What Does Losing Our Innocence Cost Us?

What does it mean to be innocent? In this episode, we explore the journey from the innocence of ignorance to the innocence of wisdom—a hard-won clarity that only comes through struggle, humility, and growth. Drawing on Emmanuel Swedenborg, Plato, Richard Feynman, and modern social questions, we challenge the comfort of easy answers and invite you to rethink your categories—from stars to gender, work, and truth itself. Because seeing clearly isn’t just an intellectual act—it’s a moral one.

Transcript

Have you ever looked up at the night sky and just paused to wonder? I mean, really looked at what is there. Beyond your understanding of what it is you're seeing, just trying to look through the conceptions you've learned about it and just marveled at the night sky, as it is, without any idea of what it is. As a kid, a star is just a tiny light in the night sky. It's way up there. It's quiet, it's steady. It's almost magical. But then the conceptions start. Maybe it's a flashlight in the dark. Maybe it's a hole in the black silk of the sky, letting the light of heaven maybe peek through. I actually used to think they were angels, little glowing angels that watch us sleep. And everyone has their own version of that. The Mesopotamians believed that stars were directly associated with the gods. The sky was like a divine map. The constellations were expressing the deities and their wills. Each major star, or planet, was connected with a specific god. For example, the planet that we call Venus was Ishtar, the goddess of love and war. The ancient astrologers literally read their god's behavior by tracking the stars and tried to use that to predict the fortune from mortals. Our word galaxy comes from the ancient Greeks who held that the streams of light and shadow that pour over the sky were actually spilled milk from the breast of Hera, literally the Milky Way. Stars and constellations were the embodiment of gods for them, and heroes. The Algonquin believed that the dead go to the land in the sky, and that the stars that we see are campfires that they made on their journey. The Maori of New Zealand view the stars of Matariki, what we would call the Pades, as a family of celestial beings marking the New Year with their appearance as a time of renewal and ancestral remembrance. Medieval Europeans believed that they were crystal balls that sang as they moved, literally making the music of the spheres. These nested crystal globes encompassed the Earth and turned at different rates of speed. We didn't always distinguish stars from planets, either. The planets, what we now call Venus, Mars, Jupiteriter, they moved differently in the night sky. We called them wanderers, Planes. We thought that they had intentions, power, influence, that the other stars didn't have the other stars being fixed in the night sky. But then science came along, and our picture of the heavens shifted. Today, we say a star is like a sun, our sun, a massive, burning ball of hydrogen and helium, collapsing in on itself and exploding outwards at the same time. It is a balancing act between gravity and fusion. It's violent. It's ancient. It's beautiful in a completely different way. And it's not closer than we thought. It's so much farther. It's not gentler, it's wilder. It's not simpler, it's stranger. And here's the thing that really gets me. In the same stars, the same dots of light in the night sky, we see and have seen so many different things. Our idea of what is there has changed a lot. And when we think about that dot that we see, we have different concepts of it in our heads, leading us to literally see different things at the same time. So what makes you wonder, what else do we think we understand? Just because we've named it, labeled it, or boxed it up somehow? What other ideas do we carry around like we know them? When really, we're just looking at them with the eyes of a child? So today, I thought we would take a look at this question of how we end up conceptualizing things. What is it that we see when we look at something? I've already talked about the idea that our minds construct the world before our very eyes. You know, we're not just seeing what's there. We're seeing it through all the filters of the concepts that we have and the knowledges that we have. So that, you know, two people can look at the same thing and not see the same things there, depending on which concepts are existing in their head at a given moment. There's a good reason why we might want to try to understand this in more in depth. There's metaphysical reasons. We want to understand how we conceptualize things. There's epistemological reasons. We want to understand what it is exactly that we claim to know. But more importantly, there's ethical and political reasons. If two people can look at the same occurrence and one see racism and one Nazi racism, it doesn't necessarily mean that's because racism is there or not there. It might just be because they see different things based on what they're capable of understanding. And so if that's the case, it behooves us to really know as much as possible about everything, that's going to allow us to see deeper, farther, more knowledgeably, into the world. To do this, I thought I might start with the 18th-century mystic, Emmanuel Swedenborg, who once said that there are two kinds of innocence. The first is the innocence of ignorance. It's the kind of innocence that you're born with. You just don't know any better. So you can't be really held responsible yet. The second kind of innocence is the innocence of wisdom, and that's different. It comes out after years of struggle, years of mistakes, after you've seen how messy things really are, how complex, how confusing. And you try to choose goodness anyway. It's one thing to be innocent because you just haven't yet been tested, but it's an entirely different thing to be innocent after you've been tested by the world. Kids don't just sit with their ignorance. They try to reach beyond it. They ask questions. They chase fireflies. They'd like to take things apart just to see how they work. That's the beauty of it. It's not passive. It's reaching towards the light of knowledge, even in the depths of their own ignorance. But the second kind of innocence is very different. And that one is earned through knowledge and understanding. When the world doesn't make sense to us, not in the way that we had hoped it would or the way we think it should, we're also confronted with a painful realization. We don't actually know reality. When you realize how complicated, how unfair, how gray things are, you begin to see in all that difficulty and complexity, a different kind of compassion for people. Life is so hard. It is so complex. People, really good people are just bound to get it wrong a lot. They're innocent because they can't have all the answers. This is the innocence of wisdom. It's not that you're ignorant and you just don't know any better. It's that you understand that everyone is so very ignorant. Even the people who are smart, even the people who are well educated, they only know a tiny fraction of all there is to know, and they are doing the best that they can. They are innocent in this wise way. You're innocent. You're holding them to be innocent because you know now the depths of everyone's ignorance. You understand that nobody could understand this. And, I mean, this is the kind of wisdom that you get from like a Buddha or a Jesus Christ-like figure where everybody's in a sense, no one's a sinner because it would take so much knowledge to be a s. The innocence of wisdom reminds me a bit of Plato's Metanoia, the turning of the soul or the changing of the mind. In the Republic, he describes education as a painful, upward journey, up out of darkness, out of the cave. The men in the caves are innocent in that they're ignorant. They were born in the cave. This is all they've ever known. So they can't know any better. But that sort of innocence fades over time. When a person returning from the surface begins to explain, Hey, buddy, you're in a cave, you know, you're just staring at shadows on a wall. Your innocence gets destroyed. Most of us want to reject that message. We prefer to live in the dark. We've called this place home for so long. It feels like a form of violence getting us to see something different, to see something new. But if you're really lucky enough to have someone finally drag you out towards the light, your eyes begin to burn. Education, as played onato describes it, is not blissful. It's not easy. It's not entertaining. It's not pleasurable. But it is very, very real. And that matters a lot more because only there can you become the kind of compassionate person that Plato and the Buddha and Jesus and many other kinds of wise and spiritual leaders have encouraged us to be. Yes, you'll be inclined to hate your teacher for the pain and the trauma of getting educated. But when you see what they were trying to show you, your anger tends to be extinguished under this frothy wave of gratitude. I had moments like this when I first got to college. I thought college would be this wide-open space for meaning and understanding. You know, where we would explore big ideas and big questions. Instead, it felt a lot like high school continued with a higher price tag. We would memorize facts. We would regurgitate them up on Scantron sheets, get our grades, and repeat the process. There wasn't really a lot of room to breathe here. There was very little room to ask questions like, why, why is this the way it is? College left a really bad taste in my mouth for many years, not because I didn't believe in education, because I did, and I still do. I try to make my classroom today. I make that experience what I wanted in college, but never really received. This exploratory journey, this chance for you to look at things with a different set of eyes and thereby come to understand them in a wholly different way. That's when I lost my innocence of ignorance. And at first, it just left me feeling kind of numb. But eventually, I started reading on my own. I started to figure out what went wrong in my college experience. And I realized part of the problem was systemic. The pressure that we put colleges under to churn out workers, not necessarily thinkers. Part of this problem was also institutional. My school was geared towards working-class kids like myself. It was publicly funded, and so it was highly susceptible to those exact same sorts of pressures. You know, this was meant to turn kids into good worker bees for future employers. My professors were often exhausted and underpaid. The class loads, there are certain things you can do with a class load of 10 that just doesn't work when you have a class load of, say, 30. That's not really an excuse for them. They did fail me in certain ways. They let me, and I'm sure many others, slipped through the cracks of academia. But part of it was also me. I didn't know how to use college, how to use it to get what I needed. I mean, how could I? I was still innocent and ignorant. I was just getting ruined in my blessed ignorance so I could no longer be that kind of innocent. Okay. The real danger here isn't losing your first innocence. It's actually clinging to it long after you should have let it go. We see it in adults who refuse to face complexity. They demand censorship to, quote, protect the children, even when they're really just protecting their own fragile worldviews. They rationalize injustice with simple slogans. They retreat into forms of dogma, religious, political, or otherwise. Because nuance from feels like a threat to them. These are the people who dig in their heels. They get mean and petty and cruel in order to protect the innocence of their ignorance. But the most dangerous version of that is the one that becomes authoritarian. The belief that people can't handle the truth, that complexity is just chaotic. And somebody needs to simplify the world for us by force, if necessary. America needs a dictator, these people will say. That's the fruit of preserving the innocence of ignorance instead of developing it into the innocence of wisdom. Growing up early has its costs, but it also comes with a lot of gifts, like self-discipline, determination,, independence. What it doesn't come with, however, is certainty. And that's okay, because the world isn't really simple and it isn't really certain either. And pretending that it is hurts people. We see this in cult like families that moralize suffering and call it love. We see it in political ideologies that demand purity and loyalty instead of understanding and wisdom. And we see it in the way people weaponize simplicity to excuse their cruelty. But if you run too far in the other direction, if you start to believe that everything is just made up, that nothing really matters here, you run headlong into relativism and you don't land in wisdom that way either. You land in something more like apathy. Or worse, you bounce right back hard into dogma, like twice as hard and twice as deep as you were before. So the real challenge isn't to stay innocent. It's not to reject innocence either. It's to transform the way we conceptualize innocence. The innocence of ignorance is a child's gift. Innocence of wisdom is something that you have to earn. By seeing the world for what it really is and choosing compassion anyway, you're not wrong for believing the world is simple, but you're not right to stop them either. Because knowledge isn't just about facts. It's about understanding what's at stake. And the more clearly we end up seeing that, the more deeply we are called to care for each other. Plato and Swedenborg, we're not the only thinkers to hit on this sort of idea. I mean, C.S. Lewis once wrote, when I become a man... I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness, and the desire to be very grown up. William Penn wrote, to be innocent is to be not guilty, but to be virtuous is to overcome our evil inclinations. And more recently, Cornell West said, to be mature is to be able to look at oneself and the world without illusions and without despair. These are all getting at the same idea here, that innocence is first forgivable because someone doesn't know better. But it's later forgivable because realizing nobody knows better. Absolutely no one on earth can know better. You have to forgive everybody because there's just no one capable of understanding the complexity of being human to the point where they're never going to hurt somebody. There will be accidents. There will be injuries. You will cause them. There's no way to prevent that. But you can be forgiven for it. So let me go back to the idea of the star. Remember, to a child or the purely phenomenological observer, it's just a tiny light in the night sky, and that's all it is. They see it with their eyes, and there's nothing more to it. It's when we start to add concepts to what we observe that we get all kinds of different and more interesting results, like stars might be a god or a divine campfire in the heavens or burning gas billions of miles away. Science tells us the star is an immense and roaring nuclear furnace, unimaginably distant from us, capable of birthing worlds and destroying them, too. It's the same thing, however, as a little dot in the night sky. But our conception of it has changed. And with that, our entire understanding of what it is that we are seeing when we look up at the night sky. The way we see something shapes how we ultimately end up treating that thing. And we're going to act very differently when we hold different conceptions of what it is we're looking at. A simple concept is okay, but often we need a more complex one to act in a manner that is efficient and wise and compassionate and caring and understanding. If you think stars are just decorations, the gods threw up to make nighttime a little more pretty, you're never going to build a telescope. You're never going to look any deeper. You don't study the movements and you don't develop physics. You never invent airplanes or rocket ships or other things. It's okay to see the stars as little points of light, but it's too simple not to conceptualize it at all, or to have an anthropocentric or biased concept rather than a neutral or more objective one. And when we stop talking about stars and start talking about people, the stakes here go way up. If you think people are simple, you have never asked what it is that they're actually going through. You just judge them according to your values, your position, your privileges, your biases, the things that work for you. You don't try to understand any deeper or you maintain your innocence through your own ignorance. You just don't want to know more about them because then you would have to understand them. And then you couldn't judge them. You couldn't tell them that they're wrong and tell yourself that you're right. Sure. telling yourself you're right feels good. But it's evil. It's not virtue. Let's say gender again. The simple story that we might call the innocence of ignorance version says that gender is just biology. You're either male or female based on anatomy, and that's it. A simple binary, and everybody knows that. Yes, that's what's true. But that's not the end of the story, any more than saying a star is simply a point of light in the night sky. If you don't know better, that view might feel like common sense, and it is. But common sense is not the same thing as good sense, because it lacks complexity and it lacks critical analysis. As you grow, as you listen, as you learn, you discover that gender is also social, also psychological, also cultural. It's about identity and not just whatever biological body parts you happen to be born with. And the more clearly you can come to see it this way as well, you can come to understand that. The more compassion you're capable of having for other people. Because clinging to the simple story isn't neutral. It hurts people. It leads to policies that erase or diminish them. It fuels violence against them. Shame and doubt inside them, rejection. And worst of all, it tells someone that their truth doesn't count because it doesn't fit your preferred, woefully simplistic categorization. So the shift from simple to complex isn't just intellectual. It's ethical, it's political, it's economic. It's philosophy. It's why philosophy is important to everyone, and not just academic philosophers like me. It asks more of you, it demands more of you. It breaks the illusion of simple certainty, and like staring into the bright sun for the first time, it's going to hurt your eyes. But it also lets you live in a world where people are seen, really seen for who they are. And it lets you face the truth rather than the carefully controlled narrative of ignorant innocence. It's really just another version of shadows on the wall. A star is not what it first appears to be, and neither is gender, neither is the rest of the world. And neither are we. Neither are you. There's this great story that the late Cornell physicist, Richard Feynman, tells, that when he was a kid, he had a friend whose father was a scientist, and they'd go for walks in the woods. And Feynman's friend would point to a bird and ask him the name of the bird. And he'd confessed, he didn't know. And the friend would say, oh, well, that's a brown-throated thrush. Your dad must not teach you much about science, does he? But Feynman's dad had taught him something about science and something much more valuable. Feynman says, you could know the name of a bird in all the different languages of the world, but when you're done, you know absolutely nothing about the bird whatsoever. Science, he said, isn't about naming things. It's about trying to understand them. I think that's where a lot of us get misled, especially in school. We're taught that science is about definitions. If you've memorized all the definitions, you've studied them on your flashcards, you've regurgitated them up onto your Scantron bubbles, then you can remember them. You memorize that a whale is a mammal, that light is a wave and a particle, or that a star is a giant ball of gas. But those labels don't exactly explain the thing. They give us the illusion of understanding when really we're learning what the current state of the art of scientific thinking happens to be. It's not learning scientific thinking itself. When I hit that wall in college, back when I was still naively thought that the university would open up the world to me with questions of meaning and how things realized work and that sort of thing. Instead, what I got was memorizing lists, names of birds, that kind of thing, definitions, categories, right and wrong answers. I was still hungry for something real. I didn't want to know what things were called. I wanted to know what things mean, how they all fit together. And this is the same thing that Fnman's trying to point out, you know, that science can be understood simply, or science could be understood in its full complexity. My point is that even in college, we're still giving kids the simple version. The SEM way of teaching is to memorize all these facts, and then you can repeat them. Like, that's makes you the most intelligent man in the room. It would be funny if it weren't so tragic, but education is kind of of funny. You know, Mother Nature tends to instruct by practical joke, at least according to Charles Purse. Do you know that there's no such thing as a fish? Not biologically speaking, anyway. Fish is one of those simple concepts, and it's so simple that it's practically useless to biologists. So they don't think in terms of, these are all fish. Fish just eat isn't a single coherent category. Salmon, for example, are actually more closely related to you than they are to say, hagfish. Yet, we lump them all together, salmon, sharks, goldfish, eels, because they all swim in the water and they just don't have lakes. And that's it. It's a simple concept, but it's not a very useful one of when we want to deal with the complexity of what the real world actually has to offer. So it's a convenient label, but it's not a reflection of deep understanding. And the truth is, most of our categories work this way. We make them up so that we don't have to think too hard about them. Fish, stars, man, woman, criminal, essential worker, immigrant. They're not necessarily false, but they're not necessarily true either. They're useful in select contexts. That is, until they start to obscure or hide the truth from us. They then become problems. This is why the university professors seem unreliable to people who never received this kind of of education ever in all of their years of school that they attended. And for some people, that includes college and even graduate school. Take work. During COVID, we started calling people like truckers, janitors, nurses, grocery clerks, and essential workers. But before that, they were just called blue-collar. Meaning that they were replaceable, it was unskilled labor, and hence, they didn't really deserve anything but low wages. I remember people clapping for them on balconies, but they didn't raise their wages. The label changed, but what they were did not. Or think about this, a landowner sitting in his living room gets called a farmer. The people in the field who do the activity of planting seeds, sweating to harvest, those people just get called farmhands or laborers. You know, it's the same field. It's the same crops, but they get a different label and a different set of power. Which one actually produces your dinner, do you think? Which one is essential here? And this one might hit a little closer to home. If other people see you as just a worker and they don't have to see you as a person, that's how we hide power in this country. I don't have to worry about whether you have enough money to feed your family. I just see you as what you can do for me. You're just a worker. We can hide power then behind words. We can hide it behind these categories. And when someone doesn't fit into the commonly accepted categories, when they're just too complicated or too inconvenient or too real, then we don't say the category is broken. We say they are. There's something wrong with them. They need to conform to the category. I used to think that I just had to learn the right names for things and the correct facts, right? That is what K through 12 public schools generally teach. But now I know that understanding the world means realizing that every label, every concept, every story is only partial. Even the way I see the world, right now, while trying to be more aware, more thoughtful, it's still just a simplified version of something way more complex. And that's not me failing. That's just the beginning of wisdom. Because real knowledge isn't about control. It's about respect. It's about seeing something for what it really is, or trying to, and realizing that to flatten it down into something small and more manageaeable just because it's easier that way, like when we grade students or when we attack minorities, this tendency is maybe human in us, and it's not necessarily conservative or liberal, and nor is it particularly American, but it is wrong. This is not a defect in us, in our humanness. It is how we are built. We are all born innocent, and we grow up, and we develop our concepts, and we cling to them. That's normal. But the best of us, the wisest of us, learn to cling loosely. And they're able to let those ideas go, to get rid of the categories when they don't fit the people or the places or the things that are out there. They learn to see the world as the world is, and they adjust their categories to fit the world, as opposed to trying to fit people into the categories that they know and understand. And that's what I hope you will get out of this, you will learn to swim in the examined life, because doing so makes you more compassionate and more caring and more wise and calmer and healthier than to the people who desperately hope to remain innocent in their ignorance. So let me leave you with just a few questions to ponder. What categories are you still carrying around quietly, maybe without noticing? Is there something in your world that you've taken for granted, maybe a truth, a person, a label? Where have you settled for the new name of a thing, instead of trying to dig deeper and finding out what is really there? The stars don't change, but you do. And if you let it, that change can reshape everything in your world. Thanks for tuning in to American Socrates. If today's episode of philosophy got you thinking in new ways, make sure to subscribe so you'll never miss an episode. New, full episodes drop every Wednesday. If you enjoyed the show, leave a review. It helps others find us and it means a lot. And if you know someone who could use a little more practical wisdom in their life, share this episode with them. Want more? Visit American Socrates.buzzrout.com for show notes, resources, and exclusive content. You can also follow me on Facebook, Blue Sky, or TikTok, to keep the conversation going. Until next time, keep questioning everything.