Is a new thing always a good thing?

When you are young, you are replete with unearned pride in your novelty.
It is the sound and fury who are seduced by ideas from Nietzsche Kant and Rousseau. There is nothing at stake for them, so they can enjoy the nihilism and self indulgence of claiming that human nature is both free and trapped by society; I never did really understand Nietzsche, despite having enthusiastically read everything he has ever written. In hindsight, his writing is more like the syphilitic ravings of a silver tongued polemicist. They make no sense and don’t really gel with reality, but it seems like a battle cry for change, and young people enjoy change for its own sake. They are full of “Aufbruchsstimmung”, with no care for where things land.

He was of a piece for me with Sartre, full of cynicism and profligacy with what life means. When you’re 20, there really isn’t that much meaning. You have let go of the certainties of your family structure, and nothing has replaced them. You are persuaded by these impractical ideas of change and new departures, because you believe in your own rightness. You alone can see because you are new. Your parents are the past. You can see the future. The times they are a’changing.

I read a set of Primers in the Economist recently about Liberalism, and they contrasted Rousseau, Marx and Nietzsche as the “prophets of illiberal progress”. It is always strange to me that Marx appeals to anyone who wants any progress at all. I read Das Kapital with great interest when I was 16, and concluded that we had long resolved all the issues that he identified. I never did understand his obsession with the means of production and how capitalism is bad because it means not everyone owns the company; well actually, they do. In the way capitalism developer, public markets meant everyone with a pension owns some fraction of many, many companies, and they get more money they more the company grows. He spent a lot of time bemoaning the working conditions of the poor, and the conditions of those who could not work. There are myriad ways in which that situation has improved since the 19th century, to the extent that surely he would view the modern welfare state as the implementation of his ideas of redistribution. In fact, it is a mystery to me how any modern wannabe revolutionary doesn’t simply say “European capitalism removed any need for communism” and go and buy some shares in LVMH. I suppose it’s not as much fun as waving banners and muttering about progress and evil bankers.

As you get older you see more clearly how little you know, and so of course you express less certainty in everything. You start to see the repeating patterns in what changes, and what stays the same.

You can only recaat things within a defined band of things that work. You can believe you’re doing something new, but it will only work if it conforms to the functional limits it has. And a lot of the time you’re not making it from nothing, you’re making it from a template. It is only young people who believe they are making something new from nothing that came before, because they thsemlves are physically so new in their adult bodies. Their brains are perceiving novelty everywhere, and they make the mistake of thinking that means evertyhing is in fact discovered for the first time. It’s a wonderful state of being, and is the reason why people look back and say that “everything was better when I was young”. Yes, it was, not because it was objectively better, but because your body was a coiled spring of wonder at the world.

It’s like DNA. History is a success of novel but familiar recombinations, and as long as they retain what went before, but try to improve it, they mostly work even if they’re not perfect. Look at ears. There’s a crazy variation of ear shapes, and there’s no particularly good reason for the variation. Do some of the shapes work better? Maybe, or maybe it just doesn’t matter as long as it forms enough of an auditory funnel. THis is the same way I think about nearly everything now. I don’t want to come up with new ears, I’m just happy ears exist and I care more about maintaining something that is good enough than about all the risks of starting again. Young people are to security what Van Gogh was to ears. Sometimes stating everything could be done better by starting again from scratch is not the best path to prosperity for the majority. Or good hearing.