Several commentators to this blog have observed that I
frequently mention my age, which is true.
That is unusual for a blogger, I gather.
Let me take a little time to explain why I do so.
First, let me observe, as I have before, that blogging [and
posting on Twitter or SnapChat, etc.] is a very odd mode of communication. I cannot see the people I am communicating with,
and they cannot see me. The vast
majority of people who visit this blog never comment at all, and many of those
who do are anonymous. Even though I
rather uncharacteristically have posted multi-part essays stretching over
several weeks, it remains the case that my posts are for the most part
momentary, ephemeral, replaced almost immediately by new posts. All of this is completely contrary to the
forms of communication that have obtained between humans for the past 200,000
years or so.
The norm, at least until the invention of writing some six
millennia ago or so, was face-to-face communication between speakers and
relatively small groups of interlocutors.
In those exchanges, the identity of the participants was known, as were
their age, gender, and relationships to one another. The young publicly deferred to the old while
mocking them behind their backs. The old
pontificated to the young and secretly envied them their youth, their virility,
and their optimism, all the while agreeing among themselves that the young really
did not have a clue about life. Writing changed
this, of course, but not nearly as much as one might imagine.
I chose a career – university teaching – that enshrined this
older form of communication. For fifty
years, I stood in front of groups of young people and spoke with them face to
face. As time passed, inevitably this relationship
changed. At first, I was little older than
my students, if indeed at all. [I think
of the famous philosopher Thomas Nagel as “young Tom,” even though he is now
82, because he was a student in my Kant course in 1959.] But time passed, and in the natural course of
things, I grew older [while my students did not – that is the really odd thing
about a teaching career.]
As I grew older, I changed. At first I was eager, precocious, ambitious. After my sons were born, I went from being a
rebellious son, hot to challenge authority wherever I encountered it, to being
a generative father, supportive of my sons and also of my students, interposing
myself between them and a sometimes distant or even punitive university
administration. There is of course
nothing unusual in this evolution. It is
the eternal playing out of what Erik Erikson described in Childhood and Society as the Life Cycle. It would be as absurd for me now to act as
though I were a young man just launching myself into the public forum as it
would have been then for me to act like Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
I am now near the end of my particular life cycle [although,
not, I hope, too near just yet.] I am as
conscious of my age now as I was of my youth sixty years ago, and I speak of it
often because it as important an element in my understanding of my world as my
youth was then. My sons, who have been a
principal focus of my thoughts for half a century, are now mature, successful
men in their fifties, full of energy and purpose and the fulfillment of their
promise.
I enjoy blogging, and I hope that I can continue for some
time to come, but quite often I wish I could gather you all in a room and speak
with you face to face!
