The Baby as Gadfly

As I tried to convince Helena Iara to sleep last night (an immense challenge, as she wanted to eat and sleep at the same time, and thus could do neither on Rita's lap), the only thing that calmed her was my voice.  Since I could talk about anything, I decided she needed to learn about the social history of Greece in the time of Socrates ("needed", here, meaning something like, "At least I could talk about it without stopping for an hour at three in the morning").  She seemed fascinated, in the same way that she is fascinated by anything that Rita and I say, as long as we say it while looking into her eyes.

What struck me, though, as I improvised a long free-assocition on the role of world trade, greek colonization, and the sociality of the agorá, was one of the famous things that Socrates said about himself.  For as much as Plato and hundreds of philosophers after him have tried to impose some kind of systematic theory on Socratic thought, it seems that system was what least interested the man.  What interested him was troubling the complacency of others, challenging people to re-think the easy propositions that allow them to lie to themselves about their own lives.  "I am a gadfly," Socrates said, an insect which buzzes and irritates to force people to think.

Helena Iara is a kind of gadfly; for me, at least.  As anyone who knows me is well aware, I am anything but intellectually or socially complacent: I constantly undermine my own thinking, work with child soldiers in Colombia or street kids in Brazil, climb mountains in the Andes... not the stuff of a boring Athenian (or American) citizen content in his mediocrity.  But I think that one could argue (and Rita certainly did argue), that I had become complacent in my incomplacency, content to constantly change my life because living one adventure after another is, in fact, a kind of repetition (there is, by the way, a pretty clear parallel to the self criticism of Deleuze's thought in Difference and Repetition, here).  I knew quite well that the only real challenge to the series of adventures I had been living, was, in fact, an inescapable commitment.  For that reason, of course, I avoided having a child with such intensity.

Older children clearly play the role of gadflies: I remember riding back from a soccer tournament with a friend one afternoon, as he complained about the traffic backed up on the roads in the south of the Island of Santa Catarina.  "Too many people moving here," he declared, "and too many people buying new cars."  His seven year old daughter, in the back of the car, thought for moment and then said, "But Dad, we just moved to the south of the island, and you just bought a new car..."  Children are excellent at catching the small (and sometimes huge) hypocrisies that we adults have so easily naturalized.  (I wrote extensively about this idea in both Agony Street and KidVid and Popular Education.)

I did not expect, however, that a baby, years before learning expose my hypocrisies with her words, would be able to be such an effective gadfly.  But through her cries at three in the morning, she certainly out Socratized Socrates.