We get too soon old and too late smart
It occurs to me, not for the first time, that the older a person is the more historical context that person has for any event. Except for the rare youthful history buff, most young people have little background knowledge to help them process and/or understand current events.
Santayana, anyone? Here’s the whole quote:
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
[NOTE: The title of this post is not, of course, from Santayana. It’s a Pennsylvania Dutch proverb.
My personal favorite from Santayana is “only the dead have seen the end of war.” It is certainly true that the young (especially those filled with “passionate intensity” for some abstraction such as justice or equality) are ill-equipped intellectually to place contemporary events (such as the tsunami of “woke” insanity flooding the nation) within a broader understanding of history, of human nature, or of philosophy.
Made smart at an early age by my parents. Never trust politicians or their experts. Always trust your gut.
i.e.,
That goes back to Plato.
If it’s a Pennsylvania Dutch proverb how come it’s always said with a Yiddish accent?
Don’t blame youth. Historical context can’t fix stupid.
Andrew Sullivan just got fired from New York Magazine, expressly acknowledged he believes he got canned due to deranged political intolerance…and still says he intends to vote for Biden in November.
And what makes it worse is that Sullivan explicitly states that such political blacklisting is more-or-less okay by him because he believes he has the status and stature to just go back to blogging on his own. All the folks out there who DON’T have that option? They can apparently just FOAD as far as Sullivan is concerned.
And, of course, the possibility that what happened to Alex Jones and Gavin McInnes could just as easily happen to him never occurs to Sullivan.
Wisdom is impossible without a basic level of intelligence and maturity, no matter how old you get or how many things you see.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/07/andrew-sullivan-see-you-next-friday.html
Mike
It’s why each new generation keeps making the same mistake. You might have thought Socialism was dead and buried by 1989, and a generation later young fools are embracing it. Of course it doesn’t help that the schools are morally and intellectually bankrupt,
Roy, Pennsylvania ‘Dutch’ is actually a corruption of Deutsch, German, hence the similarity to a Yiddish accent! The Katzenjammer Kids accent.
We had the “Vee get too soon oldt undt too late Schmart” cute trivet on the kitchen wall, among other things.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
The socialists remember the past and tell you the only reason socialism has been such a dismal failure is because the wrong people were in charge. As soon as the right people are in charge socialism will create heaven on earth. You have to keep trying.
I came to the conclusion several weeks ago that people don’t learn. A person can learn, but not humanity as a whole. It didn’t actually strike me then for the first time, but I’d been drifting toward that conclusion for a couple of years already. And here we are, and I feel it more strongly than ever.
Ray:
The interesting thing about those wrong people in charge? They often end up unconscionably rich. The Castros, for example, or Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. And I never hear them say “well, I’m the wrong one to lead this revolution.”
The problem I have with the Santayana quote is that it implies that there is an alternative; that if we do learn history, we won’t repeat it.
IMO we are all destined to repeat history to a great extent because we all re-learn with each new generation. Even the same history is, generation after generation, seen through a new set of minds’ eyes. My grandchildren are repeating the learning of the same basic language skills and arithmetic skills that I learned 65 years ago. They are also repeating the learning of history, but NOT the same history I learned. It is a history being filtered through the eyes of different teachers with different shades of opinion. My teachers treated U.S. history and the founding fathers hagiographically, the traitor Benedict Arnold being the single stain among them. I suspect that, today, such an outlook hardly exists at all, and for as anti-American as many of today’s teachers outlook may be, I don’t think the old quasi-religious approach to American history was necessarily that accurate either.
I suspect that living is a lot like parenting, I tried not to make the mistakes my parents did and I hope that my children will not make the same mistakes that I did. They will, however, make mistakes.
I believe Santayana’s quote to be an oversimplification of the very dynamic process of living. IMO the reputed quote by Mark Twain is closer to the mark: History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.
Wisdom comes with age. It is as simple as that. It’s no guarantee, if one lacks the grey matter or is blinded by ideology. One of the most remarkable things about the changes in my 75 years is that regarding race, where there has been a remarkable improvement, notwithstanding the current bs of the left and its tribunes. The other are the improvement in the treatment of medical conditions and the standard of living. We are truly blessed, but for the ignorant young and the left.
This must be a very, very old German saying. We have an old ceramic tile that hung in my husband’s Texas German grandmother’s kitchen. It is written in old German script, the glaze is cracked with age. We treasure it. This tells me it must be a very old German saying because it has been a very long time since the Pennsylvania Dutch were in Germany or Switzerland. I descend from a number of different lines of them that have been here since early 1700’s.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Those who never learned about the past are certainly going to repeat it.
Those who are deliberately taught lies about the past are going to repeat it harder.
My mother used to say that, including the German accent. She was raised in Pennsylvania Dutch country.
I paraphrase; Those who do learn from the past are often doomed to have to repeat the past by those who refused to learn.
On not learning from the past – this police officer gets it.
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2020/07/17/a-black-portland-cop-says-rioters-are-racist-leftists-immediately-confirm-it-n654828
Those who don’t forget the past are able to predict the future.
https://babylonbee.com/news/announcement-the-babylon-bee-will-now-only-write-positive-articles-in-order-to-use-our-prophetic-powers-for-good
Neo notes “The title of this post is not, of course, from Santayana. It’s a Pennsylvania Dutch proverb.” Thanks! And to younger noobs, too often deprived of genuine American ethnic studies, “Dutch” here is the English corruption of Deutsch, or German.
My late grandmother from Vienna was fond of this bit of wisdom. (Her father bore the penalty of marrying outside the Habsburg aristocracy, and therefore immigrated to the States. This was a common vehicle for the fortune seeking, aspiring middle-class of the time.)
As for the fascinating Dutch roots of America, still seen in place names like Brooklyn, the Bronx, Knickerbocker, even perhaps Yankee or “Jan Kees,” as well as names up and down the Hudson River valley, see Charles Gehring’s magical 15 minute talk “ New Netherland — the best kept secret in American history.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYxrw99uYe0
T cavils on about historical interpretive uncertainties. But the great philosopher of science Karl Popper and his epigones like Alan Musgrave, Mark Notturno, Ian Jarvie, Alan Chalmers, and Rafe Champion online, show that in all narrative matters, one can arrive a a critical preference for the one nearer to the facts underlying the issue. This means recoded data, logical implications, as well as excluding implications (like, famously, modus tollens).
Therefore, while we cannot posses the singular Truth of an event, with effort we can arrive to a closer grasp of the truth.
Which is precisely why T criticises and sums up with “I believe Santayana’s quote to be an oversimplification of the very dynamic process of living. IMO the reputed quote by Mark Twain is closer to the mark: History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.”
And thus contrary to the tyrants of human nature changes only marginally from generation to generation. Which is also — and contesting T’s logic — the past still speaks vividly to us down through the mists of time: we see ourselves through their experiences.
What’s called the Error of Presentism, which saturates the indoctrinated minds today, both deludes minds and distorts perceptions and thereby lies to the young. Millennials judge the past by a creed of Utopian Idolatry, not the useable wisdom that might properly guide radicals to worthy and achievable ends.
This is the rot seen today.
The trouble is that young fools usually turn into old fools. The most asinine material which comes tumbling over our Facebook wall is the issue of people born in 1949, 1951, 1953, 1955, 1978, and 1982, respectively. Only one of these people attended a school with cachet, by the way. (I knew that man best when he was around age 55; he was at that time a demoralized higher ed apparatchik in a ZMP job that he held onto for 19 years for various reasons; no clue why he has been in a spitting daily rage the last five years; he seemed to have no emotional life at all when I knew him).
I got old, I’m not so sure about smart.
I’m not the first person to say this :
1.Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
2. Those who remember the past will also have to repeat it, because there’s always some bonehead out there who doesn’t.
“
T.J.,
“Millennials judge the past by a creed of Utopian Idolatry, not the usable wisdom that might properly guide radicals to worthy and achievable ends.”
That is incredibly profound and well put. You have an impressive economy with words.
I have often sarcastically told my children, “It’s easier to change the world than change an individual.” Point being, we all have family or close friends who we know very well, interact with frequently and directly, yet we still often cannot help, nor change them. Yet we think we can change 9 billion people with the stroke of a pen. Change one person. If you succeed, move onto another. That is the only way real change can occur.
TJ,
Clarify please (5:07 am).
I need an object or subject here:
“And thus contrary to the tyrants of ???? human nature changes only marginally”
or
“And thus contrary to the tyrants of human nature ???? changes only marginally”
Thanks.
TJ and Rufus,
“Millennials judge the past by a creed of Utopian Idolatry . . . .” [TJ @ 5:07 am]
No disagreement on this point. It would seem that their Utopian idolatry replaces the hagiographic treatment of my own upbringing.
But such distinction is always so. Each generational reality has its own character (Zeitgeist, if you will) and I offer that the character of any age looks equally artificial from any other point of view because we view the past through the filters of our own time. Thus I would reverse TJ’s remark that “we see ourselves through their experiences” to say that we see them through our own experiences.
This bring us back to TJ’s other observation: “Therefore, while we cannot posses the singular Truth of an event, with effort we can arrive to a closer grasp of the truth.” It seems to be a kind of historical Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
Our current Millennial Idiots, urging that (cough) high minded Marxist/Socialist Shit, haven’t a clue what that horrific crap cost the Soviet Union & China alone:
40-million lives in the former and 60-million in the Peoples Republic. NOT counting the additional millions slaughtered in other “PROgressive” States like Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba, etc.
Neoconscum,
As Thomas Sowell said in one interview, socialism is a great idea but a terrible reality.
T: I’ve long loved that great critical thinker, Dr.Sowell. Now aged 90!!
Comrade Lenin’s scathing term for the western left:
“Useful Idiots.”
Even Donald Trump knows Santayana’s maxim.
https://www.aei.org/op-eds/an-interview-with-president-trump-the-real-hate-is-the-hate-from-the-other-side/
Marc Thiessen July 10, 2020
Great interview, via Power Line today.