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.

Easter

Christmas is relatively easy to explain to a baby: when mean people came from another country to take away the land of people who had lived there for thousands of years, the people who lived on the land dreamed of someone who would save them from the bad people.  One night, they thought that this great revolutionary leader had been born, so everyone celebrated and gave presents to the baby who was going to free them from the Romans.

Yesterday, as Helena and I rode to the playground, we saw children processing through Santa Fe, carrying a cross toward the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Guadalupe.  "Girls and boys," she said.  "Doing what?"  And if Christmas is easy to explain, Easter is a whole lot harder.  Oppression and Salvation can be explained through "mean people" and "freedom", concepts that a baby understands.  But the idea that this great leader failed in liberating Israel, that he never planned on making a violent revolution like Simon (the Zealot) and Judas (Iscariot, or Sicarius; the Zealots and the Sicarii were the two most violent (almost terroristic) groups in Judea at the time) had wanted, that he was convicted and nailed onto a cross...  I had no hope of explaining any of these things to Helena Iara.  I tried, of course, but I could tell that she didn't understand.

Even harder to explain, for a baby who doesn't know what death means, is that Jesus died and was resurrected, and that the "failure" of his movement actually gave it more power, and turned it into a universal movement for liberation, and not just a limited anti-colonial struggle of Israelites against the Romans.  Let alone the way that the crucifixion of Jesus leads to a critique of the idea of sacrifice and the incarnation of God-as-Holy spirit in the community struggling for justice and freedom.

As we rode the bike through downtown, Helena seemed to have turned me off, but her final words as we approached the park seemed to suggest that she understood at least something of Easter.  "Green," she said.  "Playground.  Play!"

It's spring, and time to play in the green grass with friends.  That's not a bad summary of the point of the whole Christian project.

The prodigal daughter

Helena has never been a difficult baby.  Rita and I hear stories from other parents that make us wince, of sleepless months and temper tantrums and endless crying, and we can only thank whatever combination of genetics and health care and parenting that has kept us free of such challenges.  But no baby is easy: they all make us suffer in countless small -- and several large -- ways.

I'm not quite sure why I have been thinking of New Testament parables recently, but the Prodigal Son has been on my mind.  Most of us know the story from church, Sunday school, or pop culture: the vagabond son disobeys his father, leaves home, spends all his money on worthless things, and then, finally, comes home.  The father is so happy that he slays the fatted calf and throws a huge party to celebrate; the older son, who has always stayed with his father, obeyed the old man, and helped him, arrives bitter to the party, wondering why the father would do so much for the vagabond, and nothing for the good son.

‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ (Luke 15:31-2)

Most people read the parable through that last phrase: we should forgive and ben happy when we get back something we have lost.  It's not exactly a trite lesson, but I don't think it does much more than express something about how humans deal with loss.

I wonder, though, if there isn't something else going on, a reason that that father loves the prodigal son more than the perfect one.  As anyone who has ever been in love knows, we like people because of their virtues, but we love them because of their faults, their tics, their strange neuroses.  I'm not sure that it's different for children.  Do I love Helena because she's smart and funny and cute?  Sure, that helps.  But I think I really love her because I've had to rock her to sleep when she has a terrible colic at 3AM, because she constantly disobeys and wants to climb the stairs we tell her are dangerous, because if there are olives on the table, she won't eat anything else...  It's the glitches and the errors that make love dawn on us.

Slavoj Zizek makes a whole theological structure out of this idea, suggesting that if we love people for their lacks and sins, it means that God must be lacking, essentially broken.  God is love, after all.  And in fact, I think that the process by which I child comes to love his or her parents is a very strange one, in which she begins loving them because of their omnipotence and the protection they offer her, but (sometime in the teenage years, or later) she has to learn that loving them means understanding and loving their faults.

I don't want Helena to disobey, climb the stairs -- let alone leave home, spend all the money, and do everything else the prodigal son did -- but I know I'll love her even if she does.

Christmas

OK, it isn't really Christmas yet.  We've got a good three weeks to go.  But since Rita and I leave for Brazil on Sunday, my parents came to Santa Fe this week to celebrate an early Christmas with us and Helena Iara.  It was splendid, with everything one could possibly want from a holiday: great food, presents, laughs with friends and family...


But since Christmas came early, I felt like I had to explain a little bit of the holiday to Helena.  I told her of a people who had been oppressed and abused by everyone, by the Egyptians and the Persians and the Babelonians and the Romans, and who dreamed of a savior, someone who would free them from oppression and slavery.  They imagined some great warrior, some heir of the fabulous David, who would throw the Romans into the sea with swords and fire... and they got a little baby.  Tiny, weak, and happy.  One who would soon have to flee into Egypt in fear of those some Romans.

Some savior!  But, as I explained to Helena Iara, I think that was the point.  A savior saves us, and we don't have to do anything.  A baby, on the other hand, acts by turning us into actors, makes us into agents.  We want to help, care, be kind, love the little baby.  And that was, after all, the goal of Jesus's ministry, later, too.  To help people to love each other, to do justice not only on the political level (he was pretty weak as a revolutionary leader), but especially on the personal one.  To do justice, to love one another, and to walk humbly with your God, as the prophet put it.

And babies, I have learned over the last several months, do that pretty well!

Peek-a-boo Two

When I wrote last week's blog, I forgot the great philosopher of the Peek-a-Book, Bishop Berkeley, so Helena and I had a quick talk about him this week.  He seems to make the same mistake that contemporary psychologists do about babies, thinking that what the kid is struggling with is merely object permanence, with the idea that things can exist outside of our perception of them.

Berkeley took philosophical idealism to its extreme, saying that in fact, the world itself did not exist.  All that was "really there" is the subject who perceives, and God who sends the perceptions directly into his soul.  The world "as it is", other subjects... all are merely my own projections, confusions of my relationship with God.  There is a certain mystical logic to this, at least as Western Mystics have always said that God is all that really matters, but both babies and most of the original thinkers of Judeo-Christianity didn't make that mistake.  After all, Jesus says, "As you do to the lest of these my brothers, you do to me."  It isn't as Berkeley suggests that others are a projection of the subject's relationship with God, but that God is an extension of the justice we do to others, especially the poor and vulnerable.

I think babies understand the basic premise, and parents do, too.  God is, to a certain degree, a byproduct of the love we bear for one another.

The Dinner Party

A symposium sounds so serious, the kind of thing that one tries to avoid on a university campus, knowing that it will probably be staid old men talking about something you know nothing about.  The word comes down to us from one of Plato's best dialogues, called "The Symposium" in most translations, but which really means "the drinking party" (sym being "together" and posion being "to drink").  Similarly, the central rite of Christianity, the eucharist, is also originally a drinking party, where Jesus and his disciples came together to drink wine, tell stories, and think together.  Eating, drinking, and thinking have long gone together.

(photo by David Shaw)

You can see, then, why I have been so excited about the day that Helena would begin to eat solid foods.  I had no expectations that she would suddenly burst forth with reflections on Diotema and Alcibiades (two of the guests at Socrates's symposium), but there is something wonderful about eating together, about sharing food and a table.

One can imagine my sadness when she not only made a face at the apples that Rita had carefully prepared, but then threw them up, together with all of her milk that morning.  And a houseguest -- Barbara, the wife of my mentor in politics, Scott Armstrong -- had to catch the vomit in her hands.  Not exactly the conviviality for which I had been waiting.

In fact, Helena likes the social practice of eating.  She likes to sit with us, take a spoon in her hand, coo in response to the dinner conversation, and even ask Rita to bring the lip of a water or orange juice cup to her mouth.  Perhaps it is a little like speaking, where she mastered the social conventions of talking and listening long before there is any content to her words, she has learned the social game of eating, the dinner party part, long before she has learned the joy of chewing and ingesting food.

We'll see how she takes to eating over the next couple of weeks.  For now, I'm content that she's good company at our daily symposia at the dinner table.

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!

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.