No, Baby, No!

Helena Iara is not allowed to climb the stairs in our house alone.  It's a very steep spiral, and though she has become a very good climber, we want to be sure that she doesn't fall.  Several days ago, however, we forgot to close the gate at the bottom of the stair, and Helena saw the error before we did.  She ran to the stairs, and then suddenly stopped.  "No, baby, no!" she declared, looking at Rita.  "Don't climb!"  At which point she moved forward and reached for the first rungs of the stair.  Fortunately, her words had warned us, and I was able to watch after her as she climbed.

We have noticed something similar in many things Helena Iara does.  She first declares what she knows to be the rule, and then goes about breaking it.  It can be about eating, yelling, touching the computer... she knows perfectly well what we say that she should do, but that doesn't stop her from doing what she planned in the first place.

Idealist philosophy of history posits that something similar happens with ideas and events.  Governments and social groups know what they should do long before they actually begin to do it.  Think about the noble principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States: democracy, equality, civil rights... but it took a good two hundred years, a couple of dozen constitutional amendments, a civil war, dozens of supreme court decisions, the civil rights movement, the women's movement, the gay rights movement, and only now are we getting anywhere near a coherence between the ideals of the United States and what is actually practiced.  And, of course, in those 200 years, other ideals have changed, and on that front, the US is pretty far behind.

Something similar happens with the discourse of human rights.  When the United Nations included the ideas of basic human rights in its charter -- thanks largely to Eleanor Roosevelt -- I don't think any country imagined that an ex-president of a country would be tried for crimes against humanity, as has happened with Pinochet, Serbian leaders, and African plutocrats.  Had they considered such a thing, few countries would have voted for such an offense to their sovereignty.  But the words were pretty; it would have been hard to justify a no vote at home.  So they accepted the charter, not knowing quite what they were getting into.

Growing up is something like that.  We accept the rules of our family and society "on paper" first (or more exactly, in Helena's mouth), but only later do we realize that we have to be coherent with those ideals.  Babies are hardly hypocrites when they say "don't climb" and then climb.  Maybe we should think that countries and social change work in a similar way.