Notes on Innocence

post by David Gross (David_Gross) · 2024-01-26T14:45:45.612Z · LW · GW · 21 comments

Contents

  What is this virtue?
    Scenario #1: The racist joke
    Scenario #2: What did they mean by that?
    Related virtues and vices
  What good is innocence?
    Innocence as “purity”
    Remaining innocent is easier than restraining guilt within reasonable bounds
    What bad is innocence?
  How to develop (preserve? recover?) innocence
    The brute force technique
    Hesitating before reducing reality to one’s expectations, or trying to extract from it what meets one’s agenda
    Wash that innocence back in
    Affected or defensive innocence
  Conclusion
None
21 comments

This post examines the virtue of innocence. As with my other posts in this sequence, I’m less interested in breaking new ground and more in gathering and synthesizing whatever wisdom I could find on the subject. I wrote this not as an expert on the topic, but as someone who wants to learn more about it. I hope it will be helpful to people who want to know more about this virtue and how to nurture it.

I felt more ambivalence and indecisiveness about this virtue than with most, so you may find this post unsatisfactorily waffley.

What is this virtue?

The virtue of innocence I want to investigate is not the legal “innocent until proven guilty” kind, but “the sweet converse of an innocent mind”^[1] kind: more of a character trait than a verdict. I mean innocence not in contrast to guilt, but in contrast to guile.

A lot of what has been written about a virtue called “innocence” uses the word as a euphemism for virginity or for sexual obliviousness, often specifically for these things in girls and women. In this post, I want to consider instead a more-rarely discussed virtue of innocence — a character trait that is also available to sexually-mature adults of all genders, and as such better fits with this sequence.

I’ll first introduce a couple of scenarios that may illustrate the sort of innocence I have in mind.

Scenario #1: The racist joke

Alice tells a racist joke to her acquaintances, Carol & Bob: “What do you call a black abortion clinic? Crime Stoppers.” While Carol is considering how to most diplomatically and unambiguously show her disapproval, Bob abruptly says: “I don’t get it.”

Alice: “It’s a joke.”

Bob: “Yeah, I know. But I don’t get it. What does the color of the clinic have to do with calling it ‘Crime Stoppers’?”

Alice: “No: the abortion clinic isn’t black; it’s an abortion clinic for black people.”

Bob: “Do they even have those?”

Alice: “It’s a joke. You’re just supposed to pretend. Imagine if.”

Bob: “I still don’t get it.”

Alice: “Well you’ve ruined it now. If I have to explain it, it won’t be funny.”

The “joke” Alice told — even if you put aside the offensiveness of it — isn’t funny. It isn’t really a joke, but a shibboleth in the form of a joke. What Alice is communicating is something like this: “We all understand that black people are a bunch of criminals, don’t we?” What Carol is trying to come up with is something like: “I don’t approve of that stereotype or think it’s appropriate to promulgate it.” Bob simply says “nope.”

There’s something attractive about Bob’s innocence. While Carol has to descend into a bigoted worldview to dissent against it (or has to admit that she is already somewhat mired there), Bob stands outside of it. He fails the shibboleth.

And yet, Bob is alarmingly ignorant. It’s a sort of cultural illiteracy not to have a basic grasp of the tropes of racial stereotyping, even if — especially if — you think they are harmful.

For example, I’m not sure I have ever seen the African-Americans + watermelon trope deployed in my lifetime as a straightforwardly offensive stereotype. It’s an antique — something from another era. Whenever I see it these days, it’s in a sort of meta commentary (or edgelordish provocation) on ridiculous-looking anachronistic racist stereotypes. But I think it’s valuable to know that this trope exists and is emblematic of offense-giving, both so that I know how to better interpret it and so that I don’t inadvertently stumble into it.

On the other hand, when I was growing up in a very white community in the United States in the 1970s, the well-intentioned but perhaps not very far-sighted white liberal culture that nourished me was very concerned that I learn that black people are not unintelligent and are not uncivilized primitives and are not lawless brutes. This seemed sensible and uncontroversial to me, and I was happy to go along with it. But for some reason, every time I met a black person, concepts like “unintelligent”, “uncivilized primitives”, and “lawless brutes” kept coming to mind in spite of myself. Even if they all had “not” carefully stitched to them, this emphasized negation always seemed to accompany the assertion rather than to obliterate it. Would I have been better off if I could have remained more ignorant for longer of the racist tropes in this case? Knowledge of such tropes, even knowledge acquired “defensively”, has a way of rubbing off and subconsciously lending credence to the stereotypes. And widespread knowledge of a racist trope in a culture (again, even knowledge acquired “defensively”) can give that trope enduring currency when it otherwise might have died a well-deserved death.^[2]

Each of the extremes then seems inadvisable: to remain completely ignorant of racist tropes in the hopes of not being sullied by them, or obtaining an encyclopedic knowledge of racist tropes and staying hyper-aware of them in the hopes of evading them. There is a difficult-to-find sweet spot between ignorance and pollution, and perhaps the virtue of innocence slots into this “golden mean” as virtues are prone to do.

Scenario #2: What did they mean by that?

A stranger passes me on the sidewalk. As they do, they look me in the eye and say, “nice day, isn’t it?” What did they mean by that? Some hypotheses:

• They are making an informal salutation to me, tipping their hat verbally.
• They find the current climate delightful and want to calibrate their assessment by checking it against mine.
• They are sarcastically referring to current events, maybe to some news item I am not yet aware of but should be.
• They are making fun of me for smiling like a simpleton.
• They are hoping to engage me in conversation so that they can ask me for a favor.
• They are reminding me that my days of freedom are numbered as surely evidence of my crimes will soon come to light (enjoy it while it lasts).
• They are hoping I will respond with the other half of the passphrase.
• They are practicing their English.
• They are trying to distract me so that their confederate can steal something from me.
• They are trying to politely point out that I have dressed inappropriately for the weather.
• They are showing me up by addressing me before waiting for me to address them first.
• They are trying to dissuade me from continuing to attend to the important issue.
• ⋮

Human communication is a noisy jumble of ambiguity and creative interpretation, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. When someone says “nice day, isn’t it?” to me, that phrase becomes at first a sort of superposition of interpretations in my mind. If I’m lucky or insightful, I can find some dominant most-likely interpretation which I can more-or-less confidently use as my working hypothesis of what-they-really-meant-by-that. Other times, things remain in an unresolved ambiguity and I have to either give up on confident understanding or dig further for clues (“you mean the weather?”).

Which interpretations are my working hypotheses in such a superposition are in part a function of my experience. How have people used language around me before? What sorts of motives have they displayed? What might lead me to say such a thing? A characteristically innocent person — in the way I am using “innocence” to describe a virtue — tends to have fewer working hypotheses that are sinister: that involve duplicity, mockery, sarcasm, etc. This is in part because that characteristically innocent person is also devoid of things like dishonesty, cruelty, lasciviousness, and suspicion, and so hypotheses that depend on such things do not come to their mind as easily.

This can lead to dire consequences:

As she walked along the path, she met a wolf. She did not know what a wicked beast it was, and so she was not at all afraid. “Good day, Red Riding Hood,” said the wolf. “Good morning, sir,” she said.^[3]

But there are also terrible consequences of entertaining too many hypotheses (inability to comprehend people at all, or ever-shifting erratic interpretations of people), or — more commonly — of an unfortunate imbalance of which hypotheses to consider. Any utterance could conceivably mean a vast multitude of things. You could not possibly weigh them all. You have to winnow the possibilities you will consider down to those that seem more pertinent. This winnowing colors the superposition-of-interpretations that you peer out at the world from within. For example, if your winnowing is biased to include mostly-suspicious interpretations, you will be prone to paranoia; if your winnowing is biased to hunt madly for smutty double-entendres, you risk being mired in a giggity quagmire; if you believe hypotheses are off-the-table if they presuppose caring, benevolent, loving others, some other explanation will fill the gap when (people cleverly disguised as?) caring, benevolent, loving others cross your path; if you are vain, interpretations like “I have dressed inappropriately” will always be there among the possibilities to taunt you.

Such cases show what can be described as a “loss of innocence” that works out badly. The cause might be some sort of trauma (I trusted them, they betrayed me, now I know people don’t mean what they say), or a character flaw (I often flatter people with insincere compliments, so it stands to reason that when people compliment me they’re probably being insincere), or something else (I got positive feedback from my middle-school peers whenever I was the first to point out sexual innuendo, so I remain hyperaware of any such possibility). Whatever the case, it can be a sort of over-correction that hurts both how you present yourself in the world and how you perceive the world.

So again it looks like we’re trying to find a sweet spot in the middle: There is a pathological innocence (or, early-on, age-appropriate lack of experience) that manifests as naïveté, gullibility, babe-in-the-woods vulnerability, unreadiness, superficiality. Then there is a grown-up innocence that is usually more positively-construed: purity, wholesomeness, openness, trust, authenticity. And there is a tempering that fortifies this innocence without crushing it: experience, depth, having good boundaries, healthy skepticism. But there is also a hypercorrection that breaks things: becoming world-weary, cynical, corrupt, “knowing”, “sophisticated”, suspicious, scheming, guarded.

Related virtues and vices

For what it’s worth, some other virtues that seem to cluster near innocence include purity, earnestness / straightforwardness, chastity [LW · GW], optimism, hope, & trust [LW · GW], vulnerability, and spontaneity & playfulness.

Innocence has some resemblance to temperance [LW · GW]: less a matter of resisting temptation successfully and more of being immune to temptation in the first place (a virginal child is innocent; a virginal youth is chaste).

A sense of shame [LW · GW] has a complicated relationship with innocence. On the one hand, an innocent person is sometimes thought to be immune to shame. One of the markers of Adam & Eve losing their innocence after eating from the Tree of Knowledge is that they became ashamed of their nakedness, which beforehand was not even a thing.^[4] On the other hand, the prototypically innocent person is prone to blushing at hints of impropriety: their sense of shame seems especially sensitive and may be considered part of the immune system that protects their innocence.^[5] Someone is not usually described as “shameless” for being innocent but for having no trace of innocence left.

What good is innocence?

“Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” ―Jesus^[6]

“Mencius said, ‘A great man is one who retains the heart of a new-born babe.’”^[7]

Innocence in the sense I have been exploring means that you have successfully avoided certain tempting but deceptive ruts: “locked priors”^[8] that are both deceiving and disturbing. Things like sophistication, cynicism, and smirking knowingness can parade themselves as having their blinders off and being more at ease with the real world, but they can be blinders of their own and an awkward disguise for an anxious tension. So in this way, innocence seems like it can be good for you.

And innocence of (for example) racism is certainly a blessed state, and it seems only a matter of whether or not it is timely than whether or not it is ultimately desirable.

In addition to these considerations, if you convincingly appear innocent, this can also come off as “guileless”. As such it can be a signal of trustworthiness. People may be more willing to trust you or to be more unguarded around you, which can be a good thing. (On the other hand, if you come off as guileless you may also present as an easy mark, and less-scrupulous people may be encouraged to see how much they can get away with around you. People may be less likely to trust you, for example with a secret or with the family cow, for fear you’ll innocently blab or trade Bessie for a handful of magic beans.)

An innocent person can also be like the child who points out that the Emperor has no clothes: too unsophisticated to know what everyone has tacitly agreed not to mention. They point out the elephant in the room when others will not. This too can be useful and beneficial, but likely also has drawbacks (there’s probably a reason nobody’s mentioning Jumbo).

Innocence as “purity”

“Not without a slight shudder at the danger, I often perceive how near I had come to admitting into my mind the details of some trivial affair — the news of the street; and I am astonished to observe how willing men are to lumber their minds with such rubbish — to permit idle rumors and incidents of the most insignificant kind to intrude on ground which should be sacred to thought. Shall the mind be a public arena, where the affairs of the street and the gossip of the tea-table chiefly are discussed? Or shall it be a quarter of heaven itself — an hypæthral temple, consecrated to the service of the gods?” ―Thoreau^[9]

Innocence is commonly associated with “purity” and the loss of innocence with corruption, contamination, staining. A typical rendering makes people out to be originally pure/innocent but vulnerable to being sullied. We all once had a new-car smell, but we lost it.

We use the expression “I felt dirty” when we are exposed to someone else’s skulduggery (either as a victim, a witness, or a collaborator). We understand what Lady Macbeth means when she complains “What, will these hands ne’er be clean?”^[10]

Christians hope that “the blood of Jesus… cleanses us from all sin”,^[11] while Buddhists hope to free themselves from “defilements” and become like the lotus blossom that emerges spotless from the muddy pond.

Whether it’s the modern puritan warning against the perversions of pornography and drugs, Rousseau complaining that our natural innocence is corrupted by the evils of society, the social critic decrying capitalism for selling us trademarked superheroes to quench our desire for real heroes, or a rationalist reminding us that human instincts were optimized by evolution for our species’s ancestral environment but have been rendered misleading by the accretion of cultural innovation — the familiar story suggests a promising innate potential that is blotted out by some menacing environmental threat.

Clearly there’s something intuitively appealing about this motif. The seed inside of each of us was destined to blossom into something stately, unblemished, proud, undistorted, vibrant… but only if we could resist the forces eager to make us stunted, stained, cowering, warped, and dull. You could have been a princess if you hadn’t been consigned to sweep the fireplace by your evil stepmother. Why is this sort of myth appealing?

The intuition underlying this is, I think, that as we go through life we pick up experience (and experiences) and learn from them to craft our characters. But if we stop to take an inventory, it seems that some of this we could have done better without: things learned that would have been better left unlearned, experiences better left unexperienced, ways in which we changed our characters for the worse rather than for the better. Some experiences give us wisdom, skill, and perspective; others don’t offer much more than scars, limps, or chronic tinnitus. In at least some ways, we suppose, if we had been able to remain more innocent we would be better people for it. If we had a second chance, maybe we could stay on the straight-and-narrow path where we could pick up the good experience and leave the rotten stuff to rot.

Remaining innocent is easier than restraining guilt within reasonable bounds

When “innocent” amplifies “not guilty of some particular transgression” (or “some variety of transgression”) it can highlight how such transgressions are not merely isolated events. For example, the first time you shoplift something you not only have committed a discrete act of theft, but you have also taken a first step toward adopting the character of a thief. The first such step, from innocence to naughtiness, is often fraught and difficult; the second and subsequent steps easier and more casual. So the advice to defend your innocence in such a case is really advice to defend your character — vigorously, at the borders, not merely when the siege comes to the castle walls.

Related to this is what has frequently been noted about a transgression like lying: that an original lie will often demand reinforcements in the form of further lies. If you remain innocent — refrain from that first lie, or from having anything to lie about — the others won’t be necessary and so you won’t risk being tangled in more deception than you’d allowed for. Innocent people are free from the burden of having to keep their stories straight.

What bad is innocence?

The loss of innocence is also sometimes called “disillusionment”. If the world is not as simple and benevolent as you had hoped, such disillusionment is bitter medicine, but it does cure what ails you: illusion. You can now trade in your false hopes for truer if less lofty ones. You can’t spend your whole life believing in Santa Claus.

There is a kind of innocence that precedes discovering one’s insignificance in the context of everything, or one’s mortality. One may have innocently aspired in one’s daydreams to utilitarian perfection, sinlessness, omniscience, immortal fame. Having lost this sort of innocence, one can come down from the clouds and adopt more realistic ambitions [LW · GW].

Is innocence just a phase? Maybe losing your innocence is like giving up your pacifier: something you have to do, however reluctantly, in order to mature. Maybe the idea of “innocence as a virtue” is an unhealthy nostalgia for childhood — a fruitless wish that we could return to a time before we packed our emotional baggage and set off for the real world. (My guess is that this depends on how you define innocence. You can define innocence in such a way that it is just a word for childish naïveté. But in this post I’ve tried to carve out a variety of innocence that resists illusion.)

“Innocence” also has a bad reputation from how it was used to label people who were mostly valued for their unsulliedness, as though they were pieces of more- or less-valuable produce (like the way sex “ruins” an unmarried woman in a 19th century novel), or to label whole peoples whose supposed lack of sophistication justified paternalistic colonial oversight.

“Innocence” can be deployed in bad faith. For example, there is reason to doubt the innocence of many “good Germans” who ostensibly had no idea their suddenly missing Jewish neighbors were in deadly peril. People who excuse their willful ignorance of inconvenient facts by an appeal to the value of innocence (“why should I sully my beautiful mind with something like that?”) are no more effective than anyone who sticks their fingers in their ears and sings “la-la-la” to drown out the sound of bad news.

Self-representations of being “nonpartisan” or “unbiased” are sometimes also criticized as examples of unearned, affected innocence. Nonpartisan and unbiased standpoints are esteemed because of their supposed innocent lack of prejudice. But those who pretend to be operating from such standpoints may do so by means of a disingenuous denial of their biases, rather than from an innocent lack of them.

How to develop (preserve? recover?) innocence

“Innocence more often than not is a piece of good fortune rather than a virtue.” ―Anatole France^[12]

In much folklore about innocence it is (not coincidentally) something like virginity: you can lose it, but you can’t get it back once it’s lost. Tales of lost innocence are either tragedies, or the loss of innocence is the necessary growth of a character as they transition from youth to maturity. Tales of quests to regain lost innocence are farces (or sometimes tragedies, like The Great Gatsby) of characters in denial who chase after already-popped bubbles. When innocence is conflated with youth you get the often comic but sometimes horrible (The Picture of Dorian Gray, Sunset Boulevard) tales of people trying to cheat time and remain forever-young.

But I think we can be more hopeful than this, at least for the sort of innocence I’m concentrating on here. When this sort of innocence is lost through a glitch in mental training (having an exaggerated amount of training data of a certain type, getting pathologically distorted rewards or punishments, generalizing too quickly and too strongly^[13]) there is some hope that you can identify the error and take steps to reverse it.

For example, I discovered well into adulthood that I was over-relying on cynicism in conversation. It was my go-to tactic of wit, and I leaned on it so heavily that I came off as a snide smart-ass presuming to hold the world up to mockery. When I finally noticed this, I decided to put in some deliberate effort to become more sincere, and it worked. I stopped looking for the angle from which I could look upon anything and everything as pretense, and started taking things more at face value. It was good for me, I think — it improved my outlook on life — and it probably made me more companionable to boot. Some younger me had wanted to seem more sophisticated by demonstrating (vocally, over-and-over) that I wasn’t being taken in by the world’s masquerade. When I got older and no longer had so much to prove, for a long time I hardly noticed that I had this no-longer-helpful habit: I had to discover it in myself and then work to discard it.

That experience gives me hope that we can steer ourselves back in the direction of a healthy innocence once we’ve discovered ourselves to be off-course.

The brute force technique

The slow and steady, brute-force, no-shortcuts method of recovering innocence is to address each stain on your innocence on its own terms, one at a time. If your innocence is marred by actual guilt, try atonement, apology, and (self-)forgiveness [LW · GW]: Swallow hard and consider steps 4–10 of the Twelve.^[14] If your innocence has been warped by cynicism, cunning, or obscenity — put in the work to change these habits.

If you are troubled by an unearned sense of guilt that was put on your shoulders (or that you voluntarily shouldered) long ago, maybe relitigate the case in the light of a mature outlook (and perhaps a helpful analyst) to lighten your load. People may feel guilty, for example, over having been victimized, or having had some unfashionable or untimely expression of sexual desire, or having acted childish as a child. To regain innocence may be a matter of appealing this sentence to a court that recognizes that being human is not a sin, and that if it is sometimes an ordeal this is not because it is a sentence.

It can be obscure to us where we feel guilty, and of what charges. Such things often come from directions in which we prefer not to look. One way we can discover where we are no longer enjoying innocence is to look for where we try to justify ourselves to ourselves, (that is, where we are preparing our defense against the charges). With sustained introspection (for example, disciplined meditation or the ruthless self-examination of certain marijuana highs) or with trained assistance we may be able to discover where we are doing this and use it to retrace our steps back to our innocence.

Hesitating before reducing reality to one’s expectations, or trying to extract from it what meets one’s agenda

One interpretation of the kind of innocence I’m considering here is that it is an absence of prejudice or presupposing, the lack of an agenda or angle, or the willingness to take things at face value rather than read between the lines.

In this interpretation, one’s childish presuppositions (“it’s all about me!” “everything has a purpose”) eventually give way to an open, curious, alert, aware innocence that wears its heart on its sleeve, but one remains in danger of becoming reentangled in more mature and dismal prejudices (“everyone is out for themselves,” “life is meaningless”) and temptations to artifice.

I’m not convinced that this is an accurate picture of human development. Haven’t we always been interpreting reality through a variety of hypotheses and generalizations? Haven’t we always been a tangled mess of mixed motives? But assuming for the sake of argument that there’s some core of truth to this interpretation, how can one navigate this process of maturing innocence well?

One possibility is to try to interrupt the process of imposing judgement or supposition on reality altogether, so as to avoid the possibility of prejudice or presupposing. In the Buddhist system, the world of phenomena arises from a chain of processes of dependent origination that leads (in those of us still mired in defilements) to suffering. Among those processes early in the chain, coming directly after the ignorance that is (roughly) the opposite of lotus-like innocence, are fabrications or mental dispositions (saṅkhāra). If you can work your way back along the chain and stop generating these fabrications, you’ll interrupt the rest of the chain and cut off the flow of suffering. In Western pop-Buddhism this sort of thing is sometimes expressed as seeing reality as-it-is without imposing concepts and judgements on it. In any case, it is difficult to accomplish even for people who have bought in to Buddhism and are diligently on its path; for the general public it seems far out of reach.

But maybe there are some part-way measures we can take. Is it a good practice perhaps, in conversation, to increase one’s credence of literal, earnest, straightforward interpretations of what other people say? I’m skeptical. Maybe for some people at some times, something like this would be a valuable corrective (obviously, for example, people suffering from things like paranoid delusions or delusions of reference). But rich human conversation relies so heavily on non-literal statements and on intimate, complex tangoes of ambiguity, intuition, and analysis. Even if you could take everything at face value, you’d still have to interpret questions like “why are they telling me this particular set of things? in this particular order?” the answers to which cannot be found in the statements-as-given. Meeting your conversation partner half-way with your best guess of what they mean to mean is an important way of showing that you care and are paying attention. “Do I have to spell it out for you?” is a way of expressing frustration towards someone who doesn’t seem to be putting in that effort. I’m not even sure that The Literal Meaning of a typical statement in conversation is a thing. We somehow have to be open to a variety of interpretations, some of which our partners in conversation might not even themselves be aware of (it’s not unheard of for someone to understand us better on some occasion than we understand ourselves), without putting our words in their mouths or planting our ideas in their heads.

Wash that innocence back in

The classic remedy for lost innocence is a good bath. If one’s innocence has metaphorically acquired a stain of filth, why not try extending the metaphor and wash that stain away? This, anyway, is something I see when I look at the many cross-cultural varieties of ritual purification in which a physical act of self-washing has transphysical implications.

For example, to become a Christian is to be “washed… in the soul-cleansing blood of the Lamb”^[15] and is often accompanied by a ritual baptism that is supposed to wash away one’s sins. (The “born again” metaphor also implies a kind of reset back to the innocency of infancy. With these, and with its practices of justification and sanctification, Christianity seems particularly optimistic about our ability to regain lost innocence.)

Affected or defensive innocence

“I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves…”^[16]

There may also be a case for merely acting innocent.

For example, there’s a sort of affected innocence that people sometimes deploy in conversation. “I’ll pretend I didn’t get what you really meant by that.”

Evasion or euphemism can be a sort of anti-implicature that requires the same sort of collaboration that implicature does. For instance, if I am distressingly sensitive to criticism, I can choose to accept the gambit of insincerity or changing the subject and pretend not to notice the implied criticism:

A: “How did you like my presentation?”

B: “Your tie was very striking!”

A: “Thanks! I picked it up for a steal at an estate sale…”

Implicature can sometimes be an aggressive insinuation — trying to force a particular interpretation into the mind of another, to conscript them into the insinuator’s worldview. In response, someone might deploy affected innocence defensively, to deflect such an attempted insinuation. For instance, if Carol had joined Bob in saying “I don’t get it” in response to Alice’s racist joke — Carol doing so insincerely — this could have had the effect of embarrassing Alice more thoroughly than Carol could have done by confronting her more directly. A defensive innocence in response to sarcasm, insinuation, double meanings, etc. communicates something like this: “no, I will not descend with you into sly winks and nods and second-guessing; I will instead treat what you say on the most earnest and straightforward level I know. If you want to communicate with me, you have to meet me there.”

There is also an aggressive innocence (or “violent innocence” as Christopher Bollas calls it^[17]). Someone who makes a mess and then says “who, me?” when confronted (or who uses certain other forms of “gaslighting”) is deploying aggressive innocence.

Implicature can be a motte-and-bailey tactic. Person A implies the bailey, but if person B explicitly acknowledges it, A is ready to retreat to the motte with something like “that isn’t at all what I meant; you’ve just got a filthy mind.” This is also a sort of aggressive innocence on A’s part, and it can be combated by B refusing to go along with it: “innocently” refusing to infer the bailey and so forcing A to explicitly state the bailey in order to introduce it into the conversation.

Another form of aggressive innocence is when someone insinuates something vague but portentious but then denies that they have done so, thus trying to force the other person to play detective:

A: “Fine.”

B: “What do you mean? You sound angry.”

A: “No. It’s totally fine.”

Bollas considers “violent innocence” to be a variety of denial, though an indirect denial of another person’s (valid) interpretations about oneself. More ordinary denial is often also a sort of forced innocence. When we edit our memories (such as those of a love affair that we regret — “they seduced me!”), we often do so to cover-up complicity or guilt in an attempt to patch up a façade of innocence. Something like “sour grapes” can be a way of editing-in innocence of failure or disappointment or desire, for example.

The “white fragility” Robin DiAngelo wrote about is a sort of desperately affected innocence.^[18] Rather than make an embarrassing acknowledgment that I too have been infected by racism, as a fragile white person I can opt to hide behind the innocence of my good intentions and insist that “I don’t have a racist bone in my body,” or “I don’t see race; I just see people.” Implicit-association tests are supposed to be able to help one discover the parts of oneself that are crouching behind such good intentions trying to stay hidden.

To the extent that there are advantages to pretending-to-be-innocent, this might be a good strategy on occasion, but it seems a stretch to consider such pretense a virtue: a characteristic that is evidence of flourishing. I suppose you could argue that there is some larger virtue about characteristically presenting yourself successfully as you would like to be seen, of which the ability to persuasively adopt innocent camouflage is a part. To characteristically be the last person anyone would suspect of the crime one has committed is also perhaps a Machiavellian virtue of sorts.

Conclusion

When asked on his death bed whether he “had made his peace with God,” Thoreau quietly replied that “he had never quarreled with him.”^[19]

I’m not at all confident after writing this that there really is a virtue called innocence. I bent over backwards to try to find something innocence-like that meets the criteria, but I’m not sure I succeeded. What I found may be virtuesque, but I don’t know that “innocence” is really the right name for it.

1. ^{^}

   John Keats “To Solitude”

2. ^{^}

   Compare, for example, “Polack jokes,” which were also a thing when I was growing up (you might find paperback compilations of them in waiting rooms or drug-store book racks). I haven’t heard a “Polack joke” in years and I wouldn’t be surprised if the rising generation is mostly unaware that there ever was such a thing.

3. ^{^}

   “Little Red Riding Hood” Grimm’s Fairy Tales

4. ^{^}

   Genesis 2:25–3:18 “And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.… Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked….”

5. ^{^}

   But Rousseau: “Whoever blushes is already guilty; true innocence is ashamed of nothing.” (Émile)

6. ^{^}

   Matthew 18:1–3

7. ^{^}

   Mencius Ⅳb.12

8. ^{^}

   @Scott Alexander [LW · GW]  “Mental Mountains” Slate Star Codex 26 November 2019

9. ^{^}

   H.D. Thoreau Life Without Principle (1863)

10. ^{^}

    Shakespeare, MacBeth act Ⅴ, scene 1

11. ^{^}

    1 John 1:7

12. ^{^}

    Anatole France Les Dieux Ont Soif [The Gods Are Thirsty] (1912), Chapter ⅩⅤ

13. ^{^}

    @Scott Alexander [LW · GW] “Trapped Priors as a Basic Problem of Rationality” Astral Codex Ten 10 March 2021

14. ^{^}

    Paraphrased: Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of yourself; admit to God, to yourself, and to another human being the exact nature of your wrongs; be entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character; humbly ask Him to remove your shortcomings; make a list of all persons you harmed, and become willing to make amends to them all; make direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others; and continue to take personal inventory, and when you are wrong promptly admit it.

15. ^{^}

    e.g. Elisha A. Hoffman “Are You Washed in the Blood?” (1878)

16. ^{^}

    Matthew 10:16

17. ^{^}

    Christopher Bollas Being a Character (1992) chapter 8

18. ^{^}

    @David Gross [LW · GW] “I read White Fragility so you don’t have to (but maybe you should)” [LW · GW] LessWrong 6 Sept. 2021

19. ^{^}

    Mostly as found in Henry S. Salt Life of Henry David Thoreau (1890) p. 210; I’ve seen many variations on this anecdote and don’t know where it originated. It has the smell of doubtful apocrypha about it.

21 comments

Comments sorted by top scores.