A Philosophical Reflection on Intergenerational Political Learning
By Melke Ademe
Introduction
I sincerely appreciate Dawit W. Giorgis for his thoughtful and timely article, “Why Young People Should Learn from Healthy, Educated, Experienced Elders,” which appeared in Borkena on August 14, 2026. His reflection is more than a personal defense of older people; it raises a larger philosophical and political question concerning how one generation should learn from another without surrendering its independence of judgment.
Dawit’s long public career—as a soldier, diplomat, governor, international civil servant, author, and commentator—gives particular weight to his appeal. Yet the significance of his argument extends beyond any individual or age group. It concerns whether a society can preserve memory, experience, and historical perspective while simultaneously making room for renewal, innovation, and the aspirations of younger generations.
Young people unquestionably deserve opportunities to lead. They inherit emerging realities, encounter new technologies and forms of social organization, and often perceive problems that previous generations overlooked, tolerated, or normalized. A healthy society cannot ask its young citizens merely to wait their turn, reproduce established formulas, or accept inherited institutions without examination. Youth brings energy, moral urgency, imagination, and an indispensable willingness to question what has become ineffective or unjust.
Yet generational renewal should not become generational rejection. Questioning an elder’s argument, political position, or moral judgment is entirely legitimate; dismissing that person solely because of age is not. Retirement from public office may sometimes be necessary to create institutional opportunities for younger people. Still, retirement from intellectual life, civic responsibility, mentorship, writing, research, and public reasoning cannot reasonably be imposed solely on the basis of age. The more important question, therefore, is not whether elders should continue to speak, but how their experience should enter the political and intellectual life of succeeding generations.
Experience and Epistemic Humility
The philosophical case for learning across generations begins with epistemic humility. No generation enters history with a blank slate, and no individual, regardless of intelligence, education, or technological sophistication, can independently rediscover everything humanity has learned through centuries of experimentation, error, achievement, suffering, and reflection. Each generation inherits a world already shaped by language, institutions, political struggles, moral traditions, scientific knowledge, books, customs, memories, and unresolved conflicts. Learning from those who came before is therefore not an act of submission; it is a recognition that human knowledge is cumulative.
Experienced elders may possess what might be called lived knowledge. Books, statistics, and contemporary media provide information, but experience adds context. Someone who has personally witnessed political movements rise and collapse, institutions deteriorate, wars unfold, governments change, professional strategies fail, or apparently promising policies generate unintended consequences may recognize patterns that are difficult to perceive through abstraction alone.
Experience, however, should never be confused with infallibility. Age may increase exposure to events, but exposure does not automatically produce wisdom. Experience becomes valuable only when accompanied by reflection, intellectual openness, and a willingness to reconsider earlier assumptions. An individual may live through history without necessarily learning from it. The proper value of experience is therefore not authority but judgment: the capacity to connect ideas with consequences and aspirations with institutional reality.
Information, Reflection, and the Problem of Intellectual Speed
Dawit also raises a legitimate concern about contemporary learning habits. Digital media have transformed access to information and democratized political communication. They enable younger generations to encounter diverse perspectives, organize rapidly, challenge authority, and participate in debates that were previously restricted to narrower circles. Yet speed carries its own intellectual risks. A political culture dominated by brief messages, instant reactions, and emotional exchanges can reward certainty over reflection, allowing information to accumulate faster than judgment can.
The answer is not to romanticize books or condemn technology. Older generations were hardly immune to ideological conformity, intellectual fashion, propaganda, or political error, nor are younger generations intellectually diminished for employing different technologies. What matters is the discipline of thought itself: reading deeply enough to understand an argument, studying history sufficiently to recognize complexity, testing competing explanations, questioning assumptions, and allowing time for reflection before judgment. The central challenge, therefore, is not books versus screens but reflection versus intellectual haste.
Experience Must Also Be Questioned
Respect for experience should never become obedience to experience. The past is a teacher, but it is not an infallible authority. Conditions change, institutions evolve, technologies alter communication and economic life, and social expectations develop. New generations, therefore, encounter circumstances for which inherited solutions may be poorly suited. There is consequently a danger in what might be called the trap of old data: assuming that because an idea, strategy, or institutional arrangement appeared effective or intellectually compelling in one historical environment, it must remain appropriate in another.
Young people are entirely justified in asking whether inherited advice corresponds to present realities, what evidence supports it, what unintended consequences followed when similar ideas were previously attempted, and which principles remain valid while other assumptions require revision. Such questioning is not disrespect; it is an exercise of responsible citizenship. Indeed, the most valuable elders are not those who insist that younger generations reproduce their political world. They are those capable of distinguishing enduring principles from temporary arrangements, wisdom from habit, memory from nostalgia, and conviction from prejudice. Experience should illuminate the future, not imprison it.
Intergenerational Responsibility: Beyond Inherited Blame
This distinction takes on particular importance in Ethiopia, where generational disagreement frequently extends beyond differences in age or political style to disputes over historical responsibility. Some younger Ethiopians critically view members of the political generation shaped by the ideological struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly those who embraced Marxist thought, revolutionary politics, and the principle of national self-determination.
From the perspective of many younger citizens, ideas advanced during that period contributed, directly or indirectly, to political arrangements whose consequences they now experience through ethnic polarization, institutional fragmentation, and recurring conflict. Such criticism should not simply be dismissed as youthful disrespect. Every generation possesses the right to examine the political and intellectual inheritance it receives and to question whether some of yesterday’s proposed solutions became part of today’s problems.
At the same time, historical responsibility must not be converted into inherited or collective guilt. An entire generation cannot reasonably be reduced to the doctrines advocated by its most politically influential members, nor should individuals be morally condemned merely because they belong to the generation during which particular ideologies became influential.
A more serious historical inquiry asks what conditions made particular ideas persuasive, what injustices their advocates were attempting to address, what political alternatives appeared available at the time, what assumptions proved mistaken, what unintended consequences followed, and what subsequent generations should learn from both the aspirations and the failures of those who preceded them.
The task of historical judgment is therefore not to place one generation permanently in the defendant’s dock; it is to understand how ideas emerged, why intelligent and often idealistic people embraced them, what consequences followed, and what later experience reveals about their limitations.
This demands humility from both sides. Older Ethiopians should be prepared not only to transmit their achievements but also to revisit their assumptions, acknowledge mistakes where necessary, and explain what subsequent experience taught them. Historical context can clarify why particular choices appeared reasonable without automatically vindicating those choices. Younger Ethiopians, conversely, should distinguish rigorous criticism from retrospective moral superiority.
Political actors make decisions within circumstances they do not wholly control and with knowledge that is inevitably incomplete. Ideas that appear deeply mistaken in retrospect may once have been embraced as sincere attempts to address inequality, exploitation, political exclusion, or perceived national oppression. Understanding those circumstances does not excuse harmful consequences; it makes their examination more intellectually serious.
Intergenerational reconciliation, therefore, requires a movement from blame to responsibility, from accusation to explanation, and from inherited grievance to shared learning. One generation should be able to explain what it believed, what it attempted, where it succeeded, where it failed, and what experience subsequently taught it. The succeeding generation should, in turn, be able to articulate what it inherited, what it questions, what it wishes to preserve, and what it intends to build differently. At that point, historical memory ceases to function primarily as a weapon between generations and becomes a resource for political reconstruction.
Innovation Also Requires Humility
The obligation to reconsider assumptions does not belong exclusively to elders. Young people should not confuse novelty with wisdom or innovation with progress. Every generation is susceptible to intellectual fashion. An idea can appear morally compelling while remaining institutionally impractical. A political movement may mobilize genuine grievances while failing to anticipate consequences. A revolutionary proposal may diagnose an existing injustice accurately yet produce new forms of domination when translated into power. For precisely this reason, historical experience remains indispensable.
The young should challenge inherited assumptions, but their own assumptions must also be challenged. They should ask not merely whether an idea is new, popular, morally appealing, or technologically sophisticated, but whether it can survive contact with institutions, political incentives, human behavior, and unintended consequences. A society that worships tradition risks stagnation, while a society that dismisses accumulated experience risks repeatedly paying for lessons that previous generations already learned. The objective is, therefore, neither preservation nor rejection, but critical distillation.
Critical distillation means receiving an inheritance without becoming captive to it. It requires preserving what remains valuable, revising what has become inadequate, discarding what has proven harmful, and carrying forward the lessons produced by both achievement and failure. In this sense, the mature political task of each generation is neither to replicate the past nor to destroy it symbolically, but to examine it carefully and reconstruct what it has inherited in light of changed circumstances.
Adaptive Transmission
The most constructive relationship between generations may therefore be described as adaptive transmission. Elders transmit historical memory, accumulated experience, tested judgment, institutional knowledge, and lessons drawn from consequences. Younger people contribute new questions, emerging knowledge, technological competence, changing social perspectives, and the willingness to challenge assumptions that have become obsolete. Neither generation possesses a monopoly on wisdom.
Mentorship should therefore not mean intellectual obedience, nor should generational independence require historical amnesia. Older people should mentor without demanding submission, while younger people should challenge without dismissing accumulated experience. Each generation must remain capable of both speaking and listening. More importantly, adaptive transmission requires older generations to transmit not only what they believe they accomplished successfully but also what they misunderstood. A mature generation does not transmit only what it got right; it also provides an honest account of what it got wrong. A mature succeeding generation learns from both without converting historical criticism into inherited hostility. This transforms mentorship from the transmission of conclusions into the transmission of judgment.
Intergenerational Political Learning
This mutual responsibility becomes especially important in public life, where generational disagreement is rarely confined to questions of age, style, or personal respect. Political generations inherit institutions, narratives, grievances, ideological commitments, and unfinished conflicts from those who came before them. In countries marked by political instability, contested history, institutional fragility, and social division, the relationship between generations, therefore, becomes part of the political order itself.
Ethiopia is one such case. Its younger generation did not create many of the ideological frameworks, institutional structures, or political conflicts it has inherited; yet it must live with their consequences. The older generation, conversely, cannot be expected simply to disappear from public life because younger citizens are dissatisfied with the political inheritance they received. What is required is not generational displacement but a more demanding practice of intergenerational political learning.
Such learning begins by rejecting two symmetrical errors. The first is the assumption that experience automatically confers political authority. Elders may possess memory, institutional knowledge, and long experience, but these do not exempt their ideas from scrutiny. Seniority cannot substitute for argument, evidence, or accountability. The second error is the assumption that historical succession itself invalidates older voices. A political generation does not become intellectually obsolete merely because another generation has arrived.
To dismiss experience solely because it belongs to the past is to confuse chronological change with intellectual progress. A democratic culture should, therefore, allow experience to speak without commanding it while permitting youth to challenge without allowing criticism to become generational contempt.
Intergenerational political learning also requires older generations to submit their own political histories to examination. Mentorship loses much of its value if it consists only of recounting achievements, defending past choices, or instructing younger citizens to appreciate sacrifices they did not witness. The most valuable political inheritance may instead be an honest account of how decisions were made, which assumptions proved mistaken, what dangers were underestimated, and what consequences became visible only later. An elder who can say, in effect, “This is what we believed, this is why we believed it, this is where we were mistaken, and this is what the consequences taught us,” offers something more important than authority: political judgment formed through reflection.
The younger generation carries an equally demanding obligation. Criticism should be informed by historical inquiry rather than retrospective certainty. Later generations possess knowledge of consequences that earlier actors lacked when making choices. This asymmetry creates a temptation to assume that what now appears mistaken must always have been obviously mistaken. Yet political judgment should distinguish between understanding and exoneration. To understand why a particular ideology, movement, or constitutional principle became compelling in a given historical moment is not to endorse it. Rather, it permits a more serious inquiry into the conditions that produced it, the aspirations it expressed, the failures it generated, and the lessons that can be drawn from its trajectory.
This is particularly important in Ethiopia, where historical memory is often mobilized not merely to understand the past but to allocate contemporary legitimacy and blame. When political history becomes a courtroom in which entire generations, communities, or ideological traditions are permanently assigned the roles of accuser and accused, collective learning becomes difficult. Political memory then ceases to function as a source of judgment and becomes another instrument of polarization. Intergenerational political learning requires a different use of history: not forgetting, sanitizing, or excusing the past, but examining it in a manner that allows responsibility to be acknowledged without converting historical criticism into inherited hostility.
Alasdair MacIntyre distinguishes between internal goods—such as the joys, skills, shared standards, and excellences attainable only through the practice of an activity itself—and external goods, like status, wealth, prestige, and power, which are rewards granted by society and can be acquired through various means. This distinction provides a valuable framework for examining Ethiopia’s intergenerational political divide (MacIntyre, 2007).
When applied to civic and political life, this distinction implies that political engagement should extend beyond mere competition for office, influence, prestige, or material advantage. Instead, it should foster goods intrinsic to responsible public life, such as practical wisdom, just judgment, truthful deliberation, mutual recognition, and peaceful coexistence. Senior political actors play a constructive role in democratic renewal by transmitting these intrinsic goods to younger generations through mentorship, intergenerational dialogue, critical historical reflection, and exemplary institutional conduct.
However, their influence is normatively justified only if it is not instrumentalized in the pursuit of external goods—such as patronage, partisan loyalty, prestige, material enrichment, or the preservation of political dominance. Accordingly, the political role of elders ought not to reproduce hierarchical relations of obedience or ensure the continuity of established power networks, but rather to cultivate in younger citizens the capacity for independent judgment, ethical political action, and critical participation within a democratic polity.
The distinction between explanation and justification is, therefore, essential. Historical explanation asks why particular ideas emerged, why they appeared persuasive, and what problems they were intended to solve. Justification asks whether those ideas were right. The two should not be confused. A society can understand why an earlier generation embraced a political doctrine and still conclude that the doctrine produced destructive consequences. Likewise, acknowledging harmful consequences does not require treating every individual associated with that historical period as morally culpable. This distinction makes it possible to combine accountability with intellectual fairness.
The same applies to the distinction between responsibility and guilt. Political responsibility can extend across time because institutions, policies, and collective decisions outlive those who created them. Guilt, however, should not be inherited indiscriminately. Younger Ethiopians may rightly insist that the political origins and consequences of earlier ideological choices be examined. Older Ethiopians may rightly resist being collectively condemned solely on the basis of age. Both positions can coexist if the purpose of historical judgment is learning rather than permanent accusation.
Intergenerational political learning, therefore, requires a political ethic of reciprocal correction. Older generations must be willing to acknowledge that some ideas they once regarded as emancipatory may have produced outcomes they did not anticipate. Younger generations must be willing to recognize that their own preferred solutions are also vulnerable to unintended consequences. No generation stands outside history, and no generation is exempt from error. The intellectual arrogance of the past and the present are structurally similar: both assume that one’s own historical moment provides a uniquely privileged view of political truth.
A mature democratic culture should instead cultivate what might be called intergenerational reciprocity. Older citizens contribute memory, historical depth, institutional experience, and knowledge of consequences. Younger citizens contribute new social perspectives, emerging knowledge, technological fluency, and a willingness to question inherited assumptions. The point is not to divide political labor rigidly along age lines but to recognize that each generation encounters dimensions of reality that the other may see less clearly. Political learning occurs when these forms of knowledge are brought into critical dialogue rather than organized into competing claims of generational superiority.
This reciprocal process is particularly necessary in societies like Ethiopia where political transitions repeatedly fail to produce durable institutions. If each generation begins by repudiating its predecessor entirely, institutional memory disappears, and political reconstruction repeatedly starts from scratch. Conversely, if younger generations are expected simply to inherit the assumptions of those before them, political stagnation becomes equally likely. The challenge is, therefore, to preserve continuity without reproducing failure and to encourage renewal without producing historical amnesia.
For Ethiopia, this means that generational reconciliation cannot rest solely on sentimental appeals for respect. It requires political and intellectual mechanisms through which experience can be questioned, mistakes acknowledged, competing historical narratives examined, and younger citizens can participate as equal partners in defining the future. Respect becomes meaningful when it is reciprocal: elders are respected enough to be heard, and young people are respected enough to disagree.
The goal of intergenerational political learning is, therefore, not consensus for its own sake. Generations may continue to disagree sharply about ideology, history, federalism, nationalism, revolution, democracy, or the meaning of Ethiopia itself. Reconciliation does not require erasing those disagreements; it requires changing the manner in which they are conducted. The decisive transition is from generational accusation to historical inquiry, from inherited resentment to critical judgment, and from the struggle over who owns the past to the shared responsibility of determining what should be carried into the future.
No generation owns the nation. No generation owns its history. The older generation is neither the permanent custodian of political wisdom nor the permanent defendant for every failure that followed its choices. The younger generation is neither an ungrateful recipient of inherited knowledge nor an inherently wiser successor. Both stand within a continuing historical process in which each receives an unfinished political inheritance and, in turn, leaves one behind.
Intergenerational political learning, therefore, asks something difficult of both: that the old transmit experience without demanding obedience, and that the young exercise judgment without embracing contempt. When that reciprocal discipline becomes possible, historical memory can cease to divide generations and instead become one of the foundations of democratic reconstruction.
Conclusion: Inheritance Without Captivity
Dawit W. Giorgis’s appeal should therefore be understood not as a demand for age-based privilege but as an invitation to consider a broader intergenerational ethic. Healthy, educated, reflective elders possess a continuing right to participate in public life and, where their experience is useful, a responsibility to share it. Younger citizens possess an equally important right to question, revise, innovate, and reject ideas that no longer withstand critical examination. Neither generation should seek the silence of the other.
The future undeniably belongs disproportionately to the young because they will live longest with the consequences of today’s decisions. Yet, the future does not begin with them. It is constructed from an inheritance containing wisdom and error, achievement and failure, sacrifice and misjudgment, institutions, and unresolved conflicts. The appropriate response to that inheritance is neither reverence nor repudiation, but critical distillation. Societies advance when younger generations can draw upon the experience of their predecessors without becoming prisoners of their assumptions and when older generations can transmit memory without demanding that history repeat itself.
The deepest purpose of intergenerational dialogue, therefore, is not to determine which generation was wiser. It is to ensure that the next generation does not have to rediscover every truth or repeat every mistake at the same human and political cost. The future may belong to the young, but a wiser future is built when generations learn from one another.
Reference:
MacIntyre, A. (2007). After virtue: A study in moral theory (3rd ed.). University of Notre Dame Press
Editor’s Note: Views in the article do not necessarily reflect the views of borkena.com
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