Respecting your elders

Last weekend we visited my parents. It was a big weekend, with lots going on, but a couple of stories stand out.

Saturday evening I was in the back of the house talking to my dad about not much, and I started to hear quarrelling noises from out front. Thinking I had better check them out, I excused myself and came out to the family room area, where I found a full-scale argument going on between Wife and Son 2. I later found out that it had started when Son 2 had gotten irritated with Son 1 over something really petty and pointless (Son 2 himself assessed it this way when we talked after, adding that he wouldn’t have been grouchy if he hadn’t been hungry at the time), but somehow Wife had gotten in the middle of it and Son 1 dropped promptly out. I don’t know what was said before I walked in, but the first thing I heard clearly was Son 2 shouting at Wife, “I have to listen to you complain every single day! You start as soon as you get in the car to go anywhere and you never stop! And I am going to be so glad next year when I am out of the house and away from you!”

OK. Got that.

Wife for her part was saying something about how Son 2 had to learn to respect his elders, though I don’t remember the words exactly. I interposed myself physically between them and tried to de-escalate the argument. In the first instance this meant getting Wife to stand down. She plainly wanted Son 2 punished (or something), but I asked her softly please just to back away. I urged her quietly, “Please, show that you’re the bigger one in this and just let it go.” After a couple of repititions she stopped growling at Son 2 and walked over to watch TV with Son 1. Then I asked Son 2 to join me out back for a minute.

“So you can yell at me some more?”

“Please just come out here for a minute,” I answered, although truly I had no idea what I was going to say. I just knew that had to be the next step.

So Son 2 slouched unwillingly outside with me and waited for me to say whatever I was going to say. I thought about it for a minute and realized I couldn’t think of anything. So I told him, “Actually I really don’t have anything to say at all, because anything I could possibly say would be something you already know. The real reason I asked you out here was just to put a door between you and Mom so that the whole situation could calm down.” Son 2 grumped and grouched for another couple of minutes until I found something else to talk about … at which point he perked right up, making jokes and contributing cheerfully to the conversation. It was after that that he volunteered his assessment that the whole argument had been stupid from the beginning, and that all he really needed was dinner. And indeed it wasn’t long afterwards that we ate, so I guess the evening worked out OK.

I wonder if it would be useful, somewhere along the line, for me to talk to Wife about this whole concept of “respecting your elders.” It seems that this isn’t the first time I have heard it from her. The thing is, I remember back when she was younger (since we met almost three decades ago) how positively hostile she was to the idea, and I don’t think we made a special point of it as we raised the kids. What I mean is that of course we insisted that everyone deserves a basic level of respect out of common courtesy. But I’m not sure we ever insisted that one’s elders should get an extra level of respect above and beyond the simple decency we all owe everyone ... simply on account of being old. And if my memory serves me correctly on this point, then that would mean at the very least that to insist on such extra respect now would be to change the rules midstream.

I also have to admit that I am kind of partial to the way Plato handles this very topic, somewhere in his dialogue The Laws. The Athenian Stranger is talking to Cleinias and Megillos, and says he disagrees with the common saying that “Youth should respect everybody.” Cleinias and Megillos ask why. The Athenian Stranger says that he thinks, by contrast, that it would be better to insist that the old should respect the young. Now this really irritates Cleinias and Megillos, both of whom are old men, so they ask the Athenian Stranger what the hell he is talking about. He explains that the young don’t really learn their attitudes by listening to what their elders say; they learn by imitating what they see their elders do. Therefore lecturing them that they ought to “respect everybody” won’t accomplish a thing. If you want your children to learn a behavior, you have to model it for them. So when he says that the old ought to respect the young, the Athenian Stranger concludes, what he really means is that we all ought to take seriously the education of the young … take it seriously enough that we are willing to teach by example, even if that means forcing ourselves to be better people than we might otherwise want to be, so that the young who are watching us will imitate our better examples and learn accordingly. Of course that may be easier said than done, …. (deep sigh)