No Country For Old Men

Thoughts on age and wisdom, and whether the one guarantees the other.

How old were our Founding Fathers? Were they guys in late middle age with a lifetime of experience in politics? Not really. In fact, if they time-traveled into the modern world, some of them wouldn't even be old enough to run for president.

Thomas Jefferson for example. He was 33 years old when he penned and then signed the Declaration of Independence. Twenty of the signers were in their forties. 16 were in their thirties, and there were even a couple in their twenties.

The oldest signatory was 70 years old. Benjamin Franklin. That's 8 years younger than Donald Trump will be next November. Eleven years younger than Joe Biden is now. 15 years younger than Nancy Pelosi. And twenty years younger than Diane Feinstein was when she died.

Ben was the old guy. And don’t think that few of them made it to Ben’s age. Many lived into their eighties and a few into their nineties.

John Adams was forty years old when he signed. He lived another half century, continuing to shape the country he had helped to establish.

Alexander Hamilton missed the signing party. He was only 19 and off fighting in George Washington's army. But when he and James Madison and John Jay published the Federalist Papers they were 30, 36, and 42 respectively.

How old was Tom Payne when he published the hugely influential 'Common Sense'? He was 39 years old. Half as old as Donald Trump will be at the Republican convention next summer. There are interviews on YouTube with Trump from the nineteen eighties. It’s almost impossible to believe that that smooth charming guy has become the cynical old hustler that we see today. His communication skills alone are shockingly diminished. Joe Biden doesn’t fare much better when compared to himself in his prime.

Neither of these guys can be bothered to debate their challengers. Wouldn't you think that a person who was capable of running this country would be eager to tell us how he planned to do it? And to demonstrate how able he was to communicate his vision?

Our founders were young energetic people with long lives ahead of them. Not like today's entrenched old politicos who are better at staying in office than they are at serving in office.

The current median age of the US House of Representatives is 58. And the median age of the Senate is 64. That’s the average age. Fine. These institutions are bodies of people who debate the issues at hand. There should be some older people and some younger.

But the presidency is a singular office, with a singular importance in setting the tone for our country going forward. Wouldn’t it make sense to have a president closer to the average age of congress people, than to the oldest members?

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Listen, I'm the first to acknowledge that life-experience is important. I think that I'm wiser than I was half a lifetime ago. But 'wiser', in my view, has a lot to do with knowing one’s limitations.

I'm pretty well adapted to the world I grew up in. If that world still existed, I’d be your go-to guy. But none of us really stays current. How could we? The understandings we have were formed by events and cultural influences we encountered when we were young and our brains were still forming.

We can’t talk about wisdom without acknowledging that it is a function of the brain. There’s actually been a lot of studies lately looking into the nature of wisdom. Psychology Today covered one of them.

The author of the article boiled ‘wisdom’ down to the following five characteristics.

1. A Thirst for Exploration
2. A Deep Concern for Others
3. The Ability to Regulate Emotions
4. Learning From Life Experiences
5. The Ability to Self-Reflect

Webster’s is more traditional in its definition, mentioning the “ability to discern inner qualities and relationships”, and adding ‘Insight, Good Sense, and Judgment’. Is it fair to say that none of these qualities is necessarily granted by age alone?

A couple of years ago, I met with two national leaders of an organization called Braver Angels. This is a group focused on lessening political divisions through structured discourse across the divide, based largely on what’s been learned in couples therapy through the years.

I’d met each of these bright young people for lunch previously, and we decided to have a bit of a summit in the big upstairs room at the historic Philippe’s restaurant in downtown Los Angeles. It was a rollicking hours-long conversation. I was repeatedly struck by how direct they were with one another. And with me. (each of them is roughly half my age)

If either saw problems with an idea they heard spoken, they simply said so and explained why. Neither one tip-toed around. Neither took offense when challenged. And I couldn’t help but notice that when either disagreed with me, I was much less able then they, to accept that challenge as an opportunity to refine my idea. I left that luncheon feeling encouraged about the future. But also understanding that I had developed some habits of mind that would be very difficult to unlearn.

In order to negotiate the rest of this century, we need people who are both creative and wise early in their lives. Like our founders were.

We need people in our governmental institutions who aren't stressed and baffled by modern society, but excited by its energy. People who easily see through the spam to the actual content. And who will live for decades with the consequences of what they do right now.

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Let's look at an example. Let's reimagine the COVID-19 crisis of 2020.

Our pandemic response was put into the hands of a 79 year-old bureaucrat. A man well into the highest-risk age group. A LOT of the chaos that followed is down to Anthony Fauci's inability to read the room.

He's on national TV telling us to wash our hands and cover our mouths when we cough? Literally nothing that our moms didn't tell us when we were 5.

Viruses are fascinating entities. They can reproduce, but are not technically alive. How sci-fi is that? Pandemics are like a mystery-suspense movie. Where were the CGI films showing us the riveting battle between pathogens and our immune systems? To be followed by an even BETTER sequel when vaccine testing got underway.

For Christ's sake, our pandemic education was straight out of a high-school health class, circa 1956. Which is exactly when Fauci would have been in a high-school health class.

Where was the excited story-teller of science that we needed? Somebody to illuminate the crisis in the same way that a young Carl Sagan once educated us about space-exploration. Fauci and Trump and Pence and everybody else involved missed the mark by a light year.

And then Joe Biden missed it too. If he wanted to head off vaccine fears, he should have hired Pixar to show us what an mRNA vaccine actually does. Instead he scolded the country like a cranky grade-school principle late for his afternoon nap.

All throughout the pandemic it was assumed that people weren't smart enough to understand the threat. Or resilient enough to face that threat with confidence.

That thinking is straight out of mid-20th-century UFO movie.

Is it any wonder that so many people went down misinformation rabbit holes? The people who SHOULD have been giving us the facts in a compelling way simply didn't think of doing so.

A younger, more creative governing class would have. And the USA is full of smart creative doers.

Is there a politician alive who has done a tiny fraction of what Google has done to enrich our lives? No ... there isn't. We travel all over the world and are NEVER lost! Because the search and mapping capabilities in our smart phones know exactly where we are and where we are going. We can access the accrued knowledge of history from a subway car. Sergey Brin and Larry Page were TWENTY-FIVE when they founded Google!

They're only 50 now! I can't imagine my life without Google. Or Amazon, for that matter. Jeff Bezos was 30 years old when he founded what he thought would just be an online book store.

Elon Musk too has changed the world. Creating science-forward companies in his thirties with a fortune he made in his twenties.

Between him and Bezos there are now TWO privately owned space programs, that are genuinely pushing the envelope. Nobody could have imagined such a thing 20 years ago. We just assumed that only a government could do that.

Why aren't we tapping talent like this for our political positions? I’ll tell you why.

Because partisan politics makes it IMPOSSIBLE to be habitually forthright like the two young leaders I had lunch with. Thinking outside the box in our politics is actually a barrier to entry.

As we’ve seen with the young political ‘stars’ on both sides in recent years, banging the Twitter-tested hard-partisan drum is the quickest route to power for opportunists. Think about ‘The Squad’ on the one side, and the Gaetzes and Boeberts and Ramaswamys on the other.

Political tribalism can even be the undoing of truly remarkable humans. If Elon Musk is going down, it's only because he couldn't resist wading into the noxious bog of partisan warfare.

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I’m not exactly calling for a new ‘start-up’ government in The United States. But I am calling for a pretty serious reboot. A president should inhabit the Oval Office with as open a mind as possible. In my opinion, the presidency should be a non-partisan position.

I don’t know how we ended up thinking of our top executive as the leader of his or her party, but that’s a bad idea. The president is supposed to preside over congress. Shouldn’t that mean flying above the fray? In my mind the job implies an objectivity and flexibility of thinking that we have come to actually discourage in a presidential candidate.

I watched Desantis and Haley debating the other night, and I just felt sad. Two talented leaders forced by our obsolete zero-sum system into attacking one another’s integrity for all the world to see.

Why are we infecting our young with this politics of destruction? We should be encouraging the wise among them to enter politics. Instead we cower before the hyped-up loudmouths on our campuses, while ignoring the much greater number who are working hard and making good things happen.

Because for all of our occasional sagacity, we old folks can also be as dumb as moon-rocks. We’ve had our years of cultural dominance. It’s time to step back from holding power … to offering influence. Time to let a new leadership class emerge organically. From my vantage point, it’s become pretty obvious that this is no country for old men.

Thanks for reading. If you like what I’m doing here, feel free to share these essays with friends and family. You’ll find a button for that below. -Dave