What the penguins tell us

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

My posting on this was picked up by Max Sawicky's "Max Speaks" blog. From
there it ended up on Crooked Timber and then from there on salon.com. It
finally landed up as an editorial in today's NY Times.

September 18, 2005
Penguin Family Values

The news that emperor penguins are exemplars of self-sacrifice, marital
fidelity and steadfast parenting has brought joy to many religious
conservatives, who see the brave birds in the documentary "March of the
Penguins" as little Christian beacons of family and faith.

But it could just as easily cause those of us who like to brood on human
weakness to let our shoulders sag with doubt and self-reproach. If idiot
penguins stay true to each other and their children through months of
starvation and the endless Antarctic night, what hope is there for us, who
can become flirty and stupid after just one office party?

It may be fun to find a moral lesson in that enthralling penguin movie, but
anthropomorphism, like after-shave, is best used sparingly. After all, when
The Times reported last week that Christian conservatives had embraced
emperor penguins as their own, bloggers quickly recalled another article in
this paper last year about gay chinstrap penguins at the Central Park Zoo -
a same-sex couple named Roy and Silo who raised a chick together. If
emperor penguins are sending us a message about heterosexual marriage, then
what are Roy and Silo doing?

Those who start looking outside the human family for old-fashioned values,
in fact, will need to quickly narrow their search terms. They will surely
want to ignore practices observed in animals like dolphins (gang rape),
chimpanzees (exhibitionism), bonobo apes (group sex) and Warner Brothers
cartoon rabbits (cross-dressing). Casting a wide net for chaste and saintly
creatures, the mind flails, then comes up mostly empty. Yowling tomcats?
Lazy, sexist lions? Preening peacocks? Better stick with the penguins. Or
maybe Mom and Dad.

Perhaps, though, there is one decent reason for making moral comparisons
across the animal kingdom: not to hold other creatures up, ridiculously, as
paragons of goodness, but to let our tarnished selves off the hook. As
awful as we are, our human burden of sinfulness and guilt has its
advantages, as the poet Wislawa Szymborska pointed out in "In Praise of
Feeling Bad About Yourself":

A jackal doesn't understand remorse.
Lions and lice don't waver in their course.
Why should they, when they know they're right?
...
On this third planet of the sun,
among the signs of bestiality
A clear conscience is Number One.