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Two of the dumbest things human beings do are when we: 1) attribute human characteristics to natural phenomena (the “pathetic fallacy” – e.g., that Tropical Storm Rita has “furious winds,” when a swirling mass of wind and vapor experiences no emotion whatsoever); and 2) attribute human characteristics to animals (anthropomorphization -- like the syrupy advertising tagline for “March of the Penguins”: “In the Harshest Place on Earth, Love Finds a Way”). I want to throw up every time I see that. (But at least they took out the talking penguins in the original French version and replaced them with a voiceover by Morgan Freeman.)
Animals are wonderful. I have always lived with them, and I love them. I do not, however, expect them to “love” me back in the same way (like the ill-fated Timothy Treadwell in Werner Herzog’s great “Grizzly Man”), or expect them to experience or interpret the world – intellectually, emotionally, morally, or even sensorially -- the way I do. Because they are different creatures than humans are, they have different brains and different responses to stimuli and radically different sensory capacities. And that’s a good thing, because if humans were all that existed … well, we wouldn't exist at all without the rest of the animal kingdom.
The stupendous success of “March of the Penguins” this summer has led some political and religious agenda-promoting scalawags to paint weird and disturbing parallels between penguin behavior and human behavior, and to draw insupportable conclusions that do not exactly square with zoological reality.
Pundit Andrew Sullivan, who wrote a column on “penguins and the culture wars,” recently posted an item on his popular blog, www.andrewsullivan.com:
Some on the religious right have hailed the new - and wonderful - movie, "The March of the Penguins" as a socially conservative morality tale. Michael Medved even went so far as to argue that the penguin documentary "passionately affirms traditional norms like monogamy, sacrifice and child rearing." Well, not quite. It turns out that monogamy varies a lot among birds and even among penguin species. The emperor penguins featured in the movie have a very low monogamy habit. From year to year, only 15 percent of the blokes mate with the same, er, chick. Imagine humans with an 85 percent annual divorce rate. That's the model that some on the religious right are now touting. Maybe they should re-think. When they're not gay, these birds have as many spouses as Larry King….
Comparing the movie to Mel Gibson's Death-March-of-Jesus-Christ phenomenon from last year, Michael Medved actually called it "The Passion of the Penguins."
Meanwhile, David Edelstein (one of my favorite critics) writes on Slate.com:
It has been amusing to watch the radical right/anti-evolution/family-values crowd laud the subjects of “March of the Penguins” for their commitment to their mates and as evidence of intelligent design. If anything, the film seemed to me to reinforce what we know of natural selection. Darwin would have thrilled to it….
In one (upsetting) scene, the adult penguins do nothing as a group of young'uns is attacked by a predator. One succumbs. Family values? The only way you can account for this chilling indifference is the heartlessness of evolution: You give them one—the one that can't get away—and the hawks leave the rest alone for the time being. Monogamy? The narration makes the point that they are serially monogamous: They change partners after each breeding cycle. Some penguins, we have recently learned, are queer—and this with no exposure to our debased Hollywood-liberal culture.
These people really are deluded, aren't they? They'll twist anything to suit their ends and then count on an audience that doesn't think critically—an audience that I should think is far easier to manipulate than penguins...
Then again, maybe the Christian penguin fans just think the Antarctic lovebirds are abandoning their homes and mates and offspring to follow Jesus, in accordance with what he said in Matthew 19:29:
And every one that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my name's sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life.
Why else would they trudge all that way through the ice and snow, eh? Is it anthropomorphizing too much to suggest that penguins obey the bible?
UPDATE (9/20/05): Sullivan has posted his piece on "The Politics of Penguins" here.
Money quote (as he likes to say): "Maybe it's because these beautiful creatures have the shape of Middle Americans, waddle amusingly, fall over occasionally and have heads on top of their bodies that we project our own needs and anxieties onto them. But we do so at our peril. Love, it turns out, has very little to do with the mating habits of the Emperor Penguin....
"... How do I put this gently to both the social right and the p.c. left? We're not penguins. We're not chimps. We're not even those merrily promiscuous bonobo monkeys. We're humans. And even our "natural" mating habits -- moderate monogamy and some homosexuality, according to all the best science -- do not tell us anything about morality as such. Try going to a documentary and accept its touching depiction of the natural world for what it is. And marvel at the beautiful, confounding mystery of it all. Not everything is political. And not everything is about us. "
