Do unto others...

Yesterday, Helena Iara and I went to the playground in the Trindade neighborhood, while Rita gave a presentation at the nearby university.  Helena got to play with a little boy from Angola, another from Holland, and a girl whose mother seemed to be Colombian or Venezuelan: a multicultural place in the middle of Florianópolis.  She also learned to do some new things in the playground, like the fireman's pole and going down the rope ladder.

Later in the afternoon, after Helena was tired enough that she didn't want to climb the ladders any more, she sat down on the stones of the playground and asked me to sit next to her.  When I did, she gathered up some pebbles and poured them over my legs.  "Please don't do that, Helena," I said.

She took more pebbles and poured them over my leg, this time with a naughty smile.

"Helena!"

As she gathered the pebbles for the third time, I prepared strategies for stopping her... but she poured them over herself and laughed, instead, one of those wonderful two year old contagious giggles.  Then she did it again.  "Gather stones, Daddy," she told me.

One of the most famous ethical precepts in the West is Jesus's "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," commonly called the Golden Rule.  In fact, it wasn't a new concept to Jesus (it was pretty common in the early Talmud), and you can see similar ideas in religious traditions the world over.

Most of the time, we understand the Golden Rule as a commandment -- in technical language, as hortatory, a request to do something.  I wonder, though, if it isn't more of an objective description: not a commandment, but just relating how things are.  "We do unto others as we want them to do to us."  Helena wasn't pouring the stones over me because she wanted to be naughty or to do something bad to me: it was an invitation for me to pour stones over her.

In a similar way, I've found that most of the truly bad people I've met in my life (not many... but a leader in the Chilean secret police, a couple of human rights abusers in Colombia, gangsters from time to time) truly expect that other people are going to do bad things to them.  "I'll screw them before they screw me," seems to be their motto.  It's more like "Do onto others as you expect them to do unto you," but a modified Gold Rule is actually a pretty close description of the way even really evil people think.

What's interesting here is that an ethical rule and the description of "how things are" turn out to be exactly the same, which sounds pretty Panglossian (and not a description of the ethical mess of the real world.).  But what's interesting, I think, is where desire starts.  In the evil version of the Golden Rule, we start with my imagination of the desire of the other: I think he wants to screw me over, so I'm going to get him first.  With Jesus's interpretation, a person has to take responsibility for what he wants: Do onto others as you want (not as you think that they would want) them to do to you."

And that makes all the difference.