It is, of course, impossible to have a great deal of wisdom produced by life experience when you’re young. You are young. By definition, your life experience is limited. But this lack of lived experience is balanced out by something that young people tend to have more of than their elders: moral clarity. The rage and impatience of youthful political energy is a natural result of gaining insight into how the world works for the first time, and being disgusted by its many outrages. History? Economics? Foreign policy? To learn for the first time about any of these things is to be introduced to an unbroken string of murder, oppression, and theft stretching back thousands of years. Education, performed correctly, gives kids the knowledge that the world around them did not just spontaneously come into being; it is the result of the work of many, many generations of stronger groups wiping out weaker groups and taking all of their stuff. And sustains itself today not through a friendly spirit of universal cooperation, but through power arrangements that culminate, almost everywhere, with the barrel of a gun. To see the world through a child’s eyes, and then to have the actual, blood-soaked machinery of history and politics unveiled is a shock. It prompts an urgent desire to do something in anyone with a conscience. Young people are able to see the evils of our systems with eyes that are unclouded by the harsh compromises that life imposes on all of us.
Are young people annoying? Yes of course. They don’t know jack shit and they act like they know everything and they mock our outfits, which we are certain are cool. More to the point, what chafes older people so much is, I think, the fact that younger people seem eager to pass judgment on the world without ever having had to navigate its many challenges themselves. We see their certainty as unearned, their arrogance as off-putting, and their smooth, glowing skin as an insult to our own mortality.
What I want to say at this very fraught political moment, however, is this: The wisdom that older people claim grants them the legitimacy to control the world also demands the grace and humility to be able to admit that young people bring important qualities to the political mix that we lack. To high-handedly dismiss the demands of the young that knotty moral outrages be fixed, just because those demands feel simplistic or tinged with self-righteousness, is to reveal that we are not as wise as we claim to be after all.
Awful things are happening in Israel. This week’s attack by Hamas and the subsequent brutal retaliation against Gaza by the Israeli government has thrust in front of everyone the horrific human cost of oppression, rage, and war. This is a time when public discourse takes on a real importance—what is being written in the media and said on television can have life and death consequences, as the unspooling public narrative gives shape to the boundaries of conventional wisdom about what is considered acceptable. Imagine for a moment that you are employed as a professional commentator right now. What is truly important? Well: Human life. Human death. The political choices and historic background that produced this situation. And, most urgent at this moment, the ongoing humanitarian disaster in Gaza, prompted by the Israeli government’s plans to lay waste to the entire region, with little regard for the civilians trapped therein. No matter what your position is on these issues, it is fair to say that those whose job it is to focus public attention on important things must, right now, be engaged with the momentous matters of life and death that are playing out before our eyes with every passing hour.
But here is what many professional commentators have chosen to spend their time and energy drawing our attention to instead: The annoying things that young people are saying and doing. Many people who hold prestigious and well-paid media jobs, and who control an influential megaphone at a time when that is of incredible importance, squander their time and ours with wheedling complaints about bullshit. (...)
Who is being childish here? Is it the young college students, appalled at genocide looming in front of their eyes, possessed with the overwhelming urge to do something, who—despite not possessing a PhD in global affairs—flood into the streets and rage against the atrocity? Or is it the well educated and highly placed and influential adults, granted positions of great importance, who, as a crisis unfolds, as civilians are murdered, as neighborhoods are bombed, as oppression and religion collide in war, use their time griping about the hotheadedness of the young people protesting in the streets? Which of these groups has more accurately identified what should be our current topic of attention—the young people whose focus is on the governments that possess militaries and missiles and are poised to cause thousands of deaths, or the adults whose focus is on how some college kid said something annoying at a DSA rally? Wake the fuck up. The adults in the room are everywhere proving the kids’ critique to be true.
Young people have a voice, but no power. Old people have a bigger voice, and all of the power. Guess which group has a greater responsibility not to waste the current moment moaning about petty bullshit? An inability to ignore the small annoyances of youth in order to welcome the indispensable purity of morality that young people give to us is not a mark of wisdom. It is evidence that one has maintained immaturity even as they have gotten older. It is proof that you have allowed age to shrink your moral universe, rather than expand and deepen it. It is, above all, a reason to think that you should stop talking for a minute and listen to what the angry young people are saying.
by Hamilton Nolan, How Things Work | Read more:
Image: Getty
