Something I've never really understood...

[vulgarweed]

the concept of "innocence" and why it's valued so much.



Usually when you see it thrown around online, it's got to do with sex (as if fetuses haven't been caught on ultrasound wanking in the womb). But it goes deeper than that - I just got into it with someone on a message board about a 14-year-old upset by studying history of genocide.

Urk...I read Anne Frank's diary at 11--after that I started reading every book and encyclopedia entry that I could find about the Holocaust, including lots of crying and nightmares and staring at death camp pictures, trying to understand what happened to her, for she'd become an "imaginary friend" to me, as characters in beloved books always do.

That was almost three years after the months I'd spent staring at the TIME magazine cover with all the pictures of the bloated Jonestown bodies on it, stealing it from my parents and trying to wrap my brain around the concept of people killing themselves...just because I knew my mom's best friend had killed herself 2 years before and she was still grieving - I'd overheard my parents talking about it at night, and they'd given me a dumbed-down "child-friendly" version of why Sally was gone, but just because I was little doesn't mean I was dumb, and I was well aware my mom was still crying about it sometimes.



I don't get it. Why is "innocence" considered worthwhile? Isn't it just a sentimentalized version of ignorance? If I hadn't been aware of intense human suffering in childhood, would I have any sense of social conscience or empathy now? It ALL starts young, or it never happens at all, right? (Believe me, I've met people who never empathized with victims or knew poverty or tragedy as kids. I don't envy them and I wouldn't trust them as far as I could flick them with two fingers.)

Comments

[anna-wing.livejournal.com]

I'd say that what's termed 'childhood innocence' is really just a combination of ignorance, vulnerability and oblviousness to adult social norms

So would I. Which is why tourists and foreign visitors are usually considered innocent too, in the sense of being non-combatants in whatever social struggle is going on in the particular society in which they happen to be passing strangers. Of course that doesn't work for children brought up within that society. For them, I agree that "innocence" in the sense mostly being used in this discussion ie knowledge about (a) sex and (b) various kinds of danger and wrongdoing, reflects the kinds of ignorance that a society deems desirable to inflict on children, for reasons largely to do with social control.

On the other hand, the presumed opposition between innocence and cynicism is quite false. The common assumption that as soon as one stops being ignorant of the complexity of the world one must automatically turn into a sociopathic misanthrope is demonstrably untrue.

There's also a certain false cynicism which is equally the product of ignorance (one sees this in people who lack the experience or the wits to know that they are inexperienced).

[fyrdrakken]

For them, I agree that "innocence" in the sense mostly being used in this discussion ie knowledge about (a) sex and (b) various kinds of danger and wrongdoing, reflects the kinds of ignorance that a society deems desirable to inflict on children, for reasons largely to do with social control.

I keep seeing parallels between our recent levels of cultural fetishization of childhood and Victorian era myths about what women should be allowed to know or do, and I'm thinking it's for a lot of the same reasons, with control being a big one. (The excuse for making all their choices for them is that they're too innocent to decide for themselves, and then active steps are taken to keep them from learning things that affect their own lives and perpetuate that "innocence"...)