Who Are We?

“Human beings are animals. They are sometimes monsters, sometimes magnificent, but always animals. They may prefer to think of themselves as fallen angels, but in reality they are risen apes.”  — Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape [i]

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” – attributed to the priest and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin

Well, which is it?  Are we apes fooling ourselves that we are angels? Or are we spiritual beings inhabiting a body provided for us by our biological cousins?

My favorite movie when I was kid was Tarzan and my favorite character was the chimpanzee, Cheetah.  Cheetah was Tarzan’s best friend. They talked to each other in a special language.  If Tarzan was in trouble, Cheetah might dash through the jungle and summon a herd of elephants. Or find some lions and persuade them to save his friend.  I formed the Monkey Club in second grade and was its first (and only) president.  I would have traded all my baseball cards to have a friend like Cheetah. 

         I was a teenager in 1967 when The Naked Ape came out.  It was a popular bestseller describing how similar we are to apes.  I loved it.  I wanted to be a filmmaker at that time. I took our Kodak Super 8 movie camera to the San Diego Zoo and filmed chimpanzees grooming each other. Then I went back home to San Bernardino and planned to secretly film customers at our local barber shop getting similar treatment.  I planned to cleverly edit the clips so the movie would alternate between the human and primate footage, showing how similar we are. But I never did have the chutzpah to secretly film at the barbershop.  And I didn’t know the first thing about film editing.  Unlike the Steven Spielberg character in The Fabelmans, my cinematic career ended early.

  Growing up and going to college, I did not believe in “spiritual” or “religious” experiences. I believed everything could be explained through science.

         Then I had a spiritual experience.  In a time of personal desperation, I prayed without believing in prayer because I had nowhere else to turn.  Three days later, I realized something like a quiet light was now present at the center of my inner emptiness.  It was an unexpected and vivid experience that opened my mind to the possibility that there is a divine presence surrounding us, and it means us good.  Maybe we are “spiritual beings having a human (or biological) experience.”

         I had heard some folks say science and religion were incompatible — you either believe God created the world in seven days or you are a heretic. But that never made sense to me.  Science was not shutting out wonder but uncovering more and more for it.  What’s wrong with “descending” from apes? I considered that a compliment.

         This is not to say everything in nature is pleasant.

         In 2015 I attended the Parliament of World Religions in Salt Lake. There were many interesting speakers from around the world, but no one drew as large a crowd as Jane Goodall. I was thrilled to listen to her – she has come as close to any of us as having friends like Cheetah! She said she first wanted to study chimpanzees because she was disillusioned with human behavior and felt that chimps in the wild must have greater nobility. But after living with them, she realized they could become vicious and violent when attacking a rival tribe. Her idealism ended, but not her reverence for our fellow primates.

         In 1912, Aldo Leopold was working for the Forest Service in New Mexico.  His duties included hunting wolves.  One day he shot a wolf on a rimrock canyon: “He reached the still breathing wolf and saw something that forever changed him. In his classic text, A Sand County Almanac, Leopold describes the experience, “We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.”[ii]

   Leopold had sensed something profound in the wolf’s eyes and her being – something that inspired reverence.  He became an early prophet of the environmental movement.

         Have you ever looked into the eyes of an animal and felt a deep kinship?

         Would Native and indigenous people believe you must choose between the natural world and spiritual beliefs?

         I look at myself and my fellow human beings: we “are sometimes monsters, sometimes magnificent.”  And I look at life all around us: it can be messy at the same time it is permeated with the miraculous mystery of life.

         So which is it?  Are we “just” animals or are we essentially spiritual creatures? I’m not choosing sides.  I vote for both.

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[i] The Naked Ape: A Zoologist’s Study of the Human Animal, 1967

[ii] http://www.nationalforests.org/our-forests/light-and-seed-magazine/aldo-leopold-in-the-gila-wilderness