South Asia, for the most part, makes the young old. The West keeps the old young.
In the East, life is fairly intergenerational. A boy grows up at the same table as his grandfather, so he inherits the old man’s quarrels whole. In the West, people live in age cohorts. The old are left to be old, and everyone else tries to stay young. Hyper-individualism has its costs, but it does one thing well. It lets the past rest.
I had forgotten this. My own context is selectively Western. My motto ordinarily is let ideas procreate, let them battle and let the best one win. This is what I try to apply in my daily life. Then I look at Brown Pundits and watch our conversations litigate events from 200 years ago as though they happened yesterday. Why can’t South Asia move on? Because almost nothing is lost between generations. The old wound arrives in each new mind at full strength.
It does not follow that the future-facing West wins. Forever young is the vanity of youth, furthermore weaker emotional health is a by-product of the intense loneliness prevalent in the West. One side cannot let go of the past and the other cannot remember it. Each is certain it is right, and that certainty is what makes these conflicts intractable. Nobody allows for the possibility of being wrong.
Jordan Peterson says that when you realise mid-argument that you are wrong, you dissolve in tears, because “the tears are grief for the part of you that has to die.” Tears reset the brain. For a moment it is plastic again, a child’s brain, and a child can still learn. You accept that some of what you believed was wrong.
That is the skill, and it belongs to no single culture. The values can stay eternal, rooted in divine law if you like. Everything else must stay nimble, soft enough to be rebuilt. The old ways are welcome to stay. They only have to be willing to weep every now and then.
