CREEPY HORROR CHILDREN OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT: Last week, the City Paper ran a little blurb on an art show that involved creepy dolls. I forget what the deal was–why dolls? why not?–but CP’s reviewer noted that dolls are inherently eerie. The reviewer added that horror movies often include a clip of children’s voices singing or chanting in haunting unison. Why?

There are a lot of different elements mixing together here, a lot of different sources of creepiness. First, dolls and children’s voices remind us of childhood and the passing of time. (Another article in the same CP reviewed a book about crying in front of paintings, and one of the main reasons people teared up was because the painting reminded them of the passing of time.)

Childhood was also the time when our understanding of the world began to form–and so the patterns we learned then persist. Again, it’s unsettling to be reminded of that.

Movies that use the symbols of childhood also cause us to fleetingly identify with children, and to remember what childhood was like: The world was uncanny to us then. There are so many gaps in children’s understanding. The use of children’s voices or toys–especially when those symbols are removed from images of actual children, so they can’t be fit into any narrative–recalls us to the child’s perspective, which is often a very lost perspective.

And finally, children have a different form of consciousness from adults. This obviously isn’t a rigid distinction; it’s a blurry line. But children don’t yet have the rationality that almost all adults develop. Their mindset is strange, allusive, secretive yet often lacking in self-consciousness (or what Harold Bloom calls “self-overhearing”). Children are very resonant–they pick up on unspoken messages, and they make unusual, imaginative connections between objects and emotions. They’ll say things that seem irrelevant or disjointed, but that “make sense” from their perspective.

I think we’re somewhat tripped out, unnerved, caught off guard, by the idea of sharing “our world” with these other consciousnesses who can seem so alien. Childhood has been around a good while (just read two reviews of Medieval Children, a very nifty-sounding book that attacks the belief that childhood as a separate stage of life was invented by moderns–and one review mentioned the awesome books of Iona and Peter Opie, which you should check out), but there are reasons contemporary society might find kids especially uncanny.

Modern, liberal society structured itself to value and accommodate rational, self-interested adults. It built itself on metaphors of the marketplace; it most often justified its freedoms by pointing out the wise use that rational self-interested adults would make of liberty. Much of that philosophy–especially as you move farther from metaphysics and closer to prudential policy judgments–does make sense. But our society has emphasized rationality to the point that we find it hard to even accept that not-yet-rational or less-rational humans are worthy of equal protection. (I should acknowledge that in one area–treatment of mental illness–contemporary society is much better than pretty much all of its predecessors.) I blogged a bit about this here: Children don’t exhibit the qualities that we associate with citizens in liberal societies. They’re not equal, they’re not rational. And when there is no alternative reason to value someone except his rationality, his equality, or his efficiency, children will confuse us. We know we’re supposed to value them, so we retreat into sugary sentimentality (“it’s for the children!”), but in fact we find them uncanny and not-quite-right.