The Big Bad Wolf

Helena Iara is afraid of the Big Bad Wolf.  Well, sort of.  From time to time, especially when we are playing hide and seek, she will run toward me with a gleeful scream of pretend fear and say "Lobo Mau, Lobo Mau!" and then jump into my arms.  Then she giggles again, cuddles, and runs off to find any sign of the Big Bad Wolf that might give her a chance to do it again.

There are no wolves in Helena's life.  If she really wanted something to fear, she would do much better thinking about the pit vipers we find in the garden from time to time.  How did the wolf come to occupy such a significant place in her imagination and play?

A couple of years ago, Rita and I made a series of short films with pre-schoolers from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro.  A surprising number of them featured the Big Bad Wolf, from the amazingly funny "Incredible story of Granny and the Big Bad Wolf", to "The Magic Wand" and even a music video called "Bats".  These kids lived in a place that was authentically frightening, where we heard gunfights in the streets regularly, and occasionally would see either cops or drug soldiers running through the streets, pursued by their enemies.  Yet only one of the kids' stories made reference to guns, and many of them talked about wolves.

I don't recall whether it was Kierkegaard or Heidegger who insisted that if fear means that you are frightened of something, anxiety is when you are scared of nothing.  The clenched heart and cloying sweat of fear are there, but you don't have anything to look at, to say: "This is the cause of my fear."  And though we often think of anxiety as the domain of stressed-out urbanites and patients in psychoanalysis, early childhood must be a very anxious time.  Think of Helena: from time to time, without any real explanation that she can understand, we pick up her clothes and her toys, get in an airplane, and start living somewhere else: in a favela of Recife, the mountains of Santa Fe, the middle of the Amazon jungle.  And right about when she gets comfortable and starts to like the place, we go back.

There is probably an origin of anxiety in evolutionary biology, too: the need to keep on your toes, or simply that when we evolved the biology of fear, it didn't make as much genetic sense to also evolve the capacity to relax.  So anxiety is with us, even when we are little kids.

The Big Bad Wolf, I think (or any imaginary object that scares us) serves as a way to transform anxiety into fear, a way to find a cause for the broad-ranging uncertainty we feel.  As Helena talks about the Wolf, she consoles herself to say, "Here is the danger.  Other places are safe."  Instead of worrying (another manifestation of anxiety!) that she fears something imaginary, I should be happy that she has found a way to remove anxiety from her life, displacing it onto a game like the Wolf.

Schleiermacher and the Sacrifice of Isaac

Helena Iara woke at about 3AM last night, and after eating well, had problems getting back to sleep.  An upset stomach, probably.  So I took her to the little hammock where she likes to sit and rock with me, and it seemed like it was time to talk about high German idealism.  Schleiermacher is the first thinker who entered my mind, and the subject interested Helena enough that she stopped crying.

Friedrich Schleiermacher attempted to merge Kantian rationalism with Christian Theology in the first half of the 19th century, but he may be most famous for his definition of religion as the sense of absolute dependence on God.  With those words, "absolute dependence," it might be a little easier to understand why I would want to talk with a baby about a philosopher who is hardly there in the first rank of famous thinkers.  Because if anything or anyone is truly and absolutely dependent on another, it is a newborn baby on her mother.  In spite of the myths of being raised by wolves like Romulus and Remus, if a baby doesn't have someone to give her milk and clean her bottom, she is not long for the world.

Personally, I have to say that I'm unconvinced by such a definition of religion, maybe just because it isn't the sort of thing I feel in my bones.  So Helena and I moved on to one of Schleiermacher's rivals in that time, Søren Kierkegaard (she had begun to cry a little as I questioned the idea of absolute dependence, so I had to rock harder in the hammock and try a new subject).  And if you're talking about Kierkegaard to a little baby, one subject has to come up: his analysis of the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham in Fear and Trembling.

Kierkegaard's idea of religion is quite different, as expressed by the title of the book: it involved the sense of awe one feels before God, and the need to obey even the most absurd of commands because of the power of this awe.  Kierkegaard imagines what it must have been like for Abraham, after longing so long for a son, to hear God's command to go and sacrifice the boy on the top of a nearby hill.  Abraham heard and obeyed, in spite of the fact that ever fiber of his being, his ethics, his love for his son, his hope for his future... all depended on the life of Isaac.  That troubled and troubling obedience was, for Kierkegaard, the essence of religion.

Imagine the response of a baby, whether little Helena or little Isaac.  Tell the story from the perspective of the child, and it is even more perverse, disturbing.  It seems one of the best arguments to be done with religion, to embrace the happy atheism of the modern age.  I don't want to be anywhere near a God who would even play with such a terrible command, not as a test, not as a game, not as a joke.  And I certainly want to be a long way away when I have my six day old daughter on my lap.

So I started to talk about this history of religion in the Middle East, of the cults of Ba'al and El and the worship of the Hittites.  Human sacrifice played an important role in all of these religions, and priests often commanded their believers to kill their children as a test of a sign of their obedience.  In fact, Kierkegaard had his history wrong: Abraham lived in a world where sacrificing children had been normalized; itwas something that lots of people did, that he might have seen as sad, but hardly the "unthinkable absurdity" of which Kierkegaard talks.

Abraham's courage, then, was not to climb the mountain to sacrifice Isaac.  His courage was to listen to the second voice, when God said "Don't.  Don't kill you son."  It was at that moment that he broke down his expectations, obeyed the unexpected and terrible God instead of the laws of man.  At least that's what I needed to tell Helena Iara.  Otherwise, I wouldn't want her to do anything to do with Yahweh.