March 9, 2024

“Nine out of ten of what we call new ideas are simply old mistakes,” noted G.K. Chesterton a century ago. This is brought to mind by the modern obsession with “new ideas,” typified by Joe Biden’s implicit touting of them during his State of the Union address.

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The issue “isn’t how old we are; it’s how old our ideas are,” he said Thursday evening. He’s right, too.

And, usually, the “older” the ideas, the better.

There’s an irony to Biden’s appeal: He doesn’t want to be dismissed out of hand over age.

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But he does want ideas dismissed out of hand over age.

(Though there’s a contradiction here. More on that momentarily.)

Neither should be done, of course. When I needed a certain kind of physician some years back, I purposely chose an 81-year-old man still in practice precisely because, good profiling informed, he was more likely to be imbued with “old ideas.” As examples, I was thinking about virtues such as Diligence (which relates to conscientiousness, dutifulness) and Prudence (which meant he was less likely to fancy that you can change sexes at will like some science-fiction shape-shifter). I was not disappointed.

The problem with Biden is not that he’s old. The problem is the same thing that could be an issue with a person of any age or, in fact, an idea of any age: He has repeatedly shown himself to be lacking and to have little relationship to Truth.

Biden proceeded to say in his address, “Hate, anger, revenge, retribution are among the oldest of ideas. …”  Well, so are their opposites: Love, Patience and Forgiveness. So what? Should we dispense with those “ideas,” too, because they weren’t disgorged from Berkeley last Thursday?

Ideally, one should have a child’s heart and an old soul; you then have both wisdom and whimsy. It’s those with an old heart and a childish soul who mindlessly tout “new ideas.” Ecclesiastes informs that “there is nothing new under the sun.” With many, many millennia of human civilization and striving behind us, of inventing and innovating and originating, do you really think a political/social-sphere “new idea” (or new mistake) isn’t almost as rare as a unicorn?