No, Baby, No!

Helena Iara is not allowed to climb the stairs in our house alone.  It's a very steep spiral, and though she has become a very good climber, we want to be sure that she doesn't fall.  Several days ago, however, we forgot to close the gate at the bottom of the stair, and Helena saw the error before we did.  She ran to the stairs, and then suddenly stopped.  "No, baby, no!" she declared, looking at Rita.  "Don't climb!"  At which point she moved forward and reached for the first rungs of the stair.  Fortunately, her words had warned us, and I was able to watch after her as she climbed.

We have noticed something similar in many things Helena Iara does.  She first declares what she knows to be the rule, and then goes about breaking it.  It can be about eating, yelling, touching the computer... she knows perfectly well what we say that she should do, but that doesn't stop her from doing what she planned in the first place.

Idealist philosophy of history posits that something similar happens with ideas and events.  Governments and social groups know what they should do long before they actually begin to do it.  Think about the noble principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States: democracy, equality, civil rights... but it took a good two hundred years, a couple of dozen constitutional amendments, a civil war, dozens of supreme court decisions, the civil rights movement, the women's movement, the gay rights movement, and only now are we getting anywhere near a coherence between the ideals of the United States and what is actually practiced.  And, of course, in those 200 years, other ideals have changed, and on that front, the US is pretty far behind.

Something similar happens with the discourse of human rights.  When the United Nations included the ideas of basic human rights in its charter -- thanks largely to Eleanor Roosevelt -- I don't think any country imagined that an ex-president of a country would be tried for crimes against humanity, as has happened with Pinochet, Serbian leaders, and African plutocrats.  Had they considered such a thing, few countries would have voted for such an offense to their sovereignty.  But the words were pretty; it would have been hard to justify a no vote at home.  So they accepted the charter, not knowing quite what they were getting into.

Growing up is something like that.  We accept the rules of our family and society "on paper" first (or more exactly, in Helena's mouth), but only later do we realize that we have to be coherent with those ideals.  Babies are hardly hypocrites when they say "don't climb" and then climb.  Maybe we should think that countries and social change work in a similar way.

The universal tedium of Richard Scarry

Helena Iara loves Richard Scarry books.  I remember loving the stories of Huckle Cat and Lowly Worm when I was a kid, too... but I have to confess that while Dr. Seuss has aged well -- which is to say, I continue to enjoy his books as I read them to Helena -- Richard Scarry now seems a complete bore.  Nothing actually happens, there is little narrative, no rhyme or play with words.  In fact, the book she likes so much only relates the events of a normal day, no different from the cooking and playing and driving around that we experience in our lives.

There the tedium.  More interesting, I think, is what happens when kids read these sorts of stories, see their lives writ large on the pages of a book.  Over the last couple of months, I have been thinking very intently about how people -- especially children -- on the margins of society conceive of knowledge.  Last year, we did a major research project in Recife, looking at the causes of, and possible solutions to, violence in the favelas of that city.  After four months of interviews, mapping, movie-making, and writing, the book was finally done: a toolkit for foundations and government agencies that want to reduce violence.  Adriano had been the first of the four young researchers to arrive at the closing party for the project, and as he read the first pages, a look of amazement filled his eyes.  "It's true," he said, almost stunned.  Several more lines down the page, with even more wonder, "That's just how it is."  As he continued to read, the expressions of surprise only grew.

Words about the favela too often sound like a police report: so many dead, so many arrested.  Those news stories might be strictly accurate, but they aren't really true; they leave far too much out.  We never see the motivations of kids who join a gang or the ethical struggles of kids who don't; the joy of a party on Saturday night or the pride of a old woman watching her grandkids play in the alley.  Our research took the deep experience of living in the favela seriously, seeing it as a possible source of solutions.

Adriano had been a part of every stage of the research, and many of the theories in those pages were originally his, so the surprise didn't come from new ideas or perspectives.  No, I think the real shock was that the written word could express the truth, that a description of his community could be honest to what goes on there.

"Knowledge," with the weight and importance that word implies, always seems to come from outside the favela, from teachers and books and the TV.  But as Adriano read the book, he suddenly came to see that words could reflect the world, that his experiences were important, enough to justify or even demand action.  For the first time, I think, he came to see what knowledge meant, and the power it could have.

Richard Scarry is the complete opposite of the experience of knowledge in the favela.  Instead of seeing their lives as exceptions or spectacles, Scary shows the lives of ordinary, middle class children in the US as universal.  This is how everyone, event cats and worms, lives.  The implicit message to children: "Your life is universal, your particular experience counts as universal knowledge."  Children from the favelas feel frightened to generalize the events of their lives into a word as big as "knowledge," but thanks to Richard Scarry, American TV programs, and other manifestations of US middle class culture as universal reference, kids here don't run into that challenge.

Now, we can easily find a solution in an attempt to universalize other experiences: Sesame Street, where a street in a mythical Harlem stands in for the universal, is an excellent example.  Maybe we should write a Richard Scarry for the favela... to a certain degree, the work that Rita and I do professionally with films made by marginalized kids strives for that.

However, I think there is a real virtue in the way kids from the favela see the relation of their particular to the universal.  Because they aren't convinced that everyone -- even cats and worms -- had their experience, they aren't convinced that they know.  For that reason, they are less invested in their epistemological errors, more willing to change, grow, and learn.  Socrates insisted that the first step in philosophy was to know that one knows nothing: people from the favela have that one down pat.  At that point, perhaps we can all learn together.

And maybe I won't have to suffer through more days reading about the Cat Family going to the grocery store.

The "real" Pocoyo

Yesterday, before Rita, Helena, and I got together with some friends who live here in Los Angeles, I was trying to remind her who they were.  "We saw them lots there in Brazil, Helena, and then stayed in their house last year... and remember Tiago, the little boy?  He was born in Spain, where the real Pocoyo is from..."

As soon as the words escaped my mouth, I heard how silly they were.  Yes, the Pocoyo cartoons that Helena loves so much are, in fact, made in Spain.  She often watches to them on Youtube in Castillian Spanish.  But "the real Pocoyo?"  I wanted to indicate something "more" than the plastic Pocoyo toy she plays with every day, but could I possibly say that the video of Pocoyo, something that exists only as the 1s and 0s of a computer program, is any more "real" than the plastic and rubber Pocoyo she was playing with?

In the late 1980s, the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard made quite a splash on the academic scene with his idea of the simulacrum, defined as "the copy for which there is no original."  He saw this phenomenon everywhere in postmodern culture, from the fake culture of Disney's Epcot to Hollywood movies, but it seems that a plastic doll representing an electronic cartoon, where there was never even a "real" drawing of Pocoyo, stands at the peak of the pyramid of simulacra.  When we think of the intentionally decontextualized world in which Pocoyo lives, where the background is pure white most of the time, it becomes even harder to imagine an original of anything having to do with the character.

For all of the nihilism of Baudrillard and his followers, a heavy tone of moralism always accompanied their talk of simulation and simulacra: it was as if they said, "This is how the world is now, but it wasn't always this bad."   After all, the basis for most Western philosophy is Plato's theory of the forms, some original "real," of which all of the things we see in our world are nothing but copies.  Plato condemned art because it was a copy of the things of the world, and as such, really only a copy of a copy, derivative to the second level.

Pocoyo, however, seems to steal the fire from the moralizing postmodernists.  Pocoyo isn't a copy of a real boy, and his world is not a copy of ours.  Certainly there are some references to things that we know, but we don't judge Pocoyo by whether it is true to reality or not.  It's not about representation at all.  It's about fun.  About play.  And though we may play-act, though children may pretend to be something when they play, we don't principally judge a soccer game or play with dolls by whether it "truly represents the world."  We can call it good or bad, beautiful or ugly, but never true or false.  Play escapes the logic of the real and of truth.  It's something else entirely.

And the "real Pocoyo?"  Who cares.  What matters is how Helena makes her doll run around, take baths, cook, slide down the couch.  It's about play, not about truth.

Sculptures

We're in Los Angeles right now: Rita got some money from the Brazilian government to study how indigenous children in the Amazon produce and understand music, which gives her the opportunity to do some research with a professor at UCLA.  And gives me a chance to go and find fun things to do with Helena Iara in an unknown city.

Yesterday, as Rita was in class, Helena and I walked the UCLA campus: the Bruin walk, the buildings built to look like something out of Milan, and Helena's great love, the tall flight of stair between the two levels of the Quad.  For the second time, she made it up the whole way.  And then, as we wandered on, we found the campus sculpture garden, full of early and mid-century bronzes by Arp, Maliol, Rodin, and a bunch of artists I had never heard of.

A larger than life nude stands in the center of the garden, a relatively realistic young bather.  At the moment, Helena is very excited about showers, so she imitated the motions of washing her hair, but then touched the statue's foot.  "She's cold," Helena said.  "[Put on] clothes."  Next, she addressed herself directly to the statue: "Tired.  Sit, sit."  There was no response, so Helena returned to touching the feet.  "Beautiful," she concluded, and moved on to the next.

The second nude was reclining, which Helena pointed out first.  "Lying down."  She then found each of the parts of the body, not an easy thing on the barely representative sculpture, but Helena enjoyed the challenge of figuring out what was head and hair and legs and feet.  She didn't stay long, though.  "Ugly," she declared.

A piece by Arp that looked rather like excreted bronze also won a fast "ugly," but a thin, constructivist statue called "Mother and Child," where I could find neither, got smiles and a review of "beautiful," along with several minutes of touching and circling.  She loved a modernist interpretation of a flower, because she found that when she rapped it with her knuckles, it rang with a pure tone.  Plus, she could climb around and under it.

Back to the nudes.  The next one was just a bust, without arms and head: just the chest and then a flowing base to represent a dress.  This one drew Helena's attention directly.  "Breast," she said.  "Nipple."  I looked at Helena questioningly.  "Yummy."  The she touched the base and said approvingly, "skirt."  Finally, though, she gave her evaluation: "Ugly."

"Why?"

"No head."

"Maybe that wasn't what the artist wanted to show."  She pondered, and I looked at the title.  "It's called Victory," I said, and prepared to tell her about the Winged Victory of Samothrace, upon which the statue was surely based.

"Victory?" Helena interrupted me.  "No."

And with that, she walked on to the next sculpture.

I'll take care of you

One of Helena's favorite Christmas presents was a book by Richard Scarry, whom I also remember loving when I was a kid.  Toward the end of the book, the Cat Family is reading nursery rhymes, of which one is the encomium on sexual assault,

"Georgie Porgie, puddin' and pie,

Kissed the girls and made them cry.

When the boys came out to play,

Georgie Porgie ran away."

The portrait shows two girl cats by the side of a big boy cat, both of the girls crying as the boy tries to kiss them.

Yesterday, Helena began to talk to the girl cats: "Não chora,  Bebê cuida." (Don't cry, the baby (i.e., I) will care for you).  I was very excited to see empathy spring forth at such a young age.  Then, today, she began to point her finger at the boy cat: "No, no, no!"  Empathy had moved on very quickly to a sense of justice, or at least of prevention.

At the end of the 18th century, moral philosophy saw an important debate between Emmanuel Kant and the Scottish Enlightenment.  For the Scots (people like Thomas Reed, but also the young Adam Smith), moral feelings needed be be culled and trained: empathy and a sense of justice might be natural in many people, but they were like small, weak plants in the jungle, and people needed to learn how to give them food and light so they could grow.  That way, our "natural" dispositions (in fact, trained dispositions) would direct us to act for the good.  Kant, in contrast, declared that any act based on a natural disposition, or in fact on any motivation other than duty, could not be called moral.

Now, when I was a Freshman in college, I loved Kant's moral theory.  It was hard, challenging, and logically rigorous, something that would set the moral people apart from the chaff.  As I've grown up, I have to say I'm much more convinced by Thomas Reed and his friends: though they may lack the logical and moral rigor of Kant's German thought, their ideas seem to bring more good into the world.

Why does any of this matter?  Because Helena is beginning to develop those moral seeds: the care for others who suffer (even if they are crying cats in a book), a sense of empathy for children who have lost their mothers, a rejection of the abuse of power in Georgie Porgie.  Kant would insist that there is no virtue in these young sprouts of ethics: if she is to be a good person, Helena must learn to defend the girls against Georgie because it is against the moral law exposed by our reason... not because she feels sorry for them.  Honestly, I think Rita, who sits with Helena and the book and talks her through the images, is a much wiser philosopher than Kant here.  As she talks about the girls and their tears, she trains Helena's sentiments to be just.  And that training, soon to become instinct, is better than any moral law out there.

Sacrifice

A couple of nights ago, during dinner with some friends, Helena wasn't interested in eating.  She wanted to get on the floor, chase the cats, and explore a new house, and not just eat, which is something she could do anywhere.  Our collective solution?  We fed her doll first, and then passed the doll's food on to Helena.  By the end of the meal, she had eaten quite well.


Though most people know about the role that animal sacrifice plays in most religions, I never spent much time thinking about who would really eat the goat or bull that was killed "for god."  They burnt to whole thing, right?  There's all of that language in the Old Testament about how Yahweh loves the smell of meat sacrificed to him, and Greek myths have the same sort of language.  So it was quite a surprise, when I studied classical history, to find out that the meat from a sacrifice was not, in fact, sacrificed.  People ate it: different people according to the values of different cultures (the Hebrews gave it to the poor and landless, the priests ate it in many Phoenician cults, the community as a whole in the worship of many Greek gods), but this meet sacrificed to the gods was really used for parties among flesh and blood people.

What doe these stories have to do with each other?  Helena had to "give" her food to her doll before she would eat it herself.  The Greeks "gave" their meat to the gods before they ate it.  Though the parallel isn't exact, it seems to at least merit some thinking-through.

Now, it seems that the logic of sacrifice in antiquity was that the gods, and not people deserved the best food.  They were, after all, gods.  But when the gods didn't eat the food, well, someone had too, so it might as well be the people.  The word "sacrifice" come from the Latin "to make holy," but the real process was rather the inverse: by offering the food to the gods, people de-sacralized, reduced its importance enough that they felt themselves worthy to eat good food like a bull.  In the same way that we cook food as a way to take it out of the realm of nature and make it part of culture, sacrificing the animal to the gods paradoxically made it available for human consumption.

Might Helena have been doing something similar?  We were at the home of other adults, eating adult food out of adult place-settings.  By giving the food to her baby, might she have been "de-adulting" it, bringing it into the world of play and childhood?  Then, since the doll couldn't possibly eat the food, it became open to her eating.

Maybe.  Or maybe kids just like to play with their food.

Art

Helena has become an artist.  In the last several months, she has come to love painting, drawing, crayons... Anything that can make marks on paper and on herself.  I won't say much as an art critic in this post, but I rather like two of her most recent posts.

Before Helena drew the picture on the left,  she said "coruja," or owl, and there is something strikingly owl-like in the piece.  I drew the left eye to bring out the face, but the rest of it is all hers.

Then, today, when she wanted to show the drawing to her aunt over Skype, I asked her again what it was.  "Coruja."  She remembers very well what she has drawn.

The second artwork doesn't seem to be representational; at least Helena won't tell me if it is a portrait of anything.  But I like the use of color and space.  She seems to have a talent for art that I never had.

Picasso famously said that "I spent my entire career trying to learn how to paint like a child."  There may be something to it...

 The portrait of Helena is by my brother.  For more of his work, http://www.wildimagephoto.com/journal/