There’s this weird idiom in English, which I’ve never understood the origin of, which says that:
Don’t teach your Grandmother to suck eggs
It’s a kind of mansplaining way before mansplaining ever became a thing. It means that you shouldn’t be giving advice to someone who already knows the answer - and maybe even more about it than you do.
I’ve never seen anyone, let alone Grandmothers, sucking an egg. One can only presume that in times gone by this was a popular pastime.
One nice thing about grandmothers, and other elderly folk, is that they have a ton of lived experience. They’re like a bit of a window to the past of “how we used to think”.
We have a tendency in our more youthful and progressive hubris to always think we know best, that the wrinkly in the corner is just so outdated and on the wrong side of history. But I think we ignore the advice of the ages far too readily.
I created a visual around that walking meme Ibram X. Kendi that captures what I’m talking about :
The fictional Ethel here would doubtless think that someone who changed their name from Ibram Henry Rogers to Ibram X. Kendi was a bit of a self-absorbed knob anyway, even before he opened his mouth.
The “progressive” attitude represents a tendency to ascribe woes and difficulties to external factors, to place oneself1 at the centre of the universe; the wrinklies who have long exceeded their supposed use by date would tend to adopt more of a balanced approach where both internal and external things were important factors in how one behaved and navigated the world, and that you weren’t the most important thing God had ever created.
They lived in a world where, sure, those external factors sometimes were pretty bleak, but they also recognised a world in which you played the hand you were dealt with; you had responsibility and a duty to manage yourself.
I don’t see things nearly as clearly as I would like to, but one of the things I wonder about is whether the rise of a kind of perverted and twisted liberalism we see today, where people seem to wish to be free of any kind of externally-imposed constraint, is not always acting in our best interests.
Words like sacrifice, duty, honour, integrity, faithfulness, responsibility and commitment seem like echoes from Ethel’s world these days. They’ve largely disappeared from the discursive landscape.
These things are, doubtless, all rooted in white supremacy anyway.
The thing that has got me wondering about these kinds of issues was the recent PITT article; it’s utterly heart-breaking.
Part and parcel of “growing up” is having the occasional spat with your parents. You can’t understand why they won’t let you do X, and don’t think they have any right or say in the matter. They’re ignorant fools just trying to constrain and control you. There may be a temporary breakdown in cordial relations but these are usually resolved with maturity.
Mark Twain is also credited with another great quote along the same lines
My father was an amazing man. The older I got, the smarter he got (Mark Twain)
The PITT article above represents, I think, a much more fundamental breakdown than the kind of thing Twain was referencing.
You see, the 18-year old in question has cut off all relations with her parents because they won’t properly recognise her fabulous authentic self (whatever that is). They’ve loved her, nurtured her, set themselves aside so much for her in those 18 years - but all these things get sacrificed on the cruel altar of modern identity.
Did her parents get everything right? Of course not - none of us, as parents, do. There are lots of things I wish I’d done differently, or better. But understanding that despite the occasional conflict, despite those occasional mistakes, everything, everything, was suffused with an unshakeable love directed at you and only for you, as a child, is part of growing up.
None of this seems to matter to the rainbow people - all that seems to matter is that the world, and your parents, bend to your wishes and self-perception. Maybe they made a mistake2 with your identity, maybe they’re still making it, but is this really grounds for a family divorce? Is this really all it takes for you to forget the years of love, duty, responsibility, commitment, sacrifice and faithfulness, all directed at you?
One of the things that concerns me, and I don’t really know how to properly frame this unsettling apparent observation, is that in today’s world forgiveness is in short supply. And that’s assuming there’s something to forgive in the first place.
We’ve all seen the rather nauseating spectacle of celebrities trying to save their career from a cancel-culture that is said not to exist, by issuing an apology containing the recommended stock phrases even when they’ve done nothing wrong. An entire career can be wiped out by the utterance of a phrase the Wokerati take umbrage with.
Graham Norton, a UK comedian and chat-show host, said that cancel culture didn’t exist; it was accountability. He then had to delete his Twitter account when people held him accountable for his views by disagreeing with him. I like Norton, he’s very funny, but you know what? Even though I think he was being a bit of a tit on this issue, I “forgive” him. This one comment doesn’t define the man.
And he did nothing wrong either. He was perfectly within his rights to express his views.
I’ve never been in the position of having a child who declared themselves to “really” be the opposite sex. I can’t even begin to imagine the horror of it. I’ve tried to think how I would have reacted in that circumstance and I can’t see myself as doing anything other than thinking my kid was in the grip of some delusion.
Would I be “hating” my child if this were the case? According to the trans lobby and some states in the US who equate this with “child abuse” the answer would be YES, this is hateful.
It’s fear mixed in with a good deal of panic and no little amount of confusion - but hate? What a ridiculous idea when applied to a parent who might be extremely worried that their child is embarking on a path of irreversible and harmful medical interventions that might rob their child, their precious, precious child, of any chance of living their best life - as the saying goes.
I think the issue is wider than the whole gender thing, though. The gender woo is just one aspect of a trend we’re seeing. I think it’s all tied in to this rejection of previously universally accepted ‘noble’ ideas - like duty and honour and sacrifice.
Try as I might to be tolerant and understanding, I just can’t see, for example, that building your life around the pursuit of sexual pleasure is going to work out too well in the long run. I think we, as human beings, need a little bit more than this to live our “best lives”.
Jordan Peterson, a strong advocate for taking on responsibility for oneself and others, for cleaning your room3, makes an interesting point about the liberation of female sexuality implied by the birth control pill. This is not a gendered point at all, but that this technology allowed the increase of behaviours of both sexes that hadn’t been selected for by evolution and we just haven’t had time to properly adapt to it. Sex was decoupled from consequence in a way that empowered females. It’s usually seen as a very positive thing - and I can see why, because women were pretty restricted in history because of this biological consequence - but I don’t think the balance sheet is all on the positive side.
Whether Peterson’s assessment is correct here or not, I think we’re facing a similar situation of not being “adaptively prepared” for modern technological life. Birthing Person Nature did not anticipate things like social media and the gradual atomization of human communities brought about by technology.
Technology has heated things up so that we’re no longer like a solid, held together by strong bonds, but whizzing about all over the place like the atoms in a gas.
Meanwhile, all of those evolutionary drivers, established over millennia, are at odds with this modern technological landscape. And even though we’re pretty good at overriding some of those drivers, they’re still there trying to push us in a direction that seems entirely in conflict with modern life and how we want to live it.
That is, of course, if you accept the thesis that evolution has worked on our behaviours and attitudes as well as our bodies. Evolution has shaped the behaviours of animals, but many people think it has nothing to do with human behaviour. It’s an understandable position because we want to see ourselves as masters of, and not slaves to, our “animalistic” emotions and feelings.
But the wisdom of evolution is baked into our grandmothers - when it comes to living a good life maybe they do have a reasonably good idea of how to suck eggs. They lived in a time when technology hadn’t taken quite so much of stranglehold on our lives and behaviours. Perhaps they know better than we do how to cope with it all.
These elders, the term itself was once a mark of respect, are a fast-diminishing resource. In a few years time we will only know about Ethel’s world from the history books - our own Grandmother will once have been called Brian.
Or, these days, it could be faeself, or cakeself. Gotta get those neo-pronouns right in order to prevent causing trauma.
And are you really sure they’re the ones making a “mistake”? What if they’re right? Maybe they’re better at sucking eggs than you are.
Which is meant in both a literal and figurative sense
The problem with "universally accepted ‘noble’ ideas - like duty and honour and sacrifice" in the last three years is that they were used to browbeat us into doing insane things like masking, standing six feet apart, isolating at home, taking modified mRNA injections, etc. We were told that we must do these things for the "greater good", and that sacrifices like closing your business, or not being able to go to school, or not being allowed to visit sick relatives in nursing homes, were our expected duty.
I guess the point is that I learned how noble ideas can also be perverted into tools of power and control.
When I was younger, my family suffered a massive tragedy that was hardest on my mother— who had already endured her share of hard times. We were for a period homeless and grieving our beloved. Years later, mom had a student— a young black woman from an affluent family— who lashed out at her, saying, “You will NEVER know the struggles I’ve been through because you’re white.” Mom said nothing at all. What can one say to that? Is there any reaching or teaching such people?
No one gets out of this world alive, nor does anyone escape grief and hardship. The sooner you learn you’re not special, the happier you’ll be. “Why me?” is the lament of the miserable, “why not me?” the battle cry of the wise.