The Crisis of Mentorship as a Consequence of Acceleration
As everything sped up, we left the wisdom of the elderly behind
As I mentioned last Monday, I’ve been reading this very dense but insightful book, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity by one of my favorite thinkers, Hartmut Rosa, as research for my new book. And in doing my reading I came across this passage on the way social acceleration has affected our understanding of different generations:
An institution that was self-evident for traditional societies, namely, that of “wise elders,” to whom outstanding status was attributed because they had “seen everything” and hence could no longer be surprised by any of the troubles of life, has practically disappeared in late modern society: instead the old are stigmatized by the fact that they no longer know their way around and can no longer keep up. (116)
I’ve long wrestled and worried about the crisis of mentorship in our society, the lack of cross-generational discipleship that is so desperately needed, particularly in a time of deep moral uncertainty. Rosa addresses one of my questions: Why is it that in the contemporary world generations do not pass on their wisdom to the succeeding generations? And the answer is because they have nothing to pass down. The world is moving so fast that the younger generations have more knowledge than the older generations. And so older people feel “useless” and young people feel like they have nothing to learn from the elderly (however you define that).
But what if we’re thinking about all this wrong? What if we’re valuing all the wrong things and so we’re afraid to share our gifts from one generation to another?
