What do you value of innocence?

t-mobile1892

What do you value of innocence?

Lynskey

It dosen't last long enough:pac:

Latchy

The beauty of innocence is just that .

Beautiful .

It's priceless .

ChocolateSauce

Not being guilty? :pac:

Innocence is another way of saying naive or ignorant. It's all very well and good to be naive when you're very young, but that becomes ignorance if you don't grow as you get older. If I met a 25 year old person with the outlook of a 10 year-old, I'd laugh.

I do agree it doesn't last long enough...from one's own perspective! From that of their parents, it probably doesn't come soon enough!

Lirange

I dislike that so many fawn over children as being innocent. If you're not old enough to distinguish between right or wrong that's not innocence. Just like a dog or a hamster a toddler cannot be charged with a crime. They're blameless not innocent. There is nothing beautiful about the obsessive fantasy of innocence. Humans are flawed by nature. Capable of both wicked and wonderful things. Neither Hobbes nor Rousseau got it entirely right. We are the product of both nature and nurture. Both can be good or bad.

I like the German movie the Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen). It revolves around a character that commits ugly acts but goes on to do a beautiful act. It doesn't redeem or take away his prior moral crimes. But because he is imperfect (ie human) it makes his exceptionally good act more beautiful to behold.

Contrast this with one of Dickens's early works, David Copperfield. The young boy is portrayed as the 100% pure innocent witness to the corrupt lives of the adults around him. The truth is that David is a vacuous and unengaging character as a result. The flawed adults are the only interesting people in the novel but since they're largely caricatures they're underdeveloped. Dickens was a great novelist. His portrayal of both children and adults improved. But this novel is nothing but a reflection of the obsession with the purity of childhood. Children can make great protagonists and can have an appeal but not if they're dehumanised.

Del Toro's film Pan's Labyrinth explores the life of a child that has to make a moral choice at the end of the movie. The good aspect of it is that the portrayal doesn't strip away her humanity. Critically she has also shown that she can give into temptation and make a wrong choice in the middle of the film. The story definitely portrays children in a better light than adults but this is fine in the context of the story. But it's also good to be mindful that the most beautiful and the most ugly acts of humanity throughout history have largely been the work of adults. A child cannot love in the way an adult can love. They also cannot hate in the way an adult can hate.