10-27-2024, 02:39 AM
Brains keep developing afted
Your analogy on age and learning is very wrong. Brains don’t stop developing until a person’s mid 20s. Why do you think many people go to college throughout their 20s. There are increasingly a number of older adults even going back to college to earn their degree.
(10-16-2022, 11:11 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:(10-16-2022, 01:21 AM)JasonBlack Wrote: I think there's a tendency to assume that Idealists are all overly spoiled and age into aggressive demagogues or closed-minded zealots. If anything, "idealist" also implies a level of sensitivity and a curious mind, which often takes the form of a sage or intellectual rather than someone fixated on forcefully controlling reality or ruthlessly extracting resources for its own sake. For instance, a lot of millennials don't realize that most of the boomers had stricter upbringings than they did with more corporal punishment and fatherly discipline. Keep in mind that, so far at least, it has been GIs who forced young boomers into the draft, while boomers have yet to do the same to their own children. With the exception of George W. Bush, boomer presidents have resided over smaller and smaller numbers of troops stationed overseas.
As with practically all history, Howe and Strauss find the temptation of the Great Man much of the expression of history. Not until modern times do we get narratives from others -- like peasants, clerks, foot-soldiers, and laborers. These people also experience history even if they do not direct it as do kings, generals, plutocrats, and high-level creative people. Maybe we get their stories through someone like Charles Dickens or Victor Hugo, which spares us some incoherence.
We all face predictable transitions in our lives if we live long enough. We all find something inadequate in our parents' or grandparents' way of life. Such could be on something so banal as cuisine. My grandparents liked to cook vegetables to a texture-less, bland concoction that felt like mashed potatoes. I found out that vegetables were far tastier if steamed and offered some tactile sensation and more flavor to my mouth. With candy it does not matter. With broccoli or cauliflower, texture matters greatly. Another is that one quits growing in cognitive power, usually in late teens or around 20. That is a brick wall, and that is measured in the assumption on IQ tests that people don't get smarter after age 20; They can still learn, but their ability to learn does not increase.
We have gotten complacent about the certainty of certain coming-of-age rituals from first communions or bar mitzvahs (depending on religious tradition, or perhaps nothing of the like because one lives in an irreligious environment), Scouting or 4-H, senior proms, quinceanero celebrations, graduations, getting a first driver's license, or getting to vote. (Worse, it could be the first jail term, drug high, or incidence of drunkenness. COVID-19 disrupted many of those; that's how Crisis eras operate. Perhaps had the Capitol Putsch succeeded as planned, politics would become nothing more than blind obedience. There would be votes but without meaningful choice or pre-ordained results.
Without doubt the key players of history are loud and often abrasive. They usually have the advantages in life that many of us wish we had even if we couldn't handle those advantages well. I think of celebrities, pop musicians, and athletes who mess up badly... well, maybe many of us could not handle all the advantages well. The "Lena Lamont" (Singin' in the Rain) character can easily morph into "Nora Desmond" (Sunset Boulevard). I'd like to believe that if I were a film star I would have salted away much of my take into real estate or oil wells, and not on floozies. Pop musician or child star? As the career winds down, it's off to Stanford. Pro athlete? Associate with bankers and not hookers and pushers. More resources in someone unable to handle them means even more ways in which to mess up. The rest of us get far less leeway. Many of us have soul-crashing drudgery on an assembly line -- or probably worse, jobs in which one must suffer for customers, bosses, and investors with some theatrical smile that suggests one enjoys subordination, poverty, and regimentation. Far more people endure those lives than get to enjoy the Good Life.
Quote:For example, most of y'all here are boomers. How would you respond if there was an eminent call for a draft and your son called you up asking if you knew a way to dodge it? Now how would your parents have responded if you said the same thing to them? I spoke with my own parents about this a few weeks ago, and asked if the test that showed I suffer minor hearing impairment could be used to disqualify me from the draft. They laughed, and I then continued "imagine how your parents would have reacted if you had said this to them". They could not stop laughing. I hate to say this, but...I'm glad my paternal grandfather died before geopolitical tensions rose to this level. He volunteered during WWII (a cook for the marines in the Pacific Theater), and quite likely would have disowned me as a traitor for speaking so openly about fleeing from duty to country. As much as I admired him for his firm-yet-kind demeanor and quiet heir of dignity, this would not have changed my decision. Most of the GIs would have seen me as a traitor and a coward, while most boomers would respond with something like "good on you son!", or start talking about how it's a good thing to evade conscription into useless wars and mass violence.
The military draft remains. If we ever see our country in imminent danger of attack by an aggressive superpower, then we will have millions called up for military training and perhaps warfare. If it ever comes down to this, when the most powerful forces of historical reality decide between freedom and despotism:
Quote:O thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved homes and the war's desolation.
Blest with vict'ry and peace, may the Heav'n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: 'In God is our trust.'
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
Forty-eight stars and thirteen stripes marched into Dachau and Mauthausen to emancipate prisoners of a demonic regime... in that case, our conquest was just. A war for the profit of warmongers or the glorification of some leader? Young men are getting out of Russia to avoid an unjust and absurd war. I'm not saying that we will ever have a Putin-like leader, but should such ever happen then resistance to an unjust war is the definitive act of patriotism.
Your analogy on age and learning is very wrong. Brains don’t stop developing until a person’s mid 20s. Why do you think many people go to college throughout their 20s. There are increasingly a number of older adults even going back to college to earn their degree.