Childhood Innocence and the Outsider's Humility

Have you ever been overwhelmed by a child’s cuteness? Maybe you had an urge to pinch the kid’s pudgy cheek or to hold her tiny fingers. What’s most precious about children, I think, is their innocence, but what exactly is that? And what can childhood innocence tell us about how we adults ought to live?

To give an idea of the kind of innocence I’m talking about, here are two real-life examples featuring my nephew who is almost two years old. I folded a paper airplane and threw it for him to see, and he loved to watch it soar and land. I did this numerous times, sometimes holding his tiny hand under the plane so he could experience throwing it, and each time he squealed with delight. He especially liked when the plane came close to crashing into something or someone. And here’s the innocent part: after several throws, he ham-fistedly tore off the corner of another piece of paper, scrunched it up, unfolded it somewhat, and with one hand threw it, crying out “Ha!” as he did so. The piece of crumpled paper went straight down, moving all of three or four inches forward, but he showed almost as much joy from the flight of his version of the airplane as from that of the others. And he did this several times. My nephew is at the stage at which he mimics what those around him do, so he tried to create and throw a paper airplane even though he didn’t really know what he was doing.

Another example: he likes to play with kaleidoscopes. His grandmother has a collection, placed far out of his reach, and sometimes when’s he in that room he points with both hands for someone to bring one down for him. I gave him one to hold and tried to show him how to use it, by holding another one, pointing it up into the light, looking through the lens, and turning the opposite end. He followed all of the steps but stubbornly insisted on undermining his efforts by keeping his left hand around the rear end of the kaleidoscope so that his hand blocked the light. He pointed the kaleidoscope upwards, looked through the lens, but snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by placing one hand in just the wrong spot. And this wasn’t a one-time mistake. For some reason he liked to hold the kaleidoscope in that way. We gave him a different one and again he covered the key area with his hand so that all he must have seen through the lens was his hand’s silhouette. Of course, he did all of this with a smile on his face, since as long as he’s not bumping his head on something he’s having fun.

What does it mean to say, then, that a child like my nephew is innocent? The point isn’t just that a child that young hasn’t done anything wrong; rather, a child can’t do anything wrong, because she’s not yet a self-controlling adult. A child lacks the language, knowledge, and experience to control her mind and body to the extent that she’d be considered free. Instead, she’s controlled mainly by her environment and especially by her guardians and caregivers. So she’s innocent for the profound reason that she’s not yet the sort of creature that could possibly be responsible for her actions. Instead of acting rationally or wisely, she plays and that’s how she learns. But this playing takes place within safe zones of the adult world, and it’s this contrast that makes a child cute and precious.

The Purpose of Human Development

There are, though, two adult perspectives on childhood to consider. From the conventional perspective, childhood is a stage leading to adulthood. In this case, what’s amusing and adorable about a child’s mistakes is that the child is only at the very start of a long process of maturation. In normal development, the child’s mistakes are harmless because they’ll all be corrected and they’re needed for growth; again, she learns by making mistakes and by practicing to get it right. But when she gets it wrong, there’s a pleasure an adult can take in watching the child’s bloopers, because the child’s greatest effort is still no competition for the adult’s. Thus, an adult feels like a god when she watches a child flounder, and I think this is the source of the joy of watching children play. A child’s cuteness is a delicate sort of beauty; she can’t care for herself and so is precious in that her great fragility must be matched by a very high value placed on her by adults who must care for her. The proverbial babe in the woods is a creature that only mimics some of an adult’s traits and whose achievements are only the faintest gestures towards adult actions. When most adults see that helplessness, we feel like we imagine a god would feel were he to watch his creatures frolic in relative ignorance. The idea of God, then, has been potentially with us long before recorded history; all we had to do was generalize from the universal experience of raising a helpless human child. Just as a parent is all-knowing and all-powerful compared to a child, so too our species might be childlike compared to an intelligent creator of all natural life.

But this mere idea of God is irrelevant to this first adult perspective, because the adult experiences a kind of divinity when interacting with children. The flipside of the child’s helplessness is the adult’s potency. Whereas a child is relatively awkward, ignorant, and incompetent, an adult is the opposite, because the child and the adult are at opposite ends of a period of maturation. Instead of feeling weak, ugly, or dim compared to superior adults, every adult who has developed more or less normally can feel far and away superior to the average child. Childhood innocence, then, is a happy sort of inferiority, because the child is judged relative to the stage of adulthood which is held out as the purpose of the child’s growth. The pleasure adults take in watching children play, then, is twofold: the child’s blunders are assumed to be merely temporary, reversible, and thus harmless, and every demonstration of childhood inferiority allows the adult to feel that much superior, and feeling like a god flatters the adult.

When the Outsider Looks In

There’s a second, less popular interpretation of childhood innocence. Instead of seeing childhood as the first stage leading to the end of adult maturity, childhood and adulthood can seem equally foolish from a transcendent perspective afforded by objective reason and by social alienation. Here’s how this works. The first perspective is for those who identify with adult human nature; they commit to the ideals that normal adults tend to have (raising a family, earning a living, making friends, being socially productive). Most people are more or less successful in achieving these goals, but more importantly, they regard these achievements as practically sacred. Whatever they may say about transcendent gods and divine revelation, most of what they actually do is thoroughly natural; for the most part, their behaviour is biologically and socially determined and about as aesthetically interesting, therefore, as a paramecium’s. Instead of creating anything new, most people commit to the biological and social imperatives they inherit: the genes say procreate, so most people do so; social convention says fit in, so they do so.

But for thousands of years, a minority of people has declined to identify with that natural and social way of life. This minority doesn’t succeed in biological terms, nor does it find solace in the company of others. This minority is made up of the introverts and omegas, the losers and victims who lack much ambition because their egos are eviscerated, and the artists and mystics who make the most of their failures or inabilities by speculating about a higher purpose of life. These outsiders suffer the most from what I call the curse of reason and they therefore grapple the most with our existential predicament. So instead of comparing children to mature adults who live up to our natural ideals, the outsider adults reject those ideals and judge most adults to be childlike. When viewed from nowhere, that is, from outside of the biological and social grooves, the human lifecycle seems absurd. There is no vindication, then, for the child’s muddles and blunders. First, she’ll flounder as an ankle biter, then she’ll flounder as a mother, or as a lawyer, politician, or dentist, or in just about any other adult capacity.

To be sure, children are ignorant and incompetent compared to adults, but the importance of differences depends on our interest and perspective. For certain purposes, we may ignore the differences between types of trees, let alone between individual trees, and speak of trees in general. Likewise, if we happen not to worship human nature, if we don’t share the ultimate concerns that are biologically and socially probable for mammals of our type, we may regard the differences between children and adults as insignificant. Both groups may be equally ignorant, incompetent, and foolish according to a nonstandard model, or way of simplifying phenomena for the sake of understanding. Obviously, if you have a pain in your arm, you visit a doctor, not a child holding a stethoscope. But if you’re preoccupied with the existential predicament, the average adult’s grasp of it is as useless as a child’s; the adult’s mouthing of memes and shibboleths, and her venting of genetically-determined instincts might as well be a child’s babbling. This can be illustrated with speculations about superhumans, such as superintelligent extraterrestrials, posthumans, or gods, relative to whom even our smartest and most powerful adults would be children, so that the differences between human adults and children would be negligible as a matter of fact. But even if no such superhumans exist, the curse of reason has the last laugh. All that matters is that from the outsider’s alienated, detached, and otherworldly perspective, all living things are ultimately pointless as well as ridiculous and pitiful in their strivings. This cosmicism is in fact the secret, subversive implication of even mainstream theism, as I’ve argued elsewhere.

So from this second perspective, there’s as much sorrow as there is joy in a child’s innocence, because whatever we learn about children applies also to adults. If a child’s efforts at performing adult activities are pitiful, so are an adult’s efforts in the cosmic, existential context. That is, relative to the adult world, children are innocent in that they’re not yet creatures that can be held accountable; they can’t yet succeed or fail because they don’t know what they’re doing, but just play and muddle their way through. Likewise, relative to the objective world of nature in which most of our ideals derive from cockamamie delusions or degrading biological processes, adults (and children) are innocent in that we’re only barely able to appreciate what’s really going on around us. So there’s a tragedy that unfolds whenever a child plays with her toys. From the existential cosmicist perspective, the silliness of that play is symbolic of the absurdity of most adult endeavours. The emptiness of our preoccupations is hinted at in the backwardness of the child’s obsessions, and the hollowness of the adult world is foreshadowed in the arbitrariness of the child’s world of imagination. 

Here's another example from the life of my nephew. His father was cooking him a hamburger, but the hamburger wasn't ready to eat soon enough for my nephew, so he ran to his mother and began bawling and wailing, "My hamburger!" and then "Bunny!" which meant that he wanted someone to fetch his security blanket which he calls "Bunny," because it's a small blanket with something that looks like a rabbit's head sewn into one of its corners. That forlorn cry for Bunny was heartrending, I can assure you. But all ended well because someone brought him the blanket, he stopped crying, and then he enjoyed his burger. Now, if we stop and think about the meaning of this sort of conflict resolution, the lesson is unmistakable. What children eventually learn is that the world doesn't given them everything they want exactly when and how they want it. Unlike the mother's womb which evolved to supply the child with whatever she needs, the natural world is indifferent to us. So my nephew wanted the hamburger to be ready as soon as he was hungry, but the laws of physics dictate that cooking meat takes a certain amount of time regardless of our preferences. To compensate for this sort of unsettling knowledge, a child often clings to a security blanket as a sort of reverse scapegoat: instead of externalizing all of her wickedness and then punishing the sacrificial object, a child invests an object with all her hopes and dreams so that as long as the security blanket is near, everything is alright with the world. Of course, nothing but delusion sustains the child's perfectly pitiful faith in the symbol of the security blanket; after all, it's just a scrap of fabric.

My point here, though, is that because children don't yet learn to rationalize or conceal the irrationality of their coping mechanisms, the absurdity of their daily life is obvious to anyone who cares to look. But adults too are forced to confront nature's impersonality and we too often cope by concocting all manner of pitiful fantasies to distract ourselves. The difference is that adults all look down on children, because we think we outgrow that phase: we contrast the child’s abilities with ours, because we adults can’t detach from mainstream traditions, prejudices, or politically correct expectations without harming ourselves by forcing us to confront the horror of our existential situation. Thus, most adults take for granted anthropocentric ideals that lend us some dignity, which is to say that we opt for the first rather than the second perspective. But for those who are forced into something like existential cosmicism, the rug is pulled out from beneath most adults just as it is from beneath all children. Most adults laugh at children, but the ultrarationalist would laugh at most adults: when we look at society objectively, most social pastimes become ridiculous, because their meaning is found only in identifying with some culture. As soon as you find yourself on the outside of a culture or way of life--marginalized, cast out, alienated, or what have you--you typically perceive the social process as a game in the strict sense that you become aware that its rules are irrelevant to our existential situation and are in that respect cosmically arbitrary and frivolous. It’s like discovering that people are all slowly drowning and then realizing that everyone is busy learning how to dance or to play baseball or to wear the priciest clothes rather than to swim or surface for air.

Granted, cultures aren’t arbitrary in the sense that they’re freely chosen; as I said, to some extent at least, they’re biologically determined, meaning that they contribute to our biological pattern, furthering our life cycle. The arbitrariness at issue, though, is the existential absurdity of how most people spend their time. This absurdity isn’t just a matter of objective meaninglessness, or lack of value. Value derives from a person’s choice to care about something, and the underlying choice is the religious one to pick out something as sacred, as worthy of living and dying for because of how this sacred ideal emotionally moves us like a great work of art. In addition to the fact that nothing cares about any of us except for us, there’s the fact that the contrast between our vanity and the rest of the world’s inhumanity has overwhelming comedic implications. This is to say that once we detach from mainstream preoccupations and are forced to suffer from reason’s curse, which is that reason shows us we’re not as we’d prefer to be, what we see from that accursed view from nowhere should make us laugh--not with joy but with bitter irony and a grim appreciation of our tragedy as all-too-clever primates.

The Outsider’s Humility

There are many implications of this twofold analysis of the idea of childhood innocence. Elsewhere I’ve discussed some of them (see this article and the last section of this one). Now, though, I want to show how the foregoing sheds some light on the nature of humility. Instead of talking about the two groups of adults, the exoteric, mainstream group and the outsiders, introverts, omegas, and so forth, I’ll switch to speaking of the two corresponding tendencies in each of us. We each have worldly ambition and a desire to fit in as well as the rational potential to see through all charades. And humility falls out of the latter rather than the former.

Recall that I spoke of how we’re inclined to feel like gods when in the presence of fumbling children. If we pursue that anthropocentric line of thinking, taking the teleological view of social patterns and holding up normal adult humans as more mature and therefore better than children, we’re led to think of ideal people as those who dominate social hierarchies. This is because these dominators are able to manifest our presumed divinity which most of us can only feel; that is, those who climb to the top of a pecking order get to live as gods whereas those who must submit to more powerful adults have only a notion of what that life would be like, when we’re aware of our vast superiority to children. Because power tends to corrupt, a dominator isn’t likely to be humble; instead, she’ll become arrogant, conceited, cruel, and so forth.

But those who take up the existential cosmicist perspective and are moved by the analogy between children and adults won’t likely be so successful by mainstream standards: they’ll renounce their place in the natural life cycle and fall outside of social networks. Outsiders will be relatively powerless and therefore won’t be corrupted in the familiar way. To be sure, there are other ways of being corrupted; extreme poverty can degrade a person, making her savagely desperate. But it’s hard to see how natural and social failures could feed someone the delusion of being all-important. Anthropocentrism begins with the teleological assumption that normal adulthood is good, being the end point of a process that ought to unfold. We can thus contrast children and adults, with that normative interpretation of human development in mind, and come to feel godlike because of our evident superiority to children. And anthropocentrism is a major source of vanity; we solipsistically ignore the rest of the world and fixate on our strengths and needs--much like children, in fact.

Cosmicism is the opposite of anthropocentrism. Far from narrowing our vision to what we’re most familiar with, namely psychological and social processes, the cosmicist is forced to detach from those processes because of her outsider status; her vision is thus widened to include not just the scientifically-known universe, but the likelihood that what there is isn’t exhausted by what clever mammals can possibly understand. Thus, when an introvert, artist, or mystic stands apart from society, because she fails to fit in, she replaces the human-centered viewpoint with the objective one from nowhere. She observes people with inhuman eyes, detaching from her instincts and social preferences; she’s forced to create a new and thus aesthetically-considerable way of life.

Cosmicist humility, then, is the devaluing of normal ideals due to a widening of perspective. This humility isn’t just the lack of confidence that you could succeed in achieving some goal; rather, it’s the lack of confidence in the worthwhileness of mainstream goals. Humility begins with misanthropy, with contempt for human nature, because this nature drives us to take up the first perspective and to corrupt ourselves in the attempt to dominate in social games. When we don’t identify with our natural impulses, when we’re forced to live artistically, to create an existentially authentic, original way of life, we’re humble about our ability to live in the naturally expected, traditional culture, because we appreciate the delusions, fallacies, and obsolete myths needed to sustain that culture. For example, we take the teleological notion of the goodness of normal adulthood to be a straightforward case of the naturalistic fallacy. A humble person in this philosophical respect has a low opinion of her underlying abilities because she has contempt for human norms. She won’t be jealous of superior people; rather, she’ll think poorly of the whole rat race, which is to say that the truly humble person is a social outsider. The Latin humilis means lowly, or on the ground. The classic illustration of humility as the opposite of hubris is the Icarus myth, about the boy who uses technological wings to fly but flies too close to the sun and falls into the sea. Failure is supposed to teach us not to be arrogant, to know our place as mere mammals that live, as it were, on the ground.

This Greek perspective, though, presupposes Aristotelian teleology, since it assumes that we’re supposed to live on the ground rather than to fly to the heavens. This is fallacious, but the idea of humility can be reworked if we replace Aristotelianism, which anthropocentrically projects ideals onto nature, with existential cosmicism. The result is actually an inversion of the ancient Greek framework: humility should be thought of as indeed a virtue earned by failure, but instead of learning that she shouldn’t dare to be different, the humble person learns to distrust human normality. She learns that both failure and success in the natural and social courses of human life are embarrassingly childish, so whether she first succeeds only to lose much or everything, or else tries and fails to dominate, she comes to detach from the normal human preferences, to see herself as an outsider, as psychologically inhuman or “disordered.” The psychological classification of the mental illnesses and disabilities of losers and social outcasts is as teleological as the Icarus myth. But there should be a correlation between those who suffer from mental illness and those who suffer most from the curse of reason. These people won’t necessarily be the most intelligent; instead, the curse is the loss of confidence in human nature, the detachment from social processes, and the angst and horror that follow from the resulting alienation. The curse of reason is about a gestalt shift in perspective, not a measure of intelligence.

So the outsider, drifter, seeker, introvert, artist, or mystic will likely be humble in that she’ll lack pride in the abilities she’s usually expected to have. She won’t identify so much with her ego, because her sense of individuality won’t by buoyed by success after success. Her failures and weaknesses will crush her spirit and so she’ll be brought low, as in the Icarus myth, but she won’t be reassured that she belongs on the earth or anywhere else. She’ll be lost in the view from nowhere, doomed to suffer existential anxiety. Her saving grace is her potential for posthumanity; she can sublimate her suffering in the creation of art, whether this art be the traditional kind or the creation of a worldview or an original, aesthetically pleasing lifestyle.

Will she then become proud of being posthuman, of being original rather than running with the herd? Not really, because her cosmicist assumptions are tragic and so she’d sooner take pity on herself than feel superior to anyone; moreover, her individual identity will already have been battered by her poor track record and by her marginal status, and so she wouldn’t think of herself as so sovereign, in the first place, that she could take personal pride in her artistic accomplishments. She’ll evaluate things aesthetically, not teleologically or ethically according to ancient Greek assumptions; moreover, she won’t trust in the standards fit for traversing dominance hierarchies. She’ll be motivated, rather, by pity for all living things and by disgust for expressions of existential inauthenticity (roughly, unoriginality). From inside distasteful social games, her humility will look like submissiveness, but from the outsider’s perspective, even a full-fledged oligarchic dominator looks like a floundering child in a playpen.