There is an op-ed in today’s New York Times by Bernd Heinrich (which I am not going to bother to link to; their articles disappear into inaccessible archives) about The March of the Penguins. It is a good article about an excellent, excellent movie, and I hope that Heinrich is right that the success of this movie augurs a rebirth of the nature film. It would be even better, of course, if it also stirred a new interest in nature itself, but that may be too much to hope for in times where nature is less appreciated in the concrete sense – for example, by being in it – than as an abstract exhibit in the tiresome debates about Evolution and Intelligent Design or between Environmentalists and Land Owners. One fears that a generation from now “nature” will only be appreciated by audiences who may not be able to tell the difference between computer animations and the real article.

Heinrich also commends the director for being unafraid to use the word “love” to explain the penguins’ motivations. It is an anthropomorphism that I suspect bothers the average viewer a lot less than it does scientists. By nature and training those of us in that discipline come to value objectivity almost above anything else. We also assume, if only officially, a viewpoint that rejects teleological explanations, and snicker to ourselves at Aristotle for saying fire “wants” to rise. But, as I have also pointed out (Partings, July 2005), there is little difference in either the behavior or neural chemistry of what we call love and what animals do, without calling it anything.

But perhaps the vehemence of the recent debates over the origin of life indicates that there would be some objection to saying that emperor penguins love each other, in that it seems to imply that our own cherished experiences of love are, like the animals’, no more than “an often temporary chemical imbalance of the brain”, to borrow Heinrich’s deliberately unsentimental definition. I haven’t seen anyone picketing The March of the Penguins yet, so perhaps the l-word slipped under the radar, or else no one is connecting it to the larger debate on origins.

Still, in that the potential objections to penguin love reflect a much bigger and badly argued question, I feel compelled to offer what is essentially a Thomist reflection on the situation. The philosophy of St. Thomas offers a middle way between what is on the one hand a bad sort of dualism and on the other a bad sort of monism. The dualists, who are usually religiously inclined, object to a science that explains our subjective and spiritual experiences in terms of physical processes, just as they object to an explanation of our origins that is also purely physical. Thomas, I think, would have none of this. It is like objecting to a hammer because it happens to be made of wood, and not of special “hammer particles”. If our mental processes subsist in material processes, that is what they are. It makes them no more or less human.

On the other hand there is a bad sort of monism, which concludes that if consciousness subsists in physical reality, then that is all it is and nothing more. This is akin to saying that a hammer is nothing more than the wood and steel, and that neither the person who made it, nor the uses to which it is being put, matter to the hammer. This is, I hope, obvious in the case of the hammer, but it is equally true in the case of the penguin. You and I might have the same neural chemistry for love as the penguin, but it would be foolish to ignore the fact that for us love has a meaning, and if that meaning is perhaps unclear or even hidden, it does not make it worthless to talk about it.

As we left the theater my friend said, “I didn’t know this was going to be a love story!” What was on my lips, but what for some reason I kept to myself, was the thought that all of nature may be a love story.

(cdm | LoveAmongThePenguins)