Can we recover the virtue of naiveté?
'Gosh, I never realised….10'. 'Really? I knew that ages agone—it's pretty mutual noesis you know!'
I wonder if you've ever had that kind of conversation—at work, or church, or amidst friends or family. You have assumed that things are as they were claimed to be, or presented, but all the time 'everybody' 'knew' that that wasn't actually the truth, and you were naive to assume it was. As I reverberate dorsum, I realised that information technology has happened to me quite a lot, and information technology happened to me again very recently. When it does happen, information technology leaves us with a mixture of (sometimes) quite potent emotions. I feel foolish; I am also made to feel powerless since, after all, knowledge is ability. I have missed out on the conversations around the consequence which others were clearly having. And information technology affects relational dynamics; everyone else was in the know, but I was on the outside.
We live in a complex globe, and this complexity seems to reward cunning. Cunning doesn't always win out, as the big-scale soap opera we call 'politics' often demonstrates. But in many contexts we are given the subliminal bulletin: don't take everything at face value; read betwixt the lines; watch for the signs; forge alliances and make certain yous know how to 'operate.' In such a context, the virtue of naiveté has been lost; there is no value in being 'innocent'.
The term 'naive' has both a negative and a positive sense to information technology. My lexicon points out both of these:
naive (as wellnaïve ) adjective (of a person or action) showing a lack of experience, wisdom, or judgement
(of a person) natural and unaffected; innocent:
ORIGIN mid 17th cent.: fromFrench naïve , feminine of naïf , fromLatin nativus 'native, natural' .
It can take connotations of immaturity, of lack of sentence—but also a sense of being straightforward, natural and unaffected. In our desire to lose the quondam, we end upwards losing the latter, and nothing is as straightforward every bit it seems any more than.
I think it is possible to argue that, in many ways, the Jesus we run into in the gospels was naive. Into the complex and turbulent political context of first-century Judea, Samaria and Galilee, with the ambiguities of Roman ability, the struggles for dominance between the local rulers, and the rival Jewish groups, Jesus simply proclaims 'The kingdom of God is here!' Repentance and belief sweep abroad all the other competing loyalties.
Jesus acted naively in the style he conducted his ministry, not least his healings. He must accept known that healing on the Sabbath would have upset the religious regime, and that would lead him into problem—but he did it anyway. When he healed the Gerasene demoniac (Marker v), he might have guessed that the man's restoration would upset the sense of social ordering of the community ('the mad belong on the fringes')—and that episode with the pigs didn't actually assist—but he did it anyway.
Gerd Theissen, in his landmarkShadow of the Galilean,captures Jesus' apparent ignorance of the consequences of his ministry rather well:
One twenty-four hour period a Gentile centurion living here in Capernaum came to [Jesus]. He asked him to heal his orderly. Of course you have to help Gentiles. But why this one? Everyone knows that near of these Gentile officers are homosexual. Their orderlies are their lovers. But Jesus isn't interested in that sort of thing. He didn't ask anything virtually the orderly. He healed him—and the thought didn't occur to him that later someone might think of appealing to him in back up of the view that homosexuality is permissible. (p 106).
Although this passage has been used to other ends, the general point is that Jesus acts in some sense naively, rather than in a calculated and knowing way, considering in detail the possible consequences of his action.
It has occurred to me that Jesus was naive in ane of the most important decisions he made: the appointment of the 12. This was not done without deep thought and prayer (all night in fact, Luke 6.12), simply one of the great puzzles of Jesus' ministry is why nosotros hear so little of about of the Twelve apart from Peter and John, and why Jesus chose someone who ended up betraying him. Many readers take the comment of the gospels every bit a hint at a post hoc rationalisation, that Jesus knew from the start that Judas was going to betray him, but I don't recall that estimation is very disarming. And why don't we hear of all the trail-blazing pioneering church-planting by the others? Why does it become left to Paul to transform the known world? Jesus is depicted as having profound insight into people'south motives (Mark 2.viii), and at times the gift of supernatural knowledge (John 4.17) but he was conspicuously not omniscient (Matt 24.36; the textual variant shows that the early on church had a problem with this notion). Simply I am very tempted to call up that Jesus simply took the Twelve every bit good men on face value—he made a naive decision to take people as they presented themselves.
Whatever we make of these decisions, information technology is articulate that Jesus taught the value of naiveté. 'Exist wise as serpents and innocent every bit doves' he tells the disciples equally he sends them out on mission (just just in Matthew, Matt 10.16). Information technology's funny how we e'er find the commencement of these more attractive than the second. 'Here is an Israelite in whom there is no guile' he observes, as he commends Nathanael to anyone who would mind (John one.47). 'Permit your 'yep' exist 'yeah' and your 'no' exist 'no'; everything else comes from the Evil I' he teaches, in his new covenant version of proverbial wisdom (Matt 5.37), sufficiently important for his brother to repeat it most word for word (James 5.12). No reading betwixt the lines here, no nods and winks and nudges and gestures (Prov 16.30), no 'knowing' looks—only offering and receiving speech and activeness at face value. Naively.
And mention of The Evil Ane takes us right dorsum to Eden. It'southward possible to see God'southward control to Adam and Eve not to 'swallow of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil' equally the command to remain naive, to trust God, and to have his discussion at face value, without supposing any sort of subconscious motive. That is surely why other interpretations of the episode have been put forward—that the 'fall' is non then much about the loss of innocence equally the growth into a maturity of discernment. God does want us to be mature and understanding, merely it is a maturity which somehow manages to recapture the innocence of naiveté and a straightforward dealing with the globe we find and the people nosotros chronicle to.
French philosopher Paul Ricoeur uses the concept of naiveté equally central in his thinking virtually how we know things, and how we relate critical assay to our means of knowing. When nosotros first encounter something, we understand information technology in a naive, pre-critical way. Our natural arroyo is to interpret things as they first appear to exist. Merely and then we start to appoint in a process of criticism and evaluation (our give-and-take 'disquisitional' comes from the Greekkrisiswhich ways 'judgement' or 'evaluation'). This is a necessary process, since reality isn't always equally we recall information technology to be—but if nosotros live in that fashion of criticism, and then nosotros lose the ability to trust and commit. In Ricoeur's words, criticism creates a 'desert', and it is not a happy or satisfactory state to live in. Ricoeur particularly relates this to the way we read texts, and in particular biblical texts. Anyone who has engaged in a course of study of academic theology, thinking that it might strengthen their faith, has experienced this process as a rude awakening. 'Don't report theology at academy' some accept been told 'considering yous volition lose your organized religion.' This is the desert of criticism.
Only Ricoeur goes further: 'Beyond the desert of criticism, we wish to be called again.' Ricoeur says there is a possibility of naiveté, but it is a 'second naiveté', ane that is found on the far side of the critical process. In spite of all the questions nosotros have, and the judgements we render, at the end of the procedure (if we are really going to live our lives rather than just thinking about them) we need to accept a 'wager of faith' and commit to assertive in a particular pregnant for what we read. Without this kind of naiveté, we are powerless to construct meaning and live our lives with significance.
And so, despite all the pressures to be 'knowing' and deploy cunning, I want to cover this kind of innocence. Call me naive, just I'd rather be known as someone who is trusting than equally someone who is cunning.
(First published in 2016)
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