Notes on Innocence
Daisy stood in a meadow of tall flowers. Her sights settled on a blossom of such tantalizing beauty that for a moment it seemed like a princess with an entourage of loyal subjects in full bloom. She bent down to pick this flower princess from its throne in the garden court. What a stunning gown it had, with alternating petals of pink, deep blue and the purest white she had ever seen. The flower was like the sky on that sunny blue day, swirling with puffs of white clouds.
She felt a sudden tremor in the ground, and figured it must have been the flower court demanding their most precious princess back. In joy she began plucking the petals from this flower princess, counting to herself the rhythm of numbers she was practicing in school. The warm wind tossed her hair like gentle finger. Around her the birds chirped like a Sunday choir.
It was on the count of "eight" that she felt the heat. It was on the count of "nine" that the birds were silenced. She was deafened in an instant by the thunder in the clouds. She was blinded in a second by the light. And her breath drew still through the fire in the blast.
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The young are impatient, discourteous, reactionary, dismissive, and antagonistic to the variety of life. They are in no traditional sense innocent in their behavior. A child can just as easily knowingly disobey an authority figure as an adult can knowingly disobey a social law or the standard of morality. If this is the case, as can be believed than why is it so common in the organization of our social constructions that children be treated as innocent, god-sent, or as possessing some benign part of human nature that adults have lost? Why is the construction of innocence waged so against adults and fellow human beings for the sake of preserving the young? In my mind, the preservation of all should be our priority. The innocence paradigm could be responsible for the miserable state of the world as it exists, the adult world contamination, the glorification and obsession with youth, and ironically the corruption of children.
Innocence is defined in a number of different ways. In the legal sense, a person is considered innocent when they are physically not guilty of a crime. The expression of innocence in this sense is a relative position. Innocence also manifests itself as a label for non-combatants; that is, people who are in not involved in a battle. The soldiers in the battle are considered the combatants, and therefore are assumed to be not innocent. These conceptions of innocence are valid, because they can be objectively tested. One is both guilty of committing a crime or they are not, and such can be determined in a court of law. One is either a soldier or a non-combatant, and such can be determined by whether one is assigned to a troop, or one is a civilian.
For some reason, the same dualistic comparison is drawn once again to separate the childish realm of reasoning from the adult. This is the distinction we will focus primarily on, since it defines human beings not based on their position (that is, not by whether they are guilty or not guilty, or a combatant or non-combatant). It seeks to define whole groups of people purely on their age, their relative amount of virtue or purity, their relative amount of what I shall call "life-blame," (a "guilty for living" schema) irrespective of the content of their life experience. The arbitrariness to this very common schema of human development poses serious questions about the legitimacy of an adult's so-called infallibility, and about the justification of so-called child-worship.
To quantify a person's relative innocence, people throughout history have often appealed to certain criteria. These criteria seem like common sense but when understood deeper, they present inconsistencies. All these appeals have to do with a faulty duality where adults are assigned to possess one trait, normally the negative trait, and children are assigned to possess another trait, normally the positive trait. This is due to the fact that the common conceptions of innocence tell us that this duality does exist between every child and every adult. We will later see that this duality is mistaken, that adults and children are in almost every way similar, that their actions are relative in respect to their "contamination zone," and because of that, they are equal.
When speaking of children in this writing, I'm referring to any child whom is past the toddler stage until before legal adulthood. These age guidelines are arbitrary, because development and aptitude is different in all people, but for the purposes of clarity, what I mean by child is, anyone between the ages of 5 years and 18 years. More specifically, what I mean by young children is anyone between the ages of 5 and 10 years, and by older children I mean anyone between the ages of 10 and 18.
Appeal to Virtue and Vice
It should be made clear that in most contexts the opposite of innocence is "guilt for having done something" and in other contexts the opposite of innocence is a cognitive position of life-blame. To have guilt or shame makes one not innocent, according to most definitions. One criterion for determining the amount of innocence a person has is to appeal to virtue and vice. That is to say, someone who is more virtuous is said to be more innocent, and someone who has a large amount of personal vices is said to be not innocent or full of guile. To knowingly commit a crime or act in a manner that is inconsistent with one's understanding of moral obligation, no matter how aware of it the agent of the action is, is considered an action that warrants a lack of innocence on the part of the agent of the action. To knowingly commit a beneficent act or perform in a manner that is consistent with one's understanding of moral obligation, is said to be an action that warrants innocence on the part of the agent.
Under these terms any human being can be said to be non-innocent. Children are just as capable of knowingly committing a mistake as adults are. We have the same reason to believe children are the more pure age group as we do that women are the fairer sex. The agent of a crime of petty theft can just as easily be a child as it can be an adult, for example. It becomes obvious these terms describing human innocence are inadequate. As Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One's Own, "Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. Without that power probably the earth would still be swamp and jungle." By similar extension, children's so-called innocence has since times of antiquity provided a justification for all human progress. However, by not extending the same collective empathy toward all people as we have for children, we've created a harsh world for our “innocent” children to grow up in. This has created the new schema of childhood in the midst of a harsh world. By similar extension that we are lead to conclude that in no way other than cultural are women the fairer sex, we observe that in no way other than purely cultural are children the purer age group.
As much so, this criterion holds that people who are more innocent are the people who perform more beneficent acts in spite of virtuous personalities. This criterion suggests that children just exude virtue simply by existing, because it is irrespective of what a child does. People who hold this value report that because children bring joy, hope, laughter, and open mindedness to the world, and to everyone they come across simply by existing as they are, they don't need to physically do any beneficent acts or be particularly virtuous at all to be considered virtuous. This slightly attempts to mimic Rousseau’s opinion, described as the “noble savage” or purer natural state of man, in his treatise on education Emile. No doubt influential for its contributions to modern perceptions of the natural “purer” childhood as compared to a misguided adult world, but is also short sighted. The idea reflects a shallow sentimentality that removes the veil of personal responsibility from a child's life (and later, from that child's adult life). More importantly, it doesn't follow that a virtuous person is necessarily an innocent person. A person who has made many mistakes, and may be full of guilt and guile, can still be a philanthropist. This is also true particularly in the case of children who are teasing, being foolish, or misbehaving, but are called virtuous just because they inspire others to do good through their youth and open mindedness alone. This opinion doesn't lend itself to intuition very well.
Appeal to Life Experience
One assumption that is then often drawn is that inexperience, rather than virtue and vice, is what causes someone to have more innocence than another. Someone who has very little experience in life is said to be innocent while someone with a lot more experience is said to be non-innocent; that is, is said to be full of guile. It is not necessarily the case that an older person is more experienced than a child, but it makes perfect sense to draw that distinction. The experience criterion for determining the innocence or guile of a person is really what segregates childhood from adulthood, more so than the actual fact that children and adults cognitively differ. The distinction is made before one realizes that there is no correlation between the level of experience that someone has, and the amount of guilt or guile someone has.
Indeed, one can't claim that an adult has more guilt than a child on the basis of them having more experience than a child. Likewise, one can't claim that your average boy or girl has less guilt than an adult on the basis of them having less life experience than an adult. Shame and guilt are reactionary feelings depending on personal situation. Certainly a child can feel just as much guilt for a loved one's death as an adult can, even if we have no real quantitative measure of guilt.
To assume more life experience creates more episodes to be guilty of is another question. The amount of shame or guilt a person feels after 20 years is relatively the same as for someone who has lived 10 years. The child is going to feel the sum magnitude of guilt that they have witnessed as a ratio between the percent of their lives spent in shame over their total life experience. The adult is going to feel the sum magnitude of guilt that they have witnessed as a ratio between the percent of their lives spent in shame over their total life experience as well. For example, an adult who spends 40 percent of their life in guilt or guile is relatively equal to a child who has spent 40 percent of their life with feelings of guilt or guile. A child who has only lived ten years is going to reflect on their four years of guilt or guile (40 percent) in the same manner as someone who is twenty and has experienced eight years (40 percent) of their lives with guilty feelings. So if we assume that longevity increases one’s experiences, and that experiences can be divided into ones of shame and ones of innocence, than shorter lives create the same ratio of guilt experiences that longer lives do, all experiences being equal.
Similarly, one wouldn't suppose that someone who has lived 30 years should be more innocent than someone who has lived 32 years, even though the 32 year old has more life experience. The more proximal the ages, the less difference one would think as far as the amount of innocence or life experience they have, all things being equal. More realistically, things are not quite as equal. This life experience criterion for determining the collective innocence of a person dictates a person's relative innocence before we have any idea of the content of that life experience.
Indeed, the real world is not as equalitarian as the ratios above express. It can easily be imagined that a ten-year-old on the streets of Baghdad has had more encounters with guilt and guile, as well as more life experience, than a sheltered twenty-year-old in a Florida suburb. It can also easily be imagined that that same Iraqi street child has more life experience than a sheltered American boy of the same age.
So what seems more important than the sheer "number" of experiences is the content of those experiences. If one child, A, has experienced the death of a loved one, and another child, B, hasn't experienced that, than child A is more experienced in that area than child B is. Assuming both child A and B are the same age, we start to see that experience is really irrespective of age if we are observing content over its sheer number. Furthermore, Child A, who has experienced a death of a loved on, is going to be more experienced in that area than a young adult, C, who has not experienced that.
Even so, if we contend that the longer one lives the more experiences that person will have, it won't follow that the person with more experiences is necessarily not innocent. Realistically, it is probably going to be more the case that a young adult, C, is going to be more experienced in more areas than child A or B. This distinction though doesn't automatically make C non-innocent. It is intuitive to say that if I introduce a middle-aged adult, D, that D is going to be more experienced than this young adult C, because a middle-aged person has "lived longer" than a young adult. The same could be said about any age group in comparison. If we really were a society which valued life experience on the basis of life longevity as the criterion of how much innocence a person has, than the only people who would be considered not innocent are people who have died after a life statistically longer than average. In that case, everyone who is still alive is still in a growing process and therefore still innocent.
On these grounds, it can be surmised that life experience has no relation to the amount of innocence a person has, but rather it describes something entirely different; and that is, it describes how much maturity someone has. Maturity theories describe, evaluate, and properly formulate a criterion for the process by which someone "comes to be" and ponder whether that process even exists or is cultural or superficial. Innocence theories describe, evaluate, and properly formulate a criterion for determining the amount of innocence (lack of guilt or guile) a person has at any particular moment of life. Accordingly, innocence deals with characteristics that are more innate, whereas maturity deals with one's life experiences. Often people use maturity theories like life experience to determine how much innocence a person has at any one time, but it is obvious to a more careful observer that they respond to two not entirely independent, but different things nonetheless.
Appeal to Corruptibility and Natural Purity
People will often understand something that is closer to natural state as being more pure. That is, the quality of any object or person that is coexisting with nature, and on the same level as nature intrinsically is blessed with a primal goodness. This is to say that as the amount of primal goodness increases in an individual, they are perceived as being more innocent. The most accurate definition of this primal goodness, which seems very vague at this point, defines the quality of being in an uncorrupted stasis.
When uncorrupted by some event or some thing (we'll refer to it as a "material") outside the realm of one's nature, an object or individual is considered to be innocent. Therefore, corruption can be seen as the quality of being in a transition between a nature or original state to a deviated or changed state by the act of what we will call an outside agitator. Without this outside agitator, it is often held that an individual will remain in an uncorrupted state, and that remaining in an uncorrupted state, when individuals are involved, is the healthiest way to live for that individual perceived to be occupying a position closer to nature.
What this boils down to is that just as innocence is associated with an individual's ability to reason, it is also associated with an individual's qualitative cognitive state, which is defined as being either corrupted or uncorrupted. When an individual is uncorrupted, they are living in a pure and natural state that supposedly is in their best interest to remain in, and the act of corrupting someone is seen as an atrocity, even under circumstances where necessity calls for it. This thinking seems intuitive, because children seem to be living in a natural state, uncorrupted, and the act of some outside agitator corrupting their cognitive perceptions, either through the media or in real life, is considered very unfortunate in some instances to a crime in other instances. So it seems valuable that this principle of corruption be investigated.
The major issue with this theory is that when innocence is supposedly taken, the individual's quality of natural purity (and therefore their corruptibility) is taken along with it. It holds that children have a pure nature and when that nature is taken away, it's not the case that it's no longer pure, but that the nature itself ceases to exist in them. Adults are considered void and children are considered full, according to this view. Due to the fact that relatively few adults are considered totally impure, it's not the case that the purity that was considered to be there in childhood is reversed in adulthood, but rather, it is seen as having been taken away by the outside agitator, and in its place the agitator has left them with the experience. This seems valid within the argument's definitional constraints, because the act of corruption describes any change or deviation from a natural state to a deviated state, and doesn't specify that a corruptive change is necessarily a bad influence. Corruption could very well be a change for the better, such as learning to read, in the case of childhood, whereby illiteracy is considered the natural or pure state and the deviated state after education, acting as an outside agitator, is the ability to read.
However if adults are truly void, and therefore have no natural purity or innocence in them, then we'd expect to observe adults as being completely incorruptible. From a speculative stand point it seems false that adults are incorruptible, because adults are just as prone to change and experimentation throughout life as children are, and if corruption simply mandates a change has taken place from a natural or pure state to a deviated state, whether it has a lasting positive or negative effect on their life, than it seems highly unintuitive that adults are incorruptible. However, it is true that corruption has more of a negative connotation, which is what is normally meant when applied to children being corrupted by outside agitators beyond their control, we can speculated that adults are prey to the same type of corruption as well. Adults can fall prey to temptation, to their own devices, to the suggestion of people higher than them, and furthermore they just as often as not are capable of not knowing that they are doing these things, and often are convinced that their actions are actually for the greater good, despite the amount of corruption that may be involved. If this be the case, that adults are corruptible and children are corruptible, than how can either one be considered any more innocent than the other?
From a relativist stand point, a child's ability to be corrupted and an adult's ability to be corrupted exist along the same path as the human ability to be corrupted. The ability to be corrupted undergoes changes as the individual grows and matures. A relativist might draw a line of equivocation between the kinds of things an adult can be corrupted by and the kinds of things a child can be corrupted by, as well as a line of equivocation between how a child expresses themselves once corrupted and how an adult expresses themselves once corrupted.
This argument of innocence on the definition of nature purity is generally used to justify ageist opinions on the capacities of those who are considered innocent; to set limitations for their inclusion of certain events that are deemed to have a potential corrupting influence (medias that are unsuitable for children for instance). Under a relativist restructuring, everyone is considered innocent but innocence itself fits into an individual's relative developmental position. A child's innocence is therefore different than an adult's innocence, and that difference as far as the appeal to natural purity is concerned, the estimated amount of corruption necessary to overcome the amount of relative innocence an individual holds. A few variables factor into this equivocation, because an individual's ability to be corrupted by something assumes they have the reasoning capabilities to fully comprehend the outside agitator.
A child's reasoning and an adult's reasoning are themselves relatively differentiated. So when in the presence of an outside agitator, a child's ability to reason about that agitator will affect their ability to be corrupted by it, and the same is true for an adult. In some ways, this spares children from the full effect of the kinds of corruptive forces that adults can be corrupted by, because their relative abilities to reason are existing along a microcosmic level in relation to that of the adult's. For a child to be subject to the full effect of these adult corruptive forces would be unfathomable, and also improbable because they only have the ability to reason that is consistent with that of a child. Children are affected by these adult corruptive events, but only on the scale of their ability to reason about the event. Other factors, other than reason, can contribute to a child or adult's ability to be corrupted by an event or a material as well, such as personal proximity to the people and places involved in the event or the material, personal degree of interest in the event or material, and other factors that can influence, enhance, or deter an individual's ability to reason about the event or the material.
Such an event worth noting, that had corruptive influence for everyone, child and adult alike, could be seen in the United States during and after the terrorist attacks in the September of 2001. These events were the spring board upon which a global resolve against the spread of terror was launched, and it was the toll on the psyche, for both children and adults, that allowed for it to commence. A child though, was only capable of being corrupted by that event to the scale that they could reason about it, factoring in all variables, such as proximity to the event, personal invested interest in the event (the death of a loved one) and other factors that could have influenced their ability to reason about the event, both for children and adults. This is an extreme example, but the principle should hold true for more common occurrences so long as they have the ability to corrupt even adult reasoning.
As an addendum, the hypothesis for the relativist would be that the ability to reason about a specific event or material enhances or assists in the corruptive force's ability to corrupt an individual (that is, to change an individual from a state of natural purity to a deviated state). And the inability to reason about a specific event or material inhibits or shields against the full magnitude of the corruptive force, but the event or material is still able to corrupt the individual, just on a level consistent with their ability to reason about it.
Ageist opinions generally proclaim that a child's nature and an adult's nature are two different things, which seems to be true, because what has a corrupting influence on an adult doesn't necessarily have a corrupting influence on a child. For example, while exposure to pornographic material is said to have a corrupting influence on a child, that same material is unlikely to have the same influence on an adult, all things being equal. Therefore the ageist would make the argument that because pornography has a far greater potential to corrupt a child than it does an adult, it ought to be banned from sight in the eyes of the uncorrupted. However, this proposal doesn't take into account that the amount of the corrupting material also plays a role in its potential to corrupt, because oftentimes children and adults can be corrupted by the same materials but just by differing amounts of which. Ultimately, the ageist fails to realize that though an adult's nature and a child's nature are different, the basis of the difference is not qualitative but quantitative in most cases, in that the inner corruptibility remains a constant, but the expression and reaction of this corruptibility is altered due to developmental factors.
Furthermore, the assumption is that some people have been corrupted and others have not. If corruption can be seen as any change, than there are none who are not corrupted, and many would consider it a misfortune if a child or adult was deprived of the chance to experience a bit of negative corruption for growth purposes. Ignorance is normally attributed to those who willingly choose to remain innocent despite how the presence of the outside agitators have attempted to corrupt them, and is usually considered to be a negative personality trait. Innocence is normally attributed to those who are intrinsically uncorrupted, not by will but by nature, and is considered to be a positive trait, regardless of what wrongful actions they may do while in the uncorrupted state (Adam and Eve, for example). It might be the case though, that when innocence is a common trait of all individuals to a relative degree, that maintaining a level of ignorance be the appropriate and reasonable response to maintain one's own innocence in a world full of agitators attempting to prey on our collective corruptibilities.
The bottom line is, all people are living in a natural state at all times, even in times when they are being corrupted. This natural state is for them, relative in size and shape to their developmental, social, and cultural necessities. This developmental and cultural necessity defines the nature of the difference between the otherwise uniform equivocation between the child's natural state and the adult's natural state. Corruption happens when one is diverted from their natural state, but they maintain their innocence by the fact that they maintain their corruptibility, as I speculated earlier. Corruptibility is just as human a trait as innocence, and certainly is a wholly natural one at that on both macrocosmic (adult) and microcosmic (child) levels.
In this, true innocence rests in realizing the horrors of the world exist, and still remaining unharmed by them.
Children and adults exist in the same world. This was the basis for Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory of development and it remains critical to the understanding the effects of context on a child's everyday life. This is important because ultimately we derive our ageist prejudices about children from observing their development as if it were happening on another plane of existence separate from the adult world. Nothing could be more inaccurate.
Collectively involved in the child's "chronosystem" as it is called (Bronfenbrenner, 1977), is the child's biological predeterminations and psychological assemblies, based on individual genetics, and how that is affected by the child's family, school, peers, neighborhood, daycare center...etc. Furthermore it describes how all these variables are effected by the interactions between them and the exterior environment, such as the mass media, social welfare services, inter-familial relationships, legal relationships...etc. On top of that, it also includes how those effects are themselves subject to broader cultural ideologies, historical time periods, class position...etc. All this seems very intuitive from a theoretical basis.
However, to say that children and adult's exist in the same "cognitive world' as well doesn't seem so intuitive. As I've made reference to before, a child's ability to reason about any of these outside stimuli are subject to their cognitive capacity. Whether it is the case that they reason differently because of their developing cognition or that their cognition is different from adults because of how they reason, it still remains that children understand things they see in the world differently than adults. I've hypothesized before, in my post on Corruptibility, that children and adults who see the same damaging stimulus are going to be affected by it in similar ways, but how it affects them should be determined by their ability to reason about it.
Thus a theoretical design for this concept would be as follows:
Damaging stimulus for an adult on an adult subject = adult corruptibility
Damaging stimulus for an adult on a child subject = child corruptibility
Damaging stimulus for a child on an adult subject = no corruptibility
Damaging stimulus for a child on a child subject = child corruptibility
Obviously, as I pointed out in earlier posts, it isn't this cut and dry. Many factors can play into whether or not a damaging stimulus from an outside agitator is going to have an affect, and more particularly, will determine the size of the effect. This is simply a sketch of the possible conclusions for the purposes of clarity.
As can be seen, there are differences between children and adults cognitively even though in this very general hypothetical model; an adult when exposed to a stimulus that would otherwise have a corruptive influence on a child would show little to no corruptive effect, whereas in the opposite, a child when exposed to a stimulus that would have a corruptive effect on an adult is bound to also have an effect of some kind on a child. The difference, presumably, is because an adult does not have to assimilate very much "new" information when they are viewing a stimulus that could be damaging to a child, and vice versa for children.
The world "assimilation" should be understood similar to Piaget's catalytic mechanism being utilized to progress a developing cognitive structure in children. The definition of "damage" should be understood to be the same as "corruptive influence" in this case, because a corruptive influence doesn't unnecessarily have to be a negative thing.
This all works out in theoretical terms, but in everyday life it doesn't seem as obvious. If a child and a parent are walking in the park and they pass a billboard with a scantily clad figure in it, who's to determine who that figure is going to have a corruptive influence on, if anyone? And by what degree? Most likely the adult is going to see it and attempt to direct their child's attention against it or not pay it any heed (therefore signifying the only affect it is having on them is they are concerned what affect it is having on their child), and a child, if they notice it, is only going to think about it in the terms that they are able to reason about it, which may or may not be any more "damaging" or "corruptive" for them than anything else they might observe in the park.
The bottom line is, if a child is constantly confronting new situations that are having "corruptive" or altering influence on their cognitive capacities and perceptions, then one particular stimulus that is culturally considered to be negatively "corrupting the youth" isn't going to be any different in that child's mind than another stimulus that society deems acceptable for children--all things being equal. Therefore, because it is inconceivable that a child's "innocence" can be taken every time they encounter new corruptive influences, either that innocence was never there, or the innocence itself is part of the process of this transformation, and in fact not the part that was "lost" in the acquisition. Innocence is maintained.
This is just a simple example though. More urgent examples surface when parents make the assertion that because children can't distinguish the difference between reality and the violence or sexual content that they observe in the media, it has a far greater negative corruptive influence on them than anything else they're probably getting exposed to on a day to day basis as exemplified above. In this way, it's not that their inability to reason completely about a stimulus that shields them from being corrupted by it on an adult level of complexity, it's that the inability actually enhances the level of corruptive influence the stimulus has on them.
In those cases though, it is not the act of killing or sex stimulation alone that is exerting such a powerful influence, it is the quantity and level of complexity to which it is being displayed to them (as mentioned in earlier posts). An incidence of someone getting shot in a video game or television shouldn't have any more negative corruptive influence when it is framed in a context conceivable to a child's representation of the world, and with parental assurance, the exposure's strength of influence should be all but neutralized. An incidence of a higher magnitude, with more gore, carnal destruction, or perversity, without parental assurance, should have a far greater influence on a child. There are differing ideologies as to how to deal with these incidents.
Ageists continue to argue against exposing a child to violence and sex at any level of complexity. However, all this achieves is the effective weakening the child's tolerance, therefore strengthening the effects of the very corruptive influence they were attempting to minimize. Age Egalitarians are equally atrocious, as they will subject a child to any sort of material and assume the child's ability to reason about it, and therefore their level of tolerance, is on the level with their own in some kind of adult-centric mindset, certainly breaking the child's resistance to such medias but also potentially skewing their perceptions of reality.
An Age Relativist would argue that a child ought to have exposure to sex and violence that is consistent with their ability to reason about such things in their own context. This is possible to a degree, but not entirely so, because as stated in the opening of this post, children and adults live in the same world and get exposure to the same types of outside agitators. There is no way a child can be kept sheltered from corruptive levels of sex and violence that they don't have the ability to conceive of at their stage of development.
This is why, ageists, egalitarians, and relativists as well, all seem to advocate the indelible presence of an adult figure in a child's cognitive life, they simply disagree as to the extent that figure should be involved. Ageists tend to believe that an adult should exercise all manners necessary to keep children under specific ages to have any access or exposure to all materials deemed to be outside agitators, but only end up multiplying the effects of which many fold.
Egalitarians seem to believe that an adult shouldn't exercise any intervention over a child's access to these materials, any more than one wouldn't control any other individual's access. While attempting to make the child seen as the "individual" they are, they neglect to see that that part of what makes a child an individual, like anyone else, is his or her cognitive capacities to reason about this stimulus. So ultimately, they end up potentially skewing that child's outlook by subjecting them to materials and acts they aren't ready to observe or participate in at the same level as an adult. This continues to be the faulty argument of the Childlove movement.
A Relativist would argue that and adult should exercise a moderate but consistent level of intervention over a child's access to these materials, but more importantly, assist the child when they view or participate in, activities that might require them to expand their cognitive capacities. This is best described operationally similar to Vygotsky's "scaffolding" approach, whereby the adult provides temporary aid to assist the child in learning how to solve a problem or complete a task. However, in this context, the adult aid would be assisting the child in coming to terms with or internalizing materials that are of significant corruptive influence. Otherwise exposure to these materials and acts (like sex and violence) is generally considered to be a good thing, so long as the materials being presented on a level that the child is capable of coming to terms with on their own. Only when the material is so strong that they can't do this, should an adult be necessitated to assist in the scaffolding approach.
So ultimately, children should be allowed a degree of exposure consistent with their ability to comprehend for ideal social effects, and minimal negative corruptive influence. Sadly, this can not always be the case though, and our society is far more often so ageist that when children are corrupted by these outside agitators it is seen as parental neglect, or a "sign of the times," and not the practice of ageism itself that only compounds the issue and necessitates itself in a vicious cycle.
International Effects of Faulty Innocence Theories
Obviously faulty or inadequate criterions that incorrectly formulate how innocent a person is, be them child, adult, or old age, have repercussions on the world and on civil society. Let us examine a few of the negative consequences that these age-old theories of "who is innocent and who is not" created for us in the past, and still create for us in the present.
Daisy was the name of one political advertisement for American presidential candidate Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Many consider this the seminal, or most influential, advertisement that swayed the public away from the republican opponent Barry Goldwater and in favor of the democrat, because of its shocking effect. The ad featured a little girl gleefully plucking petals off a flower and then being annihilated in an atomic blast without warning. The ad set the message that Johnson was not soft on national security and general defense, and was taking the issue of nuclear war very seriously.
She's depicted looking downward, picking the petals off a flower one by one, and counting to herself each petal she picks off. The numbers she recites are out of order and confused and often the recitations are repeated. A man's deep voice is superimposed on her crooked number recitations---the voice of a man reciting a countdown from ten, to suppose a nuclear blast is about to occur. The girl looks up in fear as the scene dissolves into a close up of her eye. The commercial cuts to a shot of a nuclear test where Johnson delivers his monologue:
“These are the stakes: To make a world in which all of God’s children can live…or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.”
The girl's ignorance to the magnitude of, or reason for, an atomic catastrophe in this circumstance is essential. The imagery displayed in this advertisement alone showcase the cultural perception of a child's innocence in order to promote cultural non-malfeasance, however the symbolism is much more subtle. The advertisement reinforces a cross-cultural perception that because children are ignorant to the evils of an adult world, that their existence alone ought to be motivation enough to promote a more peaceful world.
The idea of innocence though is mostly associated and personified culturally by the child. Indeed the child has become an instrument of society. The child justifies the need for human beings to do important things in the world to ensure the future with a kind of collective empathy. It is considered the duty of the non-innocent--the ones who are filled with guile—to look out for, protect and nourish the innocent. In this context society uses the human child as motivation for practicing universal good will. The concept of innocence is not entirely a negative cultural prejudice, as it provides for this motivation for practicing universal good will by all civilized people.
The Daisy advertisement though ignores the violence being displayed on behalf of the girl. In a sense, it was the faulty idea of that childhood exudes innocence irrespective of what children themselves do, that lead to the creation of such devastating weapons of war as the atomic bomb. At first glimpse this revelation may seem hard to accept, so I will endeavor to appeal it to intuition.
It can be argued that the history of human civilization is marred by conflict. In conflict a sharp distinction is made between people who are innocent and people who are confederates to the immorality. Immorality under the most desperate circumstances is treated as an unfortunate necessity. Indeed actions are seen as moral or immoral, people are seen as innocent or guilty; but in war or in states of emergency, actions that are deemed necessary are ones that are morally obligatory, and often the "guilty" parties feel their actions were justified by the necessity of the situation. In ethics, moral obligation means that it would be morally wrong to fail to commit the action. Accordingly, war then becomes the background behind which all injustice becomes justified; behind which all necessity no matter how immoral, against logic, or against decency, becomes morally necessary; and behind which appeals to conscience, decency, or human rights are traded in for appeals to obligation, valor, national pride and the necessity of antagonism. These are the ideas are what we shelter our children from, and for the purpose of preserving their ignorance to the realities of an illogical or conflicted human nature.
Indeed, it is intuitive to say that in conflict, the utilitarian principle is applied with devastating results. This presents a paradox, because the utilitarian goal becomes a principle where actions that lead to the best consequences are considered morally right, to one that proclaims the ends justify the means. If intuitively we see a catastrophe such as can happen in war and feel that it was instrumental or decisive in our winning of the war, than it becomes a moral obligation to carry out that action regardless of the consequences. This presents a paradox because the action that produces the best ends, doesn't always justify the means to that ends intuitively.
Why do necessary, but immoral, actions become necessary and even morally obligatory in times of crisis? More concretely, why did it seem like the right thing to do to stockpile nuclear weapons during the Cold War if "God forbid" we were ever to use them? One explanation of this question is the Daisy example. Every nation sees that it must do whatever is necessary to protect its own young even at the expense of the lives of our adversaries and their potential young. This only occurs in times of extreme conflict though, and even in times of conflict there are ethics commissions established to minimize the injury or death of our enemy's non-combatant civilians. However, in the Daisy ad--Cold War example, the point was explicitly to protect the young of the United States against a supposedly malevolent aggressor who have no compassion for the innocent of their enemy. Whether or not the Communists actually did have compassion for the American children is not important, only that in times of crisis, the enemy is made inhuman. When the enemy is made inhuman, our innocents are made to look more vulnerable.
The cultural paranoia during times of conflict provokes the non-innocent, the adults, to take personal responsibility for ensuring that their own children, the innocent, are protected at all costs. This has repercussions in the modern day as well. The invisible threat of annihilation hangs over every aspect of modern life; and all institutions of cultural life serve only to remind us that we're threatened, that our children are in danger; that a specter haunts us still. Cultural paranoia is created by this primal fear to protect the innocent, and as is seen in the Cold War example, is responsible for also putting the innocent in peril to begin with.
Cultural paranoia in spite of conflict places the children of other nations in peril, because now the so-called non-innocent (the adults) in other nations are prepared to go to any lengths to protect their children. A global struggle, a namely "cold" war, ensues, as nations are seeking to out-protect or out-garrison each other with the justification that they are doing so on behalf of protecting the innocence of little boys and girls like Daisy.
This human struggle over the so-called innocent can be also seen in other ways, but essentially, manifests itself through violence, paranoia, tyranny, and prejudice. All the afflictions of society and human judgment against itself on a broad scale (as opposed to an individual scale) have their justification seemingly, when done so for the sake of the innocent. If we want a more peaceful world for our children and for ourselves, it seems only logical therefore, that we need to rid ourselves of this innocence mechanism.
(Note: the following is mostly sporadic notes and unorganized thoughts than a formal approach to the topic and will remain italicized.)
Social Effects of Innocence Theory
Furthermore, cultural paranoia also places the children of its own nation in peril in times of peace. It is assumed a child's innocence is something so sacred that to introduce the vulgarities found so common in adult society to it would be an internal catastrophe on that child's perception of the world. Parents then rush to prevent their children from knowing about or seeing violence and all forms of aggression, and enforce only politically correct standards and institutions to co-evolve with through positive reinforcement. Though its motivation is once again benevolent, this action on the part of parents, schoolteachers, and all institutions fostering child development, also places children in jeopardy. This apparent contradiction may once again seem unintuitive, so I will endeavor to appeal it to intuition.
In social and developmental psychology experiments, we've seen repeatedly the negative effects of aggressive modeling on childhood aggression and behavior in general. Aggressive modeling, as was tested in the Bandura study on children's reaction to violent images in the media, was shown to be positively correlated with more aggressive behavior in the young. The study found that indeed, there was a transmission of aggression from aggressive models to youngsters imitating that aggression. Following this finding, it became very apparent that to prevent aggressive personalities from forming, one had to bar access to aggressive medias and models to children completely.
Furthermore, the goal was to not only just bar access to aggressive medias, but to pretend that such medias simply don't exist when one is dealing with children. There's never been a causal link between violent medias and aggressive children. One could just as easily theorize that aggressive young choose more aggressive medias. Assuming though, that there is a causal link between aggressive medias and childhood aggression in that the medias are one of the causes of childhood aggression, simply barring access or knowledge of these medias to children doesn't ensure that a child will become pro-social. All it ensures is that there are less negative role models in children's media for children to potentially imitate. Therefore, the creation of positive role models in children's media will no doubt assist in fostering a child's pro-social emphasis.
The act of bombarding a child with a series of politically correct models in hopes to orient a child pro-socially maintains their ignorance to the vulgarities, and therefore the diversity, of society. Every child ignorant to the human condition, is themselves vulnerable. Every child ignorant to the diversity of society, is themselves susceptible to the realities of the harsh world. The harsh world spoken of is a society in which social deviants and negative role models are kept for adults only and of which children are not allowed to view and participate in.
Not only does this maneuver make children susceptible to the harsh world, but its effect is also similar to effect of the criterion based on virtue in a societal sense. It has been elsewhere stated that bombarding a child with a series of politically correct models does not necessarily orient a child’s pro-social compass, but it also lifts the veil of personal responsibility from a child’s life. Anyone who is protected consistently by others finds no need to protect him or herself, and anyone who lives completely sheltered does not gain the initiative to act in pro-social ways. If a child is not exposed to the destitute, the sick, and even the violent, than a child has no understanding of those things that would be necessary if he or she were to take part in helping those who are destitute, sick, violent, or emotionally troubled.
Perhaps the gravest malice that conventional innocence theories wage against civil society is in how they systematically turn adults against other adults, children against other children, children against adults, and adults against children.
A lot of the "built up anger" that leads to hostility between people in society is caused by an internal fear of growing older, and an envy of the child. This fact, due to the knowledge of the temporary life we live, may be the leading cause of much of the hostility among adults to begin with. If we make childhood something that has nothing enviable about it, we can greatly improve the disposition of the entire world. The fear of death though I don't think can be solvable, but we can certainly overcome a fear of aging. If children are put into the positions of understanding like adults though, they will be less susceptible to those trying to market off their innocence.
Therefore, we can conclude the segregation that the concept of innocence proposes--that being between adults and children--is the real morally bankrupt interpretation of this natural human descriptor.
Egalitarian Innocence Theories
Another theory that has been raised in small independent circles, and written extensively on by Hans Peter, is this sense of egalitarian innocence; being the idea that children and adults are exactly the same in respect to how much innocence they hold at any given time. This theory hopes to suggest that by lifting the veil of this descriptor, and focusing more on an ontological definition of being, that society will eventually come to see that we ought to be investing our time in providing for every person as we would a child. Indeed, if we saw all people as we do children, no rational person would ever try to harm another human being. These statements are very persuasive and idealistic, and perhaps partly true in some alternative formation, but they're not very realistic or intuitive in the long run. I will attempt to summarize this view:
Ageism is supported by a theory upholding the notion that children have innocence, as defined by a lack of guilt or guile. Egalitarians theorize that this is probably the most destructive ideology in the history of human civilization. All the hatreds of human thinking when other people are concerned stem from a belief that innocence is something to protect, and as soon as it runs out in a person, we can now consider them a target for scorn. Innocence is a man made concept to seperate children from adults for the purpose of enforcing a protective prejudice. This protective prejudice states that children are a higher priority than adults when it comes down to who is more worthy of protection, and states that children are a lower priority than adults when it comes to who holds a more worthy opinion or consent to an opion or action. Essentially, it enforces the standard that children are needing of protection more than they are needing of personality or independent thought. The theory argues that in fact children are just as adults are; everyone, adults included, is needing of protection; and everyone, children included, is needing of personal space, personality, and independent thought.
A proper definition for innocence would state: "a univeral trait of relative ignorance," rather than, "a lack of guilt or guile." This redefinition must more importantly be backed up with an evolved change in the social perception of innocence that is more refective of these changes. Everything that has been argued thus far has been held by a criterion that understands "guilt and guile" as being the opposites to innocence, and that people who have guilt or shame aren't considered innocent. To fully expand innocence to everyone for the purpose of ending ageism, bigotry, and other malefiscent thoughts and actions that people hold against one another, we need to universalize traits that are present in everyone, rather than dialectical ones such as "guilt" and "non-guilt," and "victim" and "agressor," and "virtuous" and "non-virtuous," that only apply to some people at the disclusion of others. Egalitarians argue that ignorance is one thing that all people have regardless of what stage of life they are in, just as a child is ignorant to many of the facts that govern science and the nature of reality, adults who have knowledge about the facts that govern science and the nature of reality, are puzzled by larger philosophical and metaphysical questions. In this way, we're all ignorant of something, and therefore the human race is in a perpetual state of innocence.
Certainly there will always be those without conscience or without right mind that will harass and condemn their fellow human being even in a society where each and everyone is innocent to some varying degree, just as there are those who profit off the innocence and the ignorance of childhood in the current society.
However, if we also understand that if we are all innocent, than innocence to describe individual people is meaningless. Therefore it could be stated that all people are experienced to varying degrees, including children, and in such case children can be said to be just as invulnerable as adults are. This represents a duality, when each and every person can be said to be both vulnerable and invulnerable to the harshness of society. Innocence implies vulnerability regardless of personality, this philosophy here is a description of personality, completely independent of assumptions of which based on age guidelines.
Human beings use the innocence of children as a grounds to protect them. Sure children are innocent and need to be protected, but the same goes for all people. All people (children included that is) are innocent, and all people need to be protected. This viewpoint of total equality for all people regardless of age will draw criticism from people who think that it's somehow going to deprive children of their innocence and therefore be a harm to them. For if the ship was sinking, and it wasn't women and children first to be saved, we'd be condemning children to death along with women and men. Society has a way of prioritizing gender and age in a situation of the like that which is harmful because it sets a standard that some humans are more worthy of being saved than others. Indeed if we saw that everyone has an equal chance to be saved, men, women, boys, and girls alike, we'd be in a better position to make the judgement as to who to sacrifice. Obviously human nature will insist that it is the children who will be saved, not because they are children, but because our biology demands that we save those who are best capable of carrying on our species. This is a natural constant; an instinct.
Take children down off this innocence pedistal and once they are seen as people there will be nothing percievably good about childhood to envy, because childhood will become a lifelong trait, and adulthood as well will become a lifelong trait. When there is no "adulthood" or "childhood" it'll affirm all people that the present is all we have, the past is unchangable, and the future is determined right now.
If we can attain that type of thinking, adults will no doubt be treating children like children but moreso treating them like any other adult. The question then is, we all know how we treat other adults, do we really want to be encouraging society to treat children with the adult-like shrewdness, hostility, built up anger? No, that is not what we should be endorsing. Kicking the pedistal out from underneath children won't be placing them in a cruel adult world as people think. That presupposes that the “adult” method of social interaction is the be-all, end all of human life which, as stated before, isn’t. What Egalitarians argue is an integration has to occur between adulthood and childhood; a synthesis. Expanding innocence beyond childhood, and expanding responsibility beyond adulthood shouldn't then expose kids to a harsh adult world, it'll be exposing everyone to everything that is involved in life. The "harsh world" of the adult will be exposed to the child, but the "harsh world" of the child will be equally exposed to the adult and a synthesis will develop between these two stages of life.
If we saw that indeed everyone’s internal innocence, regardless of age needed to be protected and cared for, our society would be a much more caring and helpful one. So long as society maintains that innocence is only found in the young, they will continue to profit on that innocence, and at the same time exploit, condemn, cricize, scam, frustrate, enslave, and harrass their fellow non-innocent human being.
Inadequacies in Egalitarian Innocence Theory
More egalitarian conceptions of appropriating innocence to every living thing create some obvious moral dilemmas. The most interesting I will call the "Sinking Boat" paradox. In this scenario, we have to imagine that a cruise vessel is sinking, and stipulate there's no chance for immediate aid or rescue from any shoreline National Guard or passing vessels. We also have to stipulate that this is a cruise ship with innocent passengers; that is, the passengers on board can't have moral obligations to the vessel itself as is the case with the crew of a fishing boat or a naval frigate, these passengers should likely be innocent bystanders. We finally stipulate that there are not enough lifeboats or life preservers for everyone on board to survive. This is the most important condition because it will determine who lives and who dies.
All the passengers on board this boat, under an egalitarian principle, must have to draw straws or some other limitation ritual to determine who lives and who dies. Each passenger knows they have an equal chance of living or dying, including any children on board. When the straws are dealt, some children will be dealt short straws. The children understand this ritual and understand they have an equal chance of living or dying as any passenger would, so they take this very seriously, and will accept whatever fate they receive. Some children will offer to give their own lives to save an adult's life who was dealt a short straw.
This egalitarian conception of human innocence extends every person on the boat the same amount of innocence--the adults and the children are considered total equals. The conclusion here is unsettling and therefore unintuitive. It does appear this course of action in this circumstance would be morally bankrupt. It is not conceivable that the adults on board--who are rational people with a moral conscience and sense of duty--would allow a child to lay down his or her life in order to save theirs. They wouldn't even allow the children on board to participate in drawing straws. In most circumstances fully functional adults feel they have a responsibility to protect the innocent, regardless of whether a child would feel their own sense of duty from laying down their life to save another.
The conclusion here seems to be that children have a moral obligation to be rescued, whether they feel a strong sense of duty to look after their adult companions or other children, and adults have a moral obligation to rescue the children. A child’s duty is to live and carry on, an adult’s duty is to preserve and protect, even to death, that child’s duty.
One's "duty" in this case, could also be applied to social productivity and participation in society. To suggest a child could handle the work of an adult is placing too much importance on the adult life experience as the final criterion of whether someone is innocent or not. It is assumed that innocence is a descriptor for someone who is ignorant of a certain process. Egalitarian innocence theorists would suggest that ageism causes children to be ignorant of things such as sex and work, and that a child would understand these concepts perfectly if they were allowed to not only understand it, but partake in it at their discretion. This seems intuitive at the small level with an issue such as understanding sexuality and work, but if society is going to count children and adults as equals, and allow children to "partake" in activities such as sex and work than the theory becomes irrational.
Innocence by definition also enforces this kind of ageist bigotry. Egalitarians argue that ageism is just as potent a force to reckon with as is any social prejudice. Under a society where having innocence means needing protection from guilt or guile, we simply can't function ethically without becoming a "watchdog" society; a society that becomes a parent to all; a society that punishes those who misbehave, and treats its subjects as if they were innocent children gone astray. This sounds eerily Orwellian in nature. It can be foreseen such a society can leap from treating other adults as if they were children, to treating children as if they were other adults. This poses a moral concern, because the idea was to unite all people around a notion of tolerance and provide for all people as society currently does for children; and now you have a society where a misinterpretation has happened and treats all people, including children, with the same hostility, emptiness, bigotry, and lack of empathy, that people show for one another regardless of age.
In the case of limits and capacities, when you devaluate egalitarianism, there's no more need to enforce superficial limits and thresholds on the basis of age. You simply assume, anyone, no matter what age, is "capable" until they show signs of not being capable, and then, following with the theory, give them what they deserve...that being, the knowledge and experience to make them capable. The law, at present, doesn't deem kids as "deserving" of higher faculty experience, and therefore, kids aren't able to cope with their lower faculty experience on a level comparable to most socialized adults.
The real act of egalitarianism is in establishing the fact that all people are intrinsically "deserving" of being able to manifest the basic rights of man...regardless of age. Egalitarianism though, falls apart when deciding how you deal with all these intrinsically "deserving" people. Everyone's needs are different.
To Be Continued.
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