Possible Meaning of Ancestry
Paulo J S Bittencourt
We know the phenomenon in question well, and the Decalogue of the Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – vehemently attests in its fifth commandment: “Honor your father and your mother (…).” (Exodus 20:12) The beautiful song of our late bard Belchior [Brazilian composer] also echoes the object of the same experience, although the emphasis seems to fall precisely in its opposite meaning: “(…) it is you who loves the past
And who does not see
That the new always comes
(…) My pain is realizing
That despite having done everything we did
We are still the same (…)
And we live like our parents”.
South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han emphasizes that modern times have filled us with new emptiness that hyper-consumption has elevated to the status of the most irrational apathy. We do not establish emotional ties even with the materiality of objects, objects that we consider, for this very reason, disposable. What will be said, therefore, about the things that would guarantee us support, stability and tranquility in life? It turns out that the turmoil of the present and the compulsive obsession with surprise exclude the experience of the past from temporal architecture in such a way that the spirit of immediate time still insists on relegating it to the condition of an obtuse and tyrannical inheritance. We are still the same, ravaged by the Enlightenment arrow of that unique temporality, whose only goal, the “telos”, is developmental-extractiveism, to use a key concept systematized by the Ecuadorian Alberto Acosta in his instigating book “The Good Life: An Opportunity to imagine other worlds.” In this sense, contemporary capitalism has softened, as never before, the ever-moving desire of the Platonic meaning according to which the fundamental impulse of the loving condition, “eros” – as the renowned disciple of Socrates said in the infamous dialogue “The Symposium” – is nourished the feeling of absence of what is desired. If for Buddha to desire is to suffer, Plato proclaims that to love is to desire. Now, once the object of love is consummated by presence, loving what we lack implies transferring love to other absent objects, and, indefinitely, so on.
I take “fathers and mothers” here as a metaphor beyond the ties of consanguinity that the same words contain in their strict senses. I proceed in the same way with the term “children”, as I see it in its broad perspective. Thus, both expressions would encompass broader meanings, that is, past generations and future generations, respectively.
It does not seem meaningless to me to assume that fundamental categories of the Western tradition itself regarding the object of love can constitute fruitful lenses for us to glimpse other worldviews and cultural practices of the relationship with the ancestral past. To this end, I evoke, here, the three types of love endorsed by Clóvis de Barros Filho. The first is Plato’s “eros”. The second, the relational nature formulated by Aristotle, “philia”, that is, the love for the explicit experience of the “appointed meeting”, the contemplation and admiration for the presence that imposes itself, which does us good and helps us grow. Frédéric Lenoir, in this sense, opportunely reminds us of the categorical question addressed to Diógenes Laércio – “What is a friend?” – to which he replied: “One soul living in two bodies.” Here, much more than the position of “living better” as the unbridled search for the absent, Aristotle seems to come closer to the notion of “living well”, that is, contentment with the references that both the past and the present have bequeathed, or, also, of the sublime joy for which the experience so solidly founded.
There would, however, be a third and final conception of love, that which is strictly sacrificial in relation to the lover himself, whose maximum purpose would reside exclusively in the “well-being” of the beloved. It is the “agape” love of Jesus, a visceral love that transcends even the Aristotelian predilection for intensely shared common activity. The love of Jesus would go beyond the love of others. His love would extend to hospitable love for the enemies who persecute him and the foreigners with whom – such as the good Samaritan who kindly helps the attacked Jew who would tend to hate him more – he learns to live this same art of loving.
And here I return along this circular trail to reverence for ancestry.
Richard E. Leakey and Roger Lewin, in “The Lake People: Man [his origins, nature and future”, consider that, from our most remote past, as long as each individual was faithful to the rules of reciprocal altruism, then the human species would be prepared for its evolutionary success. “We are human because our ancestors learned to share their food and skills in an honorable chain of obligations.” And it is the web of language that makes the network of social obligations ever more closely intertwined.
Of course, we are still talking about reciprocal altruism, that is, that which teaches you to give when you receive or to receive when you give, that same altruism that comes to assume the contours of religious meritocracy with the so-called theologies of retribution that plague many of the human beliefs. “One flatters divinity to obtain its favors.” However, when the subject is the impulse of ancestral generations to care for the well-being of future generations and the nature with which they will live beyond their immediate children, the situation becomes more complex. What is the point of taking care to maintain a fire that will no longer warm me? Does this imply the imperious rule of Dawkins’ selfish gene at the molecular level of large organisms? Or there will be, in contrast, the affirmation of the era of empathy, in the words of Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal, when protection for the future to come, whether that of the species or of nature itself, seems to fulfill the impetus of the first cell which was divided into two with a single purpose, namely, to pass on what was learned – I quote here the words of the character Samuel Norman, the scientist played by Morgan Freeman, in the 2014 film “Lucy”.
Thus, with our cultural and scientific lenses, the notion that exists in the African Zulu and Xhosa languages of “Ubuntu” that “I am when we are” seems to make more sense, that is, that the parts exist only as aspects of the greater unity. universal, or the principle of “Shinsetsu” in Japanese culture, a term that can be roughly translated as kindness, kindness and respect, attitudes that strictly aim at the well-being of others. Paulo Freire’s own fundamental concern in “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed” with the irrevocable goal of the educator, which is nothing more than the joy of the student, also becomes clearer.
Reverence to ancestry for its fully lived sacrificial agape, its pure or unconditioned altruism, which will always give knowing that it will not receive, because, as Augustine of Hippo insinuated, happiness is also desiring what we have and are with those who were with us and towards the common home, even when now absent.
Like Luther, they also planted apple trees, even though the next day the world would disintegrate.
______________________________
Professor Paulo Bittencourt is a brilliant teacher of Ancient and Medieval History at the Universidade Federal da Fronteira Sul UFFS [Erechim Campus], Brazil. He contributes articles regularly, and is a columnist of a periodical too. He has several books to his credit. He is an ardent student of Vedanta.