Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

LOSING OUR INNOCENCE – AGAIN

            Not to put too fine a point on it, but hitting the nail on the head, I think that, moving forward, we should all be aware of cliché.

            It’s an insidious thing, innit? No sooner is a phrase coined than it becomes, first a commonplace, and then a tiresome, space-filling tag for lazy journalists and the people who mimic them. Consider “moving forward”, for example, now used by people who don’t know how to say “in the future” or some such.

            The war on cliché should be unending, because cliché does indeed cloud and dull thought. Just a month or two back, I had a go at one current and perfidious cliché in the post The Right Side of History (which also took a swipe at the disingenuous “starting a conversation”). Now another of the little blighters gnaws at me. It’s the one, beloved by journalists, about losing one’s innocence.

            Recently I saw a news item about a crime that had been committed in Tauranga. The report said that the crime meant the city of Tauranga had “lost its innocence”. Really? Does this mean that all the adult inhabitants of Tauranga were hitherto naïve people who did not know that serious crimes can happen in both small and large cities – not to mention rural areas? Did they really “lose their innocence”?

            In my mind, I started reviewing all the times I have heard this phrase about losing innocence. According to some of its publicity, the film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood told us that with the Manson murders, 1960s hippiedom and the age of flower power “lost its innocence”. But half a mo. Did the (American) 1960s really “lose their innocence” with Manson? I thought the 1960s had already “lost their innocence” with nightly news reports on TV about race riots and how the Vietnam War was going. At least so I was told by a number of pop historians. But then again, others said that America “lost its innocence” when JFK was shot. Or could it have been in the McCarthy era? Or maybe when the first atomic bomb was dropped? Or whenever, because each of these events or eras has been designated by somebody as a loss of innocence.

            And let’s forget about America for a while. Didn’t the British army “lose its innocence” on the Somme in 1916? In the same war, didn’t readers of British newspapers “lose their innocence” when they stopped believing the cheery things war correspondents were writing, and scanned the lists of the dead instead? As for Australians and New Zealanders, apparently they “lost their innocence” at Gallipoli. Or maybe they lost it when they first encountered barbed wire used to foil cavalry attacks in the Boer War. Again, I have heard the cliché phrase used in relation to all these things.

            So, to your obvious exasperation, I could going on banging away at this very simple point. When something overwhelming, reprehensible or shocking occurs, in comes the cliché–monger to tell us that an age of innocence is over. Surely, by this stage, all thinking adults are aware that the world is a potentially dangerous place; that people are capable of doing monstrous things; that while we may be shocked, we should not really be surprised when we hear of crime, deceit and abuse.

            I suppose if there was really a time when human beings lost their innocence, it would have been in the Garden of Eden – or if you do not like the Biblical image, it would have been when homo sapiens first enmerged as such, and became aware of human limitations. I’m happy to use the term Original Sin. Perhaps you’re not, but when I unpack the term you might agree with me. As I see it, Original Sin means our human capacity to do wrong or mess things up or finds excuses for our bad behaviour and then go ahead and do it.

            None of which is new and none of which should surprise us. As for “losing innocence” – it will be experienced by children as they grow-up, and perhaps by those teenagers who think that the world can be improved in one easy and immediate step. But if you are a functioning adult, real innocence should have gone with adolescence.