Survival, Beauty and the Macaw Communities

We are pausing our discussion on human community to consider some animal communities hoping they might shed some light on our own.  In  the second section of Safina’s book, Becoming Wild, he treats the macaw parrot of the South American rainforests.

Some lessons we are learning about these beautiful creatures follow: “Macaws are born to be wild.  But becoming wild requires an education.”  Not only gene pools, but also culture assures survival.

We learn that a macaw doesn’t mature until it’s eight years old so during those eight years a lot of “social learning” goes on including “working out who’s who, how to interact,”—not unlike kids in school. 

Parrots have been creating community for fifty million years.  During those years, “parrots flew where the mood took them.  No parrot suffered the indignity of clipped wings, went insane with loneliness, plucked himself bare, or ached for affection and normal society.”  They developed just fine sans humans.  “No one talked gibberish to parrots or taught them foul language.  For fifty million years, no parrot heard a chain saw, or fled a nesting tree being cut down, or saw its forest felled and burned and filled with scrawny cattle.”

Parrots were happy with what the earth provided, they “were made for a world that made them and provided everything they needed.  The world knew who parrots were.  Parrots knew their world.  The world of parrots was among the richest and the most beautiful realms of that original world.” 

Elders play an important role in the parrot world.  They instruct the young about migratory routes (4000 species of birds migrate).  Young mammals, too—moose, bison, deer, antelope, wild sheep, ibex, and many others—learn crucial migration routes and destinations from elder keepers of traditional knowledge.”  Usually we humans inherit ways to dress, foods to eat, the music we enjoy.  “Often we are not even taught these things.  From birth, we are simply immersed in our elders’ ways.” 

Of the 10,000 thousand species of birds, only a few seem to play and fool around for the fun of it.  The most playful are crows and parrots…. Playful birds chase, playfight, and toss objects.  Cockatoos dance to music preferably with a heavy backbeat. 

Animals play because if feels good. 

The beauty of Macaws is stunning.  “Macaws are so unabashedly spectacular that they are, for all practical purposes, nakedly beautiful.” Safina asks: “Could ‘survival of the beautiful’ explain macaws?  Could beauty itself evolve through socially learned preferences, through culture?”  Both sexes are equally beautiful and amazing.

Birds sing, Safina believe, because “evolution is not just survival of the fittest, but also survival of the beautiful.”  He concludes with this observation: Life’s diversification causes the origin of beautiful new species.  “Beauty—for the sake of beauty alone—is a powerful, fundamental, evolutionary force.  Beauty…reinforced by cultural learning that makes the young prefer the preferences of their elders, drives much of what we see in the wondrous living world.”

See Carl Safina, Becoming Wild, pp.149-151, 176, 181, 189, 199.

Matthew Fox, A Spirituality Named Compassion, pp. 158-175.

Banner Image: Blue and yellow macaw. Photo by Magda Ehlers on Pexels.

Do you agree that beauty is a powerful, fundamental, evolutionary force?  How does this reality play out in human efforts at community?

A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice

In A Spirituality Named Compassion, Matthew Fox delivers a profound exploration of the meaning and practice of compassion. Establishing a spirituality for the future that promises personal, social, and global healing, Fox marries mysticism with social justice, leading the way toward a gentler and more ecological spirituality and an acceptance of our interdependence which is the substratum of all compassionate activity.
“Well worth our deepest consideration…Puts compassion into its proper focus after centuries of neglect.” –The Catholic Register