Sanctuary of shameful secrets

Last week I found myself in New York City meandering around midtown Manhattan. Whilst I wandered, I chanced to see several advertisements of the Smoke Free Movies organization, which has been urging residents of the Big Apple to give an R rating to films that portray tobacco use.\nCreated by University of California at San Francisco professor Stanton Glantz, this organization intends to shelter children from implied celebrity endorsement of tobacco, thus luring fewer children into smoking, thus protecting their health.\nI’m not implying that it’s good to push cigarettes on kids, but Glantz, et al., have missed the boat. They’re like a mother who chides her toddler to wear a helmet when riding his tricycle, then sets him loose to cruise the interstate in rush-hour traffic. If she and Glantz were truly concerned for the health of children, they would realize that smoke-free movies and helmets don’t begin to address the dangers assailing children.\nIn his book “The Disappearance of Childhood,” Neil Postman brilliantly analyzes exactly that problem. Postman realizes that, unlike infancy and adulthood, childhood is not a biologically necessary station of life, but a socially created one. He uncovers the social forces that created childhood and, more importantly, those that are now destroying it (unsurprisingly, tobacco isn’t the culprit).\nI’ll neglect the other forces Postman identifies to emphasize that maintaining the segregation between childhood and adulthood requires the adults of a society to bear “a well-developed sense of shame.” That is, “children are a group of people who do not know certain things that adults know,” and shame among adults is the mechanism by which we keep kids in the dark regarding certain “secrets of adult life ... secrets about sexual relations, but also about money, violence, death.”\nThat’s why the movie “Little Miss Sunshine” was funny. Every beauty pageant is just a step above a striptease, and nothing but a well-developed sense of shame can keep the former from degenerating into the latter.\nSmoke Free Movies wants to add tobacco to the library of shameful adult secrets. It has no place there. While it may indeed threaten cancer and black lungs to children, the sanctuary of secrets exists to shelter children not from health risks, but from those unpleasant truths of life which would strip them of childhood innocence and cynically thrust them into a “pseudo-adulthood.”\nThe true dangers to childhood and children are the institutions and movements that threaten our society’s healthy sense of shame. This campus has been host and home to several such institutions and movements. They go by names such as “The Kinsey Institute,” “gender studies,” “feminism” and “The Vagina Monologues.” These are principally opposed to the shame with which we’ve shrouded the adult secrets of sex. They’ve taken sledgehammers to the wall that has historically insulated the child world from the adult world.\nYou’ll say that shame leads to hypocrisy. Perhaps it does. Even so, “if it is hypocrisy to hide from children the ‘facts’ of adult violence and moral ineptitude,” for their sake it is “nonetheless wise to do so.”