12.25.2005
Age, Respect, Wisdom
In thinking about how human beings age and learn, I am struck not by how much individuals gain from age, but how little. I frequently (solely?) encounter people far older than me who, perhaps despite my expectations, know so little. It is not that their generalized knowledge is lower, their specialized knowledge in fields known to me lower -- I would expect both of these for various reasons when encountering the average person double my age. It is more the case that they simply seem to have learned nothing by virtue of their longer time on this earth. This shocks me.
Why would it shock me? Our culture has a very strong and pervasive identification between age and wisdom. If you seriously dispute this, you are not from any human culture that I know of or you are being a contrarian. You can see it in television, movies, or being around relatives (in my case) for holidays. The old are supposed to have "been there, done that" and thereby attained some level of wisdom that makes their decisions and conclusions about life worth more than the young.
To a certain degree, these prejudices on our part are justified. Up until a point - perhaps adulthood - humans are prone to many cognitive and decisional errors. Perhaps many people never progress beyond such a point where they are so error-prone. Nevertheless, we might say that until adulthood humans are "lower" in their possession of wisdom than those older than they.
But what of distinctions within the class of adults? Why does a thirty-year-old outclass a twenty-five-year-old in wisdom, presumptively? Of course there will be border cases of extravagant wisdom in youth and extravagant foolishness in old age, but our culture expects that on average, the 25-year-old is simply less wise than the 30-year-old.
I don't actually think this heuristic is useful or accurate. It seems to me that the more I age, and the more "wisdom" I supposedly accumulate, the more I realize that people become less wise as they age, in a whole variety of ways. Psychologically, the heuristic bias in favor of the old having wisdom is probably crafted by the old themselves -- they have an undue effect on the creation and influence of culture, after all.
A point for more exploration later.
Why would it shock me? Our culture has a very strong and pervasive identification between age and wisdom. If you seriously dispute this, you are not from any human culture that I know of or you are being a contrarian. You can see it in television, movies, or being around relatives (in my case) for holidays. The old are supposed to have "been there, done that" and thereby attained some level of wisdom that makes their decisions and conclusions about life worth more than the young.
To a certain degree, these prejudices on our part are justified. Up until a point - perhaps adulthood - humans are prone to many cognitive and decisional errors. Perhaps many people never progress beyond such a point where they are so error-prone. Nevertheless, we might say that until adulthood humans are "lower" in their possession of wisdom than those older than they.
But what of distinctions within the class of adults? Why does a thirty-year-old outclass a twenty-five-year-old in wisdom, presumptively? Of course there will be border cases of extravagant wisdom in youth and extravagant foolishness in old age, but our culture expects that on average, the 25-year-old is simply less wise than the 30-year-old.
I don't actually think this heuristic is useful or accurate. It seems to me that the more I age, and the more "wisdom" I supposedly accumulate, the more I realize that people become less wise as they age, in a whole variety of ways. Psychologically, the heuristic bias in favor of the old having wisdom is probably crafted by the old themselves -- they have an undue effect on the creation and influence of culture, after all.
A point for more exploration later.
# posted by Vanity @ 14:42 
