Tomorrow

We're now in Recife, in the northeast of Brazil, where Rita and I are starting an internet-based news channel where kids from the favela are the reporters and the producers.  The youth hostel where we're staying has a swimming pool, which is Helena's greatest joy in this hot and not-very-safe city (in addition to the open sewers that run through both favelas and middle class neighborhoods, it was for quite a good part of the last decade the most violent city in the world), but last week, it rained several days in a row.  She couldn't get into the pool, though any time the rain gave us a break, she would walk by it and look into it.

Helena has understood the words "later" and "tomorrow" for quite some time; Rita insisted on "tomorrow," especially, as a way to show that when Helena goes to sleep at night, she'll be able to get up and play in another 8-10 hours.  It's only been at the side of the swimming pool, however, that "tomorrow" has become a happy word, that we can see the excited anticipation in Helena's eyes as she says "I go swimming tomorrow."

The use of the future tense itself is cool, with its knowledge of time, but I like even more the way that she has learned to hope.  Even when she was little, she seemed to understand that things could get better, that (as I wrote in that blog, now almost two years ago,

 if she is crying and you lay her down on the changing table, she stops crying long before you take her diaper off.  When she suffers from colic, just passing her from one set of hands to another will often quiet her.  Taking her clothes off before a bath, and she begins to smile.  The future begins to take effect before it arrives, if that makes sense.

Now, that hope can become verbal.  The future, and the happiness that it promises (a chance to go swimming!) comes to colonize, or at least to imbue, the present.

My father always used to enjoy planning for a vacation as much as the trip itself: looking at maps and photos and travel guides became a way that the holiday would give pleasure long before the car left our driveway.  I've since learned that that kind of planning can spoil the spontaneous surprises, the detours and unexpected friendships that may be the best part of travel, but I still like to think that way, I like the way that talking about the future, planning for it, can make the present better.  Helena has already started doing that, and it's great fun to be a part of it.

Fatherhood as failure?

Last week, Eric Puchner published a piece in GQ, in which he went in search of a "cooler version of myself," a kind of dopplegänger, as he put it,

The guy who's actually living that life you'd imagined for yourself before you got married, had a couple of kids, and strapped in to that desk job.

The text is clever and sometimes funny, but what I want to talk about is the basic premise: that having children is a failure.  If men were true to them(our)selves, we would "play in a band, live in California, wake up at ten, and surf before noon."

So here is the basic question: a generation ago -- and perhaps for most of human history -- having children was not only included in dreams of masculine success, it was essential to it.  In the past, one could not be a man without progeny.  Today, it's tough to call yourself a real man if you have kids.

What happened?

First of all, I want to insist that I am as much a victim of this delusion as was the author of the piece in GQ, and many (most?) educated men in my generation.  These last two years with Helena have been wonderful, powerful... and often deeply depressing, not so much because of her as because of the challenge that she implies to my self definition.  So my interest in this problem isn't just academic, because it may give some insight into the dark night of the soul that I have inhabited more than I would have liked since she was born.

The easy Marxist answer is that capitalism is to blame: the basic structural power of consumer capitalism is to tell people "You suck.  You're ugly, unpopular, and unhappy.  But, if you buy Duff Beer, then things will be great!"  The grass is greener on the other side of the fence... or on the other side of the reproduction divide.  By making men unhappy with "conventional" lives, capitalism promotes the purchase of red convertibles, expensive alcohol, and (in my case, at least) kite-surfing gear.

Maybe that's a part of it... but there's also the population issue.  Ever since Malthus wrote her famous essay almost 300 years ago, some people have lived in fear of overwhelming the carrying capacity of the planet.  There are too many of us, we all know (in spite of the fact that the evidence has proven Malthus completely wrong, everyone still believes him), so we shouldn't reproduce.  For ethical absolutists like me, having a kid requires rethinking this story.

I think something else happens in high school, or the general discourse of fear around teen pregnancy.  In our formative years, having children is a disaster.  It's what happens to people who don't take care (in the more charitable interpretation) or who are losers at live (in the subconscious way that the elites think).  It's hard to get over this idea.

Even so, I don't think I understand this change, where children, once the condition of the possibility of happiness (to use Lacan's phrase) have become the conditions of its impossibility.  I'd love ideas, if any readers have them!

I'm being censored in China: how cool!

My parents are traveling through China right now, a whirlwind twenty day trip through the highlights of an amazing country.  And today, in my Dad's travelogue about their stay in Tibet, amid reflections on buddhist debating practice in the Sera Monastery and the amount of gold in the burial stupa for the fifth Dalai Lama (10,000 lbs), he also mentions that:

Kurt, the Chinese internet filters have blocked your blog and your mom (and me) are eager to see your latest postings. Perhaps you could cut and paste them to an email.

Though I sometimes felt that my phone had a strange echo in the Bush administration, this is the first time I've ever been important enough to censor.  Very flattering.  I wonder what these innocuous ramblings about babies might be doing to destabilize the Chinese state? (I remember meeting an old leftist when I was in my early teens, who crowed about finding his name on Nixon's enemies list.  We take some of our importance from who seems to hate us...)

Now, I know that the Chinese censorship filters are mostly mechanical: I doubt that there is a real person behind the decision.  I'm not quite sure, however, what I did to trip off their system.  A couple of months ago, when we were visiting my parents, my Dad and I went to a lecture at the University of Denver about the current intellectual climate in China, and one of the clearest lessons I got from the talk was that in today's China, intellectuals should be technicians.  In the same way that an engineer gets an idea from his bosses and tries to make it happen, academics in China have a directed role, moving ideas around in order to serve the interests of the state.

Though one can blame this on communism, it's actually a long Chinese tradition.  François Julien's work, for instance, shows the way that the imperial bureaucracy did an excellent job of co-opting any independent thinker, simply by paying more for working in the tax office than they could get doing anything else.  But the basic premise of this blog is that thinking (and, by extension, what we teach children) has exactly the opposite role: to challenge, to think about new goals, to become an autonomous person.

Is that why the Chinese censor this insignificant blog?  Probably not.  I probably just used a prohibited word at some point.  But I'd like to think that these little talks with Helena Iara are, in some little way, subversive.

Learning to desire

There can be a legitimate debate about whether or not Helena learns as much critical theory from Pocoyo as I think she does.  There's no doubt, however, that the writers for the series are really smart, and consciously trying to deal with issues that challenge both kids and adults.  For instance, one of Helena's favorite episodes these days tells the story of a day that Sleepy Bird has to run errands, and thus asks Pocoyo and Pato to babysit for Baby Bird.  Valentina the caterpillar shows up as well, simply overwhelming Pocoyo and Pato, especially when they try to convince the kids to sleep.



Pocoyo and Pato only get the kids into bed with a trick: they pretend that they want to use the beds, thus making Valentina and Baby Bird envious... and getting them in the right place.

How do we learn to desire?  Certain basic things are biological: we don't need anyone to teach us hunger or thirst or exhaustion.  But even such a simple desire as wanting to go to bed emerges from a complex pedagogy, and according to both Pocoyo and René Girard, we learn most desire mimetically.  That is to say, we learn it by imitating others.  If someone else wants something, then it must mean that I should want it, too.

Girard made most of his reputation with a critique of memetic desire, showing it to be the root of intra-tribal violence, the scapegoating process, sacrificiality, and almost every religion.  Oh, and capitalism, too, of course.  At the same time, he recognizes its importance:

Even if the mimetic nature of human desire is responsible for most of the violent acts that distress us, we should not conclude that mimetic desire is bad in itself.  If our desires were not mimetic, they would be forever fixed on pre-determined objects; they would be a particular form of instinct.  Human beings could no more change their desire than cows their appetite for grass.  Without mimetic desire there would be neither freedom nor humanity.

Desire feels so natural and that we assume it to be part of us, but the truth is that most of the desires we have are a strange kind of outside-inside, both ours and not-ours.  Raising a child is, in great part, a co-learning how to desire -- not a conscious teaching process, because when Helena learned to desire, she doesn't learn from what we say, but from what we do.  It is imitation, not pedagogy.  So in the process, Rita and I have to learn from ourselves, make our actions and desires coherent with our ideals.

And Helena, like Baby Bird, is gradually learning to go to sleep when she's tired.

Sick

Several days ago, as my flu began to get worse and worse.

Helena: "Daddy sick.  Not good."  Pause.  "Helena will take care."

Things aren't quite so easy, of course, but it's good to know that she wants to help.

Parasites

Over the last week, Helena Iara has been watching a turtledove that has made its nest under the eaves of our house.  Each morning, she wakes up and walks out onto the balcony to say good morning to the bird and see if the chicks have hatched.  We've used the time to talk to her about caring for little creatures, explaining how birds reproduce, and showing her how to wait for something interesting.  So, you can imagine my concern when I walked out onto the porch this morning (well before Helena awoke, thank goodness) to find a dead little bird on the floor.

As I buried the little critter, I looked at it more carefully: the beach was different from that of a turtledove. The feathers weren't anything like the mother.  And it was huge for a neonate.  In fact, the dead baby bird wasn't even the turtledove's child: it was a chupim.  The mother chupim lays its eggs in another bird's nest and then goes away, leaving the host mother to care for her babies... and since the chupim is a huge bird, it generally eats all of the food that the mother brings for her own kids, leaving them to dies of starvation.  The turtledove's expression as she sat on her nest this morning, something I had taken for sadness, was actually something very different, maybe even the pride of a mother who had seen the danger and defended her chicks (as yet unhatched) by pushing the interloper out of the nest (all of that is a projection, of course; who knows what emotions a bird really feels).

In Brazil, a chupão isn't just a bird: it's a metaphor, and incarnation of evil.  In Brazilian popular culture, the greatest possible sin is to be a parasite, to take advantage of others without giving anything back: in a poor society where reciprocating favors and paying off debts was often the difference between starvation and survival, it's an ethic that makes sense.  Rita tells stories of her brother going off into the woods to hunt baby chupins when he was a kid, a boy's idea of defending the weak against a species that is both parasitical upon and stronger than its victims.  Whether in the favela or the countryside, you hear similar stories, and much of the progressive, left wing orientation of contemporary Brazilian life and politics depends on the critique of the chupim (and things like it).

What does all of this have to do with philosophy and a baby girl?  We generally see philosophy as a story of genius: Plato wrote..., Kant thought..., Nietzsche said...  In fact, though, it's hard to know how much of that "individual" genius isn't merely an effective expression of social ideas.  William James's pragmatism, for instance, serves as a splendid critique of European metaphysical overkill, but he himself recognized that he was merely channeling American attitudes, looking for "what works."  The amazing gift of Emmanuel Levinas, one of the great philosophers of the 20th century, was to put centuries of rabbinical Jewish thought in dialogue with phenomenology.  No thinker is just himself: he speaks the metaphors of his culture.

The attack on the chupim, whether by my brother-in-law when he was a boy, or by a mother turtledove defending her chicks, expresses a profound ethics, an idea as important -- and probably with more impact on the lives of poor people in Brazil -- as the reflections of any academic philosopher.  I'm still glad that Helena didn't see the dead baby bird, but when she wakes up, I'm going to tell her the story.

No, no, no!

Yesterday, Helena Iara and I went to a park here in Florianópolis.  This being Brazil, the park fauna included the usual fish and turtles and ducks, but also a yellow throated caiman (a small one), some amazing herons and egrets, and monkeys in the trees.  As we sat by the side of the lake, watching the caiman cruise under us, another girl wanted to come up and see the beast.  "No, no, no!" screamed Helena Iara.  "Don't come!"

"Helena," I replied, "Anyone can come and see the animals.  And why should you care?  If someone else sees the caiman, you can still see it."

"No, no!" Helena insisted.

Ethically, of course I was right to insist that Helena should not be selfish about seeing animals, nor about playgrounds, the beach, or any other places she wants just for herself.  Sharing public goods stands as one of the key elements of a liberal society, after all.  But as I began to analyze the argument I made to her, I began to wonder if I was really correct.  If someone else shares an experience with me is it really the same?  Is it, as I had said, no harm to me if someone else sees the caiman?

Let's think about mountain climbing as a counter-example.  To reach the top of a mountain requires dedication and suffering; the amazing view from the top doesn't include just the visual impact of snow and rock on my eyes, but is also imbued with the struggle required to reach that point.  The view from the top of Mt. Evans or Pikes Peak (Colorado mountains with roads to the top) are simply not as good as the views from neighboring peaks, because it is too easy to get there.

Similarly, part of the excitement of the stories I tell comes from the fact that they happened to me in the mountains of Chile, the wild streets of Medellín, or the jungles of Brazil.  These are "exotic" places, more valued and more interesting (by me and by listeners) because they are so hard to get to, so dangerous, so little visited.  Would these stories be as compelling if everyone could go there?

On a less athletic plane, think about the experience of seeing the Mona Lisa in the Louvre: don't the bustling crowds distract in some ways from the art, or especially from the aura we expect from such a great work of art?  When the painting is too accessible, it may lose something.  Walter Benjamin said something similar about art when it can be reproduced: unlike the saints carried through Italian villages only one day a year, a movie or a photograph can be reproduced infinitely.  The original doesn't carry the air of authenticity, of magic.

None the less, I'm not going to agree with Helena: though someone else seeing a caiman may detract from my experience, that's the nature of democracy, and of being a good person.  And, in the end, Helena will soon learn that meeting people -- and talking with them about the crocodile in front of them -- is an even richer experience than the selfish vision of a mountaintop or a painting.n