While Jesus was still talking to the crowd, his mother and brothers stood outside, wanting to speak to him. Someone told him, “Your mother and brothers are standing outside, wanting to speak to you.”
He replied to him, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” Pointing to his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”
-Matthew 12: 46-50
P fell asleep very early last night after the previous evening's adventure (see yesterday's post), which gave me a little time to return to the book I'm reading these days, Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari. The book is my favorite sort of interdisciplinary analysis, never terribly deep in any one area but with a tantalizing bit of history, philosophy, and bioscience all drawn into his argument. Harari ventures from the present into a dystopian future (I won't spoil it for you), and along the way asks a number of provocative questions regarding the nature of freewill, what it means to be human, and whether religion has anything relevant to say about this moment in human history.
Early in his discussion, Harari addresses and dispenses with the notion that humans have a soul that makes us distinct from the rest of the animal kingdom. Among his most compelling observations is tied to the theory of evolution. If we share a common ancestor with primates, and primates do not have a soul, then neither did our common ancestor. If that is true, at what point on the road from homo erectus to homo sapien did our common ancestor develop a soul? Did Mr. and Mrs. Neanderthal look down in the cave crib and realize this baby is somehow different?
That all seems unlikely, at least to me. If there was in fact no evolutionary moment in which a deity imprinted one strand of highly evolved primates with a soul, then it seems to follow that, well, there's no such thing. And if there's no such thing, we spend a lot of theological resources saving something that doesn't exist. A great waste and a burden on the conscience of a "guilty" humanity.
Or maybe not. Maybe we have just taken the wrong lesson about our own place in the world. I am shifting from Harari's observations to my own here.
If there is the stuff of divinity in us, perhaps it predates all that, perhaps it lies in sentient life itself. If that is true, then Mange the rooster and Gus the goose and WL the guinea and I all share more than we humans care to admit, because to concede an equal dignity with all of these fellow-beings must necessarily change our relationship with the living world. Big game hunting is simply murder. To the extent we eat meat at all, and humans seem wired for that, it is a sacramental act---taking part in a hot dog eating contest until one vomits, which is a thing I'm told, is more heretical than pretty much every proscribed behavior in Leviticus.
It is no answer to say we are smarter than our animals--we have never found a moral or ethical way to use intelligence as a dividing line within humanity between human and less so, and frankly the geese seem to know things I do not. Besides, our homo sapien ancestors actually had bigger, denser brains than us, so if intelligence is your lodestar we are working our way back to everyone else on the farm.
Maybe it's language. After all, the author of the Gospel of John begins the story of God's relationship with us with the Word, the logos. But every animal on the farm seems to have its own language, and my son spent a chunk of his college time learning how to understand, if not speak, the language of the ospreys that nested around the Sarasota Bay. The animals have a language; we simply don't comprehend it.
So if it's not intelligence and it's not language, we are left with the brute fact that we won the Darwinian race, and exploit the others and deny their individual dignity because we can. That is the lesson lived out by every sow in every breeding pen in every factory farm. And we justify all that by looking away and telling ourselves that we are different because, unlike that mama pig, we have souls and God cares about us and not them.
The farm teaches a different lesson. These animals have distinct personalities. I don't know if they feel love, but they certainly cleave to one another and to us as one big family. Stripe the cat sits on the porch and wails at the loss of her daughter.
Viscerally, I find myself reacting to my own argument here with an accusation of anthropomorphism, of mawkish sentimentality. But that is the wrong way to look at it. I am not suggesting animals are humans in fur and feathers, as in a Disney movie, but rather that there is no moral or ethical justification for denying their dignity as sentient beings, and acknowledging the common divinity that makes all of us, cows and chickens and ducks, what Kurt Vonnegut once called "lucky mud" by having evolved into beings that live an experiential, sentient life in a beautiful world.
In my mind's eye, Jesus could well answer the question of who are his brothers and sisters by gesturing across the pasture at Wyldswood, where Gus and Mange and all the rest of them do the will of God by being who they are.
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