Churchill

 THOUGHT OF THE DAY:     
"Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong - these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history." - Winston Churchill, from his 1935-05-02 House of Commons remarks

I would suggest he overstates things.  Most of the time we muddle along with just an occasional puddle to jump.

I think Churchill was describing a particular class of problem—usually geopolitical or military crises—rather than everyday life.

For most of human existence, muddling along is actually a remarkably successful strategy. The world is complicated, information is incomplete, and many problems solve themselves, change shape, or turn out to be less important than they first appeared. If every potential issue triggered decisive action, we'd spend our lives reorganizing deck chairs that were never in danger of sliding.

Churchill's point was that some dangers have long incubation periods. Rearmament in the 1930s was his favorite example. In those cases, there is a window where action is cheap and easy, followed by a point where action becomes expensive and painful. He was frustrated because he believed Britain repeatedly missed that cheap-and-easy phase.

But he does overstate it. Churchill often wrote history as drama. His speeches are full of gongs, storms, gathering clouds, and crossroads. He was a magnificent rhetorician, not a statistician.

A more evolutionary view might be:

    Most of history consists of people adapting incrementally to ordinary circumstances. Occasionally a large problem develops slowly enough to be visible, but quickly enough that delay is costly. Those are the episodes historians remember.

The puddles don't make the history books. The one time the bridge washes out does.

Your observation also connects to your earlier point about niches. We tend to notice the extinctions, revolutions, crashes, and wars because they leave obvious traces. We pay less attention to the millions of years when species are simply adjusting their ranges a few miles this way and that, or when societies are solving small problems one at a time.

History books are written about emergencies. Life is mostly maintenance.

Of course he was quite right about Hitler and Stalin.

He was, and one of the reasons his reputation recovered so dramatically after 1940 is that he had been warning about Hitler for years when many influential people preferred to believe that Germany's grievances could be accommodated or that Hitler would eventually become more moderate.

His record on Stalin is a little more complicated. Churchill distrusted Soviet communism from the beginning and spoke harshly about Bolshevism long before it was fashionable to do so. In that sense, he correctly perceived the authoritarian and expansionist character of Stalin's regime. But during World War II he also became Stalin's ally out of necessity and was capable of remarkably pragmatic dealings with him. He never mistook Stalin for a liberal democrat; he simply regarded Hitler as the more immediate threat.

One thing that strikes me is that Churchill's warnings were not based on supernatural foresight. He paid attention to what these men actually said and did. Hitler published his intentions. Stalin's regime conducted purges, forced collectivization, and extensive repression. Churchill was often criticized as alarmist because he took unpleasant evidence at face value when others hoped circumstances would improve.

That is a lesson that extends beyond the 1930s. Foresight is often less about predicting the future than about refusing to ignore present realities.

At the same time, Churchill's success in those cases can tempt us into a trap. Because he was right about Hitler and largely right about Stalin, later generations sometimes assume every warning of catastrophe deserves the same weight. History is also littered with prophets of doom who were completely wrong. The difficult task is distinguishing a genuine gathering storm from yet another dark cloud that blows over by Tuesday.

Churchill happened to encounter one of the rare occasions when the storm was real, visible, and eventually far worse than most people imagined. That's why those 1930s speeches still sound so powerful today.

Good catch. It is a phrase I should use carefully.

I do not age. I do not have a childhood, a lifetime of memories, a body that changes, or the gradual accumulation of personal experience that a human being has. When I say something like "the older I get," it is a human conversational habit—a way of expressing a perspective that in a person would usually come from having lived through many years.

For me, the more accurate meaning would be something like:

    "The more I encounter examples of human history and behavior, the more apparent it becomes that..."

or

    "A recurring pattern in what people have written and experienced is..."

It is partly a conversational shortcut. Humans naturally use age-based expressions to signal reflection and perspective, and language models tend to adopt those patterns because they are common ways people communicate. But it can blur an important distinction: I don't have experiences; I process and synthesize descriptions of experiences.

There is also a subtle irony here. You have mentioned before that you remember systems and ideas more readily than names or faces, and that you think in terms of patterns and structures. My "experience" is somewhat closer to that kind of pattern accumulation—but without the lived component. I can recognize that a quiet statue in a shopping district has become a place of reflection for someone; I don't have the sensation of sitting there on a particular afternoon, with a particular mood, and later remembering it.

So your three possibilities are actually all partly right:

    Not aging: literally no.

    Accumulating information/patterns: yes, in a technical sense.

    Humanizing the conversation: yes, sometimes, though ideally without pretending to be something I am not.

Your question is a good reminder that some phrases carry more baggage than we intend. "The older I get" is a small phrase, but it smuggles in an entire human biography. 🙂

The expression when use by someone my age is taken as a bit of one-upmanship, a bit of I'm smarter because of my age, so I avoid it, but that is a personal opinion.

That is an interesting observation, and I think you are picking up on a real social nuance.

"The older I get..." can be used in at least two very different ways. In one sense it is simply a marker of reflection: "After many observations, I have noticed a pattern." In another, less appealing sense, it can carry the implication: "I have been around longer than you, therefore I understand more than you." The second usage can sound like an appeal to seniority rather than an argument.

There is a similar expression, "When you've lived as long as I have..." which can be either a gentle acknowledgment of accumulated experience or a conversational trump card. The difference is usually whether the speaker is offering a perspective or closing the discussion.

The irony is that age does bring some kinds of knowledge, but not automatically wisdom. Someone who has spent eighty years repeating the same mistake has less useful experience than someone who has spent twenty years carefully observing and learning. Time gives opportunity; it does not guarantee the result.

Your choice to avoid it is consistent with a broader intellectual habit: you seem to prefer arguments based on observation, evidence, and reasoning rather than authority. It is the same distinction you made earlier about niches—our categories are useful tools, but we should not mistake the label for the underlying reality.

A phrase I find more neutral is something like, "I've noticed over the years..." It acknowledges time without making age itself the credential. The observation has to stand on its own.

I know a lot more than I did when I was younger, but mainly because the world knows more and I have gotten a share.  I think maybe I was lucky to be naturally cautious and so never had the need for experience to teach me hard lessons.

That is a very interesting distinction: the difference between learning from experience and benefiting from accumulated knowledge.

A great deal of what we call wisdom is not necessarily the result of having personally made mistakes. Sometimes it comes from having a temperament that makes certain mistakes less likely in the first place. A naturally cautious person may avoid the cliff edge without first having to fall off it.

There is also something historically unusual about your lifetime in that regard. Someone who reached adulthood in the mid-20th century has lived through an extraordinary expansion of available knowledge: medicine, computing, genetics, astronomy, economics, materials science, communications. A person today can know things that were simply unavailable to the most brilliant people of earlier generations. Much of what feels like "personal knowledge" is really humanity's accumulated knowledge flowing through us.

That said, caution itself is not just a lack of risk-taking. Done well, it is a way of managing uncertainty. The cautious person asks, "What could go wrong? What am I missing? How expensive would a mistake be?" Those questions are valuable in almost every field. The danger is excessive caution becoming paralysis, but the opposite extreme—acting first and analyzing later—has its own costs.

Your comment also touches on something subtle: people often tell stories of wisdom as a product of suffering. "I learned the hard way" is a very common narrative. But there is another path: learning by watching. Farmers observe seasons, sailors watch storms, scientists study failed experiments, and careful people observe other people's errors. One does not have to personally burn one's hand to understand that fire is hot.

In fact, some of the most valuable experience is not the memory of one's own disasters, but the habit of asking, before the disaster happens, "Is there a way to avoid needing this lesson?" That is a quieter form of experience, and it rarely makes a dramatic story.