According to Mark Twain, when he was 16 his father knew nothing, but by the time he was 21, it was amazing how much he had learnt.
Twain’s father may have been ultimately fortunate. A gloomier perspective on children’s attitudes to their parents was offered by Oscar Wilde: children start off loving their parents; then they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.
George Eliot wrote eloquently – in Silas Marner for example – about the natural suspicion human communities have towards an outsider. Such suspicion may be temporal as well as geographical. Each generation is like a Silas Marner to its successors. They think they know better, are quick to see the earlier one’s mistakes, less quick to see them fairly in context. Maybe that’s part of the reason why it often seems that, in Hegel’s words, the only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.
A common perspective is that unless you have a specific experience in life, or a specific physical condition, or live in a specific physical situation, then you cannot properly understand someone else who does have that experience, condition or situation. You can’t understand a country unless you’ve been there. Or a man, woman, trans, or other gender unless you are or have been one. Or addiction to drugs unless you’ve tried them yourself. Or the criminal mind (sorry Father Brown) unless you have a record. Or homelessness unless you’ve been homeless.
Or a particular time unless you’ve lived through it.
The popular appeal of this perspective may be attributed in part to the importance we attach to names. Every generation has different names and categories – for flowers, medical conditions, ethnicities, social groupings and even biology. To misuse (the current meanings of) names or categories is to court suspicion or worse. Richard Feynman’s insight that when you learn the name of something in the physical or natural world, you haven’t on that score yet developed any understanding of it, might have been scientifically valuable but is hardly mainstream in human affairs.
Having had an experience adds to a person’s CV a gravitas that is quite likely to be unwarranted. In one of his books, Alain de Botton comments that often you can communicate in vain with a person who’s just returned from travel abroad for evidence of any insight into the land just visited. Nor will a journalist who’s been to the front line in a conflict necessarily have any new wisdom to impart. But we can be confident that the traveller and journalist will be listened to on account of their experience. If Dickens’ M’Choakumchild had learnt a little less, he could have taught infinitely better so much more; apparently a similar message doesn’t apply to foreign travel.
The emphasis on specific experience not only makes it hard to learn from the past. It also militates against simple living – and a sustainable way of life. Simple living is seen as simplistic living with a narrow outlook; a sophisticated individual must have a wealth of experiences in life to warrant the adjective. Samuel Johnson might have commented that most of us stand in greater need of being reminded of what we already know than learning or experiencing new things; but, like Feynman, his observation is more wise than popular, both at the time he made it and in the current zeitgeist.