Henry David Thoreau Argument

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It’s natural, simple evolutionary, biologically, anthropologically, demonstrated fact that humans respect their elders, listen, understand: learn. Evolved from a time where day in and day out all we would do is hunt, gather, forage, build; nothing changed in this ancient, troglodyte lifestyle where gender roles were significant, where race indicated danger, where those who weren’t normal were cast outward. In a time where Moore’s Law, despite its apparent slowing down, is being proved constantly, perhaps the relevance of past experiences diminish. Henry David Thoreau may have been far too blunt, far too fatalistic about his conclusion, there is a nugget of understanding to be mined from his statement, much like he predicts. Thoreau, concluding from his experience, commits a psychologist’s fallacy: the way Thoreau perceives things must be the way it is. Thoreau viewpoint comes about the contingence that since he has not viewed any of his senior’s “wisdom” as “valuable,” that all explanations of life experiences are examples of superfluous language. That is how we learn, understanding the experiences of the past! How else would one learn about history? Math? Science? How would any academic progress be made if we …show more content…
Henry David Thoreau did not think that all older people are empty, failures, their knowledge and understanding is entirely superfluous. In this context, Henry David Thoreau speaks of the fallacious importance given to the ideas, experience, stories of the elderly for the mere fact that they are old. Thoreau questions the cliche that ‘age gives wisdom’ and rather denotes that ‘wisdom gives wisdom,’ that “age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.” Thoreau speaks coldly about the importance of individual analysis of each and every story and anecdote, regardless of the age and perceived “wisdom” of the
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