On the origins of culture

4AM.  Helena Iara woke up hungry, and ate more than she should have, perhaps thinking that Rita's breast was a kind of all-you-can eat rodízio, and the extra milk gave her a stomach ache.  So once again, we made our way to the hammock, where Helena looked out the windows onto the bright stars that shone down on the jungle and the Morro do Lampião.

Why did I start talking about contemporary paleo-anthropology?  Maybe because she didn't like talking about Schleiermacher the night before, maybe because I was thinking how much harder it was for most parents of newborns.  In any case, Sara Blaffer Hrdy came up as I tried to talk about anything that would distract her from the colic in her stomach.  And it seemed to work.

Now, any number of anthropologists have hypothesized about the origins of culture, society, and human language, so the fact that Hrdy would try for a kind of grand unified theory of man is hardly new.  What is new, however, is where she situates this origin: in babies.  Specifically, in the premature birth of human babies.

The argument goes something like this: humans, unlike dogs or horses or almost any other mammal, can't do anything for themselves when they are born.  Horses can run, cats can worm their way close to their mothers' breasts.  And unlike marsupials (which are also born helpless, but whose mothers can get raise the baby on their own), one human being cannot take care of a baby.  The task is just too big: the food and the crying and excreting and cold and health...  As any mother knows, she needs the support of her own mother, of sisters, of a husband, of social services and professionals.  Four of us live here with Helena Iara, who is a great little baby who makes few demands in comparison with other babies, but even so, Rita, me, her sister, and her brother in law are all exhausted from the work.  Society, culture, and language, Hrdy suggests, all emerge from this human weakness, the need to have others help us in the essential task of reproducing the species.

I don't know if Helena was really interested in all of this, or just calmed by the rocking of the hammock, but she certainly perked up when she heard me mention her mom, whose anthropological research in the favelas of Recife led her to exactly the same conclusion: collaborative child care is the root of civil society in poor neighborhoods.  Women care for each others' kids, allowing one to work Monday, another Tuesday, another Wednesday.  When kids get to know each other, they introduce their parents, who might have been divided by warring favelas or high walls.  And because even gang leaders want the best for their kids, everyone can come together in a common purpose to create a day-care center or a soccer league.

We often think of kids as students, as the objects of adult education, discipline, and action.  In fact, though, of Hrdy and Rita are right, little babies may be the most important social agents around.  Without even trying, they are the ones who make human culture.

Schleiermacher and the Sacrifice of Isaac

Helena Iara woke at about 3AM last night, and after eating well, had problems getting back to sleep.  An upset stomach, probably.  So I took her to the little hammock where she likes to sit and rock with me, and it seemed like it was time to talk about high German idealism.  Schleiermacher is the first thinker who entered my mind, and the subject interested Helena enough that she stopped crying.

Friedrich Schleiermacher attempted to merge Kantian rationalism with Christian Theology in the first half of the 19th century, but he may be most famous for his definition of religion as the sense of absolute dependence on God.  With those words, "absolute dependence," it might be a little easier to understand why I would want to talk with a baby about a philosopher who is hardly there in the first rank of famous thinkers.  Because if anything or anyone is truly and absolutely dependent on another, it is a newborn baby on her mother.  In spite of the myths of being raised by wolves like Romulus and Remus, if a baby doesn't have someone to give her milk and clean her bottom, she is not long for the world.

Personally, I have to say that I'm unconvinced by such a definition of religion, maybe just because it isn't the sort of thing I feel in my bones.  So Helena and I moved on to one of Schleiermacher's rivals in that time, Søren Kierkegaard (she had begun to cry a little as I questioned the idea of absolute dependence, so I had to rock harder in the hammock and try a new subject).  And if you're talking about Kierkegaard to a little baby, one subject has to come up: his analysis of the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham in Fear and Trembling.

Kierkegaard's idea of religion is quite different, as expressed by the title of the book: it involved the sense of awe one feels before God, and the need to obey even the most absurd of commands because of the power of this awe.  Kierkegaard imagines what it must have been like for Abraham, after longing so long for a son, to hear God's command to go and sacrifice the boy on the top of a nearby hill.  Abraham heard and obeyed, in spite of the fact that ever fiber of his being, his ethics, his love for his son, his hope for his future... all depended on the life of Isaac.  That troubled and troubling obedience was, for Kierkegaard, the essence of religion.

Imagine the response of a baby, whether little Helena or little Isaac.  Tell the story from the perspective of the child, and it is even more perverse, disturbing.  It seems one of the best arguments to be done with religion, to embrace the happy atheism of the modern age.  I don't want to be anywhere near a God who would even play with such a terrible command, not as a test, not as a game, not as a joke.  And I certainly want to be a long way away when I have my six day old daughter on my lap.

So I started to talk about this history of religion in the Middle East, of the cults of Ba'al and El and the worship of the Hittites.  Human sacrifice played an important role in all of these religions, and priests often commanded their believers to kill their children as a test of a sign of their obedience.  In fact, Kierkegaard had his history wrong: Abraham lived in a world where sacrificing children had been normalized; itwas something that lots of people did, that he might have seen as sad, but hardly the "unthinkable absurdity" of which Kierkegaard talks.

Abraham's courage, then, was not to climb the mountain to sacrifice Isaac.  His courage was to listen to the second voice, when God said "Don't.  Don't kill you son."  It was at that moment that he broke down his expectations, obeyed the unexpected and terrible God instead of the laws of man.  At least that's what I needed to tell Helena Iara.  Otherwise, I wouldn't want her to do anything to do with Yahweh.

The Illiad

This morning we had to take Helena Iara to the doctor to do the teste do pezinho -- I'm not quite sure what the translation of that is to English, but it's where they take blood from the baby's foot in order to do a series of tests for congenital defects.  I thought that in order to build up the girl's courage before she had a lancet stuck in her, I should tell her a bit about her heroic namesake, Helen of Troy.

Now, the strange thing about telling a well-known story to someone who has never heard it, is that the teller has to hear it again from the perspective of the new audience.  And in telling the story of Helen and Menelaus and Agamemnon and Hector and Priam, I saw how perverse and terrible is this foundational myth of western culture.  Homer may tell the story with a wonderful flair for language, but I think we get the story basically from the side of the bad guys.

What, then, would a little girl hear as someone tells the story of Helen?  Leda, a married woman, refuses the advances of Zeus so much that she transforms herself into a swan to escape him, but even in that form, he rapes her, leaving her with a little girl, Helen.  Many men pay her suit, but her father finally sells her to the highest bidder, Menelaus of Sparta, who takes her to live in his totalitarian city, where he soon abandons her without friends or family to travel to Crete.  As Helen wiles away boring days under the unfriendly eyes of her husband's family and stormtroopers, she spies a dashing young Ionian, come to Sparta on a diplomatic mission.  In perhaps the first autonomous act of her life, she decides to flee her prison with the handsome youth (Paris) and they return to the city of which he is a prince.

We don't know much of whether Helen and Paris were happy together; Homer and other Greek myths tell more about the Greek's anger than about the lived experience of the lovers.  Everything we know of the Greek response, however, is terrible: the political power plays to force local leaders to sign up with Menelaus and Agamemnon to take advantage of the lovers' flight to invade another country.  Wives and fields and fishing vessels abandoned, so that whole communities went hungry.  And perhaps most dramatic of all, when the winds keep the Greeks in the harbor, Agamamnon kills his daughter as a sacrifice to force the winds to change.  Imagine telling this story to a little girl, and trying to say that these people are "the good guys."

One of the great things about contemporary children's literature (whether in Dr. Seuss or in Pixar films) is that it insists on taking sides, almost always with he weak against the strong, children against adults, the oppressor against the oppressed (think about Robots, the Lorax, Finding Nemo, Yurtle the Turtle, Shrek, The Princess Bride, and who knows how many more stories).  There is something wonderfully Marxist and Christian to this insistence on the rightness and eventual victory of the underdog.  So when we look at the story of Helen with the eyes of a little girl (or the eyes I project onto a little girl), we see that we are getting the story from the side of the bad guys.  Bad guys with very competent poets and playwrights, but bad guys none the less.

Some photos

I had no idea that holding a baby could put your back out... but it did.  So I'm afraid I have few words today, and more photos.

Tupi-Guarani Philosophy and a good night's sleep

Helena Iara's first name is, of course, Greek, so it made sense that she would enjoy talks about the pre-socratic philosophers of Ionia, where her namesake fled with Paris almost three thousand years ago.  Iara, though, is a Tupi-Guaraní name, for which it seems that everyone has a different intepretation (when Rita and I did a pair of films with Guaraní Indians in Paraguay last year, as we tried to write the subtitles, we were stunned by how polysemic the language was, where one phrase could have half a dozen radically different translations into Spanish).


In any case, last night as I tried to convince her to relax and sleep, I sat in the hammock, rocked her, and talked about Tupi-Guaraní philosophy.  She enjoyed it so much that she slept almost instantly... though probably more because of the smooth swings of the hammock than because of anything I had to say.  She ended up sleeping until two in the morning, and then after a quick nurse and cry, slept again until eight this morning.


Among the tribes of the Amazon and Paraná river basins, philosophy proposes a radically different road to truth, not an attempt at objective knowledge, but at plural subjectivities.  For many of these tribes, one of the fundamental goals of life is to see through the eyes of the other: cannibalism after battle, for instance, symbolically allows the warrior to ingest the perspective of the enemy.  Similarly, shamanism serves as a path to see the world through the eyes of a jaguar or a caiman.  The sacred songs of many Amazonian and Orinocan cultures are the ones they have stolen from their enemies, a way to capture the world others see.  

In the "dialogue" with Helena Iara as she fell asleep, I had to wonder what could make it possible to see through the eyes of a baby, to imagine a world without hard lines, with only two dimensions, where colors are only barely coming into definition, where sounds can't be broken down one from another.  I don't know that Rta or I (or any other parent) can achieve that.  But we can share one of the experiences of shifting perspectives that a baby likes: rocking.  Swinging back and forth in the hammock is a kind of parallax (the word that Emmanuel Kant chose for this idea of shifting perspectives, and which came to be central to his epistemology), if only a small one, as one moves from one point of view to another.  Babies love the motion... because it helps them digest, because it reminds them of the mother's womb, but also, I think, because they love the new while at the same time, they want repetition. 


Rocking with a baby in the hammock may be the best lesson possible in Tupi-Guaraní philosophy, and a real way to share it with her.

The Baby as Gadfly

As I tried to convince Helena Iara to sleep last night (an immense challenge, as she wanted to eat and sleep at the same time, and thus could do neither on Rita's lap), the only thing that calmed her was my voice.  Since I could talk about anything, I decided she needed to learn about the social history of Greece in the time of Socrates ("needed", here, meaning something like, "At least I could talk about it without stopping for an hour at three in the morning").  She seemed fascinated, in the same way that she is fascinated by anything that Rita and I say, as long as we say it while looking into her eyes.

What struck me, though, as I improvised a long free-assocition on the role of world trade, greek colonization, and the sociality of the agorá, was one of the famous things that Socrates said about himself.  For as much as Plato and hundreds of philosophers after him have tried to impose some kind of systematic theory on Socratic thought, it seems that system was what least interested the man.  What interested him was troubling the complacency of others, challenging people to re-think the easy propositions that allow them to lie to themselves about their own lives.  "I am a gadfly," Socrates said, an insect which buzzes and irritates to force people to think.

Helena Iara is a kind of gadfly; for me, at least.  As anyone who knows me is well aware, I am anything but intellectually or socially complacent: I constantly undermine my own thinking, work with child soldiers in Colombia or street kids in Brazil, climb mountains in the Andes... not the stuff of a boring Athenian (or American) citizen content in his mediocrity.  But I think that one could argue (and Rita certainly did argue), that I had become complacent in my incomplacency, content to constantly change my life because living one adventure after another is, in fact, a kind of repetition (there is, by the way, a pretty clear parallel to the self criticism of Deleuze's thought in Difference and Repetition, here).  I knew quite well that the only real challenge to the series of adventures I had been living, was, in fact, an inescapable commitment.  For that reason, of course, I avoided having a child with such intensity.

Older children clearly play the role of gadflies: I remember riding back from a soccer tournament with a friend one afternoon, as he complained about the traffic backed up on the roads in the south of the Island of Santa Catarina.  "Too many people moving here," he declared, "and too many people buying new cars."  His seven year old daughter, in the back of the car, thought for moment and then said, "But Dad, we just moved to the south of the island, and you just bought a new car..."  Children are excellent at catching the small (and sometimes huge) hypocrisies that we adults have so easily naturalized.  (I wrote extensively about this idea in both Agony Street and KidVid and Popular Education.)

I did not expect, however, that a baby, years before learning expose my hypocrisies with her words, would be able to be such an effective gadfly.  But through her cries at three in the morning, she certainly out Socratized Socrates.

A philosophical blog for a new baby

What matters most with a baby is to talk: The content isn't anywhere near as important as the tone, the eye contact, the attention.  Last night, after she was born, I just began to free associate on the history of philosophy with Helena Iara. It might seem that talking ontology with a baby would be a one-way conversation, but she responded, reacted... and her mere presence made me think in different ways than I would talking with a child or an adult.  Even if the content wasn't the most important thing, I'm very glad to say that Helena Iara was very attentive as I tried to explain to her the development of pre-socratic philosophy and how autarchic, decentralized government lies at the root of the thinking of Thales and Anaximander.  Whether these hypotheses are true or whether she will even be interested in philosophy matters very little.  What was great was her constant, curious eye contact.

Today I'm creating a new blog to celebrate an entirely personal event, one that has little to do with street kids or child soldiers or indigenous kids making telenovelas (though the name Iara is Guaraní...), the themes about which I write, film, and work.  Rita and my daughter was born last night, weighing in at a little over seven pounds, and since then has shown herself to be strong, healthy, and curious.  Her eyes are in constant movement until they find an interesting object or person, at which point they maintain an intense attention.  Pediatric neurologists say that babies can't focus their eyes at birth, and certainly the concept of an "object" hasn't yet entered her eager brain, but she certainly pays attention to color, form, and movement.

For the Pre-socratics, the world was made of up of four elements: water, fire, earth, and air.  For Helena Iara, the elements are probably movement, color, smell, and sound... but they still come together to form a world.