Watching Birds
Peter Porcupine wonders why birds have so much fun
(Reprinted from Here and Now)
Looking out my window, or taking another break from
digging the allotment, birds are always visible. The thing about birds is that
they seem to have a lot of free time. Crows, in particular, hang about the air
indulge in delinquent acrobatics, make a lot of noise and rarely seem to spend
much time ensuring their preservation. Similarly round about the evening a
hedge sparrow will start a piercing and delightful song and its persistence
will invite the human – all to human question – ‘What’s
it for?’ Well what is it for? Why do we catch birds doing do much that
makes no sense in evolutionary, preservational or reproductive terms? The hedge
sparrow which bursts into song does so long after the chicks have fledged, at
times of ridiculous abundance on the plot, such that the fruit rots on the
branches when not harvested by human ands and bugs and grubs enjoy an exuberant
proliferation. The crows are quite visibly playing, there is no other word for
it. I’ve seen other birds do the same, lapwings flying upside-down,
eagles faking a stoop, tits so engrossed in an argument that they have come
tumbling to my feet without oblivious to any danger.
And yet when I turn to a birdwatchers’
textbook or visit an R.S.P.B. visitors’ centre, bird behaviour is
explained primarily, if not exclusively, in survivalist terms. They do X in
order to secure Y in the struggle for survival. Watch any of the fascinating
nature programmes on the box and you can guarantee that the life of the animal
is explained entirely in terms of survival mechanisms. It doesn’t matter
whether the underlying ideology of the programme is promoting the selfish gene,
evolutionary psychology or even, I have observed, cost-benefit analysis, animal
lives are routinely reduced to function. Everything is given a reason and that
reason ultimately comes down to a utilitarian interpretation – each
manifestation of the form of a living creature can be explained in terms of its
function. Hedge sparrows sing in order to delineate territory (despite the fact
that no territorial imperative pertains), crows play in order to hone their
hunting skills (when did you last see a crow kill anything?), lapwings fly
upside-down in order to scare off potential predators (what predator is alarmed
by something as ungainly and misdirected as an upside-down bird?). The
explanation pales in the face of the activity it purports to describe. Science
brings a spanner and wrench view to actions which in their particular nature
defy functional analysis.
Or course science is not wrong. Or rather it is
only as wrong as the medical textbook which describes the human act of love as
the behaviour necessary for the perpetuation of the species homo sapiens. It is
just inadequate. Fixated by the big picture it obscures the detail in the
little ones which make everyday life everyday living. Anyone who
bothers to watch anything alive will
be struck chiefly by one thing. That is its incredible exuberance. I took
my ten month old daughter to Bempton Cliffs near Flamborough Head in Yorkshire,
near the end of the breeding season when the seabirds are just putting the
finishing touches to their terrestrial existence before embarking on the long
winter sojourn at sea, and she couldn’t contain her delight at the furious
activity going on beneath her. As far as I know she had little idea about what
she was looking at and listening to but her response was immediate, happy and
untutored. She knew exuberance when she came across it. At her birth some
friends sent us a quote: “Man is born to live, not to prepare for
life” (Boris Pasternak). If contemporary naturalists were to be believed
present life is only a preparation for the future, and every individual only a
cipher for forces an imperatives whose connection with the individual is
practically arbitrary.
Why is any of this important? Well one thing
that is disturbing about the plethora of nature interest programmes is the
relentless imperative to fit nature into human systems of thinking. Thus some
ecological thinking veers dangerously close to imposing economic thinking on
life. Everything is seen in terms of input/output equations, almost as if an
animal were the quintessence of the enlightened self-interested individual.
Nature ends up purely as a zone of scarcity requiring astute management of
resources. But perhaps what I find most worrying is the vogue for evolutionary
psychology as a means to explain human as well as animal life. It is almost as
if we are softened up for this (not so) new explanation of our crises and problems,
by the vigorous promotion of the idea of the animal as essentially a set of
adaptive functions. Now that anthropocentrism is out of fashion it is an easy
step to start to explain human activity through the science that claims to
explain animal life, or as it would say, behaviour. Not wanting to claim any
special theological place for human beings, we are exhorted to view ourselves
through the lens of the zoologist. That lens leads us down the path of
accepting that all characteristics are the result of evolutionary adaptation.
The animal or the plant, or the bacteria is completely explained by the
interaction between genes and environment. No principle of self-organization or
self-expression is accepted. There is no sense that evolution exerts an influence
upon a subject – everything is merely an object of forces whose time-span
alone renders it impervious to individual influence. This scientific monomania
is bad enough when applied to animals – it simply fails to register
either their playfulness – but becomes distinctly sinister when it turns
its attention to human beings and becomes a plank of state social policy.
A number of groups have become excited by
evolutionary psychology. It panders to their own adaptation to the market and
the state, by asserting an iron law of evolutionary determination of life
itself. With the exception of certain maverick minority publications it is
impossible to escape the monotonous mantra that political action or social
change can only occur within the limits set by the global market, welfare
state, resources available, etc. In the forefront of this adaptive behaviour
from leftists is Demos, who recently held a conference announcing evolutionary
psychology as a breakthrough in understanding human behaviour – a breakthrough
which happily gelled with their own abject surrender to what seems most
powerful in society (currently, the market, whatever that is) thereby
confirming Orwell’s charge against the real treason of the intellectuals.
Evolutionary psychology is nothing more than Darwinism applied to the human
personality and therefore presents human beings as a ‘fait
accompli’[a finished work – editor] that can only be managed or
‘worked with’. True to their Stalinist roots the idea of freedom is
foreign to them. Like any nineteenth century gentleman naturalist they toil
over their taxonomy of exhibits, only this time it is human beings who are to
be collected into the various types, identities, genders or categories that
currently appear to present the most exhaustive picture. No wonder the present
government likes them so much. They have provided it with the justification for
the maximum meddling with the added advantage of a fail-safe excuse for
failure. More surveillance is absolutely necessary, but if that doesn’t manage
to improve people’s lives then it is entirely as a result of certain
intractable evolutionary characteristics.
If people though it was bad enough when
architecture embraced the formula: ‘Form follows function’ which
managed to banish the playful and ornamental from most modern housing estates,
how much worse will it be to live under a state for whom this watch word is the
foundation of its reason to be. Adaptation being perhaps the most unequivocal
achievement of New Labour there is no surprise in its willingness to subject
the rest of us to adaptation to whatever is already most powerful.
I however remain away with the birds. Just as
the variety of birdsong within species has no evolutionary function (in fact
could be described as counter-evolutionary) so I plump for self-representation
before function, life before its desiccation into little parcels of useful
attributes. To those who think I am putting the spirit of things before the
matter of them, I would ask them to reverse their priorities. To be oneself is
the most materialist position to take – to rewrite oneself as an assembly
of evolutionary and economic functions is the triumph of the spirit, albeit a
very cynical one, as far as I can see. When crows play they take it very seriously
but it is still play. A dog would have great difficulty with the concept
‘It’s only a game.’ The playful is the most important, and
only the pressure of managed lives could have led us to impose our own
miserable conception of life on what is blatantly and stunningly without
purpose.