can be fully formed without it.

For the Love of Dog

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All I have to do is say “Old Yellar,” and everyone will know the feeling.  Everyone of a certain age, I should add, who’s owned a canine.  The love of dog.  From where I pass my days I can see out the window into the neighbors’ back yards for four houses over.  They all have dogs.  Big dogs, mostly.  They also have fenced in backyards.  One of the things I haven’t seen too much in our neighborhood is dog walking.  People let their dogs out to frolic, and do their, ahem, other outdoor activities in the yard.  Once a day some member of the family, either with the basic plastic bag or with the specialized, long-handled brush and scooper, slowly surveys the yard to remove any offensive matter so the space may be used for human activities.  It’s a level of care that most would shudder to provide for their own species.

Wolves were the earliest domesticated animals.  In those hunter-gatherer days either they or humans—the jury’s out on which—realized the advantages of working together.  Kind of like we were fated to be partners.  Besides, unless the dog turns on us, there’s no question of who’s the master here, and everyone likes to be the boss.  When I catch a glimpse of one of the neighborhood pets being scolded, or praised, it’s clear they share emotions with us.  The bond is deep.  I often wonder about this—they recognize the tone of voice, something that takes humans a while to learn.  I grew up with dogs and I found out that even if you insult them in a friendly, encouraging tone of voice they’ll love you for it.  Dogs are just that way.

Our first real dog—the one that ended up staying with us his whole life, was a beagle pup we got at a farm.  Dogs like to be with others.  Unlike humans, they don’t have to pretend.  (Although they can do that too, as when they growl at you during a game of tug-o-war.)  Then we leave home and go to our places of business, where capitalism reigns.  We treat other humans coldly, clinically.  “It’s only business,” we’ll parrot, especially if we feel bad about doing what the boss tells us.  That’s the way we treat our own species when money’s involved.  And we’ll sit at our desks, daydreaming of our dog at home that will be so glad to see us when we walk through that door.  And we’ll gladly clean up after our pets what we find obscene even to write in human language.  It kind of makes me wonder when I glance out the window while at work.

Ethology Theology

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MindingAnimalsProminent public intellectuals, we’re used to hearing, often lament the survival of religion into a rationalist age. As an obscure private intellectual—if I may be so bold—I am always pleased to see when a credentialed scientist asks if we are being too hasty. No, but actually says we’re misguided to dismiss the evidence of our own observations. Marc Bekoff’s Minding Animals: Awareness, Emotions, and Heart is an encouraging study by a balanced individual. Bekoff, unlike many scientists, realizes that emotion does play into observation and reasoning. More than that, materialistic reductionism does not account for human or other animals’ experience of life. Historically motivated by religions to separate ourselves from animals, we have only come to know slowly—painfully slowly—that the distinctive markers of humanity are shared in degree by other animals. Bekoff is bold enough to give the lie to the belief that animals have no emotional life. Traditionally science has said that we cannot know what goes on in animal brains so it is best to take animal emotions off the table. Then scientists go home and love their dogs, who love them in return. When’s the last time I read a scientist writing about love?

Minding Animals is a manifesto. We have, in our arrogance, made unwarranted assumptions about both animals and our unique status on the earth. We drive other species of animals to extinction at a rate that required an asteroid collision or some other catastrophic event in the past. And we use animals as if they had no interests of their own, even such basic interests as avoiding pain and suffering. “They’re just animals,” we’re told. Bekoff is an ethologist—someone who studies non-human animal behavior. As common sense, both the sine qua non and bête noire of science, reveals, animals experience and express happiness, anger, and love. They can be depressed. They can be overjoyed. And we treat them as if they were objects to do with as we please.

Bekoff admits some of his fellow scientists treat him as if he’s gone soft. Like Diogenes, however, I search for an honest man and I think I have found him. Instead of castigating religion, Bekoff ends his book with a chapter on theology. Not to make fun of it, but to show that even scientists must integrate different kinds of knowledge. Not only is the science that Bekoff describes appealing to the emotions, it also makes sense. No scientist is completely objective. Even Mr. Spock breaks down once in a while. We all have perspectives. And that includes our fellow earthling animals. We evolved from the same ancestors and yet treat them as if we own them. Minding Animals will—or at least should—make us feel guilty about that. Being human and being humane, after all, are only a silent e apart.

Monk over Matter

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ManWhoCouldFlyPeople can think with their emotions. At a young age we begin formal schooling to teach us the rational ways that we must develop to live in society. Emotions are trained, tamed, and sometimes repressed as we are taught that “higher brain” functions are what make us distinctly human. Even in our supremely rational world, however, we can’t figure out consciousness. It remains elusive, provocatively bordering on the supernatural, and the experience of being human gives the lie to consciousness being emergent from a physical brain. These are the kinds of issues that underlie the strange case of Joseph of Copertino. The subject of Michael Grosso’s recent book, The Man Who Could Fly: St. Joseph of Copertino and the Mystery of Levitation, Joseph may well be off the radar of most people. In fact, in the seventeenth century church in Italy, his presence was downplayed and hushed, almost as an embarrassment to Roman Catholicism of the day. Why? Joseph was known to levitate. In fact, his levitations were often in public and were witnessed by individuals whose credibility was not in doubt. With the Reformation going on, however, the last thing the church needed was a miracle.

The standard historical line of dealing with Joseph is to laugh and wave our hands in the directions of those credulous early moderns. They thought they saw him levitate, but it was all imagination. Even if we have to invoke mass hallucination. People just can’t levitate. Grosso’s book, however, takes a different approach to Joseph. Looking at first-hand accounts, carefully considering the political situation of seventeenth-century Italy, and being open to parapsychology, this book presents a very different portrait of the flying saint. There was nothing to be gained by hiding such a prodigy unless, as Grosso argues, there was actually something to the story. It may come down to a basic misunderstanding of consciousness, his book suggests.

No doubt The Man Who Could Fly will be simply dismissed by many. Those who dare to read it, however, will find a cogently argued, rational exploration of a man who was lifted by spiritual ecstasies in a way we have yet to understand. Grosso demonstrates that, depending on perspective, such events do not violate laws of physics so much as demonstrate that we have much yet to learn about them. Categorizing events as supernatural puts up an artificial barrier to exploring scientifically events that have evidence in the form of multiple witnesses. Obviously we can’t go back to the 1600’s and visit Joseph in some obscure convent where he’d been shuffled by church authorities to keep him out of the public eye. Even if we could there would be no way to prove his extraordinary gifts. When it comes to the life of emotion, the only way to accept the impossible is with belief. And at times belief may be the most rational response at hand.