The wisdom of age and the wisdom of youth

We are often told that we should listen to the wisdom of our elders. Generally speaking, it's not bad advice. What is heard less often is that elders should listen to the wisdom of the young. That's something I've been thinking about a lot recently.

I have a lot of aunts and uncles and cousins on both sides of my family. On my dad's side, people are scattered all over the country and there is a family email list mainly used by my aunts and uncles to keep in touch. Some of my cousins and I are also on the list and generally participate less often but occasionally contribute. And there's an interesting dynamic some of my cousins and I have noticed which is that even though we are now all over 30 years old, to some of our aunts and uncles it seems we will always be "the kids." This has been most evident when political issues come up on the email list. It's been a recurring theme over the years, but was most striking last fall, during the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, which is what in large part led me to write this post.

Discussion of the Kavanaugh hearings led to a huge eruption of drama and in fact ever since then political topics have hardly been touched at all on the email list. Which is a little disappointing to me because the email list was one of the only forums I had in which I could discuss political issues with people I know personally but who also fall all along the spectrum of different political views. (It's interesting to me that I never made any effort to choose friends based on their political views but it just kind of happened that basically all of my good friends hold generally progressive views.) But then, I have also started to question the point of those discussions, which is partly because of how people in general have just become very polarized and set in their ways, but also because of the aforementioned dynamic of the cousins being viewed as "the kids."

During the Kavanaugh hearings, it was abundantly clear that some of my cousins and I were vastly more knowledgeable and better informed on the relevant issues around sexual assault than were any of the aunts and uncles. Several of us wrote lengthy, thoughtful, and impassioned emails only to have most of our points ignored or dismissed by some of the elders of the family. This sort of thing has happened many times over the years but it was especially infuriating in this case because we all know people who have been personally affected by the horrors of sexual assault. Some of us even directly said so, but this didn't seem to help. One elder family member in particular has a tendency to occasionally reply in very condescending and dismissive ways to messages with which he disagrees, mainly but not exclusively toward those of the younger generation, and the irony is that the same elder family member (based on past experience) would basically throw a temper tantrum upon receiving replies containing a fraction of that level of condescension or dismissiveness.

There were a lot of hurt feelings all around from these emails. But what I think most struck me was that it really seemed like some of my aunts and uncles (definitely not all, but some) had hurt feelings due to the mere fact of their nieces and nephews trying to passionately engage and disagree with them on an adult-to-adult level. Like they thought that we didn't know our places and were being disrespectful. And when I look at society at large I think that's a common problem.

As we age, we continue to accumulate more and more knowledge about the world. Everyone knows this. Based on this fact by itself, one might assume that older people, in general, possess more wisdom than younger people, and younger people have more to learn from older people than vice versa. I think some people do think this way. I also think it's a very simplistic view.

As we age, we do continue to accumulate more and more knowledge about the world. But there are other effects of aging. Our minds also become less adaptive. We become more set in our ways. It becomes more difficult to incorporate new information into our internal models of how the world works. There are also, of course, issues like dementia that can emerge with age, but even in someone who possesses a healthy aging brain, it is very clearly the case that there are ways in which that brain does not work as well as it did when it was younger. Recent studies have shown, for example, that the 65 and over demographic is the worst at distinguishing opinion statements from fact statements, and that the 65 and over demographic is the most likely to share fake news on social media.

Of course, there are very smart old people and not so smart old people just as there are very smart young people and not so smart young people. My general point is that age does not necessarily correlate with wisdom. There are two forces working in opposition to each other - roughly speaking, they could be described as the increasing accumulation of knowledge with age, and the decreasing ability to successfully utilize that knowledge. Perhaps peak wisdom occurs at an age that strikes the best balance between the two opposing forces - perhaps about age 35?

Nah, I'm kidding. I couldn't say what that age is. It's undoubtedly very different for different people. It's also undoubtedly different within an individual person when looking at different categories of knowledge and wisdom. So there are certain topics a young person might have more to learn from an old person about, and other topics for which the reverse would be true.

It's struck me that in the last few years the way I view my parents has changed a lot. When you are a little kid, your parents are the ultimate authority figures. You think they know everything. As you grow through childhood and young adulthood, you realize that they of course don't know everything. You start to form your own world view that can diverge from that of your parents, at times dramatically. But you still tend to look at them as authority figures to whom you look up. At some point, though, the parent-child relationship switches to a relationship between an adult and another adult, and while the parent never stops being a source of knowledge and wisdom to impart to the child, eventually the now fully grown child becomes just as much of a source of knowledge and wisdom to impart to the parent, just in different ways. At least that's the way it should be. I think some parents have a hard time with that transition. Perhaps this is even more true for aunt/uncle to niece/nephew relationships in which the aunts and uncles might have somewhat crystallized views in their minds of their nieces and nephews as children.

I think this also applies to the society-level relationship between an older generation as a whole and a younger generation as a whole.

Recent events in society have dramatically illustrated some of the concepts I've touched on here. After the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last year, student activists have fundamentally shifted the national debate on gun control. Sure, those students don't have the same level of accumulated knowledge about the world as the generally much older people who hold positions of power and authority in society, but those students are much more able to think about things in new ways. Older political figures, set in their ways after having spent many more years on this Earth, assumed standing up to the gun lobby's stranglehold on our legislatures just couldn't be done. The young students realized that taking the fight directly to an organization that opposes something like universal background checks that a supermajority of the citizenry favors can be very effective, and while we still have so far to go, those students have accomplished so much in the last year that older people never could have done. Wisdom doesn't only come from age.

Similar things can be said about the young climate activists who have been taking to the streets in cities across the world.

And many in the older generation automatically dismiss those young voices. It's sad but it's not surprising. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has taken the country by storm since being elected the youngest congresswoman in history. And along with her dramatic rise, there are of course loud voices dismissing her as crazy or not smart. There are comparisons to infamously dimwitted political figures like Donald Trump or Sarah Palin. These comparisons are utter garbage. AOC won a prize in an international science fair as a high school student and went on to graduate cum laude from Boston University with majors in both economics and international relations.

Not only is she not unintelligent, she is almost certainly one of the most intelligent members of Congress. (Let's face it, there are a lot of congresspeople who don't have particularly notable intellects.) Of course, racism and sexism and political tribalism are all major contributing factors to the attacks on her, but I really do think a significant component for the attacks on her intelligence is the assumption by many old people that someone that young just couldn't understand how the world works as well as they do.

Young people do have a lot to learn from old people, but old people have just as much to learn from young people. When it comes to certain topics, the older generation has more to learn from the younger generation than the other way around. There are many older people who already get this, but there are many who don't, and a lot of the problems in society could be better addressed if we would all listen a little more to the wisdom of youth. I'm making a vow that I won't forget this myself when I reach my later years.