Wisdom vs. Ageism

Gandalf was old. Dumbledore was old. Obi Wan Kenobi was old. Curly in City Slickers was old. It seems in our literature and entertainment, at least, we equate wisdom with age. Even in our Sunday comics the guru at the top of the mountain, to which everyone goes for wisdom, is an old guy.

Funny, then, that in everyday life we immediately assume that any old person is out-of-touch at best, knee-deep in dotage at worst. Except for the Dalai Lama, so long as he keeps his jokes politically correct, of course, or Pope Francis on a good day.

I suspect the wisdom of our elders is relative–relative to whether or not we like what they have to say. Indulgent grandparents are great when we’re the kids they’re indulging, but transform into obnoxious saboteurs when it’s our kids they’re hopping up on sugar and handing back to us.

But in that light, I have to wonder where we got the wise elder stereotype in the first place, then. Did it used to be true, and we’re just producing an inferior crop of elderly these days? Or are we just experiencing another form of that proverbial teenage malady of “the older I get, the smarter my parents become”?

I’d vote the latter. We see them struggle with new tech, for example, and assume that, just because they’re struggling with a smartphone, they’ve never experienced disruptive tech before and have no frame of reference that could apply. It’s more likely a different, related form of teenage malady, the “no one could ever understand me and what I’m going through.” We find it easy to believe that the elderly couldn’t possibly understand conditions today, and couldn’t possibly be clued in enough to have any applicable wisdom to share.

Especially if it’s a message we don’t want to hear.

And I suppose, for some people, or for some topics, that’s probably true. I wouldn’t go to my mom, for example, for advice on how to fix my computer. But I’ll bet she knows more than I might suspect about how to encourage my kids to maintain balance in their time on the computer or smart phones and other activities. It may not have been smart phones, but I suspect that the television and video game systems were a similar concern when she was raising me, and whatever insights she gained from hard experience would probably apply.

But no, we like to think we’re special, that today’s troubles have no analog (pun intended) in the “old days”, and that we’re breaking new ground in our wisdom of youth. The elderly are far too chill about all of this–or far too worried–and can’t be trusted to know the real score. They can’t possibly understand the complex times we live in. Right?

I hear that–or variations thereon–said about the leaders of my church, for example. People feel that having so many old people running the show can’t be a good thing. They’re out of touch. They can’t possibly understand the new, modern world  we live in. They’re too mired in the ideas and morality of the past. At best they really need us young people to help them sort things out.

It’s actually rather amusing, when you think about it. Laying aside whether or not they have direct access to divine wisdom, these aging gentlemen spend much of their time each year traveling around the country and around the world. They probably talk to more people in the space of a month than I do in a year, and more new people in a week. Among the fifteen top leaders of the church, they probably visit more foreign countries in a month than I’ve even flown over in my life. They probably have more “on the ground” experience with foreign nations and the issues facing their people than most US Presidents have after their term of office, let alone before.

But they’re so old!! Why, some of them only got on Facebook this year! Most of them still haven’t!

Considering my love-hate relationship with Facebook, I’m not sure that’s not a point in their favor, actually.

I think it’s terribly ironic that we only consider our elderly to be wise in fiction. Perhaps that’s because in fiction they’re usually proven to be right within a few hundred pages at most, whereas in real life it may be years or decades before the proof is evident–and by that time we’ve forgotten that they ever said anything at all. But the other half the equation in fiction usually proves just as true as it does in reality: the young whippersnapper to whom they dispense their wisdom almost never listens. To them, the aged are only wise when they tell them what they want to hear.