The Selfishness of Animals?

When a friend first sent me a news alert referenced in the last post—the one in which Pope Francis criticized some people as "selfish" for choosing to have pets instead of children—a passage from Whitman came to mind. In the famous section of the "Song of Myself" that begins "I think I could turn and live with animals...," the poet justifies his preference for quadrupedal life by observing that animals, unlike humans, "do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,/They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God[.]" Which seemed like a particularly fit rejoinder to the Pope's comments—not only because the poet's words justify a love of pets, but because they abjure the whole framework of sin and self-mortification in which condemnations of the "selfishness of others" are so often posed. 

In turning back to Whitman's verse to find the exact phrasing, though, a different resonance struck me. The reasons the poet gives for wanting to "live with animals" are the same that Freud gave—as cited in Dombek's book discussed in the previous post—in seeking to explain why people are drawn to "narcissists." The animals, Whitman says, are lovable because they are "so self-contain'd." Freud speaks of the attraction of the narcissist in similar terms, and compares it explicitly to the reasons why people find delight in animals. Dombek quotes the passage as follows: "The charm of a child [...] lies to a great extent in his narcissism, his self-contentment [....] just as does the charm of certain animals which seem not to concern themselves about us, such as cats and large birds of prey." 

And so, the poem might seem to lead us back to vindicating Pope Francis's comments after all. The pontiff said that people who prefer animals to people are selfish, recall, and here we find one of the great poetic justifications of animal companionship leading us to the same place: the company of narcissists. This suggestion seems even more confirmed when we recall that the entire poem cycle in which Whitman's fragment appears—his "Song of Myself," not to speak of the whole 1855 Leaves of Grass—is a hymn of praise to the all-comprehending self—a self so replete and so capable of containing all other selves and experience that it has no need of anything beyond itself. It is the ultimate poem of narcissism, if we accept Freud's definition of the narcissist as one who is entirely "self-content[ed]."

Dombek's point, though, is that we should not accept the psychoanalysts' definition of the narcissist so uncritically—in part because it contradicts itself (and, unlike Whitman's all-pervading self, it is not supposed to contradict itself, nor contain multitudes). Dombek begins her book, after all, by citing a long list of contemporary books that describe the narcissist precisely as someone who is not self-contented. They are depicted, rather, as full of deep insecurities, gnawing emptiness, seeking perpetually to fill this void by extorting the unreciprocated love of others. And if the working definition in the psychological literature—and which shaped the diagnostic criteria still used by the DSM—contains this fundamental contradiction, is "narcissist" really a helpful and logically-sound category after all? 

To accept that the idea of the "narcissist" may after all be a psychoanalytic myth is not of course to deny the reality of all the behavior we tend to describe under this label. People do in fact behave selfishly in this world. They deny the reality of the rights of others; they see themselves as more important, more real, more worthy of respect and care than others. Equally obvious, however, is that people who habitually act this way do not possess the self-contained or self-contented quality that Whitman describes. The person who celebrates themself in the Whitman sense is as capable as any other of the generous, open-hearted gesture, if not more so. Being self-contented, they may also be less likely to demand the praise of others. They may be more capable of regarding the other as another no-less-worthy self. 

In short, being self-contented doesn't have to mean the same thing as being self-occupied—in fact, it may lead to the opposite. (To contrast the two personality styles, just read the poems of Whitman himself side-by-side with the introduction penned by Harold Bloom, in the Penguin 150th anniversary edition of the 1855 Leaves of Grass that is open before me now.) Perhaps even more obviously, even if we grant the existence of self-involved, self-centered people in this world—the group is by no means coterminous with the number of people who like animals and prefer their company (I acknowledge that this claim is in tension with something I've written previously on the subject of animal-loving people, such as Byron—but no matter; I too reserve the right to contain multitudes.)

You and I have met selfish people. Ask yourself honestly: are they necessarily—or even occasionally—the same type of people who love their pets and/or who opt not to have children? And this is not to imply that having children is selfish either. I am not among the doomsayers who think that bearing children is an environmentally-unsustainable practice. But in a world where human beings have cruelly decimated the populations of other species—leading to what many have called a sixth mass extinction event in the Earth's history—and in which human population growth must eventually stabilize in order to avoid exhausting the planet's resources, it is at least fair to say that taking care of non-human species while declining to have children of one's own is as admirable a choice as any other. 

My sister the biologist, for one—while the opposite of an anti-natalist—admitted after watching a David Attenborough documentary that it made her think, however briefly, "wow, I need to not have any more children." On her recommendation, I watched the film. It is Attenborough's testament about the damage to the environment he has witnessed first-hand over the more than 90 years of his life, and it is indeed disturbing. Of course, I always wrestle with what to make of such gloomy environmental predictions. So many of them seem to rest on the assumption that human behavior will continue in the same track indefinitely, without at any point adapting or regulating itself, when the whole of human history suggests the opposite is the case (this is my beef with the Neo-Malthusians especially). 

And yet, precisely one of the ways in which human behavior alters and regulates itself is through conscious collective political effort—for which environmental activism is needed, and for which spelling out the consequences of not changing our behavior is essential. So we need the predictions of gloom precisely in order to once again avoid them. Attenborough describes, for instance, how his lifetime nearly saw the elimination of Mountain Gorillas and large whales from the planet. These hypothesized extinctions of large mammals did not come to pass—so one could be tempted to say, "ah, see, we didn't need to worry!" But they were averted precisely through people becoming aware of the problem and organizing to address it. So we did need to worry; and it is good that we worried. 

Nor does the slight recovery in the populations of some particularly well-known large mammals (the so-called "charismatic species" that are easiest to conserve because they are easiest to generate sympathy for) alter the basic storyline that Attenborough unfolds. The human destruction of biodiversity has continued apace, even if one no longer sees so many bumper stickers about saving the whales. And this is true even for our most closely-related fellow animals. Among the more sobering statistics Attenborough cites is that remaining wild species of mammals make up just 4% of the total mammalian biomass still living on the planet—all the rest are either animals we breed for food (meat, dairy, etc.), or humans ourselves. And this is not to mention the innumerable non-mammals who have already been pushed to extinction. 

In such a world, it is hard to entertain with any seriousness the conviction that people who devote their lives to quadrupedal mammals are doing something immoral. We need more people to care about animals than they do at present, and we don't need the human population to grow indefinitely. So too, it's hard in light of these facts to make sense of the suggestion we saw in the writings of Freud: namely, that animals are the template of the "narcissist." If any species can be said to be behaving selfishly on this planet, is it really anyone but us? In a haunting poem by W.S. Merwin, he envisions all the species of extinct creatures we have annihilated meeting one another again in a land beyond death. Tell this death, he adds, emphasizing the arrogance of human narcissism, "that it is we who are important." 

Merwin writes in this regard of whales and gorillas—just as Attenborough speaks of them. He also writes of the Great Auks—a species of large, flightless bird that once resided in the Northern Hemisphere, and which Europeans hunted to extinction in the 19th century, just around the time that Whitman was writing. Indeed, Whitman mentions some of these species too. Just before the famous passage about turning and living with the animals, he seeks to emphasize just how all-encompassing his vision of the self and the universe is, by saying that no animal can hide from him: In vain the mastodon retreats beneath its own powder'd bones,/ [...] In vain the ocean settling in hollows and the great monsters lying low, [...] In vain the razor-bill'd auk sails far north to Labrador[.]"

One appreciates the sense in which Whitman intended them, but the lines take on a different meaning in light of subsequent events. In all too real a sense, these animals were indeed ultimately unable to hide themselves from human self-enlargement. The auks were hunted down to the point of extinction (just as the mastodon and other mega-fauna are believed to have been prehistorically annihilated by humans). And so there is perhaps a sense after all in which the belief that the human self encompasses all life, and all that really matters, can become a dangerous kind of narcissism. But it is the height of paradox to believe that this selfishness manifests itself in the human love of animals. To the contrary, it expresses itself in the human species's tendency to destroy our fellow creatures.