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The Paradise Perspective: Commentary from a Free and Compassionate Alternate Reality Volume 1, Number 13 Dogs and Love, Part 1 by Glen Allport Exclusive to STR April
9, 2007 I
am continually amazed at the dog's ability to love so unconditionally and
without ambivalence. ~
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson [1] Q:
To turn a friendly puppy into a vicious guard dog, what must you do to it? A:
Restrict its movement and beat it often. In
Feeling,
Emotion, Intellect, I used dogs in general, and my own small dog
Zoomer in particular, to help describe emotional consciousness. I want to
expand on that, and to examine some of what dogs can teach us about love
and freedom, and about the human condition generally. Dogs
love with a completeness and vividness that pleases, warms, and often
startles their human companions. As intellects,
dogs are almost too faint to see, but as feeling and emotional beings,
they show more power and intensity than do most humans, and love is a big
part of that. -
- - - - Yet
– and here I must apologize for being direct – despite the
often-celebrated ability of dogs to love deeply and unconditionally, dogs
are equally complete and vivid
in their role as cold-hearted killing machines. I
find this combination almost overwhelming sometimes, especially as it
mirrors the greater character of the world as a whole. "Predator and prey" describes something so fundamental to
life, and yet so horrifying, that humans simply hide from it for the most
part. One of civilization's many virtues is that it facilitates this
hiding; "nature,
red in tooth and claw" seems very far away in our high-tech
world. My
idea of "original sin" – to the extent such a concept could
have any meaning for me – would be the evolutionary discovery that
killing and eating another organism is an efficient way to obtain
nutrients. From that point on, millions of species have evolved with murder
of other animals as their primary or only
means of obtaining food. Think, for a moment, what that actually means: hundreds
of millions of years (so
far) of horrifying, bloody
murder as the essential basis for much of the life on this Earth. Add
parasites and disease, and you have a perfect trifecta of horror: life as
a vision of hell. (Not to mention starvation, thirst, freezing cold,
aging, and other hardships, but those do not involve one life murdering or
tormenting another.) The one proof I find truly persuasive against an
omnipotent, loving god (or against intelligent design, by anything but a
race of alien sociopaths) is this widespread, basic use of murder to
obtain food. One can easily imagine designing an ecology where murder of
anything sentient is genetically forbidden, and where all life forms are
either vegetarians, scavengers, or capable of photosynthesis or some other
process that enables life without requiring murder. One could also imagine
an ecology where parasites and disease are missing or at least more often
benign. Yet carnivores, parasites, and disease organisms are extremely
well-represented among Earthly species. A loving, all-powerful being would
simply not create such a nightmare. Evolution by natural selection
absolutely would create this
situation, however. Evolution cares nothing about pain or violence or
anything else, because (as many have pointed out) evolution does not
"care" at all. A species either lives and reproduces
successfully, or it does not. Species that do survive change occasionally
by mutation and the resulting slightly-new forms must survive the same
test: live and reproduce, or die out. -
- - - - Imagine
such a world – and shudder. Predators, parasites, disease: one life
feeding on the suffering body of another; torture and murder as the basis
for life, or at least for much of life. Every animal as prey, and many as
predators of one type or another. Eventually,
after millions of centuries, something else
came into being; something that evolved from, perhaps, protective parental
instincts which had long given eggs and newborns of various species better
odds for survival. Gradually, with infinite slowness, such instincts –
embedded within brains and bodies that were adding function and complexity
over time – became the first, faint glimmers of a New Thing in the
world. [2] This
New Thing was love, and it was
dramatically and completely opposed to the ancient and fundamentally
murderous nature so common in life. -
- - - - Nietzsche
wrote that "without music, life would be a mistake." That may be
true (for humans, at least; dogs and most other animals don't seem to
care), but it is love that truly
fits Nietzsche's maxim. Love is, among other things, compensation and
counterbalance for everything ugly and painful in the world. Without love,
life really would be a mistake. Furthermore,
love serves as an increasingly-needed guideline for the blossoming power
of intelligence. As I have pointed out before, a healthy, loving world may
be the only world compatible
with a human future. -
- - - - We
don't normally think of it this way, but personality
is software, running on the hardware of our brains and bodies. Your
conscious self is software (or,
if you prefer, the result of
software). Science-fiction and increasingly science itself both declare as
much, but it goes against the be-all centrality of one's own consciousness
to see our inner selves as no different, in principle, than other types of
software. Living
with a dog makes the software-based nature of personality highly visible,
because different programs [3] in the software create
dramatically different personalities within the same animal, and the
change is often lightning-quick. It is this ability to move between
programs or subroutines that makes modern computers so versatile, and the
same basic ability is an important tool for life itself. A wolf hunts and
kills prey using the tool of its hunting/killing software to properly
activate and control the physical tools of legs running and teeth biting,
and so on. Returning to its young in the den, the wolf shifts to a program
that includes love and other instincts, feelings, and behaviors that
enhance survival by protecting the young and cooperating in defined ways
with other adults. Trotting up to her cub after a successful hunt, the
wolf is a very different being than she was only minutes ago when she sank
her fangs into a terrified rabbit, crushing bones and internal organs,
while snapping her head back and forth to break the rabbit's neck. The
two personalities are not mutually exclusive in every circumstance. A wolf
protecting her cub uses her killing software in the service of love to
scare away, disable, or kill the attacker. The cub is thus saved and life
continues. Modern humans rely on this same basic emotional choreography in
dogs for protection of their own families; dogs will often attack someone
threatening or hurting a family member and even a tiny dog can at least
alert one to an intruder by the small-dog trademark of "barking like
a lunatic." When
Zoomer is asleep in another room and I walk by, he sometimes wakes up and
is apparently certain that my footsteps signal a four-alarm intrusion by,
well, something that threatens
the pack. Zoomer will then bolt towards the door and confront me, barking
at full voice and with his entire body engaged in the process, but of
course he immediately sees it is me and not the Bad Thing he was
expecting, and he instantly starts showing pleasure at my presence: his
tail begins wagging, the wagging includes the start of wriggles along his
body, the hint of a smile appears on his face, and so on. The barking
continues a few moments longer, however, as the two pieces of software
collide within him. He sorts things out quickly but the overlap is, in
technical language, hilarious. -
- - - - Living
with a dog is a constant reminder of the pleasures of love and affection.
The healthy nature and power of
love and of relationship are
shown by the health
benefits conferred on humans who live with a dog (or a cat, or other
pet). Dogs
are not only loving; they are hugely demonstrative. Zoomer sleeps in bed
with us, and when we wake in the morning, he begins a display of affection
that dwarfs anything I have ever seen from a human. Zoomer (who,
thankfully, weighs only about 8 or 9 pounds) jumps on my chest and licks
my face, wagging his tail and almost vibrating
with obvious affection. I eventually push him away from my face; Zoomer
then licks my hand or arm or moves over to my wife and licks her
face, hand, and arm. After awhile, he starts rolling on his back between
us, legs in the air, wriggling his body energetically in a typically
canine expression of joy. He will pause for a few moments, laying on his
back or side, and then resume. Zoomer will sometimes start nuzzling my leg
(or my wife's) through the covers; pushing his head against me or her as
if to somehow get closer than he already is. Then perhaps he will decide
to play-fight with my hand, smiling and biting and wrestling as I wrestle
back. Eventually – after maybe five minutes or so of megawatt affection
and play – Zoomer will dash off (running at full speed the entire way)
to find one of his flavored hard-cornstarch chews and come back to gnaw on
it contentedly as my wife and I talk and get ready to rise for the day.
The
experience of love in our daily lives is more than a health-enhancing
pleasure: it is a reminder of how important love really is, and, looking
outward and ahead, of how important is the
creation of a healthy world. A
well-treated dog is already there, living in a world of love and (given
the dog's innate social rules) freedom. The human lucky enough to live
with an emotionally-healthy dog is, in turn, blessed with daily reminders
of the power and importance of love. At a time when more love is a
life-and-death issue for the human race, dogs thus, once again, earn their
reputation as "man's best friend." -
- - - - Part
2 of this essay will appear in a few weeks. -
- - - - Notes: [1]
From Masson's Dogs
Never Lie About Love: Reflections on the Emotional World of Dogs, in a
chapter titled "Love: The Master Emotion of Dogs", page 39 [2]
It is not possible to know exactly when love came into the world, in part
because the precise definitions of both "love" and
"consciousness" are elusive. The fine shadings in development of
love and consciousness make their starting points inherently vague. Did
the social instinct of some early dinosaurs include (and their level of
consciousness allow for) anything one might reasonably call love? How
about early fishes or other animals? I have seen and heard of many
examples of mammals showing compassion and affection to their own kind and
to others (dolphins saving a drowning person, for instance), but cannot
recall any such examples among reptiles, amphibians, or insects. My belief
is that mammals in general, and more advanced mammals especially, are
uniquely equipped to feel and to express what we call "love" but
I have no way to prove that belief, beyond the apparent strong development
of the limbic
system in mammals as opposed to earlier species. On the other hand,
there is evidence suggesting that the limbic system was well-developed far
earlier than had been assumed. I would be interested to hear from
readers about any evidence pointing to the first emergence of something we
might reasonably describe as conscious, meaningful love. [3] One might also call these programs "subroutines" or other names. And clearly, the software involved in the brain, like that utilized by DNA, is different in many ways from the software running on a modern digital computer. Regardless of the platform and programming language involved, coded information, including stored data and/or instructions for various actions, is the essence of software. Examples of software in this broad sense include music on an analog 33 rpm record; the same music digitally encoded on a CD or DVD; the word-processing program I am writing this with; and the data file I am creating with the word-processor. Even a printed book with paper pages is a form of software. It is neither the form of storage nor the language used for encoding that defines something as software. Note that the purpose of software is ultimately to create an action or an experience; software itself (like the hardware it runs on) is not the essence of what is wanted when software is created. Software, as opposed to its physical manifestation on (say) a hard drive, has no location in space and cannot be seen, touched, heard, or otherwise detected directly; like the mental image of a flower, software is in essence conceptual, not physical. The ineffable nature of software is similar to the nature of consciousness – difficult to describe or define because, once again, consciousness is merely a specific effect of the software within a living creature such as a human being – or perhaps, at some point, within a machine. There are dozens of excellent books on consciousness from widely different perspectives. For those interested in the topic, four starting points I can suggest are Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (mostly for its startling discussion of the many things we can do without consciousness, such as driving a car while daydreaming), Daniel C. Dennett's classic Consciousness Explained, Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop, and (especially for its discussion of the three levels of consciousness) Arthur Janov's The Biology of Love. Glen Allport is the author of The Paradise Paradigm: On Creating A World of Compassion, Freedom, and Prosperity and maintains paradise-paradigm.net. This is one in a series of columns on the human condition.
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