letterhead

Learning From Animals

For centuries, storytellers, philosophers, and scientific behaviorists have looked to the animal kingdom to provide both metaphorical and literal models for human nature. We have told ourselves stories (not always recognized as stories) that satisfied our longing for simplicity and order. We have built societies that punish whatever contradicts those stories.

In Zen, as in science, we always begin with our best attempt to clearly see what is so. Not what we presume, desire, fear, expect, find convenient or comforting – whatever really is. Buddha said that suffering largely arises in the gap between what we desire and what is so, between our unacknowledged illusions and what is so.

Here we will consider two ways in which we suffer profoundly because we hold on to inaccurate nature stories instead of committing to understanding ourselves as we really are.

The Alpha Myth

We celebrate (promote, highly reward, idolize) the "alpha" individual as the prime mover of personal and group success. Observations of unrelated wolves in captivity gave us the model for "alpha males": one individual who socially and physically dominates. This is then conflated with being the leader, rather than merely the top aggressor.

Corporations eagerly took the alpha male as the ruling metaphor for leadership. It matched what political leadership has looked like since the invention of warrior kings. Management books and self-help culture enshrine "alpha" assertiveness as the engine of progress, and actively disparage being non-alpha, which of necessity is almost everyone. Disparaging almost everybody as inexplicably and pathetically not-alpha is not one of our great achievements. And, oops. That's not what wolves have to teach us. That's not how wolves live in nature.

A natural wolf pack is typically composed of parents and their offspring. The "alpha" male isn't the "alpha" due to constant battles for dominance, he is the father. This wolf father does not "lead" by intimidation, alliances, or brute force. When the pack moves, he actually takes up the last place in line, not the first, providing a protective rear guard, and noting if any pack member needs help.

Let's shift to a model in which a company's leaders, and our political leaders, act like protective fathers, ensuring that we are all okay. That is what it actually means to be the alpha wolf.

Here is something subtler, but it sheds further light on our insistence on seeing what we expect instead of what is actually so. From casual observations in earliest times to scientific observation in modern times, the movement of herd animals has been seen as being directed by the alpha male. Oops. We expected to see an alpha male, so we did, but that's not how herd movement happens.

More careful observation shows that as herds of deer, horses, and other animals graze, individuals with varying degrees of influence do things like look in a given direction, presumably looking and sniffing for signs of predators, water, and food. As a result, over time, a significant subset of individual animals end up facing the same direction (toward some desirable sight or smell), which inclines nearby others to also face the same direction. Eventually some few animals begin to move in that direction, which induces others to follow. The "alpha" might or might not initiate the movement, but he definitely did not make the decision on which way to go. The herd "voted" as individuals, affected by local influence. The "alpha" simply went along with the consensus of the majority.

Let's shift to a model in which our corporate and political leaders take input from everyone and facilitate enactment of the group's collective decisions. That allows all minds to contribute their best instead of everyone relying on just one or just a few minds being the only one(s) permitted to have valuable ideas.

The Monogamy Myth

For generations, we have looked to "monogamous" animals – swans, albatrosses, gibbons, wolves – as nature's sermons on the natural wholesomeness of sexual fidelity. Oops. That's not what's happening. DNA paternity testing shows that these allegedly monogamous animals are better models of human behavior than anyone suspected. Just like humans, they act on competing drives for:

As a result, they pair bond for life, but neither males nor females provide a guarantee of sexual exclusivity. That is, there is a difference between social long-term stable pair bonding and sexual monogamy. They are not the same thing. Roughly three-quarters of species that are monogamous in surface appearance produce up to 20% of their offspring with a sexual partner other than their pair bond mate.

This is quite like what people do. Even today, with a limited window of fertility, ready access to contraception, access to abortion in many locales, and tremendous psycho-social and financial pressure not to get caught "cheating", around 2% of children have a father who thinks he is the biological father when he is not. This does not count the much larger number where a child's non-pair-bonded paternity has been discovered or the all the undetected incidences of non-pair-bonded sex that do not produce a child, which is most of them. 20% of men and 13% of women self-report having had sex outside of an established pair bond. That is, even though we can't put a number on it with precision, we know that non-pair-bonded sex is very common.

I put "cheated" and "infidelity" in quotes because the facts just given require us to reconsider these terms. How has it come to pass that we have reckoned as heinous and unconscionable, akin to murder, an activity that is demonstrably native to our species, whether we consult literature, history, science, the news, or conversations with friends. 20% is not an aberration, and neither is 13%, especially in a setting in which doing it is severely punished.

Non-monogamy unarguably naturally occurs with non-trivial prevalence in human populations. In light of the problems it brings, honesty demands that we describe it as irrepressible at population levels, even if many individuals don't feel the need, or suppress the feeling because of the penalties. It's time to see what is so, and stop insisting that non-monogamous behavior can only reflect immaturity, depravity, and disrespect. Infidelity reflects a normally present aspect of the human condition, cross-culturally, and throughout history. It's time we dealt with being human instead of pretending we can banish the bits we find inconvenient. It's time to figure out how to incorporate this aspect of reality non-destructively, instead of letting our denial that it is natural to us blow up so many people's lives.

Natural does not necessarily mean good. Violent behavior is also a natural part of the human condition. But violence is inescapably destructive, while infidelity is only destructive because we have agreed to see it that way. Seeing it that way is optional.

How many good relationships have been damaged, ruined, or ended because one partner or the other did this completely ordinary thing? How many children have suffered from their parents divorcing due to something completely ordinary? How many men and women have been shamed and shunned, and developed self-hatred because they did something completely ordinary? What is this very high price buying us?

Failing to see what is so, denying what is so, effectively criminalizing what naturally occurs in hundreds of species, including ours, is not one of our great achievements. We suffer immensely over infidelity, and in many cases suffer from preserving fidelity in sexless marriages, because we have "agreed" to suffer about something that we could instead just see as normal, because it is. We could have (and still can) produce social expectations and institutions that are aligned with what is so, or we can remain signed up for a very high level of suffering that is completely voluntary. We can leave the simplicity of Disneyesque stories behind and deal with who we actually are, or we can continue ruining lives by turning real people into storybook villains.

If you are in a relationship in which sexual exclusivity is expected, the pain you would cause by violating that expectation is gigantic. Don't do it. But at a societal level, we should be asking how many more centuries we will continue inflicting needless pain on ourselves and our children in the service of a cute animal story that isn't about us, and isn't even accurate about the animals in the story.

Let's shift to a model in which we develop expectations, customs, and institutions that account for who we actually are, instead of making parts of who we are needlessly catastrophic.

The Unifying Principle

The unifying principle in the myths considered above is the human addiction to simplicity at the expense of truth. Or, if you prefer, it is our insidious tendency to see what we expect to see, or even worse, to see what justifies something that happens to please or favor us. Whatever way you frame it, it should be disturbing to see how well-disguised it is when we assert that something is so, based on apparently solid evidence, and yet we are completely wrong. We especially want to see moral simplicity ("strong" leadership, "good" fidelity) even though reality abounds in ambiguity, gradation, paradox, and contradiction of our Disneyfied fairy tales.

Zen practice begins with radical empiricism: to see directly, without the distortion of desire or ideology. The injunction to perceive what is so is the same discipline that good science requires. It is, ultimately, the discipline that a morally and pragmatically good life requires.

When we fail to see accurately, we create suffering. In personal life, we punish our partners, ourselves, and our children by believing a story that is actually counterfactual, embracing a simple story as if simplicity ensures truth when experience teaches us again and again that few truths are that simple. In larger social systems, we idolize "alphas" and suppress the collective intelligence that could liberate innovation, and preserve rights that protect individuals and the environment. Our refusal to recognize what is so is a moral and practical failure. We can do better.