The Honesty of Children

Bikeface!
During the summer I attended a Green Party Rally in Manchester. As I was representing cyclists and cycling and there was a nice lady there who did face-painting, I got her to paint a bicycle on my face. It all seemed pretty logical to me!

The rally itself was a bit of a washout. It heaved down and we all got very, very wet. Afterwards, I pedalled my weary, dripping way home via a supermarket for some wine and nibbles to warm up the evening of an otherwise disappointing day. The thing is, I hadn't removed the picture of a bike from my face.

The reactions were fascinating, and all exactly the same - except for one. Everybody looked at me with surprise, and then attempted to appear as if they hadn't looked at all - all within a split second. The body language of a person desperately attempting to be nonchalant while trying to look at something unusual is just this side of hilarious.

So, who was the one exception?
He was a little boy of about 5 years old. He stared straight at me whilst swinging on his mum's arm and said in a loud, clear voice, "That man's got a bike on his face!", to which I replied (smiling whilst his parents suffered mild heart attacks and made frantic attempts to shut him up), "That's right. I have!"

Pink!
My beloved and better half has recently dyed her hair. It's pink. Not pink bits amongst the blonde. Not a subtle shade of pinkish tinge. Bright pink. All of it.
It really suits her. It brings out the blue of her eyes like some kind of lantern. She looks great.

Other people seem to think a little differently, though. She went to Asda yesterday (for my American friends, that's the UK branch of Walmart, more or less) and had much the same reaction that I had with the bikeface - a whole bunch of people deliberately and obviously not looking.
Except for (yep, you guessed it) a child. In this case it was a little girl of about three years old who shouted "Mum, Mum. That lady's got pink hair!"

Any other reactions to her hair have been as positive as the little girl's, but only from friends and family. Never from strangers, who pretend they don't notice.

The Question
Now, I fully understand why a child can (and often will) say and do things that an adult won't. It's called socialization. It's the same training that teaches us from an early age not to shout "Fire!" in a crowded cinema or pinch traffic wardens' bottoms, and for the most part it's quite a useful thing.
Without a basic level of socialization the normal day-to-day interactivities of people wouldn't work. We couldn't, for instance, get a bus to work and expect the driver to take us there. We're socialized to expect that the bus will go to the place that's shown on the front, and the driver is socialized to do what he's agreed to do - ie. drive the bus from point A to point B, picking passengers up on the way.
The question is now whether socialization is entirely good and if it isn't, is it possible to separate the good bits from the bad and retrain ourselves.

Honest children
The children who shouted out were only saying what their parents were thinking, and what they shouted contained no sense of judgement, simply an expression of surprise at something unusual. This was entirely harmless and perfectly acceptable from a child, but not, apparently from the child's parents. I'm reminded of things said by people who suffer some sort of facial disfigurement. Adults try to ignore it, young children ask about it in simple, honest and non-judgemental ways. Unfortunately they get told off for that, possibly because they're doing what the parents want to but can't.

So what are we, as adults, afraid of? Is it possibly the fear of causing offence? In my own example this doesn't seem to work. I'm not a scary-looking person (I don't look like Mr. macho-hard-case, is what I mean), so there's unlikely to be a fear of violence. Questions such as "Why have you got a bike painted on your face?" are likely to elicit a sensible response such as "Oh, I've just come from a Green Party rally". Even the act of shushing the child seemed to be an act of fear of some kind.

Fear of difference
I've always been a bit different from a normal person. Mostly this has been in attitude and interests - I like art but I don't like sport, for example - but as I got older this came out in my appearance. The only strangers to comment (with a few notable exceptions) were confrontational. In other words, they were reacting to something unusual with violence and, as any good Buddhist knows, violence is a direct descendant of fear. Sadly this is a worldwide problem - think of the recent death of young Sophie Lancaster from Bacup, who was killed for wearing heavy eyeliner.

Obviously the "people" who killed Sophie weren't the thoughtful types. If they (and others like them who do and have done similar things) actually bothered to think, they wouldn't have done it. Instead they reacted to a stimulus, much like one of Pavlov's dogs. The stimulus was: here is something different and the response was fear followed by violence. This doesn't excuse them their actions because they are - at least nominally - human and therefore capable of choice in their actions.

Instead, though, they followed a stimulus-response pattern. I used to think that such patterns were genetically coded (like the coding that makes a white blood cell attack any foreign body), but the example of the honest and non-judgemental children proves that theory wrong. Fear of difference is a result of socialization. In other words we are taught to be afraid of what we don't understand, to see it as a threat and reject it, often violently. This isn't genetic, it's societal. Rather than some form of survival strategy, fear of difference has appeared as a form of social control via socialization.

Mutation
I once read a piece by a sociologist (if you know who this was, please tell me!) who said "Nature loves variety, sadly society hates it".
Mutation, change, experimentation and difference are the ways of nature. These are the mechanisms of evolution and without them we wouldn't have the staggering diversity of life that covers this incredible planet, even in places where we think it shouldn't be able to. As a Pagan and Taoist it is my job to accept, understand and follow the ways of nature. To do otherwise would be to hold back the natural evolution of the human race.

Fear of difference is one of the forms of socialization we could do without, but it's deeply entrenched. Can it be separated and done away with? Well, I'm trying to "Embrace the Mutation" (J.K. Potter), and I hope that the more people that do will eventually reach a kind of critical level and cause some perceptual change in society as a whole.

It may take small children to teach us how to do that.

Love,
Seán