Tuesday Talk*: From The Mouths Of Babes

A commenter to my post about Judge Kopf’s twit on the law clerks’ demands wrote something concerning.

I find it curious that you honestly seem to believe that decades of experience in the judiciary necessarily qualify someone to effectively make policy on sexual harassment.** It really doesn’t, no more so than decades of judiciary experience qualifies someone to play second base for the New York Yankees.

Putting aside the bizarre attempt at analogy,*** there is a shocking disconnect reflected in this assertion. Decades of experience don’t matter. Experience has no value.

It’s not particularly controversial to note that young people have an unwarranted belief in their brilliance. This has long been the case, that they have fresh, new, burgeoning ideas that need to be aired, need to be taken seriously, need to be respected. People are far smarter when they’re young than they are when they’ve suffered some experience.

But there has been a nuanced shift in this otherwise banal view: it’s not just that young people are brilliant, but that experience is a negative, an evil to be avoided and ridiculed. In the past, I’ve explained it thus:

But consider this: a young person, well-educated and with strong skills and a good attitude, sees herself as a zealous, competent lawyer.  Then an older lawyer, with all the same virtues as the young lawyer, plus years of experience, comes along. The older lawyer offers the young lawyer the benefit of his experience, and the young lawyer is offended.

“I’m a good lawyer,” she responds. “How dare you suggest that you, just because you’re experienced, know better than me.”

The older lawyer isn’t suggesting that the young lawyer isn’t good, isn’t well-educated, doesn’t have strong skills and a good attitude.  The older lawyer is merely adding one additional virtue to the list. Experience.

In other words, take your brilliance, young lawyer, and add experience. Does this make you dumber? But not only has this fairly obvious idea not caught on, but young lawyers affirmatively fail to grasp the idea even when it’s spelled out for them.

Why? Is it true that experience is merely a kind way of describing “doddering” old fools? Do brilliant young lawyers lose too many brain cells along the way, such that they turn into dopey old geezers, barely capable of not drooling in the courtroom?

To repeat an old aphorism, it may be true that an old fool is worse than a young fool, but if they weren’t fools when young, are they fools with experience?

This affirmative rejection of experience as a virtue, as a benefit, is striking, and seems to be a core rationalization for why young people not only extol their own genius, but are entitled to reject and ignore anyone who possesses the experience they lack. How is it possible that these otherwise very smart, very well-educated young people are unable to grasp the benefits and understanding that comes from experience?

*Tuesday Talk rules apply.

**Contrary to this facile ignorance of the issue, this was never about making policy on sexual harassment, but about making policy for the federal judiciary on sexual harassment. On the flip side, victims of offenses (though the clerks do not claim personal victimhood, but only vicarious victimhood) may well possess some personal expertise at how it feels to be a victim, but they gain no expertise on how to address the problem by “virtue” of their victimhood.

***The analogy would be whether someone with decades of experience playing baseball would qualify someone to play second base, as opposed to someone who took up America’s past time last year. But analogies are hard.