Can mothers have it all?

This week, Facebook and blogs and even (gasp!) real life conversations have been lit up by an article by Anne Marie Slaughter, who had worked in policy planning at the Obama State Department, about the (im)possibility of mixing motherhood and career.  The piece, an honest portrayal of the difficulties of second and third generation feminist women to "have it all" has clearly touched a vein among my friends who work as lawyers, policy professionals, doctors... truth is, pretty much everyone with whom I went to Harvard or Williams, and who then went on to be a mother and a high powered professional.

Rita and I have not had to face anything like the world Slaughter describes: no 20 hour work days, no leaving the house before the kids wake and coming home after they are asleep, no impossible choices between a sick baby and a professional deadline.  Next month, Rita will go to an anthropology conference in São Paulo, and it will be the first time that Helena Iara will have to spend a night without her mommy in the same house.  None the less, we have seen enough of the challenges of parenting and working to know how much harder it must be for someone working at the United Nations, in government, in a bill-by-the-hour law firm.  Slaughter is right: after fifty years of feminist successes in policy and ideology, children still make it much harder for women to climb the professional ladder.

I don't recall which of my professors declared that philosophy does not have the role of answering questions, but of asking why we ask those questions in the first place, but it's a good place to enter this debate (and is the starting point for William James and Ludwig Wittgenstein, two of my favorite thinkers).  So here's my poor contribution to the debate:

I've been readying Dostoyevsky recently, and finding some humor amidst the gloom by laughing at the silly hierarchies of state bureaucrats, classed just like military officers in 19th Century Russia, with a "Collegiate Registrar" equivalent to a warrant office,  a "Titular Counsellor" like an Army Captain, all the way up to an "Actual Privy Counsellor" who held the same rank as a Field Marshall.  Russians of that age may have taken the quest for honor so far that it becomes ridiculous, but they aren't that much different than we are, with different levels of professorships, pay-grades for government service, and whether or not one becomes a partner.  Men have always dedicated themselves to honor, in one way or another.

Mainstream American feminism has done an extraordinary job of showing why and how women have been oppressed and excluded, but at a price: it has accepted masculine terms for the debate.  When we look at definitions of success for women (or for feminism in general), we ask about how many women sit in corporate boardrooms, what salary women earn, how many women work in policy roles in government.  I wonder, though, if these concerns don't simply accepted traditional masculine (and not universally human) milestones for success.  Even the question "Why can't women have it all?" uses the verb most associated with honor in postmodern capitalism.  As Marx (among many others) noticed, capitalism moves us from a concern with being to one of having.

That move from being to having was critical: no one would ever ask if you can "be it all."  Of course not: you can't be mother and father, God and man, master and servant... the  verb "be" recognizes that certain things exclude each other.  But "have"... It seems like, hypothetically at least, we could possess everything.

Slaughter addresses this question in a way: she says that she and many women like her (and many men, as well), work as hard as they do because it is the way they can change the world; she herself was working in Planning for the State Department, and cites many women in government, academia, and the international human rights system.  Here, for better or worse, I might be able to add something useful: I know lots of people who have both worked at the grass roots and in "the system", and almost all of them say that they are not only happier on the "outside", but that they do more good (a quick caveat to expose my bias here: after working in Washington think tanks and going to Harvard, I made a conscious decision that I didn't want that life; I'm not an objective observer).  People at UNICEF, the Foreign Service, government education departments... To quote one high UNICEF bureaucrat I met last year, "Let's be honest, I could do a lot more elsewhere.  But when I look at myself, I know that I wouldn't earn as much or get as much prestige elsewhere.  So I stay."

The point isn't that mothers shouldn't try to "climb the latter".  Power matters, and who holds it is no small thing.  But I think we need to ask deeper questions about the nature of success, happiness, and even "having;" it allows us to ask the question in a much better way, and maybe even one that will make us happier and more able to change the world.

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!

Learning to buy

Over the last couple of weeks, Helena has become... well, "obsessed" is too strong a word, but certainly very concerned, about economics.  Specifically, she wants to understand what allows us to go into a store and take certain things home, while we don't or can't take others.  She seems to have resolved this conundrum with a single word, "pagou." (Paid).

Helena's concern with payment serves as a way to de-normalize something that we do every day.  It seems so normal to buy stuff, but in fact it's a relatively new and strange way to exchange good and services.  For most of human history, barter and other informal forms of exchange were much more common, as were sharing, potlatch, and completely non-commencial forms of distributing goods.  It takes a lot of work for a baby to understand how capitalism works.

It's not just babies, of course: people from traditionally non-capitalist cultures famously have a hard time adapting to the money economy.  I remember very clearly, for instance, the way that the cooking oil market worked in Cazucá, a shantytown above Bogotá where I worked for many years.  Most of the people who lived there were refugees from the war, peasants, indigenous people, and traditional blacks who were used to subsistence agriculture as the basic way to sustain themselves.  They had always grown their own crops, shared a successful hunt or catch of fish with everyone (knowing that others would do the same later), and bartered their produce for things they didn't grow themselves.  Then suddenly, in Bogotá, none of those resources were available.

Cooking oil, then: these refugees bought oil each day, just enough to fry what they wanted to cook that day.  Unfortunately, however, buying in small amounts made bad economic sense: in 10 days, they might spend five dollars on oil, while if they had bought the same amount all at once, they would have spent less than a dollar.  If we think about why these people spent so much of their salary on food, and had so little to save or invest, knowledge of how capitalism works was part of it.  (Another serious problem was that the paramilitary gangs controlled the oil market, and they had a vested interest in people not learning.)

Helena Iara is just learning this stuff as we shop.  Not an easy lesson, but an important one.

Do your shoes control you?

Sometimes it's tempting to turn this blog into a series of commentaries on Pocoyo (don't worry, I won't really do it, but the Spanish cartoon does open so many amazing ideas in little kids' heads...).  Here's one I found particularly interesting:

Like many other things we buy, Pato's shoes seem at first to be magical: they allow him to do things he never could before, they give him and intense kind of joy... and they make him better than his friends.  It's what we want from our athletic shoes, isn't it?

Pato soon finds, though, that the magic in his shoes isn't completely under his control.  In fact, they soon control him much more than he controls them.  Though the metaphor is childish and drawn in primary colors, it is also quite honest: Rita and I were just in Los Angeles, for instance, and found the bus and metro to be much better than anyone thought, and we were amazed at the friendly atmosphere in public transit.  In contrast, most people drove their cars alone, with a grimace on their faces, and then had to pay $10-25 a day to park.  Might these cars be like Pato's shoes?  After all of the financial and emotional investment we put into them, we simply can't take the bus.  The car, to some degree, comes to control us.

Marx says this about the products we consume, words that seem even more interesting today than in the 1950s when he wrote:

A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.

Pocoyo shows some of these theological niceties, more exactly how the shoes come to function as a magical power outside of ourself, not too different from a charm in animist religion.  But in general, Pocoyo is quite a bit more fun than Karl Marx... and it has better colors.

Cars II

Though a lot of children's movies and TV shows are too insipid for words, I have always liked Pixar films, which seem more intelligent and thought-provoking than most movies made for adults: truth is, I like them so much that I even wrote a book about using Monsters Inc, Nemo, and A Bug's Life to teach philosophy to kids.  And even though I didn't think Cars was the best Pixar film, I was excited to watch its sequel with Helena Iara.

Helena liked the film: enough so that she was able to sit still for almost an hour before she began to fidget.  The pure visuals of the movie are great, and they probably attract an almost two year-old as much as they do any other kid.  What struck me, however, was the political critique implicit in the film: though supposedly about race cars, the movie's subtext seems to be about the rise of the populist Right and the Tea Party.

OK, that sounds a bit out of context, so let me make the argument.  The enemies in Cars II are failed automobiles, Pintos and AMC Pacers and Gremlins who can't find parts anymore.  They want to destroy other cars -- and the possibility of a real alternative fuel -- out of pure resentment of the success of others.  They fall in line behind a movement led by a faux-folksy oil tycoon who is really using the movement as a way to make sure that no other fuel undermines his base of wealth and power.

Let's talk about the origins of the Tea Party: they are mostly white and working class, and many of them have lost out in the modern economy.  Their skills of manual labor have been outsourced to India, China, and Latin America, and they haven't been able to take advantage of the new opportunities of globalization.  Resentment against elites is the fundamental motivator behind the Tea Party, and they are manipulated by a faux-folksy Australian (not that different from the accent of the villain on Cars 2!), Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Fox News, who needs their support for his nefarious business dealings.

As an insight into the origins of the populist right (I bet it would work as a way to understand Le Pen in France and many other Euro-neo-fascists, too), the movie is very sharp.  I can understand why Pat Buchanan and so many others on Fox News got riled up about the movie... especially coming as a sequel to the original Cars, which seemed to emphasize small town values, NASCAR, and other things Republicans love (personally, I think it was about class consciousness, but that's another story).  But here's the problem: there are only two sides, only two alternatives.  The salvation of the world comes from the elites (in the form of the British MI5, no less!), while the marginalized and forgotten can find an advocate only in a manipulative demagogue in it for his own benefit.  We see the American political landscape seen through the lens of well-educated, Hollywood/New York liberals, where the poor have to choose between one of two champions, and they (we, quite frankly, because I can't except myself from this liberal elite) can't understand why the people would possible chose Newt Gingrich and his ilk.

The promise of any politics of liberation is that there aren't just two sides, a choice between two elites that represent the people, but that the people might, in fact, be able to govern themselves.  And there's where the movie falls flat.  And, quite frankly, where America falls flat, too.

Philosophy

Anyone who has read this blog for a while has probably noticed some changes in the last couple of months.  I'm posting less often, and when I do, the comments are less explicitly philosophical, or at least have less to do with elaborating the ideas of individual philosophers.  This change doesn't mean that I'm talking less, or less seriously with Helena Iara, but that as she grows up, interests and relationships change.



When Helena Iara was a little baby, she loved the sound of a voice: intonation, rises and falls, the sound of funny or soothing words.  What mattered most to her was the fact of talk, and the joy of looking into someone's eyes; musing about the history of philosophy helped me to find things to talk about as we rocked in the hammock or walked in the deserts of Santa Fe or the jungles of Florianópolis.  Philosophical reflections were really for me, a way to understand what was going on with her, to have the minimal difference of the other that allows thought to happen.

But as Helena has grown up, she now understands what I have to say, or at least a truly surprising amount of it.  Her interests now drive the conversation, and though those interests aren't any less intellectual or stimulating, they don't emerge from a dialogue with Zizek or Kristeva, but with bow-wows and miows and flowers and the other exciting parts of her world.

 

As Helena and I began these reflections, she taught me by her presence, by what I imagined that she might be thinking.  Now that she can actually tell me what is interesting to her, these lessons are different, less easy to describe in philosophical language... and frankly, more fun to have than to describe.  To paraphrase Marx, "In the past, philosophies have tried to understand babies.  The point, however, is to play with them."

The gift

For at least a month, Helena Iara has been obsessed with giving things to Rita and me.  She wants to give us her toys, feed us her food, give us her clothes and her books...  Now, lest one think that we have been successful in creating a truly altruistic baby, I have to add that several seconds afterward, she wants those things back, which created some minor complications when she offered us food, at least until we understood what was going on.

Reflecting on this giving of gifts, as Helena and I sat in the hammock today, watching the monkeys play in the trees, I told her a little bit about how different anthropologists have looked at the gift.  She wasn't entirely interested in the differences in the way that Claude Levi-Stauss or Marcel Mauss or Eduardo Viveiros de Castro understand gift giving, but I think that she understood the basic idea: we give gifts to establish and strengthen social relations.  Whether we're talking about the formal gift-giving that happens in diplomatic meetings, the gifts exchanged between tribes when they encounter in the Amazon basin, or birthday gifts for babies, when we give a present, we get back trust.

Every Christmas, you'll see an article in the Times or some newsmagazine, in which a famous economist talks about the failure of the marginal utility of gift-giving.  My mother gives me a sweater; she paid $75 for it, but I would not have paid more than $30, so according to these orthodox (and Scrooge-y) economists, there is a $45 inefficiency in the market.  Their lesson, of course, is that we should all just give each other cash.

Gift-giving, fortunately, is not a capitalist activity, for all of the attempts to make it one.  It's a process of creating trust, building relationships.  I give a friend a birthday gift, he gives one to me, and we become better friends in the process, more mutually engaged, more willing to trust and depend on each other.  

What Helena has done, as I tried to explain to her, is short circuit the process.  She gives me her toy and then wants it back right away.  In the process, she built something like trust (she knows she will get it back) and something more than just "like" love.  We laugh, she smiles, and a family grows from it.

Medea in the car-seat

Helena has never really liked her car seat, but yesterday, she absolutely hated it.  She didn't just cry, but wailed, pretended that she was choking, unable to breathe... anything to get out.  She was willing to hurt herself to get what she wanted.  When she finally calmed down, I told her the story of Medea, and then something about masochism and politics, from Deleuze to Marx.  Here, I'll just plagiarize a radio commentary I recorded eight years ago which captures something of the same ideas...

Imagine a little girl, perhaps eight years old, with blond curly hair and a heavy sweater. Her name is Ana Isabel, she tells me. It’s ten o’clock at night in the Alpujarra, one of the areas of Medellín that the police have abandoned to gangs and prostitutes. About fifty homeless kids have come to a filthy little park, hoping that the grass will make for a softer bed than the street. We might be tempted to pity these young refugees from war, poverty, and violence, but they were proud of their ability to survive in conditions that would quickly kill you or me. 



I don’t know why, but Ana Isabel became furious with me -- perhaps because I didn’t give her candy, like the nun who came with me, perhaps because I reminded her of her father. Her cheeks reddened, she stomped her feet, then, with a final look of rage, she put a little plastic bag to her mouth, inhaled and exhaled. Inside was a glue that gave an instant and fatal high. She stepped closer and closer to me until each explosive breath slammed the bag against my stomach. Her red eyes were full of hatred -- against me, against the world, against herself. 



The next night in Medellín embodies the contrasts that define Colombia. Though most famous for cocaine and violence, Medellín is also home to remarkable avante-garde art and theater. I went to see a minimalist version of the classic Greek drama, Medea. Medea, as you may remember, was princess of Colchis before Jason seduced her and convinced her to steal the Golden Fleece for him. When the play begins, years after the adventure of the Argonauts, Jason has abandoned Medea so that he can marry a Greek princess that will aid his new political aspirations. Jason and his allies have condemned Medea to live in a hut far from Corinth, and soon the king will send her into exile.

 

We remember Medea best for her revenge against Jason. The man has destroyed her, but she has no way to hurt him. In madness and despair, she kills their two children.

 

Thanks to Freud, Oedipus became the dominant metaphor for the 20th Century. I wonder if Medea isn’t our Oedipus -- think of little Ana Isabel: like Medea, she is powerless, forgotten. She has no power, no one respects or loves her -- she can’t even make people look at her, except in pity. And proud people -- whether a Colombian street urchin or a princess of Colchis -- despise pity.

 

So what power do Medea and Ana Isabel have? How can they take revenge on those who have hurt them, those who ignore them, on us, who let little girls live on the street? They can only hurt themselves. Medea murders the children she loves, because Jason loves them too. Ana Isabel destroys her brain with glue, because she sees the pain it brings to my face. I don’t need to point out the connection to the teenage Palestinians who strap bombs to their bodies, or anorexic American girls. Medea is the last refuge of the powerless, the hopeless, and the excluded... and a too terrible metaphor for the lives of many people in the 21st Century.

Perhaps I exaggerate: Helena Iara is no Medea, and no Ana Isabel.  But like many of the powerless, she has learned that one of the few ways to get some modicum of power over the other is to hurt herself.

A ball of meaning

For at least a month and a half, Helena Iara has been using words, but it's only in the last day or two that I'm confident that she understands that words aren't only useful, but also can signify.  And the word that has shown this fact is the very simple "ball", which she says (and repeats and repeats) in both Portuguese (bola) and English.

Neurologists and linguists who work with language acquisition talk about "semantic over-reach," lingo which just means that when babies begin to understand how words refer to things, they think the word means a much broader category than it really does.  The classic example is a child who learns the word "doggie", and then declares any four-legged animal, from a puppy to a lion, a "doggie".  Language learning happens through paring down our knowledge, chiseling away the meanings that don't work so that we get down to the "real" meaning of a word ("real" in scare quotes because it is always a little flexible, turned into a metaphor, and in flux).

For Helena, what that means is that any sphere is a ball.  She has a little ball that she loves to kick, but she also likes a full-sized soccer ball and an interesting little empty ball with lots of holes.  Oranges and apples are also balls, as are passion fruit... a problem when she declares "ball" and throws them onto the tile floor. The truth is, though, that an orange seems more similar to her little ball than either the empty ball or the soccer ball: she's developed a theory about "ball-ness" and is trying to apply it.

We don't lose this tendency as we grow up; it just changes.  In college, for instance, marxist cultural  theory was my "ball", something I tried to apply to everything.  Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory?  Jane Austin?  Post-modern philosophy?  The drinking culture of small, liberal arts colleges?  A combination of Georg Lukacs, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse offered an explanation and solution to everything, generally detailed with excessive pedantry (and a bit of humor) in my monthly column in a college magazine.

Now this isn't a bad thing, even as I make fun of my younger self.  Helena's joyful shouts of "bola, ball!" as she sees anything round make her excited about the world, curious and thrilled about learning.  The same was true of my own theoretical over-reach, and it continues to be: finding an idea that you love is essential not just to intellectual life, but to life itself.

In the long run, we all learn that an apple isn't a ball, and that if we throw it on the ground, it will be too bruised to eat.

The evil eye

With the exception of a brief flirtation with a superstition about the number 16 as a teenage soccer player, I've never really had much time for magical thinking.  I'm a pretty hard nosed materialist.  So as one might guess, I've always quietly scoffed at the idea of the evil eye, in spite of its pervasiveness here in Brazil.  None the less, two weeks with Helena Iara in Recife forced me to do some re-thinking on the issue.

Though there are many forms of the evil eye, the most common one in Brazil often isn't intentionally malicious; in fact, the danger comes from admiration.  If someone compliments my clothes or appearance or anything else, it shows the possibility of envy, and that envy has consequences; in fact, in Portuguese, the word "evil" doesn't enter into the dynamic.  People fear the "olho gordo" or fat eye, the desire of the other for what I have.  It makes sense in a culture that has long been poor, and where social equality (within an economic class, though not from one to another) is an important virtue.



The problem comes when the object of envy is a baby.  If someone else admires Helena Iara, or envies Rita and me because she is our daughter, that envy can make her sick.  An entire social group of "benzedeiras" or blessers (sort of like good witches) exist in order to help kids get over the illnesses caused by the evil eye.  This struck me as sort of silly... until Helena became the victim of the olho gordo, as she did last week, with fever, confusion, and inability to sleep.

Lest you think I'm getting soft in the head, let me explain what I think happened.  In Recife, blond children are uncommon, and because they are almost always the children of the rich, they seldom turn up in the favelas and areas of urban decay where we spent most of our time.  For that reason, Helena attracted a lot of attention.  A lot.  She literally stopped traffic from time to time, and people surrounded her as if she were a rock or soap opera star, each one of them with more extravagant compliments.  In a city of almost 3 million people, one of the dirtiest and hottest and noisiest places I know, it was just too much.  Helena became over-stimulated and got sick.

A benzedeira blessed Helena, and I doubt that it did any harm -- in fact, the kind and soothing words of the woman, and the sweet-smelling fond she swung around Helena probably helped.  But what really worked was rest: getting her away from the chaos of the city, from the intense and desiring eyes of thousands of people.  She still had to deal with the heat, but she soon was as happy and healty as she had ever been.  And I came to have a little more respect for folk beliefs that I used to think were all confused with magic...

Nature and commerce

The aspen are turning color in Santa Fe this week, and my parents are visiting from Colorado, so we decided to take a day off and climb the mountain and hike through the turning leaves.  In spite of a nasty stomach ache, Helena loved the walk through the woods, both because of the colors and because of the many people she met on her trip: a family from Texas, a little Tunisian girl named Noor, dogs and their owners...  It was a beautiful autumn afternoon in the New Mexico mountains.  For Helena, whose favorite activities involve being with people and playing with nature (particularly grabbing flowers and messing with herb gardens to conjure up the smell of thyme and basil), it was as wonderful a trip as she could imagine.

Then, this evening, we went out to an African-Carribean fusion restaurant in a little strip mall on the other side of town. The food was spectacular (pomegranate and videlia onions over beef kebabs!), but the place is, unfortunately, in a strip mall, and when Helena inevitably got impatient with the restaurant and her inability to eat food like big people, she wanted to go out and walk.

In a strip mall, there are no flowers.  No trees.  No changing aspen.  And at 7 PM, not too many people.  So to entertain Helena, I showed her the posters and mannequins in shop windows, the bright colors of a video-game store and the swaths of fabric on a plus-size women's clothing vitrine.  Fortunately, she didn't seem to find any of this as interesting as the orchids in the garden in Brazil or the tomatoes and basil in front of our house here in Santa Fe.

The contrast between nature and commerce opened a nice chance to talk with her about Marx's theory of the commodity.  If you'll permit me a rather long quote (only the first part of which I remembered as I talked with Helena before the shopfronts):

A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties…  There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities. This Fetishism of commodities has its origin, as the foregoing analysis has already shown, in the peculiar social character of the labour that produces them.

The products in a shop window are "really" just things, things that may or may not be useful to us.  Unfortunately, that "really" is quite false, because we all know that a shoe is more than just a shoe.  A Blahnik symbolizes one thing, a Nike another, and a shoe with a brand we don't recognize, something else entirely.  We envelop ourselves in these products in order to present ourselves to other people, to win prestige, to impress.  And in the end, we often turn ourselves into these images, the eyes of a subject a real person, lost behind the Prada sunglasses.  In fact, when I buy shoes, I am buying the labor of an anonymous boy in Indonesia who sewed the shoes, and so the exchange of money should be, in some way, the creation of a relationship with him.  It is, of course, nothing of the sort.  In fact, my Nikes enter into a relation with your Adidas, and you, me, and the boy in Jakarta are all forgotten.

Talking with Helena, I told her how lucky we are to live in places where we can see flowers and trees and bees and birds, to talk with people on the sidewalk in front of the house.  These things aren't yet commodities, and when (many) people stop to talk with a baby, it's because they want to look in her eyes, not because they admire the clothes she has on.  Other people don't have such good fortune.  To satisfy the infinite curiosity of a baby, they have only malls and stores, one bright and shiny commodity after another.  Helena has the good luck that this land of pure commence only intersects with hers form time to time, instead of being her only world.

Maria Bonita and Lampião

This week I'm in Bolivia, working on a telenovela (Latin American soap opera) made by indigenous kids from the shantytowns above La Paz, which sadly leaves me far from our beautiful and smart daughter.  None the less, I can at least tell some stories from last week and keep her in mind, even from far away.

Last weekend we went to visit Rita's parents in Braço do Norte, a small town in the foothills of the Serra do Corvo Branco, because it was her father's birthday.  On the wall of their living room, there is a wood-cut print that Rita and I gave him several years ago when we were working in the northeast: the print shows a family leaving the countryside to move to the city because of drought (the attached image is similar to the one on the wall, but made by the artist's father).  Even when she was a tiny baby, Helena fixed her eyes on the picture, perhaps because of its simple, black and white forms, orperhaps for more existential reasons.  Rita's parents faced the same tragedy when she was a little girl: they lost their land and had to move to the city to make a new life for themselves.  Rita's mother learned to sew clothes, and her father became a stonemason, a hard life for people accustomed to the rich farmland of Santa Catarina.

I started off by telling Helena Iara this family history, but then moved on to the historical reasons why so many people have been forced from their land in Brazil: the unjust distribution of land, Portuguese colonial policy, slavery.  And while many families have responded by moving the huge favelas that surround every Brazilian city, many have also resisted.  And since Helena Iara and I always talk about philosophy, I decided to tell her a little of the most philosophically sophisticated of these rebellions: the cangaço led by Maria Bonita and her husband, Lampião.

Different cangaços had long been a part of the northeast of Brazil, small groups of men without land or possessions who robbed the rich o sustain themselves, and Lampião grew up in one of these groups.  However, as Maria Bonita integrated herself into the group (she fell in love with Lampião when his group camped near her husband's ranch), their band began to develop a real philosophy of social justice: not just to rob from the rich to support themselves, but to undermine the unjust system of huge landholders and military leaders who lorded over landless peasants.  The redistributed land, taught the peasants reading, writing, and history, and united many of the varied bandit groups into a sort of proto-state struggling against the injustice they had lived.

In the end, Lampião and Maria Bonita were killed by the army and their movement lives only in memory, in music, and in dance and crafts pioneered by the group (they believed that culture and fashion were an integral part of the revolution).  But as I told Helena the story, I got an insight into the connection between childhood and political philosophy.

Every kid knows the basic tenant of any political critique: "That's not fair!"  Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Marx... they all start with that basic issue: Life isn't fair.  The bandits of the cangaço had the same insight, and they wanted to get a bigger piece of the pie for themselves, just as a boy declares that it isn't fair that he gets less birthday cake than his brother.  Real political philosophy emerges when one universalizes the question: not how life can be more fair for me, but how it can be more just for everyone: that was the move we see in Lampião and Maria Bonita, and one that I contend is the basic insight of many great children's movies today (A Bug's Life, Robots, Monsters Inc).  [I'm afraid I have only written about this in Spanish, but it is great fun to use philosophy to analyze Pixar!]

Maybe this story will help Helena see, as she grows up, that what matters isn't getting more for herself, or her family, tribe, country... but for everyone.