The pseudonymous “Thursday” has a suggestive post on The Wisdom of Elders and [Its] Decline:
That is the main reason the “wisdom of the elders” is no longer heeded. Most people aren’t abstract thinkers and therefore whatever wisdom they have to impart is very concrete and specific to the peculiar circumstance of their environment….
Literature is somewhat different. The wisdom of the great writers is indeed applicable to how we live now. But, unlike that of most people, it is frequently a somewhat abstract wisdom and thus is only helpful to those who are capable of abstract thought. It is up to the reader to recognize the parallels to his life and properly apply it there.
This ties into a point that Orwell made: literature has always been a minority taste. He said, “It hardly needs pointing out that at this moment the prestige of the novel is extremely low, so low that the words ‘I never read novels,’ which even a dozen years ago were generally uttered with a hint of apology are now always uttered in a tone of conscious pride.” But great literature, or even just literature without the modifier, appeals to us because it has elements of both the abstract and concrete: it moves between them more efficiently than many if not most other mediums. In addition, its technology (words on paper) has been relatively stable for centuries, unlike movies or TV shows, whose age shows by comparison to modern techniques. And the people who read have relatively long time horizons, in part for the reasons Thursday states.
I’m not sure I buy Thursday’s argument that at one point we, collectively, placed a lot of stock in the opinions of older people and now we don’t. But if I did buy this idea, I would argue that today we’re more focused on what you can do or the value of what you know than the source of wisdom or the prestige of the person. In other words, we (collectively) are less inclined to value some idea or opinion or whatever just because of its source, and more inclined to judge it based on its merits. Paul Graham argues this to some extent in pieces like “You Weren’t Meant to Have a Boss” and “Is It Worth Being Wise?“
Overall, this would seem to be a good thing, albeit it a challenging one: if we’re less inclined to respect authority merely because it’s authority, how do we decide what to respect and what not to respect? We end having to make judgment calls on our own. And that’s a place where people who like literature and ideas probably have an enormous advantage over those who merely want to be told what to do. The ability to think abstractly appears to be receiving steadily larger financial returns over time, which exacerbates income inequality but probably makes society as a whole better off. I don’t foresee anything obvious to check the trend toward returns to abstract thinking ability.
One other point: although I’m relatively young, I don’t have much experience in disrespecting the “wisdom of the elders,” in part because nearly all of the older people who I interact with on a regular basis are professors. Almost be definition, professors have to be powerful abstract thinkers who have spent years if not their entire lives mastering and extending a field. Being a graduate student means being ready to study the wisdom of one’s elders and then learning how to modify, disregard, or change that wisdom. So maybe the underlying ideals Thursday mentions are already built into many graduate schools, and those ideals are increasingly being built into economic life at large. That’s probably good for people like me, but not so good for people with different skill sets, or who grew up at a time when respect for age was more automatic or axiomatic than it is today.
