Old babies
We are all merely old babies. Camille had what I presume to be a nightmare the other day. In her sleep, she scrunched her eyebrows, fidgeted, shook her head, made noises. I felt pity. She shouldn’t have to endure nightmares already. Perhaps developmentally it wasn’t a nightmare but more of a reflex. It looked tragic either way.
Still, she has other emotions like we all do: fear, happiness, greed. We’re not so different, she and I. Her fear looks like “Will I be fed? Will I be warm? Will I sleep?” My fears are the same, though they may be higher on Maslow’s hierarchy. We adults send astronauts to the moon and pierce the sky with skyscrapers, but we still just want to be safe. Instead of “Will I be fed?” we ask, “Will I lose my job? Can I pay my mortgage? Do my coworkers respect me?” and so on.
Emotions simply become more complex as we age. Christine has a feelings wheel for her clients to use to help them name what’s going on inside. Though we can name feelings like “inquisitive” or “dismissive,” each complex emotion has a more basic counterpart, like “happy” or “angry.” It’s why movies like Inside Out speak to both children and adults.
They tell me Camille can see only high-contrast objects, where light and dark draw sharp distinctions like Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro. We adults like contrast too. An important design principle, along with space, color, and weight, is contrast. Type styles for headlines, for example, should have a large enough contrast ratio with body styles as to be very distinct. Bold one or the other, but not both. If you put a leather couch in your office, put a fabric couch in your living room. If your walls are dark, leave the trim white.
In the Netflix docuseries Babies, researchers conducted experiments to show that babies are born, not with a tabula rasa or blank slate, but with certain expectations about the world. They understand and expect the concept of gravity, for instance. They can compare like with like. They stare longer at unexpected events, indicating that something is amiss.
Camille’s mind is already a brilliant machine, even at two weeks old. It’s a shame that it won’t stick around, at least in its current form. The researchers said that at an early age, around six months, babies can detect individual faces regardless of race. The same goes with detecting subtle tonal shifts in language, accents, and dialects. But by nine months of age, they lose this ability. Races different from their own become a mere group of Other, no longer distinguishing individual characteristics. Research shows that babies can keep track of individual monkeys, but later they all become Monkey. Our Korean friend once said that all white people look the same.
This is not because babies are inherently racist, the scientists assured, but because they “prune” less useful processing information. Our brains do everything they can to reduce cognitive load, even as adults. Camille is learning that her mom and others like her—family and friends, often of the same race—will care for her and provide for her needs. A white female is useful to her, so her brain is learning to prioritize that face above others. The same reasoning applies to a father who’s recently shaven his beard and frightens his child: The baby hasn’t yet processed that the clean-shaven face is useful.
That makes you wonder about our tendency to discriminate against out-groups: Catholics and Protestants, foreigners and native-born, white and black, male and female. Driving around town you’ll often see bumper stickers that say, “Texas-born and raised,” and “Don’t California my Texas.” We’ve learned to prioritize what’s familiar at a very young age.
Children also gain inhibitions as they grow older. A two-year-old like our friends’ will lift up her shirt to show her moo cow, a picture of a cartoon cow on the underside. She’ll toot on you and tell you exactly what she thinks, even if it hurts your feelings. Some of these behaviors are more socially acceptable than others, but our society would be better off if some were retained in adulthood.
In writing classes in undergrad, we read the work of small children under the age of ten to learn how to think and describe the world more clearly. It sounds odd, but they do say the darndest things. Instead of “three people sitting in a jacuzzi,” a child will write, “three heads floating in the water.” Instead of writing that the branches obscured the moon, a three-dimensional depiction of space, they’ll flatten it into a two-dimensional plane and write that the moon was caught in the branches like in a spiderweb. A child’s mind is fascinating.
But it seems that worry, fear, and other emotions come at a very young age too. Adults need to learn how to work through these emotions just like children do. That includes parents worrying in the middle of the night, “Is she breathing? What was that noise?”
On a hillside in Galilee many years ago, a group of adults gathered to hear a man preach about this. Jesus delivered his first sermon, saying:
That is why I tell you not to worry about everyday life—whether you have enough food and drink, or enough clothes to wear. Isn’t life more than food, and your body more than clothing? Look at the birds. They don’t plant or harvest or store food in barns, for your heavenly Father feeds them. And aren’t you far more valuable to him than they are? Can all your worries add a single moment to your life?
Later on he told his followers, “Unless you turn from your sins and become like little children, you will never get into the Kingdom of Heaven. So anyone who becomes as humble as this little child is the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven.” While we must grow into adulthood and beyond “spiritual milk,” in many ways we need to learn how to become like a little child.
I hope Camille grows up to face her days without worry, accepting those around her who look or talk different, to cast off useless inhibitions we or her culture place on her, becoming like a little child again. I hope she can later claim what the writer Marilynne Robinson called “earned innocence.” I hope she explores attics and forests and rivers like C. S. Lewis did as a child, holding onto her now-flourishing imagination forever. I hope that that virtue isn’t placed too high on the shelf.
