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.