Charles Siebert’s cover story from the July 12, 2009, New York Times Magazine, “Watching Whales Watching Us,” became one of the more popular articles for the week or so following its publication. Therein, Siebert tells of his journey to Baja California to learn of new studies being conducted with the eastern Pacific gray whale. Alongside continuing human-made threats to the extinction of many whale species (whaling, navy training, etc.), this gray whale has fared better than its beleagured cousins and offers scientists many points of research.
Siebert’s writing is nicely seductive, perfect for a Sunday afternoon reading, the Baja cool breeze laced with tidbits of scientific research from working biologists along the way. And while anthropomorphic whale descriptions may be contested, clearly part of the intention is to suggest that it isn’t anthropomorphic, but rather the fact that we homo sapiens share many behaviors with these deep-sea cetaceans. The whales actually do “mourn” the death of family members, they “teach” their young (their behavior isn’t just hardwired into their nervous system), and they actively reach out to help other species of whales, not to mention the article’s main point: they seem to be reaching out across the specificities of species and making contact with us humans, even offering, Siebert intimates, something like “forgiveness” for killing off their ancestors.
One finds, here as elsewhere, an underlying question: If animals like non-human primates (see the inspiring work of Jane Goodall and her followers) and cetaceans have shown themselves to have highly developed communication skills (possibly higher than homo sapiens), self-awareness, tool use, a refined memory apparatus, and even dreams, can they also have religion? “Religion,” like “culture” and other human categories, is indeed predicated on such abilities.
These abilities include that oft-elusive term, “transcendence.” Can animals have transcendent experiences, and thus also religious ones? I’m not a biologist, but I do think we need to think through our terms here. Transcendence itself must be reimagined. There is nothing in the notion of transcendence itself to suggest anything “meta-physical,” for one can “go beyond” oneself and one’s species and remain purely in the physical realm. If the whales are trying to express anything, perhaps it is just that. When we dream, when we connect with others (animal, plant, or human), when we express pain and joy, we live in a state of transcendence. And there is increasingly every reason to believe that animals too experience this. So, again, do animals have religion?
