Nature and commerce

The aspen are turning color in Santa Fe this week, and my parents are visiting from Colorado, so we decided to take a day off and climb the mountain and hike through the turning leaves.  In spite of a nasty stomach ache, Helena loved the walk through the woods, both because of the colors and because of the many people she met on her trip: a family from Texas, a little Tunisian girl named Noor, dogs and their owners...  It was a beautiful autumn afternoon in the New Mexico mountains.  For Helena, whose favorite activities involve being with people and playing with nature (particularly grabbing flowers and messing with herb gardens to conjure up the smell of thyme and basil), it was as wonderful a trip as she could imagine.

Then, this evening, we went out to an African-Carribean fusion restaurant in a little strip mall on the other side of town. The food was spectacular (pomegranate and videlia onions over beef kebabs!), but the place is, unfortunately, in a strip mall, and when Helena inevitably got impatient with the restaurant and her inability to eat food like big people, she wanted to go out and walk.

In a strip mall, there are no flowers.  No trees.  No changing aspen.  And at 7 PM, not too many people.  So to entertain Helena, I showed her the posters and mannequins in shop windows, the bright colors of a video-game store and the swaths of fabric on a plus-size women's clothing vitrine.  Fortunately, she didn't seem to find any of this as interesting as the orchids in the garden in Brazil or the tomatoes and basil in front of our house here in Santa Fe.

The contrast between nature and commerce opened a nice chance to talk with her about Marx's theory of the commodity.  If you'll permit me a rather long quote (only the first part of which I remembered as I talked with Helena before the shopfronts):

A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties…  There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities. This Fetishism of commodities has its origin, as the foregoing analysis has already shown, in the peculiar social character of the labour that produces them.

The products in a shop window are "really" just things, things that may or may not be useful to us.  Unfortunately, that "really" is quite false, because we all know that a shoe is more than just a shoe.  A Blahnik symbolizes one thing, a Nike another, and a shoe with a brand we don't recognize, something else entirely.  We envelop ourselves in these products in order to present ourselves to other people, to win prestige, to impress.  And in the end, we often turn ourselves into these images, the eyes of a subject a real person, lost behind the Prada sunglasses.  In fact, when I buy shoes, I am buying the labor of an anonymous boy in Indonesia who sewed the shoes, and so the exchange of money should be, in some way, the creation of a relationship with him.  It is, of course, nothing of the sort.  In fact, my Nikes enter into a relation with your Adidas, and you, me, and the boy in Jakarta are all forgotten.

Talking with Helena, I told her how lucky we are to live in places where we can see flowers and trees and bees and birds, to talk with people on the sidewalk in front of the house.  These things aren't yet commodities, and when (many) people stop to talk with a baby, it's because they want to look in her eyes, not because they admire the clothes she has on.  Other people don't have such good fortune.  To satisfy the infinite curiosity of a baby, they have only malls and stores, one bright and shiny commodity after another.  Helena has the good luck that this land of pure commence only intersects with hers form time to time, instead of being her only world.

Water

Helena Iara's favorite place in the house is probably the bathroom, and not only because she loves to take baths.  No, she loves the bathroom because of the sink.  Neither Rita or I are quite sure why she likes the sink so much, (for Rita, it has to do with the sense of personal agency she gets in turning on and off the tap; I think it has more to do with the fact that the sink is a something that is also a nothing, a way to enclose empty space.  Rita is probably right.) but even if she is in a terrible mood, crying, gumbling, we just have to take her to either of the bathrooms, say, "pia, olha pra pia" (look at the sink!) and she's smiling and laughing again.

We turned on the water in the sink yesterday, and she put her hands under the running stream, her eyes lit with happiness and discovery.  I told her the story of Helen Keller, the deaf and blind girl who first learned the concept of language and signification when her teacher, Anne Sullivan, held her hands under a well-pump and continued to sign "water, water, water," until the girl understood.  Signification -- and the idea that there were other people who could make signs and thus have consciousness -- was the way out of darkness (or perhaps better, out of solitude) for Helen Keller.  Most of us know the rest of the story, one of those "inspirational tales" that we all have to read in middle school, but which can be truly impressive if we go back to them on our own years later.

The inspirational tales don't often tell that Keller became a socialist, a pacifist, and a wobbly.  Sometime they talk a little about the fact that she studied philosophy.  One of her most profound observations, I think, is the following: "Philosophy is nothing but the story of a deaf-blind person, writ large."  Philosophy is, indeed, the vague reaching of people lost in the dark, trying to understand a world to which we have only limited and uncertain access.  For most of us, that quest is ethical or metaphysical, trying to understand what to do or why there are the things that there are, but I think Keller was right on.

We might also say that philosophy is the story of a baby, writ large.  Babies are in the same shoes as philosophers, trying to understand things that don't really make any sense: the material of the world, the social relations between people, the nature of language and signification...  In the end, we're all trying to figure out the water that runs over our hands.  But what I admire about Helena Iara is that, as she feels the wetness over her fingers, she smiles in awe and wonder.  I wish I could do that more.

Jesus as philospher

Most parents see Sunday School as an important part of a child's development, and they are probably right. I tried to keep my first mention of Jesus to Helena Iara out of the religious frame, though, not so much for any ideological reason as because she and I talk mostly about philosophy.  But given that Jesus was a pretty good philosopher, it makes sense to bring him up from time to time.

Children's pastors love to use the different parables about children in their sermons: "Suffer the little children to come unto me," for instance, or the story of the teenage Jesus and the rabbis in the temple.  As we walked through the streets of Santa Fe (no hammocks here, but I have found that walking is also conducive to philosophizing...), I told her another one of those stories, from the book of Matthew:

At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, "Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?" He called a little child and had him stand among them. And he said: "I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.

From the beginning, the question is pretty stupid: after all, Jesus has spent his entire career talking about justice and equality, that the first is the last and the last first, and then the disciples want to know who's the best?  So a lot of people see the parable as a kind of lesson to the disciples: little kids aren't worried about prestige, so don't worry where you are going to sit at the big dinner party in the sky.

Now, we shouldn't get confused by later Christian doctrine, here: Jesus wasn't talking about some kind of heaven after death.  The Kingdom of Heaven -- like the Kingdom of God in the book of Mark -- is a metaphor for utopia, the world as it might be if people loved and were just to each other.  Jews in the first century AD didn't have an idea of the afterlife: some believed in the resurrection of the dead (as it appears that Jesus and Paul did), but the idea of a spiritual afterlife, Heaven and Hell, comes from the Greeks and Romans, hundreds of years later.

I didn't take that tack with Helena, though.  Just that morning, she had been furious at her mother because Rita had put a shirt on her; she hates to get dressed after her morning bath.  Screams, tears, anger... and two seconds later, the joy and love that she normally shows.  There was no rancor, no holding a grudge.  She had hated putting on the shirt, but afterward, she was as happy as ever with her mommy.

Might it be for this reason, I asked Helena, that Jesus said that one had to become like a little child to enter the Kingdom of Heaven?  If there is a center to Jesus's philosophy, it is forgiveness: turn the other cheek, walk the extra mile, the whole Sermon on the Mount.  Jesus wasn't just making his critique on the idea that "An eye for an eye and the whole world will be blind," as Gandhi put it, but on how miserable and unjust we become when we hold a grudge.  We "have our pride", we "don't get mad, we get even" (or we do get mad), and we become both miserable and mean.  It's interesting that Jesus talks about humility in the parable: overcoming the pride that wants to hold a grudge is essential.


Jesus wanted this kind of humble forgiveness to form the basis of human community: in a world of brutal dictatorships, vile profit seekers, and petty vengeance, a world like ours (or his!), I'm not sure it would work.  It does make a baby happy, though!

The Mayas

The last couple of weeks have been a challenge for Helena Iara (and, of course, for her parents): we just flew from Florianópolis to Santa Fe, and though the trip was much better than anyone might have expected with a little baby, it hasn't left much time for blogging -- or even talking about philosophy!  I guess I leave the excuses for the lack of recent posts at that.

One of the wonderful things about parenting is the sense of solidarity with other parents, who know what you are going through, and who often have clothes, toys, and lots of other baby things that their own kids have just grown out of.  So when we got to Santa Fe, we got wonderful presents from friends, including several cloth books.

Most of the books are bound like the books that most of us read, but one of them was bound as a codex, where the sheet folds over on itself to make pages, so one is opened on the left, the next on the right.  Until the end of the middle ages, many European books were bound as a codex (other were in scrolls), but I took advantage of the form of the book to tell Helena about Maya literature.  We have some of the most famous tales from the Maya post-classical period (the Popul Vuh, the Chilam Balam) in codices with beautiful glyphs and illustrations.  I would have liked to tell her the stories, but it has been too long since I have read them, and I didn't want to get them wrong.  So instead, I told her a little about contemporary Mayan philosophy, especially that of the Zapatistas.

It's the nature of American news to cover a story only when there is novelty or tragedy or violence, so when the Zapatistas took San Cristóbal in 1994, it got headlines around the world.  Now, when I tell friends about the Zapatistas, many of them say, "They're still around?"  The truth is, though, that the 1994 revolution gave the Mayas control over a huge territory in the south of Mexico, and though no other country recognizes them as independent, that have basically created their own nation-state.

Helena and I haven't talked political philosophy much, so it takes time to explain how different Zapatista ideas about democracy are from Euro-American ones.  Leaders, for instance, are not elected, but chosen in a lottery (exactly as was done in Athens, lest we think this is a strange idea), and they are obliged to listen to the ideas of all of the people in their village and then implement those idea, whether they like them or not.  All decisions are discussed in detail and at length (a Zapatista joke: "How many Zapatistas does it take to screw in a light bulb?"  Answer: "Come back in a week and I'll tell you after we talk it over."), but not in the way of the English parliament or US congress.  I was struck, for instance, when working with a Zapatista NGO in Chiapas, that the indigenous members of the group would caucus together, then present one coherent idea to the whole group.  Within their caucus, they could debate each other, but when faced with the other (from another village, another social group), they would always stand together.

The fundamental idea of the Zapatistas, something they get from Maya thought and from Liberation Theology, is autonomy, sometimes translated into Tsotsil as Stalel Stuk, or "doing and thinking for oneself."  In the United States, the tradition of protest movements is to demand rights or benefits from the government: the civil rights movement or the women's suffrage movements were all about the fact that women and blacks had been excluded from the state, and needed to be included as a way to be recognized as human beings (a very Hegelian idea) and to gain more prosperity.  The Zapatistas, in contrast, decided to cut themselves off from the Mexican government.  They did not want to gain recognition, rights, or benefits from the state.  They wanted to be left alone, so that they could do it themselves.

And in fact, they have done a better job than the Mexican state: whether we're talking about education (obligatory for Maya kids, available for all of them, and good), agricultural innovation (the Zapatistas set up their own agricultural university), or security (the Zapatista area is one of the few parts of Mexico not demolished by the violence of the drug war), the Zapatistas' autonomy has made life much better for them.  And perhaps more significantly, when you see an indigenous peasant in Chiapas, in Zpatista controlled territory, she'll have a straight back and she'll look you in the eye with pride.  Not many other places in Mexico (or the world) that you could say that.

A pair of pathetic peripatetics

Last week, as Rita's sister Sandra was looking after Helena Iara, she lifted our baby's hands above her head as she stood up, and the little girl began to walk.  With a lot of help, of course, but even so, it is quite striking to watch a baby as small as she is stepping along the ground, shouting with joy at each step.  The day afterward, Rita and I took some pictures of these steps:

I have always found it fascinating that one of the most influential schools of classical philosophy called itself the "Walkers": the Peripatetics, founded by Aristotle in the 4th Century BC.  Many of the philosophical schools started with rather strange names, including the stoics (because they met under the stoá, or common porches) or the cynics (who took the kuon, or dog, as their symbol as a way to symbolize their affront to authority.  Some people say that the Peripatetics took their name because Aristotle liked to walk as he lectured, others because their members were to wander the world to teach others.  Regardless, it is strange that the most establishment and staid of the schools would choose a name having to do with movement.

I didn't start off talking with Helena about Aristotle, though.  I told her a joke from Calvin and Hobbes: "What if someone calls us a pair of pathetic paripatetics?" Calvin asks his friend.  After the pause (one of the most important innovations Bill Watterson brought to the cmic strip was the idea of dead time), Hobbes responds, "I've never heard of anyone taking the time to rhyme weird insults."  "But shouldn't we have a ready retort?"

The joke is even more clever than it seems, given that "pathos" (the root of pathetic), which meant both suffering and passivity, was the thing that the Peripatetics, the Stoics, and many of the rest of the philosophical schools of the ancient world were trying to avoid.  A pathetic peripatetic isn't just a weird insult: it's a metonymy for failure.  The Peripatetic's philosophy, it appears, was insufficient to guard him from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, which was the whole point of philosophy: to be a shield against the suffering endemic to the world.  Of course I explained all of this to Helena, but what she really liked was the alliteration and rhythm of the words.

It's interesting how often walking comes up as a philosophical or religious practice: I told Helena about mendicant monks in Theravada Buddhism, about the vision quests of Native North Americans, and about the way that the prophet Micah summarized the message of the Hebrew religion: "He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?"  (The King James translation doesn't catch the heavy political tones of Mishpat and Hesed, the words translated as justice and kindness, but that's for me to explain to Helena Iara another day)  Jesus called his philosophy the 'hodos, the path or way, and he's hardly the only thinker to do so.  Walking, wandering, wondering, all of them seem to get mixed up as a way to talk about philosophical reflection, but without a mirror.  Perhaps it's a way for us in the west to think through the shift in perspectives that is so central to Tupi-Guaraní philosophy.

After all of these digressions with Helena, I finished with the story of Justin Martyr, who's confessions are also about walking... walking from one philosophical school to another as a way to find truth, happiness, and some kind of justice in an unfair world.  Though we don't generally associate Justin with a good sense of humor, one of the things I remember from my attempts to translate his writing in grad school is how he made fun of the cynics and stoics, the epicurians and the peripatetics.  What's interesting, however, is that the last philosophical school he found, the one that gave him the most useful way of thinking, was Christianity.  We see it as a religion today, but in the 2nd century, it was a philosophy: a powerful one, one that made people willing to rise up in revolution against the Romans or be martyred in hundreds of icky ways, but a philosophy.  Away to walk, we might say.

It's pretty exciting that Helena Iara ca walk and think every day a little more, and with a little more autonomy.