Immaturity, Sin, and Family

See also Is Holiness the End of Childhood?.

When people are children, they are both immature (or "childish") and child-like. Sometimes when people are adults, they are immature. Perhaps some adults can be child-like.

Immaturity is what is undesirable in children, that they are supposed to grow out of. Emotional neediness, thoughtless irresponsibility, and perhaps other traits are not necessarily sinful, but they are things that life tends to push you to give up so that you can live it effectively. Immaturity also includes the sinful habits that children seem to naturally develop (in what they are) and whatever extent to which they themselves choose or deeply prefer those habits (which is sin in who they are).

Immature people also don't fully understand what they're doing. In this, they may be held to a lower standard than adults. For instance, a little girl might tell lies that get her out of trouble. She doesn't really get the full consequences of being a liar, how that can ripple out through her whole life. So her parents might not look at her as a disturbing person, just an immature person. They might try to turn her away from her lying behavior, but not come down harshly on her. But, imagining an adult daughter, who lies just as assiduously to get out of trouble, we might expect her parents to perhaps want to get as far away from her as they can, perhaps functionally or even officially disowning her. They might be offended by her dishonesty, find it shameful, or simply not trust her so much that they can't have her in their lives, living out the potentially loaded parent-child dynamic.

If you don't fully understand what you're doing, are you still sinning when you do things like lie for your own gain? To some extent you are. It's dangerous for five-year-olds to sin, even with their relatively innocent minds, because any sin is dangerous. To choose to sin involves preferring something that keeps you from being in tune with God 100%, and if you harden on that preference, you will reject God.

Fortunately, five-year-olds grow up so that they can understand and turn away from sin. As they grow, their capacities to understand and will things grow, along with their developing brains and understandings of the world, and who they are grows to inhabit these new capacities. Some people, perhaps the developmentally disabled, or the congenitally innocent, don't develop all of these capacities in this life. I assume that in the Millennium, they are given new bodies / brains that can understand sufficiently for them to deal with whatever sin is in them. But, for those who do have the capacities, to not use them is a choice, and a dangerous choice. If we prefer to be immature in order to avoid dealing with sin, maybe we love sin in some way. Also, if we do not inhabit our full capacities, our love of God may be shallow, because we are not establishing our whole beings in loving him (loving with all of our hearts, souls, minds, and strength).

Sometimes choosing a role automatically inclines you to a whole set of behaviors. You can try to take on the role of being a child, or your younger self, and this may necessarily give you both child-like and immature traits. Some people may have to put their younger self in the past, even at the risk of losing some of the good and beautiful child-like traits, but some may not. One would hope that those who love childhood could pick apart the immaturity from their own child-likeness and could adopt the role of child or their younger self without getting into immaturity, which can lead to sin, or is sin in itself.

To the extent that family is a space in which immaturity is tolerated, it can be spiritually dangerous. It is more gratuitously dangerous if it encourages immaturity. People need slack to grow, and to an extent, they have to go at their own pace. So tolerating immaturity is a kind of necessary evil. But encouraging it is an unnecessary evil. Families include everyone and in a sense travel at the pace of the least-developed member. People like to be in families, but if Family conquered the world, it would be spiritually dangerous. There has to be something outside family and being in families for us to become holy. Families index themselves to their children, where those children are, in order to protect, nurture, and include them, but there needs to be some thing or things outside of Family that are indexed to the truth.

Perhaps Truth and Family coincide if each are properly understood. In order to be protected, nurtured, and included for all eternity, children must someday come into tune with God. We might think that the truth recommends including everyone in the family of God.

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[17 June 2022: I wrote this section mistakenly, having not re-read my X-Risk review before writing. In the review, the "silly" thing is the prospect of humans modifying themselves to take satisfaction in (/ caring about) the outputs of the process of "piling up art, science, games", which conveniently happen to be things our civilization can crank out. Art, games, and science themselves are not necessarily considered "silly" or "cheap".]

[I should take this as a lesson to be more careful when I write, but I do still like the thinking in this section, though it came about out of a mistake.]

[Art and games (and, I suppose, science) are not silly and cheap when they help us survive, or grow up. Also they are not cheap when they are not wealth. Wealth is what makes us rich, not in the sense of "wealth is a thing we sell to make lots of money which makes us rich", but in the sense of what makes us rich to possess it or participate in it ourselves. Full-grown love could be considered wealth. "I'm becoming rich off of video games" or "art" or even "cool scientific discoveries" is like having a lot of candy or eating a lot of candy. Even "I'm becoming rich off of love" is like eating a lot of candy -- immature love, or fake love, or love which is just a form of pleasure. But full-grown love really does make you rich, and it's appropriate to think of it as wealth.]

This subject makes me think of my review of X-Risk. I attacked aspects of transhumanism on the grounds that they were childish, but I realize that to attack childishness can simultaneously attack childlikeness. Transhumanists who want a future of 10^100 art and game units may simply be childlike, overcome by the wonder of fun, beauty, and large numbers. As I write this, I feel like I'm making fun of transhumanists, like I still haven't learned not to be harsh or even disrespectful of transhumanist (adult) children, of the child in them.

Because (adult) transhumanists are adults, I think that in a way, they can handle being made fun of or treated harshly. But even adults can be damaged by words. I don't want to take back my enmity with a certain kind of transhumanism, or the point I wanted to make that there's something cheap or silly about its goals. But children have the seriousness and the innocence to not be cheap or silly in their relations to things that are in some sense lacking. When I was a boy, I played with Legos, little pieces of plastic. The Legos could express my imagination, but what I made by way of instantiating my imaginings were structures that were too small for me to live in -- like an elaborate submarine, too small to be in, that would have filled up with water undersea. When I played with Legos, I did so with focus and absorption, not condescending when I played. Perhaps transhumanists are childlike and thus serious and innocent in their love of such lacking things as pleasure, fun, and beauty. I think a thing is fundamentally what God makes of it, and part of what he sees in something has to do with how it is seen by his different children and what they need, and so maybe childlike transhumanists add something pure to the cheapness and silliness of those forms of wealth, in comparison to full-grown love.

But, again, transhumanists are also adults and have an adult side to them. Some of them, by how hard they work, show that they are people who can value things even when those things bring them pain, tedium, and ugliness. They have the capacity for full-grown love, and not just childlike love, or childish pseudo-love. As I think about the childlike and childish people who seem to surround me, and I think of the value of childlikeness, I can see that perhaps in the future there may be some reason for there to be art and games in great profusion in order to impress childlike people with large numbers. However, I think that it is dangerous for any child who has an adult side to not exercise that adult side. We need to love with all of our beings, and to learn to really love. By doing so we can really be both child-like, and good adults. Otherwise, we are immature or even evil adults, who do not fully love and truly value, whom God cannot live with forever.

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12 September 2023: I think a child who really loves would be happy with one work of art, or one favorite game, or one scientific discovery. They would really connect with that thing and feel feelings of love toward it. So maybe in the ideal future, we should looking to maximize that tendency, and thus not need a huge pile of art, games, and scientific discoveries. So, to try to address what I remember of X-Risk, I would say that a booster for X-risk prevention could say "someday we can really learn to love, as long as we don't get wiped out by an X-risk".