SCHWARTZ SETS OUT TO RECOVER our lost innocence with an
eclectic--not to say eccentric--combination of Buddhist spirituality,
ancient philosophy, Biblical allegory and modern-day neuroscience. In a
series of letters to a friend's 16-year-old son, he describes in dramatic
and even apocalyptic terms the dangers of our drug-addled, sex-obsessed,
morally lax and spiritually bankrupt society. The only escape from this
modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah, says Schwartz, is through a return to
innocence--which, he reminds us, originally meant "not harming." In a
culture as sick as ours, he suggests, not harming may be the best we can
do.
Radio talk-show host Michael Medved and his wife Diane, a
psychologist, present an equally grim picture of American society (so
grim, in fact, that they've surely prohibited their children from reading
it). Music and the movies, television and the Internet, sex ed in the
schools and oral sex in the news all conspire to deprive American youth
of a "classically carefree childhood." Their response is to raise their
daughters and son in a bubble, sealed off from the culture's
contaminants. Though the Medveds' concern for their children is clearly
genuine, such overprotectiveness Seems also to satisfy some need of their
own: they're making their children monuments to the innocence they've
lost.
Second-hand innocence isn't good enough for Shalit. She wants the
real thing, for herself and for other young women who feel compromised by
our coarsened culture. Drawing on personal anecdotes and pop culture
references, Shalit deplores modern indignities both small and large, from
co-ed bathrooms to sexual harassment, and tells us that "modesty is our
way out." She has the odd notion that if we close our eyes and wish hard,
we can will our innocence back into being, forget what we know, undo
what's been done. She wants a second sexual revolution that will reverse
the results of the first.
Those who remember the 1994 film Forrest Gump and its phenomenal
success will not be surprised to find innocence's reputation as pristine
as ever. The movie charmed audiences with its story of a simple-minded
but sweet man who stumbled innocently (and very, very luckily) through
life. Then as now, we find the notion of an adult unversed in the ways of
the world deeply appealing. But why? Why celebrate what is effectively a
lack--in the case of children, a lovely and delightful lack, but an
absence all the same?
Because, its proponents might say, it's an absence that affords
breathing space, a lack that leaves room to think. Innocence offers an
escape from the insistent pressures of the information age and all its
unwelcome news. Twenty-four-hour cable on 200 stations, the
ever-expanding Internet, reporting that revels in scandal, one movie more
explicit than the last: our time's tree of knowledge is so heavy with
apples that we've grown sick of tasting them.
NOW THAT WE have no choice but to know about war in Bosnia, famine
in the Sudan, hurricanes in Honduras, it's no wonder that we envy the
infant who knows only his blanket, his own foot, his mother's breast. Now
that we're adrift in the ether of signs and symbols, it's no wonder that
we cling to the confines of the nursery. In our alarmed houses, in our
gated communities, the only thing Americans can't keep out is
information. V-chips and Internet filters are fig leaves that can't cover
our new nakedness, our vulnerability to the ubiquity of electronic
media.
And so, innocence has come to tempt us more than knowledge. But
it's a dangerous seduction, and one we should resist. Intentional
innocence is a renunciation of the chief responsibility--and the chief
pleasure--of adult life: to know, to experience, to apprehend the world
in all its glory and its horror. Knowledge is potent stuff; that's why we
keep it away from small children. And it's why we must keep some of it
for ourselves. In careless or unscrupulous hands, knowledge is dangerous,
and the innocent are powerless to oppose it.
Women are especially wary of innocence, or ought to be. When Wendy
Shalit traces higher rates of rape to the cultural moment "when we
decided to let it all hang out," she mistakes the acknowledgment of rape
for its occurrence, and chooses the illusory security of ignorance over
the equivocal rewards of reality. Women who reject the innocence that has
often been expected of their sex will forfeit the right, as Clarence
Darrow told the jury in the Scopes "monkey trial," "to retreat behind
their powder puffs." But they will gain a field of vision free from the
modern equivalents of powder puffs and parasols and downcast
lashes.
Perhaps the best argument against a willful innocence is that it
won't work, anyway. The steady seep of electronic information will not
stop. Hollywood will not bring back chaste kisses and twin beds.
Reporters will not withhold the fact that a President has polio, or
affairs. Knowledge, often of an unsavory or unsettling sort, will be our
constant companion in the next century, and we had better begin to get
acquainted.
Tags:
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diane medved,
eldest daughter,
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harper collins,
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late twentieth century,
names of the spice girls,
national assault,
proud parents,
saving childhood,
sex and violence,
spice girls,
tender sensibilities
