Maturity – Sophistication vs. Stultification

Maturity shouldn’t mean being boring.  Instead it should be an awareness of when it is appropriate to goof off.  Often maturity is seen as the ability to remain sombre and unexcitable – this is a great shame.  Whilst the ability to remain calm and unflustered is very valuable, being older and more mature should not prevent people from having fun, enjoying life and being spontaneous.  The misconception that being mature means that you can’t have any fun is borne out of an over-application of the idea that there are situations where sombreness is appropriate. If you are unable to determine in which situations it is acceptable to be silly, you learn to err on the side of caution, applying a sombre attitude even when it is not warranted.

True maturity, resulting in being able to have fun, but also being able to be level headed in a crisis, supportive in times of need and safe in a dangerous environment is largely down to effective risk assessment.  Children are notoriously bad at risk assessment, and get into difficult situations or cause damage that should have been avoidable. Experience should hone our risk assessment ability, allowing us to determine when it is not appropriate to mess around, but equally to determine when it is appropriate, how far to go and when to stop.

Learning the wrong lessons

The parody of maturity that is stodgy and boring arises from learning the wrong lessons from our experiences.  If we are burned by fire, the lesson is not to never go near fire again, it is to exercise caution, learning the particular parameters of the situation that caused problems, so that future endeavours will have better outcomes.  Similar things can be said of hope and progress – it is often considered starry-eyed immaturity to allow oneself too much hope. This is often the result of prior youthful exuberance running headlong into the brick wall of reality, and people learning not to aim so high next time, for fear that what is left of their fragile sense of self-worth be further trampled underfoot.  This is again the wrong lesson to learn, as this leads to people looking ever inward, never daring to strive for better. Learning instead how to strive more effectively, how to break down your goals into more manageable, and how to anticipate pitfalls on the path ahead is the hallmark of true maturity.

Throughout any study of history, one of the ideas that we are faced with time and time again is that dramatic, world altering change does happen, and that it is (or at the very least, appears to be) often driven by particular individuals, without whom history would have taken a very different shape.  Whilst clearly not all of this change is good, it is important for people to remember that it is possible to make a difference. It may be immature to expect to make a difference – fundamentally the probability of one’s actions shaping the world in a noticeable way may be quite low, but it is false, pseudo-maturity to not even try.  Looking down on people that are trying to make a difference, considering them naive, is self-defeating cynicism masquerading as wisdom.

This being said, maturity may lead to taking a different approach.  Proper risk assessment leads us to be wary of large, rapid change. Radicalism brings with it risks that are well documented and hard to mitigate.  It is impossible to forecast every eventuality, so when striving for change, evolution rather than revolution is usually preferable. We should not be overly wary of change, but rather of large change, rapid change or irreversible change.  Maturity should bring a sense of modesty – the more we learn, the more we realise that we don’t know. We don’t understand everything, and we don’t know the reasons behind everything, so we should be cautious when trying to change things. It is again false, pseudo-maturity however to say that because of this nothing should change – just as radicalism can be indicative of an immature perspective, traditionalism is pseudo-mature – learning the wrong lessons from life.

Not every change is an improvement, but every improvement requires change

There is a well known quote, often attributed to either Churchill or Disraeli (though no-one quite seems sure who originally coined it):

“If you aren’t a liberal when you’re young, you have no heart, but if you aren’t a middle-aged conservative, you have no head.”

This exposes a false dichotomy that exists all over our society. Observing that younger people are often radicals, while older people are often traditionalists is not an unreasonable thing to do, however liberal should not be considered synonymous with radical, and conservative should not be considered synonymous with traditionalist.  Taking the most non-political definitions available, conservative means to be cautious about change, and liberal means to be accepting and respectful of new ideas. These two concepts are by no means mutually exclusive – liberalism and traditionalism are opposites, and conservatism and radicalism are opposites, but it is entirely possible to be a conservative liberal or a radical traditionalist.

Younger people are often radical and liberal, while older people are often conservative and traditional, however as discussed, the complete resistance to any and all change that traditionalism represents, demonstrates learning the wrong lessons from life.  Maturing, in part, should therefore be the process of replacing radicalism with conservatism (caution about change), whilst not falling into the trap of replacing liberalism (openness to ideas) with traditionalism. The quote therefore should not be presented as dichotomous

Unfortunately the phrase “if you aren’t open to new ideas, you have no heart, but if you have a head, you should learn to be cautious when trying to change things” isn’t quite as catchy.