mills

Love & Dogs

My first requested over-long essay; here it is, TWIB. It surely reads too much into the subject, but I defend myself with Kafka’s assertion: “All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers, is contained in the dog.”

As a child, I didn’t use to know if I loved anyone. I wondered whether it was possible that I had simply assigned to the extremity of fondness I felt a name which it didn’t deserve; I have always been neurotic about such things (we perhaps expect too much of love).

It is a human concern, whether some devotion or adoration rises to the level of love; so too are concerns about love’s details, dimensions, and duration. They are human because they are linguistic and self-reflective; they involve the conscious mind, a spatiotemporal metaphor-machine which came into existence perhaps ten or twenty thousand years ago, not more.

It is at that approximate time that dogs and humans became intertwined, our domestication of them morphologically splintering them from their lupine forbears and their devotion to us perhaps helping to engender the moral decency Herbert Spencer referred to when he wrote that the “behavior of men to the lower animals and their behavior to each other bear a constant relationship.” (He was not alone in thinking that our relations with animals are a barometer of our morality).

The relationship between dog and human is peerless. Malcolm Gladwell noted some expressions of the inter-species connection from researchers who have found that absolutely alone among animals, dogs instinctively believe that humans will help them accomplish tasks. They are hyper-attentive to us, more than we are to ourselves; they register minute differences in posture, breathing, pupil dilation, and tone. They are more trusting of us, more drawn to us, than primates are, even Chimpanzees.

Recent scholarship suggests that this is the result of evolutionary development. After so many millennia of shared existence, dogs now come into the world looking for us; they seek us out and, finding us, have no wish to part. Their integration into human life has structured the formation of their mental world: they are now an animal which exists for another as well as for itself.

But does it abuse the language to say that they love us or that we love them? And if it does not, how do we relate this love to other forms of love?

One easy hierarchy of affections is proposed by Roger Scruton, whom I quoted some months ago; discussing pets, he writes that

“…[We] pour out on them the pent-up store of fellow-feeling, without fear of reproach. At the same time, we are acutely aware of their moral incompetence. Their affection, if it can be won at all, is easily won, and based on nothing… It implies no moral approval and leaves the character of its object unassessed and unendorsed.”

Though this is exaggerated (as there are some men even dogs dislike), it gives us a division: the “easily won…based on nothing” affection of an animal and the affection of humans, which carries with it “moral approval,” assessment, and endorsement. Although I found this idea striking when I first read it, something about it now seems presumptive, even absurd: Scruton’s vision of human love is precisely what is least appealing about it!

Milan Kundera once observed that if his wife said she loved him because he was handsome, intelligent, or charming, it meant very little: everyone loves those qualities, and they are only part of one’s character! But when she said that she loved him despite his ugliness, stupidity, or boorishness, it meant a great deal. Love based on attributes is contingent and common; love in the face of foibles is precious.

What Scruton suggests is superior is debatably so: it is a process of assessment; assessment is judgment. It is therefore a process in which one ignorant human, with pitifully partial knowledge of the deeds, experiences, thoughts, and feelings of another, judges him morally and either endorses him or rejects him, and that judgment will be based on shared, common, social norms: it will be replicable.

We recognize that such love is of dubious value. None of us will long survive the moral interrogation of a judge! In our depths and our darkness, humans are complexly ambiguous. Thus real love is understood to be a commitment -an act, a pact, a planned, willed, decisive choice- rather than the result of feeling or “moral approval.” Indeed, it is for this reason that we have other avenues for the moral approval we cannot give each other, most notably religion. Most religions in some way address the innate human sense of moral corruption, whether by contextualizing it as natural or something to be overcome or by asserting that it is forgiven by an act of a godly love.

This is felt to be a very profound sort of love: it is willfully blind to social judgments, to legal infractions, to filthiness and failure. It loves the soul, so to speak, and the soul is not one’s doings, one’s speech, or even one’s self; it is not the personality, the psyche, or the subconscious; it is the inimitable, unique essence of an individual beneath even his or her heart.

Of course, such a love does not recognize the parts of us we care most about: the sense of humor, the quickness with a kind word, the charity, the wounded self. Indeed, if we are all equally gifted this superhuman (or subhuman) love, what is it worth? We want to be loved both deeply and for who we are, even as that latter element is a changing and illusory quantity. We want to be loved both for the soul and for the self.

But we do not derogate this high form of love because it ignores the self. It is “extraordinary…so close…yet so remote,” as Thomas Mann said of dogs; it is a blind commitment to all humans, but we treasure it.

It may be objected that unlike the purported love of a god or a deeply affectionate relative, the blindness of a dog’s devotion is worth little because it reflects a calculus of natural selection, an evolutionary imperative. The same could be said of a mother’s love for her child, which has neither selfhood nor character and is no less loved for it. We tend to slight that which we perceive as “naturally-ordained” or automatic, as opposed to “consciously-willed.” But we are evolved creatures too, and those are impossible distinctions to clearly make.

My dogs are devoted to me and I am devoted to them, not in a way that leads me to cook for them but in a way that leads me to consider them of the utmost moral value. Indeed: for every story of a dog dying for its master there is a story of a master unwilling to part with his or her dog. A professor told me of one of his graduate students whose labrador had disappeared into the currents of the Mississippi at a treacherous point; the student dove in after the dog, and both drowned. Some people I share this with find it sad, and others ludicrous.

Perhaps devotion and love aren’t the same, but given that love as a feeling is less important than love as a willed decision, we might justly regard devotion as love’s deepest manifestation. And since we are all partly acting out our biological imperatives, we might argue that the presence of “intentionality” and “comprehension” in our affections is overemphasized.

These, too, are wasteful, idle, human questions. What is beyond them is the curious and felicitous relationship we have with this other species, which Maeterlinck described:

“We are alone, absolutely alone, on this chance planet; and amid all the forms of life that surround us, not one, excepting the dog, has made an alliance with us.”

However we describe this alliance, we are as fortunate to have it as the dog is, perhaps more so: in it we can see a paradigmatic instance of non-judgmental devotion, which I maintain is not less significant for being unconscious. It is not surprising that even atheists must refer to Eden to describe dogs and their effect on us: there is something very sublime in canine affection, whatever its origin.