Digging Holes in the River

Innocence vs. Experience as an Ideal

A couple of weeks ago, I realized that one place where people’s fundamental beliefs can differ is whether you regard innocence as ideal, or experience as ideal.

I noticed this while reading my friend’s memoir. He was describing some of the traumas that his ex-wife had experienced as a child, and it was clear, from his description, that he saw these traumas as harmful, as having deprived her of her innocence.

In my friend’s view, all people are born with a sort of essential radiance that he calls “splendor”. If I’m understanding correctly, it seems to involve empathy, and loving kindness, and the ability to be one’s true self without any concealment or shame. Trauma can diminish a person’s splendor by making them react to the world with pain and hate, instead the love that all people are born with. He expressed a hope that people could overcome trauma by returning to that original state of innocence.

Ever since reading that, I’ve been thinking about what it means to view innocence vs. experience as ideal. These aren’t clearly defined terms, so it’s hard to specify them precisely, but here’s an attempt to explain what I mean:

• Innocence is the state you are born with, before you are influenced by the outside world.
  
• In particular, there are certain kinds of experience that are most likely to take away one’s innocence.
• Witnessing death, hardship, or pain (either of strangers, or loved ones; but the closer you are to the death, hardship, and pain, the more of your innocence it takes away).
• Being betrayed (trust is considered a kind of innocence, and being betrayed decreases your level of trust).
• Sexual intercourse (losing one’s virginity is tantamount to losing one’s innocence, in a lot of people’s view).
• When you lose your innocence, it changes you as a person. It makes you less sensitive, more “hardened” to the world.
• Innocence is a state of purity. When you lose it, you become impure.

I particularly want to focus on the kind of innocence you lose after experiencing death, hardship, and pain.

Like, I think that, as a culture, we have a sense that children are born with a strong, innate sense of empathy. For instance, a five-year-old who witnesses a fist-fight will likely be really upset. But as we gain experience, this sensitivity decreases; the more violence you witness (or experience personally), the more it will start to seem like just an ordinary part of life. It’s not strictly age-related; a 30-year-old who has never seen anything more violent than a loud argument will probably be very upset by a fist-fight, while a 10-year-old whose parents get in violent fights all the time might think it’s not such a big deal. In general, I think this empathy / sensitivity is a function of a lot of things: age, amount of violence experienced, your innate level of sensitivity, etc.

Anyway, I have noticed that people differ on whether they think this loss of innocence is bad (it takes away an important sense of empathy or ability to love) or good (it increases your ability to deal with the world). I myself have shifted back and forth in terms of which side of this I’m on.

Growing up, I always thought of innocence as a good thing. I was raised in a sheltered suburb, where violence was rare. I also have a strong innate sense of empathy. And I was raised with a sense of morality that centered around the care/harm foundation: violence and suffering are bad, and it’s important to decrease them as much as we can. This was back in the days when utilitarianism appealed to me.

I thought that innocence was good, because the more sensitive you are to others’ suffering and pain, the more you’ll be driven to decrease the suffering and pain in the world. Like, if you think of war as horrific, you’ll work to fight against it; but if you’re inured to hardship, and you think of war as just a part of life, then you won’t bother to fight it, and might even contribute to it happening, because you think of war as just a part of life.

I remember, when I was in high school, we had to watch Saving Private Ryan as part of a history class. We were warned that it would be a very violent war movie. I begged my teacher not to have to watch it, because I knew I would find it very upsetting. But my teacher wouldn’t give me permission to leave the class. I remember spending the entire movie crying, biting down on my finger to avoid making any noise. And I remember… being angry that we were asked to watch this (why should high school students have to experience the atrocities of war?), and also upset that my classmates didn’t find the movie horrifying. I considered it a sort of moral failure, on their part, that they weren’t as upset as I was. How could you watch all these people dying, and then walk out of the classroom afterwards as if nothing had happened?

Later in life, I came to adopt the opinion that experience is ideal. It’s hard to remember how this came about. I think it happened when I realized that… I, personally, might have to deal up-close with all the horror and suffering of the world.

Sometime in college, I went from the opinion of “war is always horrifying, and I am anti-war” to “war is always horrifying, but sometimes it’s inevitable, because there’s limited resources and people tend to fight over them. and I’m not going to start any wars, but if someone attacks the people or culture that I care about, then I want to be willing to fight to defend it. and there’s nobility and honor in fighting out of love; there’s something admirable about loving your family, culture, or land so much that you’re willing to die to defend it.”

Like, it’s the contrast between “Goodnight Saigon” by Billy Joel, and “The Boys of Forest Hill” by The Whiskey Farm. They’re both about soldiers who lose their lives in wars, and both songs treat this as a tragedy. But “Goodnight Saigon” expresses the opinion of “these deaths were unnecessary, and we need to put an end to war, so this never has to happen again”, while “The Boys of Forest Hill” expresses the opinion of “these men died honorably, fighting for something they believed in, and we ought to honor their sacrifice”.

Sometime in college (or maybe grad school), I went from believing that war was horrible, and something I would never participate in, to thinking that… it was possible that someday, I’d have to fight for what I believed in, and I wanted to be ready for that day. I wanted to be able to act honorably when the time came, instead of cowering in fear, or being so overcome by sorrow that I couldn’t take action. Desensitization (and loss of innocence) seemed good, because they’d make me better able to do what needed to be done.

It’s not just war, either; it’s also the ability to deal with everyday accidents and pain. Like, in general, I get quite upset when people around me get hurt. Like, other people’s blood makes me dizzy. I would be pretty useless in the face of a crisis.

And I never really thought much about this, growing up. As I mentioned, I grew up in a sheltered suburb. You never committed violent actions yourself; all violence was outsourced to the police. Someone breaks into your house? Cower in a closet, try not to be seen, call 911. And all heroism was outsourced to ambulances, paramedics, and fire fighters. It’s great if you know first aid, but it’s not something everyone is expected to be able to do; if someone gets injured you call 911.

But then I moved to Appalachia, where people have a more “do it yourself” attitude, more of a sense of personal responsibility. My friends there are astonishingly capable; compared to them I feel completely helpless. Many of them have medical training, and most of them are able to act productively in the face of a crisis.

I knew that, if anything happened to me, those friends would be there to help. And I felt ashamed that, if one of them got injured, I would have no idea what to do. So I asked my dad (who’s an EMT) to teach me first aid. He gave me some instructional videos to watch, but I had to stop in the middle, because even watching these terrible actors pretend to get hurt was too upsetting. The fake blood made me dizzy.

I told my dad this, and he said “go online and watch videos of people receiving first aid; that’ll help to desensitize you.” And I remember experiencing enormous cognitive dissonance when, a few days later, I traveled to Israel on Birthright. We went to a Holocaust museum, and they explained that, when Germans first went to work at the concentration camps, they would be shown videos of the horrors in order to desensitize them to the Jews’ suffering. And the educational video at the museum presented this as self-evidently evil. But I was confused, because it sounded so similar to the advice that my dad had just given me. It seemed like generic advice: if you’re going to deal with horror and death, whether it’s to hurt people or help people (or to hurt people in order to help people), then you need to be desensitized.

Anyway, I don’t know where I stand these days. I can see the virtue of both innocence and experience. I just figured I would write this post because it’s interesting to understand the two different points of view.