A rash of new books is urging a rebirth of humility and decorum. No
one woulddeny that our culture has become crass and vulgar, but these
books have another, more insidious message: they equate innocence with
ignorance.
KEEPING WATCH OVER YOUR KIDS' innocence is no easy task. Just ask
Michael and Diane Medved, authors of Saving Childhood: Protecting Our
Children From the National Assault on Innocence (Harper Collins, 1998).
It's not enough to ban television from your home, as the Medveds have, to
limit videos to six G-rated hours a week, to carefully screen prospective
playmates. Threats to your children's blissful ignorance can still sneak
past: a Girl Scout manual contains references to sex. A Judy Blume novel,
recommended by a kindly librarian, mentions menstruation. Classmates let
slip the names of the Spice Girls.
Fortunately for the Medveds, their offspring have joined in the
effort to preserve their naivete. Should the news come on during the
family's Sunday drives, the proud parents recount, "our children
immediately beg us to turn off the radio, lest they hear something" that
"spoils their contentment." And when a haunting song from the soundtrack
of Showboat! plays on the stereo, their daughters scream "Fast forward!
Fast forward!" because "they wouldn't even consider hearing lyrics that
predict sadness or trouble on the horizon."
The Medveds' efforts to safeguard their children's tender
sensibilities border on the fanatical (they have forbidden their eldest
daughter to read any books published after 1960). But it's hard not to
sympathize with their concerns. If innocence is not quite under assault,
it has been treated none too gently by the late twentieth century, with
its bruising rounds of sex and violence, cynicism and corruption. Our
appalled fascination with schoolboy murderers and tiny beauty queens has
its source in the fear that childhood's magic has faded, replaced by
something harder and harsher.
But beneath our worries about a younger generation lies an unspoken
uneasiness about our own. Perilous as the modern age is for children, it
has been every bit as unsparing of the illusions of adults. Grown-up
fairy tales--that marriage will last forever, that sex produces only
pleasure, that loyalty to an institution will be returned, that elected
leaders are benevolent and wise--have taken a darker turn, shading into
stories of divorce and AIDS and single motherhood, mergers and layoffs
and low-wage workers, Watergate and Iran-Contra and now,
impeachment.
THE LAST FEW DECADES HAVE BEEN specially unkind to the illusions of
women. Wendy Shalit, a young neo-conservative writer, bitterly laments
the passing of an era when daughters belonged to their fathers ("what is
really so terrible about `belonging' to someone who loves you?" she
asks), when girls waited for their one true love, when sex was an
enchanting mystery. Writes the 23-year-old Shalit in A Return to Modesty:
Discovering the Lost Virtue (Free Press, 1999), "Our mothers tell us we
shouldn't want to give up all the hard-won `gains' they have bequeathed
us, and we think: What gains? Sexual harassment, date rape, stalking,
eating disorders, all these dreary hook-ups? Or perhaps it's the great
gain of divorce you had in mind?"
Her caustic appraisal of modern adulthood is echoed by the Medveds,
who insist that "the secrets of adulthood are harsh, morbid, oppressive,
and seamy," bringing nothing but "obligations, troubles, burdens and the
potential for depression and gloom." Already spoiled by such secrets,
they can only enjoy the vicarious pleasure of postponing their children's
inevitable disillusionment.
But Shalit sees another way. Believing that most young women's
problems--from depression to eating disorders to unsatisfying
relationships--follow from our culture's corruption of their natural
modesty and purity, she urges them to reclaim their innocence, to "take
it all back." Another voice in this chores, UCLA psychiatrist Jeffrey
Schwartz, goes further: he writes in A Return to Innocence: Philosophical
Guidance in an Age of Cynicism (Harper Collins, 1998) that every adult
ought to aspire to innocence, as it is "the highest of human
accomplishments" and "the defining mark of those who have achieved
genuine victory in facing life's innumerable challenges."
INNOCENCE WASN'T ALWAYS SO ELUSIVE, these authors argue. America
was once a veritable Garden of Eden, a place where "women enjoyed being
home for the kids" and "peers came over for basketball in the driveway
and homemade lemonade," say the Medveds; where "men respected all women
as ladies," according to Shalit, and mothers devoted themselves to "the
family, volunteer work, religion, shaping the hearts and minds of the
next generation."
Then the country took its first fateful bite of the apple,
initiating what Schwartz calls the "orgy of self-gratification" that was
the 1960s. "As a result of the destructive behavior unleashed by a
mindless belief in bad ideas, we live in a society that has lost its
innocence," he writes, "and that is no longer able...to protect the
innocence of its young."
While the serpent in the garden assumes a variety of wily disguises
in these books, he sounds like the same creature: for Schwartz, it's the
"intellectual/power elite"; for the Medveds, the "Hollywood elite"; and
for Shalit, the "elite white feminists." Artfully seducing the public
with promises of effortless pleasure and fulfillment, these evil spirits
have held America in their thrall ever since--and only innocence can lift
the spell.
Tags:
assault on innocence,
beauty queens,
blissful ignorance,
book,
classmates,
decorum,
diane medved,
eldest daughter,
girl scout,
harper collins,
haunting song,
innocence,
keeping watch,
late twentieth century,
names of the spice girls,
national assault,
proud parents,
saving childhood,
sex and violence,
spice girls,
tender sensibilities
