Looking in the eyes

Rita, Helena, and I just got back from two weeks of work in Recife, a city that can be wonderful in many ways... but ethics on the bus cannot be included in that list.  There, commuting is a war, where the drivers of jam-packed busses wrestle their broken-down machines past each other, jerking and accelerating so much that the dozens of strap-hangers can only keep their feet by falling into each other.  Shin-kicking, stepping on feet, elbows... it's all part of the morning in one of the world's most violent cities (the connection between murder rate and bus behavior is not, I think, a random one).

One of the few rules that people obey on the bus is the social obligation to give up a seat for a mother with a baby (sadly, people don't give them up for old or handicapped people).  Over the last several years, however, we have observed a growing exception to this rule: if you don't see the baby, you're not obliged to give up your seat.  As such, on crowded busses, people make a conscious effort to avoid eye contact with any standing mother.

As Rita rode one particularly crowded bus last week, swaying dangerously with Helena in one arm, I counted seven young men who began to "sleep" only after we made it onto the bus, and a couple more people suddenly fascinated by whatever was happening out the window.  Finally, one man let his eyes wander, and Rita's eyes met his.  With a sign and a feigned shrug of "Oh, sorry, I didn't see you," he stood and gave up his seat.

I could write pages on the brutality of public space in Recife (a great part of Rita's PhD dissertation addresses exactly those issues), but here I want to talk about eyes.  What is it about eye contact that inspires responsibility?  Why can we ignore our responsibility to others as long as we can pretend that we don't see them?  And how can we "pretend" this when we, the person to whom we are responsible, and in fact everyone else around, knows that it is a lie?

Parasites

Over the last week, Helena Iara has been watching a turtledove that has made its nest under the eaves of our house.  Each morning, she wakes up and walks out onto the balcony to say good morning to the bird and see if the chicks have hatched.  We've used the time to talk to her about caring for little creatures, explaining how birds reproduce, and showing her how to wait for something interesting.  So, you can imagine my concern when I walked out onto the porch this morning (well before Helena awoke, thank goodness) to find a dead little bird on the floor.

As I buried the little critter, I looked at it more carefully: the beach was different from that of a turtledove. The feathers weren't anything like the mother.  And it was huge for a neonate.  In fact, the dead baby bird wasn't even the turtledove's child: it was a chupim.  The mother chupim lays its eggs in another bird's nest and then goes away, leaving the host mother to care for her babies... and since the chupim is a huge bird, it generally eats all of the food that the mother brings for her own kids, leaving them to dies of starvation.  The turtledove's expression as she sat on her nest this morning, something I had taken for sadness, was actually something very different, maybe even the pride of a mother who had seen the danger and defended her chicks (as yet unhatched) by pushing the interloper out of the nest (all of that is a projection, of course; who knows what emotions a bird really feels).

In Brazil, a chupão isn't just a bird: it's a metaphor, and incarnation of evil.  In Brazilian popular culture, the greatest possible sin is to be a parasite, to take advantage of others without giving anything back: in a poor society where reciprocating favors and paying off debts was often the difference between starvation and survival, it's an ethic that makes sense.  Rita tells stories of her brother going off into the woods to hunt baby chupins when he was a kid, a boy's idea of defending the weak against a species that is both parasitical upon and stronger than its victims.  Whether in the favela or the countryside, you hear similar stories, and much of the progressive, left wing orientation of contemporary Brazilian life and politics depends on the critique of the chupim (and things like it).

What does all of this have to do with philosophy and a baby girl?  We generally see philosophy as a story of genius: Plato wrote..., Kant thought..., Nietzsche said...  In fact, though, it's hard to know how much of that "individual" genius isn't merely an effective expression of social ideas.  William James's pragmatism, for instance, serves as a splendid critique of European metaphysical overkill, but he himself recognized that he was merely channeling American attitudes, looking for "what works."  The amazing gift of Emmanuel Levinas, one of the great philosophers of the 20th century, was to put centuries of rabbinical Jewish thought in dialogue with phenomenology.  No thinker is just himself: he speaks the metaphors of his culture.

The attack on the chupim, whether by my brother-in-law when he was a boy, or by a mother turtledove defending her chicks, expresses a profound ethics, an idea as important -- and probably with more impact on the lives of poor people in Brazil -- as the reflections of any academic philosopher.  I'm still glad that Helena didn't see the dead baby bird, but when she wakes up, I'm going to tell her the story.

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."

"Where's her mommy?"

A couple of days ago, Helena Iara and I were playing in the living room, when she found a tiny rag doll.  It's a very simple thing, just arms and legs and head and eyes, and Rita bought it when we were in Chiapas, Mexico, five or six years ago.  But what matters to the story here is that the baby is part of a pair: there is also a mommy doll, and they are always together (they were first sewn together, but as happens with curious babies, Helena seems to have picked them apart).

So what did Helena do, upon finding the doll?  A worried expression came over her face, and she began to say "Mommy?  Mommy?" but not with the sort of voice she uses to call Rita.  She walked around the room, looking in the toy box, on the sofa, other places where the mommy doll might be.  She only came to smile again when she found the other doll.

Who knows how many ethical systems philosophers have thought up over the thousands of years since Aristotle talked about finding virtue in the middle between two extremes.  Kant and the duty to the moral law, Mill's utility, Levinas and the face...  But I'd put a good bet on the first step of any ethical system being empathy, feeling for a baby who has lost his mommy.  Maybe both the baby and the mommy are just cloth, but it means something.

Isn't she just a doll?

On our recent trip to Salvador and Recife, Helena Iara heard one comment time and time again: "Isn't she just a little doll?" ("É como uma bonequinha!")  Helena is a cute baby, but what really attracted interest was how blond she is: in the very African cities of Brazil's northeast (and where the harsh sun burns everyone black pretty soon), such a white baby is shocking.  I'm not exaggerating when I say she stopped traffic on downtown streets.


I began to tell Helena a little more about the philosophy of Jean Baudrillard, which seemed quite apropos... Baudrillard's basic idea is that in post-modernity, the sense of reference is lost.  Instead of a picture signifying some real thing "behind" it, representation develops a new relationship to reality.  What, he asks, does the China exhibition at Epcot Center have to do with China?  He defines the simulacrum as a "Copy for which there is no original."

As I explained to Helena, it seemed even more perverse the doll -- originally a signifier of a baby, but now a kind of simulacrum -- would now become the reference by which real babies are judged.  If a baby is "like a doll", then she is pretty and good. Certain other comments we heard on the street also made it clear that the comparison had to do with wealth: several women declared "She looks like a soap opera baby!" while one street boy innocently spoke the truth that lies behind all of these comments: "She looks almost like a baby of the rich people!"  The rich, like a doll, are unreal and perfect, powerful but untouchable.

Fortunately, Rita was listening to my diatribe and stopped me before it got out of hand.  She explained to Helena that the real problem wasn't ontological, but practical.  When people describe a baby as a doll, they may also treat the girl as a thing.  The cheek-pinching, hair-mussing, and invasive stares she got from people she had never seen before and would never see again served as very good evidence of this fact.

In the end, I still contend that issues of the constitution of being in postmodernity are important... but Rita is basically right.  The real issue with seeing the other was a doll is that she becomes a thing.  Prized and treasured, perhaps, but basically an object.  Instead of another subject with whom I interact, people on the street wanted an object with which they could play.

On the street

Sunday night, Rita, Helena, and I were walking through Recife Antigo, the old city built by Dutch colonists in the 16th and 17th centuries, and now a contrast of old beauty and urban decay.  The sound of drums echoed through the narrow streets, as maracatus practiced their rhythms, but few people were around, and few streetlights illuminated our way.  Crossing an abandoned street, we saw a girl of thirteen or fourteen years -- the kind of girl we might have named a "street kid" before understanding how life on the street really works -- who was kicking a light rubber ball and watching it float slowly to the ground.  Helena Iara was fascinated, and pointed to the girl and her game.

Attracted by the finger and Helena's shouts of interest, the girl approached: not with the timidity one might expect of a street girl, nor the begging tones of a poor urchin, but with an excited voice.  "Do you want to play?" she asked Helena, and then turned to us, as if asking permission.

Rita set Helena on the cobblestones, and she grabbed the string of the balloon-ball and began to kick it across the ground, limited only by Rita's hand from running and falling.  She laughed, screamed, kicked to ball to Thaisa (as the girl introduced herself) and then waited for it to come back.  Rita and I joined the laughter, which lifted the sinister air that had filled the streets.

I don't think we played any more than five minutes before we picked up Helena and headed to the bus stop, but I think that those minutes probably taught Helena more philosophy -- the encounter with difference, treating others as equal, as ends instead of means, of the chance to learn and play and not fear -- than any number of talks that she and I might have.  A beautiful night of practical philosophy and ethics.

The Face of a Baby

Two nights ago, Helena Iara wouldn't go back to sleep.  This has become rather common for her, I fear.  She sleeps well through the first half of the night, then wakes and doesn't seem interested in sleeping after her midnight snack.  So that Rita could get a little sleep, I took her out to the hammock, and (yes, the story has become repetitive).

Helena has an immense attention span, especially when she finds colors that she likes (there is a wall downstairs, somewhere between red and brown, that fascinates her) or random movements (light on blowing leaves in the morning).  But what is striking is how long she can stare into one's eyes: with or without focus (there is some debate about this), she can sit and watch and watch and watch as long as I am willing to keep my eyes on hers.

Now, there is an interesting neurology reflection here, given how much of our brains are dedicated to recognizing faces, and it might be worthwhile to suggest that this ability emerges even before a baby is able to focus clearly.  That's not the point of this blog, however.  As we looked into each others eyes in the low light of a single lamp in the middle of the night, I began to think about Emmanuel Levinas.

Like many philosophers influenced by structuralism after the second world war, Levinas was obsessed by the Other, the relationship between the I and the thou.  As a Jew who had just been freed from a concentration camp, he brought an intimate ethical perspective this question, and began to think about a commandment that appears many times in the Torah (though not in the famous 10 Commandments): the requirement that God's people care for the orphan, the widow, and the stranger.  For Levinas, this is the center of Jewish teaching, the responsibility to be open and loving to people who have no social support structure.

Levinas was not, however, by any means naïve.  He had seen too much of the Holocaust for that.  He didn't think that merely talking about this commandment would make people change.  Instead, he began with his own observation: when people have the courage to look each other in the eyes, to recognize the face of the other, they hear a call.  After looking into the eyes of the other honestly and profoundly, I myself am no longer the same: I am called to a relationship to that person, called to justice and kindness (Hesed and Mishpat, the two great Hebrew virtues).

I spend a lot of my time looking into the eyes of the widows, orphans, and strangers of our epoch: street kids, child soldiers, forgotten indigenous people, homeless mothers...  It's my job, but I also like to think that I live up to the Levinasian expectation, and that each one of these encounters leaves me transformed (and, of course, does something for the other, as well).  But to look into the eyes of a baby, of my own daughter... there is something much deeper there.  It isn't about ethics or politics or theology or hesed and mishpat.  All of those words imply love and responsibility, but not to the same degree as is required with this little tiny girl.

Rather intimidating, I have to say I as write this...