Swallowing Whales: What Jonah can teach us about faith
The clan gathered on the beach. Children were silent and their parents murmurred quietly while all together they stared at the shimmering behemoth which lay stranded by the outflowing tide.
Whales were not unknown to the people of the coastal forest. They had occasionally spotted pods swimming near the coastline, had noted the spout or spume when the great beasts breathed, and had witnessed a sudden breach or the slap of massive tails and fins. But the Neanderthal were not seafaring folk and, in fact, had not yet learned to include fish in their diet. The sight of such an enormous beast stretched out on the strand, feebly twitching and breathing out in labored gasps presented an entirely new tableau.
An experienced hunter advanced and touched the whale’s side with his wooden spear. There was no reaction. He pressed harder and a coconut-sized eye eased open to fix him for a long moment in a clearly sentient gaze before falling shut once more.
When the clan returned the next morning the creature no longer breathed and chunks of its flesh trailed in the surf, torn out by sand sharks which had dug into the carcass during the intervening high tide. Gulls were picking at shredded wounds and crabs scurried and nibbled at the margins.
Two hunters drew stone knives and carved into the whale body, tasted cautiously, then took full bites of the succulent red flesh. As the unfamiliar meat was passed from hand-to-hand and savored mouth by mouth others joined in the butchery. Later still, chunks of whale meat, some bearing sizable slabs of blubber, were impaled on sticks and roasted over a cook fire where the dripping fat set off leaping flares as it sizzled into the flames.
The Neanderthal were familiar with the various properties of animal grease and quickly understood the fuel value of the beast delivered to their shore. They gorged on whale meat for days thereafter, until the flesh began to putrefy, and used the blubber for much longer to stoke cook fires and torches and to work into animal hide to render it waterproof.
Perhaps the first of our predecessors to utilize whale products were not Neanderthal but Cro-Magnon or Homo habilis or Homo erectus or Paranthropus, but at some time in the ancient past we began a cultural, ethical and utilitarian dance with our cetacean kin.
Some whales are utterly enormous. One can’t help but wonder what a one hundred and ninety ton creature feels. What feedback do they receive from the distal portions of their vast epidermal sheath? They are inured to cold, surely, or at minimum less sensitive to extreme cold than you and me. We know they tend to be well insulated with blubber, of course, but that is interior to the skin. While it may serve to keep their innards warm in the frigid, heat sucking sea, there is still that outer layer of whaleness that interfaces with the aquatic realm from the tropics to the poles. Skin is the sensory organ that collects data about the air-ocean puddle in which we earth-folk swim or walk or fly.
In our own skins we have nerves that react to temperature, to the tiny needley tube inserted by a mosquito, to a lover’s touch, to a bucket of ice water in the night.
How sensitive is whale hide by comparison? Is the rush of water across her skin as pleasurable as my warm shower or your sitting beneath a cascade in a mountain stream? Is the penetration of a harpoon into a cetacean more akin to a mosquito bite on one’s arm, or a spear in the gut? Fat doesn’t contain a wealth of nerves, so if the skin is relatively numb, how far in does the barbed weapon have to go before she feels pain?
Or is the pain of violence really more about violation of one’s envelope than it is about sensation? It’s hard enough to claim certainty about how or what other human beings feel. The basis for interspecies empathy is largely conjectural.
Not that most humans have thought long or hard about whales’ pain. Before the last years of the last century, most who considered whales at all were chiefly interested in converting them to cash. At one point whaling was the fifth-largest industry in America. Collateral damage has never much mattered where it stands between men and wealth—whether it’s cancer and black lung in coal mining communities, children blasted by cluster bombs and land mines laid in oil fields, or gang victims in the misguided and fraudulent war on drugs. The pain of whales, poor or non-white children, and those defined as criminals rarely affects public policy, no matter how they might climb our personal heart charts.
When the discovery that whale blubber could be rendered to useful fuel was combined with improved navigation and the construction of large ships, we started on the road to Exxon-Mobil, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, global climate change and the BP oil blow-out in the Gulf of Mexico that has rendered a wide swath of the ocean floor lifeless.
“Thar she blows,” indeed.
It all started with beached whales.
For reasons largely conjectural, whales beach themselves but there’s strong anecdotal evidence that human technologies trigger some beaching. For example, the U.S. Navy’s new high powered sonar is a particularly potent source of intense sound waves. Cetaceans are a sonically attuned, auditorily nuanced family. The high-powered sonar may drive them mad.
But “natural” whale beaching far predates intrusive human technologies. Recall Jonah, whose myth could easily have been swallowed by humans familiar with great “fish” on their beaches. There’s some evidence that whales in poor health run themselves aground and perhaps that’s not much different than the practice of Inuit elders who go out on the ice when their time arrives.
In any event, as described in my opening vignette, the arrival of huge mammals on the shore was a great windfall for our ancestors who ate the flesh, used the bone for tools and rendered the fat. Whale oil became an important but sporadic source of energy. Various peoples hunted the giants starting several thousand years ago, but their use of whale products on a subsistence level didn’t contribute to the evolution of our industrial and petroleum economy.
Subsistence hunting remained the rule until larger boats and dense population centers combined to create the means and the demand for large scale harvest. European whalers began to work the waters of the north Atlantic in about 1600. Then, in the 1630s, the Dutch began commercial whaling in U.S. waters.
The financial reward for successful whaling was enormous. A single right whale carcass towed to shore in Rhode Island in 1662 reportedly garnered more cash than a whole farm could earn in a year. In addition to the oil, right whales were “right” because their bodies floated when they died, making them easier to haul.
During his days inside the great fish—or whale, depending on your preferred version of the tale—the Biblical Jonah repents and obeys the call to prophesy against Nineveh, the Ninevites repent in turn and God forgives them for being recalcitrant Ninnies.
The Jonah story offers one of those odd tests of faith that populate religious belief. No one with any understanding of physiology could imagine that a human could survive three days in the digestive tract of a beast, and of course that’s the point—it could only have been a miracle that permitted the prophet a chance to reconsider his wayward path and be delivered intact to a beach. But, then, whose word do we have on that score? Why, the word of a raving prophet who claimed to have been swallowed and spit up on a spit.
Seems, um, a little fishy to me.
When I came to write a biography of the evangelist Billy Graham I was startled to learn that while he had rejected a literal interpretation of the Biblical creation story and allowed that the seven days could be read as an allegory for the billions of years over which our solar system and planet evolved into existence, Graham, even today, still holds to his belief that Jonah actually spent three days inside a whale.
Embracing faith seems ultimately a matter of choosing to believe in the putative benefits of having faith, and where one chooses to draw one’s lines seems as arbitrary as taste in music or art or literature. It begs ancient questions about nature and nurture, with some embracing their familial beliefs and others flatly rejecting them. We seem to say, “This set of rules speaks to my need for mystery or inspiration. That set does not.”
Of course, the faithful generally assure others that lack of faith in their version of reality will result in an eternal journey through hell, or reincarnation for another shot at enlightenment, or conquest by heathen enemies, or crop failure, or bewitchment, or disappearance of the sun from the sky … there are warnings aplenty for the apostate. Last year the Christian televangelist Pat Robertson announced that the Haitian earthquake was punishment for a supposed pact with the devil made by the denizens of that sad nation— just as he previously opined that Hurricane Katrina was God’s vengeance on sinful New Orleans and 9/11 God’s reaction to sodomites in the Big Apple. I’m eagerly anticipating Robertson’s explanation of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Perhaps God is angry about faulty Toyota floor mats.
As usual Robertson had it all backwards. When someone makes a deal with the devil it is for wealth and success and pleasure in this world to be paid for later with one’s soul. If Haiti had actually made a deal with the devil it would be one of the richest countries in the world instead of one of the poorest. And in that case the buildings would have been more substantial and the earthquake would presumably have done less damage, if the devil permitted the earthquake to happen at all.
What good is a deal with the devil if it doesn’t include earthquake insurance?
In 1690, Nantucketers upgraded their techniques with the expertise of a Cape Codder named Ichabod Paddock. Paddock’s first claim to fame was to have been swallowed by a whale in whose belly he found a mermaid and the Devil playing cards for his soul. What Nantucketers thought of their instructor’s elaborate history is less than clear, but this more modern-day Jonah’s hunting expertise and the new harpoon he invented were deemed a boon to industry.
The disparate translations in different versions of the Bible teach us a good bit about our long-term confusion concerning whales. Was Jonah supposedly swallowed by a great fish or a whale? While it might make little difference to those who focus on the supposed spiritual nature of that tale, the difference is profound.
In March of last year, The Hump, a sushi restaurant in Santa Monica, California, was busted for serving whale meat, a direct violation of the Marine Mammal Protection Act. It seems pretty clear that anyone who would serve or eat whale must be thinking of whales as fish, or at least as dull-witted creatures like chickens, sheep or cattle. I would guess that few of The Hump’s patrons would request dog sushi.
In our culture we know dogs too well, as responsive, individualistic creatures. We have personalized them and even labeled them as man’s best friend.
And one must surmise that the sushi-eaters at The Hump would balk if they were told that their California rolls were sprinkled with ground-up human beings. Cannibalism isn’t a big seller these days, but in the 16th and 17th century, finely ground Egyptian mummies were sold as medicine, a cure for whatever ailed you. The practice emerged due to a mistaken translation involving the balsam used in mummification, and if being “well preserved” is a compliment for elderly folks, it’s hard to argue that those dead Egyptians weren’t well preserved.
Nor is the human appetite for higher animals limited to cetaceans. You may have seen the report issued by the Zoological Society of London, last spring, that revealed that hundreds of tons of bushmeat is smuggled into Europe each year, through just one airport, Charles de Gaulle in Paris. Bushmeat is a term used to describe the flesh of wild animals, and the meat confiscated during last year’s study included chimpanzee, bonobo and gorilla. Eating primates is almost unthinkable to people in our culture, but expatriate Africans in Europe clearly hold different views.
Today we know that whales have brains up to five times larger than human brains, fifty times larger than dogs. Furthermore, whale brains contain the same kind of spindle neurons found in human, great ape and elephant brains. These brain cells have been pegged as having an important role in many cognitive abilities. Whale songs are still a mystery, but linguists have begun to understand that their vocalizations contain the same elements as human speech.
When we hear another human being speak in an unfamiliar language we are able to understand that the person is engaged in intelligent communication, even if we don’t understand a word. There is a form and a flow that lets us see through the absence of translation. And, of course, all humans have evolved with the same physiology, most importantly with opposing thumbs, and in the same terrestrial environment with the same experience of gravity. We humans walk alike and talk alike and manipulate tools alike and eat similar foods and view and listen to the world through the medium of air.
We posit a certain amount of cuteness to vertebrate land animals that we don’t accord to fish. Even watching a lizard, which exists with somewhere near the same brain function as a fish, we relate differently. We “get” how legs and arms and climbing and crawling and jumping happen much more easily than we apprehend fish movement. We connect, or think we connect, to what other terrestrials see and hear in a way that we don’t feel for a fish. This figures significantly in our relationship with cetaceans. When we use the term “cold-blooded” in regard to humans it means “unfeeling” and it’s easy to decide that cold-blooded creatures like fish are just that. Despite the fact that whales and dolphins are warm blooded animals, their “fishiness” still affects our perception of their thinking.
Think how vastly different the world must seem to creatures which evolved in virtual weightlessness in a medium that transmits sound four times faster than air and where visibility is greatly reduced. What different conversations must occur for beings without technology, without the opposing thumbs that make most of human technology possible? How can we stretch our minds to imagine the dietary habits of whales that eat krill, scooping up millions of gallons of water in the course of their lives, sifting tiny food particles through a baleen sieve, and only eating during the summer months each year, but fasting through the winter while giving birth and tending their young.
How would we be different if we constantly heard the singing of others across hundreds or thousands of miles, but with no recording devices other than our own memories?
One small clue might glimmer at us from the aboriginal people of Australia, as out on the edge as any group of humans, whose unwritten history was captured in the song lines, and whose physical world was all but enmeshed in their singing.
If whale minds and cetacean stories and dolphin philosophy evolved in even less familiar conditions, how could we possibly imagine that they are actually in some macroscopic view, like us? And yet, of course, they are.
As I discuss in a couple of chapters in my book, Whale Falls, the puzzle we confront in making dietary choices, or considering whether whales are more appropriately co-equal earthlings or a source of lamp oil, is that of consciousness. Who or what qualifies as conscious?
Carbon-based life as we know it only began once. It could have begun and ended multiple times before our line got started, but every living carbon-based life-form on earth is part of one great chain of being that emerged billions of years ago when our planet was young. Since then, as even Billy Graham has accepted, we evolved. Actually, we are still evolving. Whatever creatures are alive on Earth five billion years from now when the sun flares up and burns out will be as different from us as we are from the first bacteria. That is one of those facts that seems to be overlooked by people who believe that we were made in God’s image or that we are the crown of creation. Evolution isn’t over.
Bacteria can offer us an interesting insight into our own very self-centered view of the world. Bacteria receive direct input about their environment at every moment. Their experience is unmediated.
Our experience of the world is very different. Everything we experience is processed by our amazingly complicated brains. Our experience is constantly mediated. In that sense you could say that bacteria have a better picture of reality than humans do. It might be why they are so enormously successful – having outlasted millions of other life forms that have come and gone through the ages.
Due to our brain function we think we see the sun rise, move through the sky, and set. Although we are riding on a spinning ball that is moving through space at tens of thousands of miles per hour, at this moment your brain is telling you that you are sitting still. Our mental screening is so complete that we are often unable to see things we don’t believe in or find repulsive. Some Native Americans reportedly were unable to see the multi-masted sailing ships that brought Europeans to their shore. One famous psychological study showed that when test subjects watched a hotly contested basketball game on TV, during which a person in a gorilla costume wandered across the court, serious basketball fans rarely saw the gorilla.
To an alien circling the earth in a flying saucer, whales and humans would just be two versions of big-brained, warm-blooded, air-breathing, infant- suckling, vocalizing, earth animals, one aquatic and one terrestrial. One branch of intelligent earthlings likes to build things, the other likes to sing about them. They might also note that while the terrestrial mammals sometimes eat the aquatic ones, the reverse is never true. Even killer whales, the most ferocious of their kin, are not considered a threat to human beings outside of theme parks.
Theme parks, on the other hand are terrible places for whales and dolphins, where creatures accustomed to roaming over thousands of miles are imprisoned in concrete swimming pools where they die young, only to be replaced by more wild-caught prisoners. If you haven’t seen the recent documentary film, “The Cove” about the annual capture and killing of tens of thousands of dolphins by the Japanese, I commend it as a real eye opener.
And here we come back to who swallows whom, and what matters of faith we decide are palatable. For many people through the centuries the story of Jonah’s journey and salvation have offered a meaningful spiritual lesson. To others the story has seemed as irrelevant or silly as the Walt Disney version of Pinnochio which drew on the Jonah story. To some of us, whales are self-aware, intelligent and endangered: to others they are what’s for dinner. The important lesson, I believe, is that belief itself is a matter of choice.
Pick the metaphors that speak to you, that reaffirm your principles, whether those principles are seven or ten or simply the Golden Rule. Sometimes you swallow the whale story, it seems, and sometimes the whale story swallows you.
