Monday, February 28, 2011

Time and Change

Time is something fleeting. Human beings can only perceive time through movement, and movement is only a series of changes in position and state. We sense that time is unfolding because we can see objects resting in one position one moment and then observe them resting in another position just by moving them, or understand that a child has aged based on observing them being seven years old one moment and eight years the next. The interim between these two moments where a change has been observed is what we call time. If an object could remain stationary and completely unchanged at all so-called "times", we'd have no evidence of time existing around that object.

Because we're unable to fully observe time itself unfolding on an individual, we tend to assume that they are whatever they appear to be in the moment we observe them, and that they will continue to be what they were in that moment for every one thereafter. On the contrary though, we may look at a new car one moment and then watch it run off the road and wreck on a tree, and consider the wrecked car and the new car the same vehicle and focus on the change in its state, but we don't see the child and the adult as one entity at two different times in the same manner. This is to say, there's a disconnect in how we perceive the line between child and adult, we may not see it as a straight line from one to the other.

Rather, we seem to observe children as if they were a race of subhumans coexisting along with adults, and the line connecting them to the human race appears to us to be divergent, mysterious, or just totally heading off into obscurity. Cognitively, of course, we understand that all adults start out at one time being children, and that all children (unless they meet with an unfortunate end or have some other circumstance), eventually mature into adults at another time, but because we can't see it happening, there's a tendency for our minds to assume that it's not happening. This is how a child can "grow up so fast," for instance. In reality, they are not in fact growing up fast, they're growing up normally. It's just that we don't perceive that growth has happened unless we can physically observe it in the space of a much shorter interval.

Due to this inability to perceive natural growth, adults may make inaccurate assumptions about a child's maturation. For instance, the eye can observe a moving image that the brain perceives as a static one, and will judge the image to be static--as in, no change from the time the image began to when it ended--all because the image is moving imperceptibly. If the growth of a child is similarly imperceptible, then adults may often judge the child to be static over a definite amount of time--as in, no change from the time they began seeing the child and when they stopped--when in reality, the child is maturing every day, as are adults in one way or another.

Children also make inaccurate perceptions about adults, and don't perceive their parents' hairs growing grayer, or in general, tend to believe that the way their parents are in the moment is the way they always were and will always be. Children have an unnatural expectation that things will never change, and perhaps only have a fleeting idea of what it may be like to change over time based purely on what they know about the nature of the world. Children who've no doubt experienced a lot of change will be more adept to notice how time impacts all things regardless of how stable everything appears in the moment. But however inaccurate children and young peoples' perceptions of adults may be, only the adults have granted themselves the authority to flex their inaccurate perceptions over a child's development and even punish them for growing up faster than is perceptible--no matter how natural the development is proceeding.

These errors in perception account for the majority of ageist prejudice against adults and children alike, and everything in between. Racial prejudice is a shorthand way of categorizing a person based on characteristics that are permanent (skin color for instance), whereas ageist prejudice is a shorthand way of categorizing a person based on characteristics that are impermanent (short stature in children, or mental capacity for instance). To underestimate or overestimate a person for a characteristic they exhibit temporarily, and assume that because they are exhibiting it now, in the moment, they'll continue to exhibit it forever, is discrimination.

For instance, if a child exhibits a sexual behavior with another child as a purely natural expression of their temporary lack of knowledge on sexual social customs, to criminalize or at least stigmatize that child as a lifelong pervert would be age discrimination. In it, those making the assumption would be choosing to focus on the immediacy of the action's appropriateness, factoring in the child's lack of understanding, and ignoring the temporary nature of the circumstance. It could be that in twenty years time, that child is not the sex beast that their actions at the age of four would have led us to predict, and perhaps even less so because of the abundance of negative attention those actions might receive in the present. In many ways, children are at the mercy of how adults perceive or don't perceive them changing over time.

Due to the fact that we are never fully here or there between being born and being in the full maturation of our faculties, what sense does it make to continue dividing up individuals along artificial categories spread out across time? Can we not just look at a child and think "human being," as we do for adults, and just expect that any differences between them are expressions of being in two different developmental timezones, and that all behaviors and expressions pursuant to one are simply relative to the expressions of the other? For while it may be sunset in one timezone, in another that very moment, it is dawn--and for all the hoopla surrounding their objective difference, the only thing that separates them is their relative distance from one another across time.

1 comment:

  1. Some interesting ideas in this post Crake. So, on a lighter note I am wondering if you can help me with a little problem?

    While reading this my mind has wondered,(staying with the car reference) into a dead end, or a cal-de-sac of one great paradigm - not sure which. The child that I was has greatly influenced the adult that I have become, but can the adult I am influence the child that I was? If not then I guess one might conclude that the child is solely responsible for all that is good and evil in this world.

    Or should I simply write it all off as one and the same?

    Keep in mind that the majority of Shakespeare's sonnets are understood to be addressed to an unknown boy. hehe!

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