The March of the Penguins
'The March of the Penguins' "is not just a story of survival, it is a story of love.” But "not so fast, penguin breath. I am prepared to admire animal mating lust, animal sacrifice for the survival of their species and even, as we see in the movie, animal cooperative behavior as they construct a living, moving mass penguin scrum to help them survive the freezing Antarctic blasts. However, I am not prepared to believe that penguins or any animals actually fall in love the way we as humans understand romantic love. That's where I get off the iceberg."
And here Rabbi Marc Gellman does indeed get off the iceberg saviour of free thought into the frozen ocean of religious doctrine. Marc beleives that God created the world (in seven days, no less), and specifically gave humans abilities far greater than the other animals, such as the human capacity for love.
I beleive strongly in evolution. This leads me to question why humans love, why emotions exist at all. They evolved, like everything else, for the benefit of the genes which specify them. Emotions were selected as the increased the proliferation of their parent genes, either through increased survival (suspicion), increased procreation (lust) or increased survival of offspring (due to increased care and cooperation through love). Emotions push us to do things we can't rationally justify- Dylan Evans calls this "emotional intelligence". Sometimes daft, like that crush who you never could've dated anyway, but often very sensible. The dodgy guy on eBay who had six Paypal accounts, the three-card guys on Liebknecht Brücke. Everyone who bets wins, except you. Your emotional intelligence tells you it's dodgy, don't bet. Five minutes later, you figure out that all the winners are plants.
What compels the penguins to lead such a fragile life? Emotions. Emotions draw them into relationships, lead them to starve themselves for weeks, help them evade predators hunting, and to then give all their food to their child. Lacking the cognition to see that they need to raise a child, for the survival of their species and for the continuation of their genes, emotional intelligence and real love is all they have.
And here Rabbi Marc Gellman does indeed get off the iceberg saviour of free thought into the frozen ocean of religious doctrine. Marc beleives that God created the world (in seven days, no less), and specifically gave humans abilities far greater than the other animals, such as the human capacity for love.
I beleive strongly in evolution. This leads me to question why humans love, why emotions exist at all. They evolved, like everything else, for the benefit of the genes which specify them. Emotions were selected as the increased the proliferation of their parent genes, either through increased survival (suspicion), increased procreation (lust) or increased survival of offspring (due to increased care and cooperation through love). Emotions push us to do things we can't rationally justify- Dylan Evans calls this "emotional intelligence". Sometimes daft, like that crush who you never could've dated anyway, but often very sensible. The dodgy guy on eBay who had six Paypal accounts, the three-card guys on Liebknecht Brücke. Everyone who bets wins, except you. Your emotional intelligence tells you it's dodgy, don't bet. Five minutes later, you figure out that all the winners are plants.
What compels the penguins to lead such a fragile life? Emotions. Emotions draw them into relationships, lead them to starve themselves for weeks, help them evade predators hunting, and to then give all their food to their child. Lacking the cognition to see that they need to raise a child, for the survival of their species and for the continuation of their genes, emotional intelligence and real love is all they have.
posted by zrenneh at 9:10 AM
2 Comments:
Rabbi Gellman's argument has one major flaw. In arguing that penguins cannot experience love, he fails to define the word 'love', hence making his claim impossible to support.
Love is clearly a very difficult concept to pin down to a single definition, but in order for language to be meaningful, a broad agreement on the meaning of the individual words needs to be reached. The Merriam Webster online dictionary gives many meanings for the word, but the primary definition of the verb 'to love' is:
1 a (1) : strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties (maternal love for a child) (2) : attraction based on sexual desire : affection and tenderness felt by lovers (3) : affection based on admiration, benevolence, or common interests
In 'The March of the Penguins', the penguins demonstrate all three of these forms of love:
(1) Strong affection based on close personal ties: the mother for the child (evidenced by her selfless nurturing of it), the penguin for its partner (evidenced by the penguins' cooperation and the personal depravation endured for one another's benefit).
(2) Attraction based on sexual desire: although we may argue that this is only instinctive animal lust, such instinctive animal lust accounts for a great many human sexual encounters and is a large part of the human, as well as the animal, genetic make-up.
(3) Affection based on common interests, i.e. that of looking after their child. The cooperation exhibited by the penguins could teach many modern parents the benefits of working towards a common goal in harmony rather than in conflict.
Rabbi Gellman's only attempt at justifying his rejection of the concept of penguin love is the following:
"Penguins don't plight their troth to one another for fish or no fish, for colder or really colder, for seas full of krill or seas full of leopard seals."
What he appears to be suggesting here, is that love is not really love unless it is everlasting and able to surmount all obstacles. This is manifestly not the case, not only for penguins but also for humans. Literature has taught us that the greatest loves may only be temporary: Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary and Rhett Butler are proofs that it is just as easy to fall out of love as it is to fall in love. In addition, rising divorce rates in the Western world indicate just how many people declare their love to be everlasting, only to discover that it is not. Very few people suggest that this calls into question the validity of the emotion in the first place.
Perhaps Rabbi Gellman's real problem with the concept of penguins falling in love arises, not out of their lack of eternal committment to one another, but from their inability to love an abstract being, that is, God. As a Jew, Gellman focuses throughout his article on the unique ability of humankind to love. Perhaps it is this abstract, spiritual love which is lacking in penguins and leads Gellman to abandon altogether the notion of penguin love. Whatever Gellman's reasoning, it is clear that, although there are possibly several types of love which penguins probably do not experience, there are also many types (illustrated by the Merriam Webster definitions) which penguins do demonstrate. To say that 'The March of the Penguins' is a story about love is a fair summary. As Elizabeth Barrett Browning so neatly pointed out, there are many different ways to exhibit love, and the enguins on the icy wastelands of Antarctica certainly seem adept at exhibiting many of these.
If you're interested, Bronzino's Allegory, which illustrates your original comment, is the subject of my latest historical novel, Cupid and the Silent Goddess, which imagines how the painting might have been created in Florence in 1544-5.
See:
http://www.twentyfirstcenturypublishers.com/index.asp?PageID=496
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