The Wisdom of Old Age
....is perhaps no wisdom at all?
When I was young, it was usual to play outside with your friends. We’d ride bicycles and throw balls around (‘Wall Ball’) or, if there were enough of us, we’d play football. But, being boys, we often preferred to play Cowboys and Indians. It was possible for doting parents to purchase suitable costumes to deepen our immersion in our characters – I was very proud of a gun belt with a pretend six-shooter and a ‘ten-gallon hat’.
It was understood that Cowboys were the Good Guys. Indians were Bad. We didn’t pause to consider if this was right. Maybe half right; maybe quite wrong. Our basic reasoning was that you needed two opposing teams, so niceties like political and cultural fairness, veracity and historical accuracy were irrelevant. We’d take turns being the Indians. Because that was fair.
The most complex element we ever introduced was that some cowboys wore light coloured hats and one or two had black hats. These were the really Bad Guys. They’d attack other cowboys without warning. At least the pretend Indians would give a blood-curdling whoop before launching themselves at an unsuspecting white-hatted cowboy.
It took me a lot of years; an embarrassing number of years, in fact, before I came to realise that there are some subtleties involved in this basic ‘Good Guys versus Bad Guys’ game. I learned that supposedly Good cowboys (and their ilk) had displaced supposedly Bad Indian and indigenous tribes from what the latter considered their tribal home lands, in search of gold or prime agricultural land. The modern day sop to long-standing tribal protest is to allocate areas to each tribe – ‘reservations‘ – and to grant significant financial breaks to the tribes. For example, in America, many now host gambling casinos and do very nicely, thank you. At least in financial terms. Culturally and morally? Not so much.
But I have at least come to realise there might be more to the story than I had perceived as a younster. The stage of ‘Conscious Incompetence’, perhaps?
The same went for my first exposure to another culture than my own. As a 21 year old, I went to live in the New Hebrides (now ‘Vanuatu’). I assumed these people who eked out a life in the South Pacific jungles must be backward in many ways. But slowly it dawned on me that their habits, their way of life – their culture - actually suited their environment perfectly. My prescriptive ideas of what worked in south east Great Britain would not help in a hut on the edge of the jungle close to a live volcano.
They say that ‘travel broadens the mind’. I guess my mind was getting broader the longer I stayed there. It broadened further when I spent years in the Middle East and then in America. By the end of my sojourn in New York, I’d had so many jolts to my initial assumptions about the way the world should work that I have become accepting of almost everything.
Almost.
Over centuries, several of the places in the world where I lived have been subject to attempts to wipe out the existing way of doing things to inflict some culture which is foreign but viewed as ‘better’ by the conquering force. If we think back to Vanuatu for a moment, voyaging Christians arrived in such ‘Godless’ places in the mid-19th Century and did their best to convert the islanders to Christianity. Missionaries frowned upon island traditions and their ceremonies of drinking Kava and dancing to venerate their local deities. The visitors did their best to eradicate such beliefs. In fact, those local beliefs persist to this day, not in opposition to Christianity, but alongside it. Then, as the prospect of armed conflict in the South Pacific grew during the 1930s, first Japan and then America began a programme of delivering cargo and supplies to the indigenous population. This was softening then up to accept an expeditionary force from the donor nation to establish a military presence on the islands. Locals began to view the deliveries as gifts from the gods – maybe their own gods; maybe the Christian one. Did it matter?
It became a cult – a ‘cargo cult’. The American one is still referred to as the cult of ‘John Frumm’ – widely attributed to a miss-remembered conversation in pidgin English in which the New Hebridean asks how to address the American:
‘Wunem name blo’ yufella?’
To which the answer might have been, “I’m John, from [insert American state of your choice)”.
The outcome? The Americans established an airstrip and a naval port on the eastern side of the largest island in the group, Espiritu Santo, in 1942. The first was named Turtle Bay airfield. A couple of others followed shortly afterwards at Palikulo Bay and Pekoa. Further south on the main island of Efate, there was another military airfield constructed at Quoin Hill. It fell into disrepair and a civilian airport was built at Bauerfield later on.
The islands were used by the Americans as a springboard for their upcoming operations in the Solomon Islands against the Japanese fleet.
Did these actions change the native population? It seems to me that the New Hebridean (now ‘Ni-Vanuatu’) culture has survived all these intrusions by outsiders. Sure, they now have pick-up trucks and radios, TV and mobile telephones, but the essential spirit of their culture persists.
When he visited in July, 1774, Captain James Cook likened the New Hebrideans to those he had encountered in Tonga in October of the previous year. He named them the ‘Friendly Islanders’ due to the initial warm welcome he received.
To this day, they remain a gentle people, tolerant of the ways of visitors.
I have tried to take a leaf out of their book. To not become unduly exercised by the vicissitudes of others. To ‘go with the flow’ as it were. I honestly thought I was managing to increase my tolerance, my forbearance, my patience as the decades rolled past.
But now my seventh decade of life is well under way, I’m wondering if the reverence many societies claim to have for older folks is still the case. I used to believe traditional Old Age came with a span of experience which could be doled out to young ‘uns whenever they threatened to go off the rails – if they were prepared to listen. You could wag your finger and say, “I told you so” if things went wrong.
Maybe this was true when the pace of progress was modest. Advice from an old-timer still had a grounding in relevant experience. But now? In 2025?
Human beings are naturally hungry for more knowledge. The co-founder of the computer chip manufacturer, Intel (Gordon Moore) tried to describe his vision for knowledge growth in 1965. He suggested that the number of transistors on a computer chip would double every couple of years. Thought to be wildly optimistic at the time, it is now a dramatic under-estimate of the span and depth of expansion of computing power – perhaps it now applies to the rapidity of expansion of artificial intelligence autonomy!
Most of my knowledge, memories and recorded experiences are closer to artefacts than relevant help to youngsters these days. What I hope remains relevant is the over-arching tolerance and acceptance which comes with anno domini.
Although certain politicians in positions of enormous power are testing this to breaking point right now… Don’t get me started!
