WISDOM OF THE ELDERS

MY CHILDHOOD FRIEND DEAN TORGES posed a question for me on his fine blog, www.bowyersedge.com. He said:

I regret not asking a question of old men when I was a boy. When they told me, “I wish I knew at your age what I know now,” I regret not prompting them. Several times it happened, always in the company of assembled friends, but not once did I or anyone else ask, “What is it that you know now, Mister? Is it about opportunity? Does it concern confidence or nerve? Something about Standard Oil stock certificates? What? I want to know.”

They understood that we hung on their next words, yet not one of them ever volunteered further information. Instead, they smiled and went silent, outlasting our attention.

These old men were not talking about future events played to an advantage, but about perspective and understanding, something profound, some pearl of wisdom. This much I was sure of and no more. Since I was new to life compared to them, I reasoned that perhaps I was not ready for such wisdom. After all, life lessons worth knowing can’t be told or taught, right?

Dean and I both knew those old guys, elders we respected for their chops – skills in rabbit hunting or frog-gigging or simply making money. We saw this money skill from our perspective as boys – it allowed them to have some of the free time we had, time we knew would be stolen when we were thrust into citizenship. We saw hunting skill as God-given: a man could be blessed enough to be a hunter. Or a woodworker, or an artisan who had God in his fingertips. We knew those old guys but we didn't know much about them. In short, we knew shit.

Why couldn’t they impart their wisdom to us? Why can’t we impart our wisdom to our grandsons, Varmint and Max? Dean’s question heated up my brainpan and my roundabout thoughts have forced me way out on a limb. I must hypothesize from this thin and bendy perch.

I’m going to begin back a piece, because I believe that elders of the tribe once transferred wisdom to young men as part of their manhood rites. But only as far back as World War I for now.

The overwhelming lesson of World War I was that we can’t trust tradition, anointed authority, or royalty. The Great War was largely fought among three grandsons of Queen Victoria: George V of Britain, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, and Czar Nicholas, and Kaiser Bill was Vic’s favorite. The calamitous losses of a war which had no real goals or even a sensible cause were disillusioning and drove a generation out of its comfortable emotional attachment to the familiar. The result was stark modernism, functionalism, reduction. During the Third Battle of Artois (One and Two seem to have been preludes) the Entente Forces lost 86,000 British troops and 250,000 French Troops for a temporary gain of a few hundred yards. The nonsensical official reports of victories costing millions of men for negligible territorial or strategic gain disconnected a generation from any trust they might place in institutions. Cubism, Dadaism, twelve-tone music and the hard-boiled detective novel were post-war products of a disillusioned age.

World War II disillusioned the next generation in another way. It was a more egalitarian conflict with clearer lines drawn between fascism and liberalism (the definitions of these two creeds have changed radically since then). But this war caused another disconnect: the system doesn’t work. The simultaneous Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and U.S. bases all over the Pacific revealed that our Navy and intelligence services were completely bamboozled by a second-rate power. Then that strange oriental nation kept the upper hand for the next three years. More confusion: our Communist enemy, Uncle Joe Stalin, became (suddenly, inexplicably, by fiat) our friend and favorite charity. Invasion operations in Dieppe and Norway were total cockups; we couldn’t get it right. Our Atlantic convoys were nightmarish slaughters. The attrition rate for “precision daylight bombing,” something our experienced allies refused to do, approached 100% for the tour of 20 missions. D-Day, the Great Invasion, was such a SNAFU that our toehold on the continent was tenuous for weeks. In those weeks after D-Day our troops moving inland were confronted with the bocáge, impenetrable and stubbornly defensible hedgerows. Our crack aerial photo analysts had assured invasion troops that the hedgerows (most topping 20’) were minor obstacles, only about three feet high. We couldn’t get anything right. Without the USSR’s seemingly unlimited capacity to bleed, we would have surely sought terms with Chancellor Hitler. Men in charge, systems, experts, generals, boards, agencies – never got it right. World War II was one unexpected FUBAR ("fucked up beyond all recognition") after another from Pearl Harbor to the Battle of the Bulge. We couldn’t trust anyone.

The old men we knew were veterans of that conflict or at least that time. Perhaps they had wisdom, but they didn’t trust it. They didn’t trust any obvious truth because they’d seen so many truths die quickly. They were a saddened, cynical generation with a hard shell of “well, we won on a technicality, and the best revenge is to live well.”

But we're not them. Why can’t we impart our wisdom? Let’s go to another war and another time. In the 70’s we shot ourselves in the foot, Dean. Our generation, appalled by the purely political wars in Korea, Cuba, the Congo, and Viet Nam, rejected any “wisdom” from anyone over thirty. We established a Youth Generation. We insisted that given truths were always tainted by politics and corporate manipulation (this happens to be largely true of national truths). We were a “free” generation, open to anything new, rejecting worn-out morality and polite society, questioning both etiquette and hygiene, exalting style over content, adoring the “natural” as achievable by common sense and gut feeling. We cried up youth as a magic time of inherent wisdom that needed no external input. Especially from pigs, honkeys, Tricky Dicks, or war-mongers. We rejected anything the old guys were willing to pass on.

And now we’re the old guys, Dean. We created a youth culture, then grew out of it. I believe we’re actually embarrassed to have an opinion, or to pass on a set of skills. Our young men have no rites of passage into the tribe. Hell, Dean, there ain’t no tribe. It’s every man for himself.

There’s also a cultural certainty that men (compared to women) are foolish, childish, toy- and sex-obsessed, and probably unnecessary when genetics catch up to female superiority. What could they possibly offer young men except more foolishness?

We had a liberal desire to make a better, fairer world, Dean. Out of our fear for crumbling governmental institutions and bumbling authority figures, we have succeeded in writing ourselves out of subsequent scenes. We’ve become the drones. Honestly, I’d looked forward to being a white, Anglo-Saxon, domineering, triumphant male. Nope. It didn’t work out that way. History and our own best instincts torpedoed me.

In order to pass our wisdom on to Varmint and Max, you and I must embrace the importance of what we know. Not many men, in this helter-skelter culture, are brave enough to claim the importance of their intellectual heritage for fear of sudden and derisive denial. Can we sort through thae (considerable) backlog of skills we’ve acquired and settle on the unimpeachably important things our grandsons need? Can we create the rites of passage that prepare young men to receive wisdom? Can we get away with it?

I’m betting we can, for Max’s and Varmint’s sake. We’re the elders now and though our forebears were reluctant to pass on truths tainted by their crushing experience, we have an obligation to find our own assurance, somehow.

A few years ago I sailed on a racing cruise with my dear, incarcerated John Carter. We shipped a crew of ringers – young, strong men picked for their racing experience. Several were Olympic small-boat sailors, all were marvelously beefy deck apes. The first night out I insisted that they sit down to supper instead of take their plates on deck. I discovered that none of them had actually dined with their parents and families. After dinner we had a bit more wine, some poetry, cigars, and civilized talk. The boys were astonished, in thrall. They’d never been part of a formal male gathering with intellectual content and gentle rules of decorum. One of the boys finally spoke up, admitted that he'd never really had the opportunity to sit down with his father or any other adult male in a quiet, conversational atmosphere. Then he said something remarkable, “You guys are, like, grown up. Men. You’ve been, like, around.” We nodded grimly, thinking we had the scars to prove it. Then the boy said, “What’s all this business … about … women?”

Well, what could we say? Perhaps nothing in the absolute truth line but it surprised us later because we had some sound advice and some valuable warnings. It was even important that the boys knew we had shared their confusion and had taken the same perilous journey toward love, had crashed and burned, and it was important that we recognized that they’d do their share of crashing and burning.

So let’s take this as a parable. If we can find the right venue, the right time, and if we know what our young men need from us, we may be able to impart wisdom that, yes, will make their journeys easier. This is a truth in itself.

BRAXINOSO SPEAKS

That was an extraordinary evening afloat. The boys were bright. Because they had been involved in class and club racing they were accustomed to mature men, even if most of them were shouting skippers and selfish louts. So they were primed to receive something from men. It's doubtful if less worldly and less accomplished boys (winning many races built their assurance) would be as receptive. I'm not sure Himself is justified in his belief that he and Dean Torges can transfer wisdom. It's probable that a "normal" late teenager would be gravely bored by dinner, poetry, discussion and intellectual pursuits without benefit of digital enhancement.