On Threatening Babies with Death
by Marc Barnes
Generally speaking, the best way to make a baby laugh is to pretend to kill it. The effect can be achieved by different methods. Holding the baby to your face, engaging it in serious conversation, drop it two feet—three, if you are a Highly Skilled Father—and catch it again between your arm and leg. The baby will laugh. For optimal results, cry, “Oh no, the baby!” while it falls. Hanging the baby upside-down by its feet and/or threatening to eat it is also hilarious. Throwing it towards the ceiling: classic. Loving words are well and good, but “I’m gonna getcha” —replete with clawing, stalking, pouncing, and other signs of unhinged animal aggression —usually cracks the kid up.
Historically, mothers disapprove of baby-chucking, but, unless the baby is too young, they tend to discourage it through a smile that obviously encourages it: “I can’t look,” I remember my mother saying, rather unhelpfully, as my father would fling me about, flip me over, and otherwise leap at me like our living room was a minor-league wrestling venue. But even the gentler signs of affection threaten death. Some poor, fat child sits, blissfully gnawing at the end of an empty beer bottle, and his mother, that river and giver of life, stirred by some perverse spirit, pretends she can’t see him, that she’s lost him—“where’s the baby?” Or she hides from him, ducking behind the couch to pop out again, or covering her face to reveal it at the last moment—boo! Of course, the absence of the mother means death for the baby. The gestures that get the giggles always get screams of horror when carried on too long or too far—for what an absolute nightmare, should your only love and sustenance and security disappear behind a couch while you sat helpless and high-chaired! Where’s the baby, indeed!
Tickling has this quality. It is a cause of laughter because it is also a restrained threat: the hands of the other poke and prod, revealing, most basically, that the child is entirely in the adult’s power. It is not the purely physical sensation that gets the laughs. No one can tickle themselves. It is the inability to anticipate where and when the sensation will occur, the breathless being in the hands of an overwhelmingly powerful other—this is what has the kid in stitches, with a laughter always on the edge of alarm.
The first joke of life is the possibility of death. This would be basic evidence of the immortality of the soul, that our response to being dropped, squashed, flung or attacked is a giggle—as if mortality were an absurdity. But really, it more immediately reveals our origins in love. Humor relies on the defiance of expectations. A man slipping on a banana is only funny under the presumption that man has dignity and self-control. Every joke sets up an expectation only to break with it at the end, and the threat of death is only funny if life begins under the presumption of love.
The very first giggles we get out of a human person are through some way of saying—without language—“imagine if I didn’t love you.” (Har, har, how ridiculous!) I don’t suppose a baby would chuckle to see a pig fly, but he’ll split a seam watching his mother disappear. Laughter gives evidence of the ridiculousness of the counterfactual—that I am not loved—and so affirms the reasonableness of the fact that I am loved. And if it is strange that the baby delights in almost being killed, it is stranger still that his parents delight in almost killing him. No one teaches a mother to suddenly turn on her precious and singular munchkins with a roar. No one prompts the uncle to engage his nieces and nephews in the art of combat. Rather, the very self-assurance of the baby cries out to us, and we are inspired to test the primordial thesis given in its chubby placidity—that we are all, from the beginning, loved.
Many things have been said about the story of Abraham and Isaac, but one that can’t be said is that the thing was funny. Still, I can’t help but see in the story the same ritual dynamic by which every father pretends to kill his children: God the Father tells his beloved Abraham to sacrifice his own beloved son; the son is brought to the point of death and caught at the last minute; the event is a test that proves that Abraham loves God and God loves them all. Did Isaac chuckle on the way down from the mountain? Did they joke later on—“what are you going to do, Dad, kill me?” Who knows.
It is the basic thesis of liberalism—that philosophy embodied in all our modern technologies and institutions—that we are not social by nature, but individuals, and that anything that looks “social” is in fact some amalgamation of individual things and persons. The most famous one (repeated by weird people who talk about “marriage markets,” Redditors, and evolutionary psychologists to this day) is the Hobbesian argument that society itself is “really just” individuals making contracts with each other in order to pursue their own self-interest.
This idea took off with various mythic re-workings of the book of Genesis, all of them designed to eliminate the Bible’s insistent description of man as constitutively social; male and female; linguistic by nature; naturally pursuing the common good. Instead, Enlightenment philosophers chewed the cud of pagan texts and came up with new origin stories in which “individuals” wandered “up and down the forests,” without “moral relations or determinate obligations one with another,” from the beginning “without industry, without speech, and without home ... neither standing in need of [their] fellow-creatures nor having any desire to hurt them, and perhaps even not distinguishing them one from another.” That was Rousseau. Hobbes had already described the same scene with less frills: agreement “of men is by covenant only, which is artificial.” Locke is just a milquetoast Hobbes: men by nature are in “a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit.”
Living according to the myths of such men makes each of us into what Charles Taylor called a “buffered self,” in which we guard and govern our little asocial core, seek our private goods—and complain about the “social constructions” that impinge upon our efforts of self-realization. Contemporary leftists play at original thought, but they go no further than the forays of Hobbes: We survive as individuals only through a “primary and inaugurative alienation in sociality,” says Judith Butler. That “sociality” is not natural, but a violence individuals must undergo—this is the consistent faith of modernity.
One thing I love about babies is that they make funny sounds. Another is that, after a few months of waking up, they are already laughing at the libs. Babies presume abundance, and laugh whenever some jovial parent threatens them with scarcity. Contra Freud, the thought of competition between them and their parents cracks them up. Rousseau posits that man, in his original state, was an individual, a silliness that necessitates that he imagine babies as proto-individuals, kept for self-interested reasons and then abandoned:
The mother gave suck to her children at first for her own sake; and afterwards, when habit had made them dear, for theirs: but as soon as they were strong enough to go in search of their own food, they forsook her of their own accord; and, as they had hardly any other method of not losing one another than that of remaining continually within sight, they soon became quite incapable of recognising one another when they happened to meet again.
Now, Rousseau gave all five of his kids up to an orphanage, so I concede that some may be nearer to his “state of nature” than others. But, for babies, it is quite literally a joke. Losing the mother is a game they love to play, precisely because it affirms the non-individual status of both: “peek-a-boo” makes known, by way of contrast, that the two belong to each other; that they are members of one body; that the mother is made mother by the child even as the child is made child by the mother, and that this is an enduring metaphysical relationship and a social reality; that, in short, they cannot lose each other, even if, God forbid, they do. Imagining this social reality as actually being a mere individual contract—that the mother might walk away, that she might disappear, that she might hide her face, that the so-called bond is just her choice—all of this is hilarious to the kiddos.
Hobbes argues that “the Infant is first in the power of the Mother; so as she may either nourish, or expose it, if she nourish it, it oweth its life to the Mother; and is therefore obliged to obey her, rather than any other.” Dark as hell, but it makes sense. If individualism is true—if all so-called relationships are really only so many dressed-up, self-interested power grabs—then the mother-child relationship can only be explained as one of domination. She may freely kill or let the child live; to “let live” is to freely contract and consent to the relationship. This allows her to remain an individual with a child attached—rather than finding herself already changed, already a being-in-relation to the child, already “mother” as a substantive fact (rather than as the extrinsic modification of a fundamentally unchanged individual).
Like all individualists, Hobbes ruins the joke. It is not the case that the baby owes its life to the mother because she does not kill it. Rather the mother owes her life as mother to the child even as the child owes its life to the mother—the two are one. We could describe this obviously social phenomenon as nothing more than an individual one—but why would we?
A creature breaks out into guffaws when it is suggested he will be eaten, cooked, exposed, and abandoned; the adults near this creature threaten, with beaming smiles and to the delight of all parties, precisely these atrocities—why would we suppose anything but that the creature in question is born into an enduring relationship of love which is natural and proper to it? Why would we deconstruct such a primary phenomenon with some nasal-toned “well, actually”—as in, “actually the creature is born as an individual whose parents have dominion over it by virtue of their raw power to kill it if they so decided”—when this is precisely the joke! Babies are born laughing at Hobbes.
One of the reasons abortion is so popular in liberal societies is that it strips the game of threatening babies with death of all its humor. Abortion is sociopathic, humorless, without irony or depth: it takes the joke seriously.
Because of legalized and genuinely possible abortion, it seems true that the first relationship between man and man is that of an individual decision to “allow to live” made by one who may as well have chosen to kill. Abortion seems to make liberalism true, and when the mother says “where’s the baby?” and the father throws the baby up in the air, both have some reason to reprimand the child for giggling: “What’s so funny?” says a society of abortion, “Don’t you know that I really could have killed you?”
All of which is to say that the Catholic does not merely stand for some esoteric “right to life” when he opposes abortion. More fundamentally, the Catholic opposes the fundamental ground of liberalism—the anthropology of individualism embodied in its institutions, its economic habits, and its technologies. He calls it what it is—a bad joke—and recommends, in its place, a good joke: a civilization of love.
This essay originally appeared at New Polity, and is reposted with the permission of the author.