Ecological Intelligence (13 page)

In any modern home there is bound to be a picture, a painting, or a calendar that features some kind of nonhuman animal. We have toy animals, animal carvings, and animal stories. They are in our blood and in our imagination. And now, with the unraveling of the human genome, we have proof of a kinship of science and soul. And let’s not forget those animals that rarely feature on our family crests—hyenas, vultures, and the other shadow animals in our psyche. Let’s welcome them back again. After all, we named them. They, too, are our soul mates and we can learn a lot about ourselves from them. Life without animals would be unthinkable. It is what the poets and the shamans have been trying to tell us for years. Let’s remember our wild side.

Yann Martel,
The Life Of Pi

One of the biggest intellectual challenges of the
21st century will be to construct unified images
of human nature that do not denigrate our animal past or
our future potentials as members of the human family.

Jaak Panksepp

5

REMEMBERING OUR WILD SIDE

I
N A WORLD THAT GENERALLY REGARDS REFINEMENT AND DOMESTICATION of everything from sugar to human instincts to be the hallmarks of civilization and progress, we need to be mindful that invariably something significant has been lost in the process. Civilization, for all its socalled advances and advantages, has cost many of us, perhaps too many, our sense of wildness. Sometimes we are not even sure what this wildness means, but it does not take much analysis to realize that deep down we really miss it.

To be wild is to be alert to the needs of the flesh and the warning calls of distress. It is to be spontaneous—to live one’s Earthiness and one’s notions of God independent of outside approval. It is to dance, to work and to play with passion, and, when called upon, to act dispassionately, swiftly, and without personal feeling or bias. It is to be as patient as a heron—to be able to wait for hours at the edge of hunger. It is to understand the double meaning of the word
outrageous
—to act without rage, to do something out of character, to cross-dress, to stilt walk to a disciplinary hearing, to use a shoe as a basketball, and to make a fool of yourself without being stupid. Its other meaning is to act out of rage. It is to be aware of the fury at the edge of an inner hurricane and to know your way back to the calmness at its eye. It is to conform every now and then, to be streetwise, and to be unafraid of entering those inner and outer territories where shit happens. It is the man-child, woman-child in us that admires this kind of wildness in others, especially in our fathers and mothers. It is that same child who loves the wildness of nudity, who longs for a larynx that is free to sing and shout, and who loves to go down to the river and to watch it as if she was watching the flow of her own blood.

P
oet Robert Bly reminds us that the wildness of the wild man is neither criminal nor psychotic. Rather, as Yeats puts it, it is to be “mad as the mist and snow.” And we do miss that madness. How many of us remember, sometimes with nostalgia, sometimes with envy, the wild, benign mischief makers of our youth so aptly described by Rumi in this poem, translated by Coleman Barks and John Moyne, “Has any-one seen the boy?”

Has anyone seen the boy who used to come here?

Round-faced troublemaker, quick to find a joke,

slow to be serious, red shirt,

perfect co-ordination, sly, strong muscled,

Have you heard stories about him?

Pharaoh and the whole Egyptian world

collapsed for such a Joseph.

Children love the wild anecdotes of their parents. Porous to the psychic conditions that surround them, they love the hidden stories of the soul, often demanding to hear them again and again. It is a strange fact that children often grow up to become the champions of the unlived wildness of their parents. These children are sometimes known as the black sheep of our families.

And then there is Rilke who, in this masterful poem, writes of the caged wildness of the panther in all of us:

I think we can all, in some small way, relate to the stuckness of that elegant yet pathetic animal in the poem. We are the only animal who can turn our back on our animal nature and it is then, and precisely then, that the bars come down on our world. To be caged is another way of describing a loss of creativity. Watch out for it. It is a well-known condition among all men and women who “go to work.” It is called burnout—a condition in which the sensing of the dream of what one always wanted to do or to be enters one’s thoughts, plunges into the heart, and disappears. It is about a career that began as a passion, then became a duty and, finally, a burden. Be aware of the process, for in its early stages, the signs are subtle. You will hear it in the sharpened cynicism of your speech when you talk about your work. You will feel it in the growing heaviness of your body when the subject of work is raised. Because our identity is so intimately linked with our work, and with it “the complex, volatile chemistry of approval, self-worth and the instinct to provide,” says the poet David Whyte, it is vital that you keep asking yourself, “What has become of me in my work?”

Creativity, passion, and vision invariably go together, which is why Rilke’s poem of the panther is so significant. Try not to forget the vision, the energy, and the wild archetype—that great inner artist that drew you into your work in the first place. Try to remember who, or what, put you behind those bars, if not you? After all, said Camus, “a man’s work is nothing but a slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.”

T
o lose touch with one’s wildness is to mistake it for brutality—the shadow, or the dark side of wildness. As Bly confirms, “some boys are so afraid of becoming domesticated that they become savage.” They become defiant, aggressive, coarse, and self-destructive—the very opposite of the wildness that we miss. And as many of us know, there is sometimes a fine line between what is savage and what is wild. Poet Theodore Roethke captures the knife-edged fineness of the line—as well as the fear of what could be unleashed when it is crossed. In his poem “My Papa’s Waltz,” it can be found in his description of the face of a mother watching her husband, lost in a drunken dance with their young son.

HUMAN SURVIVAL—WILD STRATEGIES

F
rom bacteria to buffalo and brain surgeons, the history of everything organic can be described by British science educator Michael Poole’s acronym MR. GREE N, which stands for movement, respiration, growth, reproduction, excitability, excretion, and nutrition. It is at the same time a history of self-preservation and protection, involving competition, challenge, cooperation, collaboration, opportunism, deception, risk taking, and even altruism. It does not matter who or where we are, our lives at all times will involve subtle and sometimes obvious combinations of these survival strategies. Whether we are lions, hyenas, or humans, we engage in these activities for the same reasons—for food, turf or territory, security, approval, sexual partners, rank, status, attachment, and belonging. And our emotions and residual feelings come along with them—anticipatory pleasure, anxiety, fear, joy, disappointment, envy, hate, frustration, panic, distress, contentment, and love. In the interest of self-preservation, we employ these strategies not only to establish ourselves, but also to promote and to protect ourselves. This is nothing to be ashamed of. For example, cooperation, that essential social endeavor to share one’s life with another, is, at its roots, an endeavor to enhance one’s own protection and survival.

It is difficult to find a creature that is not equipped with some form of self-protection. From the exoskeletons of beetles, tortoises, and lobsters, from stingers, thorns, and claws, to the burglar bars, jagged, written warnings, and barbed words of human speech, every organism has a way of dealing with external threats to its existence. Every creature is, in some way, geared to being sensitive to and escaping from danger. Some organisms rely on speed or brute strength to protect themselves, others on electrochemical defenses such as toxic juices and repellent sprays. And that includes the human animal. How many of us live in homes surrounded by electric fences or have been on the stinging end of an accusation designed to shock? Attacking language is a part of the evolution of the human tongue and so is the socially expedient ability to say “I’m sorry.”

When they are balanced, our survival strategies are healthy—they hold families, units, teams, societies, and civilizations together. On the other hand, any excessive or underuse of any one of them is a guarantee for individual or group disharmony often presenting as frustration, withdrawal, isolation, anger, passive aggression, and depression—some of the reasons why people seek psychological help.

Because it is such an integral part of our shadow, the strategy that we are least likely to own up to is deception. Deception is an ancient game in which the human animal is an expert. Its roots are biological and wild. Take, for instance, the red-winged pratincole,
Glareola pratincola
, which pretends to have a broken wing in order to divert the attention of an egg-seeking predator away from its nest and toward itself. Do we do that? Absolutely. We are the great pretenders. We pretend not so much with broken wings but with broken words—we mislead, mimic, and misinform, which is why it is almost impossible for us to be transparent. To be accountable, yes…but to be transparent, no. And it is not about being dishonest. We all have skeletons in our cupboards and sometimes that’s exactly where they should remain. We all have dreams and schemes and to make them known prematurely is sometimes to put an end to them altogether. If it directly affects me, I might not want to know your secrets, and you, for the same reason, might not want to know mine. In other words, it is one thing to have all of one’s cards on the table—to be accountable—but it is another to have them all turned up at the same time. We might not be ready for what we want to find out, for, as Russian writer and Soviet dissident Varlam Shalamov, wrote after seventeen years in a Siberian prison, “There is much that a man should not know, should not see, and if he does see it, it is better to die.” And then there is poet Czeslaw Milosz who writes:

No-one with

Impunity gives himself the eyes of a god.

True deception, writes primatologist Frans De Waal,

is one of those capacities that we employ all the time without taking too much pride in it. It can be defined as the deliberate projection, to one’s own advantage, of a false image of past behavior, knowledge, or intention. In its most complete sense, it requires awareness of how one’s actions come across and what the outside world is likely to read into them.

We are indeed the great pretenders, masters at disguising our emotions and our intentions. We are also the masters of
self-deception
. We pretend to be what we are not, deluding ourselves into believing that we are the apex of creation, intrinsically different to other animals, the inheritors of the Earth, the masters of our fate. And when things go wrong with our stewardship we pretend that we did not know, or we twist the truth. Struggling to distance ourselves from our animal nature, we tend to believe that the virtues of courage, patience, fair play, and moderation are the sole property of
Homo sapiens
, and if we do happen to recognize these qualities in wolves, elephants, baboons, cats, and dogs, then we are accused of anthropomorphism. Deception can be expedient and therefore necessary, but it can also be sinister. The philosopher Nietzsche, for instance, believed that some of the virtues we most admire in others such as prudence, sympathy, and delayed gratification are sublimations of motives that we readily condemn, such as cruelty, cunning, resentment, and revenge.

In social settings, especially if it involves the harmony of an in-group, it is often inexpedient to be brutally honest. Discretion is the better part of valor, we are told, and so in order to keep the peace we learn to remain silent, to tell white lies and half-truths. We all know how to cry wolf and the monkeys are our genetic mentors. Watch a vervet monkey,
Cercopithecus aethiops
, harassed by its companions and it won’t take long before it utters a false cry of warning that there is a leopard, a raptor, or a snake nearby. This, of course, sends the harassing monkeys scattering for safety. As it is with humans, these false calls of alarm are not taken lightly by the troop and they are effective, provided they are not continually misused. Young vervets, not unlike young children, spend a lot of time practicing the different alarm calls—with minimal response from the adults.