Suzanne Moore - young women should learn from older generations

[ArabellaScott]

In the Telegraph today.

'It’s 2021. It’s time to reclaim the streets, reclaim our rage, reclaim our history and make some more. I don’t care what this wave gets called. It’s time for a tsunami. '

www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/can-turn-moment-movement-women/?fbclid=IwAR17A6AutjtkJmI7uKeHqUN7x-rEnZL3mk2ELS6dYUVv4Du9TNB-rZKT2SU

Ha, yes, I will save it for later when the existential gloom is descending!

@ArabellaScott

Don't know if I want to click on that link, Sophocles, I'm a bit scared I've peaked without ever even getting anywhere!

Same!

@ArabellaScott

The baby boomers are the first generation to really take up that idea, which their parents did not believe in

Is that true? Hasn't 'progress' been part of our cultural narrative since - oh, at least the Enlightenment?

Oh, for sure, I was thinking of the idea that older people have no wisdom to offer. Which is related but people did tend to think they did, in large part, up till the Boomers.

It was all this, die young stuff, kill me if I'm still doing rock n' roll at 50, etc.

Now we have this tendency to elevate young activists and such, as if they are more advanced because they are young.

It just begin to create an atmosphere where there is no sense of value of the knowledge of the elder.

I was listening to the reports of Dominic Cummings evidence to a Parliamentary committee where he talked about wanting government to pay millions to set up a new kind of experimental science finding agency for very blue sky thinking type stuff. Dom kept saying how great it would be to get really young early career people in to work on these ideas. The sort of work he envisaged being going out to find the problems then to find a disruptive novel way to solve them. Massive failure rate of solutions to problems would be a marker of success etc.

I do get the need to think outside the box. Great. But middle aged me is listening thinking, why would we pay zillions for young people to reinvent the wheel, try out things that haven’t worked before but are new to them, and in general based on less experience of life so maybe naturally with less awareness perhaps of some of the social impacts of the solutions they are finding- or which problems should be researched.

I’d say innovation is more likely to arise from mixing people up together, not from listening to any one group in isolation. Ideas seem to happen for example when really specific experts in their fields look together for transferable problems and solutions that can then apply in different fields. MDT working etc etc. It didn’t seem convincing that just being young of itself would give any special insight in the way Dom seemed to think.

@TheRabbitOfCaerbannog

It's also that young women survey the ground, see where the power lies, come to learn that it lies with men, not older women, and act accordingly. So it's about self preservation and self-promotion to those who have power and influence. I'm not being critical of - I did it myself to a certain extent, I see that now - it's necessary to appeal to men and ignore older women if you're ambitious and you want to get on, but also because it's a survival instinct. Obviously there are anomalies- women working for women, but it's less common.

Interesting, I’ve never thought of it like that

the idea that older people have no wisdom to offer

Ah, I see. Could be. The focus shifting from older/wiser to younger/cooler? I wonder why that would be?

Who invented 'cool'? Post-war? Does it suit those in power to keep the masses refusing 'experts' and dumbed down? (Not saying young people are dumb, you understand, but that they have by definition far less life experience).

The cult of youth (please don't delete me, MN, it's sometimes just a relatively inoffensive word describing a social phenomena) is definitely something that's changed over time. In fact, the whole 'creation of childhood'.

I don't know. Thinking aloud.

Thanks, SophoclesTheFox, I really enjoyed that article.

'the Principle of Psychoprofessional Gravitation'

Glad to hear it, arabella, I know it was a bit of a tangent for this topic, but I thought an interesting one anyway.