We the old assume it is our job and our competence to instruct the young. Here is why: we have learned from experience that the young have not had. We point out to students that by no coincidence all the beneficiaries of our vast and expensive education network are the young being taught by elders. It’s not the other way around.
But one thing the young must learn is that sometimes what we take for the wisdom of the ages is wrong. It should never have been handed down as noble tradition. Some of it in fact is bunk. Take bloodletting. Ever since the first-century Roman physician Galen prescribed the draining off of bad blood to heal someone, it was taken as utter wisdom. Barber shops were the place where this service was available. Hence the red of the barber pole. George Washington died of this, and not in battle.
Or else there is foot binding. Right into the 20th century women in some far eastern countries were made to endure a painful, lifelong custom of binding their feet in childhood so that their small toes were bent under. An ancient emperor thought the footprint resembled a lotus blossom. And then there is the ancient African barbarism of female genital mutilation, condemned by both Muslims and Christians yet widely prevalent.
In India, women fare worse where they practice suttee. This is the custom of a widow throwing herself on her husband’s funeral pyre to show her loyalty. Bride-burning is a tradition there involving a family claiming a bride has not brought enough dowry to the groom, or has dissatisfied him somehow. She is set on fire. This continues to the present day. So do forced marriages of girls as young as 10 to wealthy men several times that age.
So does slavery. We Americans think that the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery, what with the bloodiest war in our nation’s history. We no longer import kidnapped Africans on slave ships to auctions, led in chains and separated from family to provide free labor for the cotton industry. But in today’s world there are more slaves than the millions in Civil War times, both for labor and for sex.
Attempts to justify slavery then were pathetic: it’s in the Bible. (But so are murder, rape, adultery, theft, genocide and more.) The Israelites enslaved captive gentiles and considered it a God-given right. So why could it not be practiced after that? Popes once called it distasteful but allowable. Pope John Paul II called it intrinsically evil. Yet today we shop in mega-stores that underpay their workers and buy from foreign sweatshops like the one recently in Bangladesh. Supporting an economic system by buying wares made by victimized workers is a step away from cracking a whip over the back of a slave in a cotton field.
But all these hideous practices of “wisdom“ ancient and modern pale into insignificance next to the frenzied madness of war. From bow to longbow, from musket to rifle, from Gatling gun to helicopter gunship, from mustard gas to napalm, from aerial bombardment to atomic incineration, weapons have transformed from the barbaric to the fiendish. By what intelligence do we decide that the maiming and slaughtering of people not of our nation or color helps us? So often we justify the costly arming of whole nations with the word “defense,” failing to recognize that such preparedness has led us into war. It has yet to dawn on us that we should question the age-old militarizing of societies after all the tears and the funerals for cannon fodder. We even choreograph the sacred rituals with which we bury the fallen.
The very complexification of modern weapons has added another condition to be met in order to authorize a “just” war: the insistence of separating innocent noncombatants from belligerents. Today’s weapons are indiscriminate. Even so-called “smart” bombs like Hellfire missiles fired from drones are responsible for the deaths of thousands of civilians. It was a naïve, delusional faith in mechanized, computerized weapons that led the George W. Bush administration to claim a war could be won in Iraq without any U.S. boots on the ground. Over a million civilian lives and a trillion dollars later, what have we won? When will Barack Obama bring our forces home?
Vietnam protest songs by Peter, Paul and Mary affirmed that it’s been going on for 10,000 years. When will we ever learn?