Neal A. Maxwell wrote: “In urging members of the Church to be more sensitive to other people we seek to avoid the trap. . . . predicted when it spoke of an age when men and women would allow the needy “to pass by you and notice them not.” . . . . speaks of the need for us to be “familiar with all.” This is not a matter of economic familiarity and of imparting our economic and material substance to others, for in an affluent society, food and clothing often are not people’s primary needs. We need to be familiar with others psychologically and spiritually—to know them well enough to know their other kinds of needs: spiritual, intellectual, and emotional. We should assist in the meeting of those needs.
Increasingly in teaching and leading situations (secular and religious) some of us treat people, as Jacques Barzun observed, as “human silos for grains of knowledge.” When we pack grains into these human silos, we assume we have, therefore, taught or communicated. The scriptures have foretold an age where there would be such an abundance of learning and yet, pardoxically, people would be “ever learning but never come to a knowledge of the truth!”
The individual antenna of others are more sensitive than we know, not just in terms of measuring the warmth of our personal relations with them, but also in gauging whether or not their ideas matter to us. They are more sensitive than we know in assessing our capacity or willingness to let them get their doubts out on the table where such doubts can be dealt with effectively and supportively within the climate of trust in the kingdom.
So much depends also on the leader’s seeing a restless or rebellious individual with some sense of the person’s potential. Pericles urged the ancient Athenians to contemplate Athens not alone for what she was, but for what she had the power to become. Believing in an individual—as he or she may become—may be at times the only deterrent to proximate (immediate) despair.
Generational differences between leaders, teachers and those they serve are normal. But note a quotation which followed the significance of the gap between generations:
“We see antagonism between the older and younger as an antagonism between someone who is trying to feel his way in life as we feel our way along a road, and who has a flickering light to guide him, and someone who claims to be at the other side of this same life (and of his own life as well) and be able to give out, from abstract spot, truths acquired at a great price. It goes without saying that this conflict is at the heart of what is called the problem of the generations and that no truly logical or rational solution can be found for it, because the antagonists are on different levels of time.”1
“. . . a mature sense of time is learned gradually. The infant lives in the present—there is no tomorrow. The teenager may be able to anticipate an event a month away, but little as remote as a year hence. Much of the difference between the young and the mature—which expresses itself in impatience on the part of the young, indignation on the part of the mature—can be explained by this profound difference in time sense.”2
No individual differences are apt to be more significant for leader-follower relations than generational differences.
“They (young people) have exalted notions, because they have not yet been humbled by life or learned its necessary limitations; moreover their hopeful disposition makes them think themselves equal to great things—and that means having exalted notions. They would always rather do noble deeds than useful ones; their lives are regulated more by moral feeling than by reasoning—all their mistakes are in the direction of doing things excessively and vehemently. They overdo everything—they love too much, hate too much, and the same with everything else.”
What is striking about these words is that they were reportedly uttered by Aristotle 2,400 years ago!
~Neal A. Maxwell, A More Excellent Way (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1967), 58-60
