The Follies of Youth
RL Stevenson was of the opinion that wrongthink was better than groupthink.
1878
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
Introduction
In Crabbed Age and Youth, Robert Louis Stevenson argued that we should not try to silence the opinions of the young, however foolish they may seem. He did not pretend that the young are wise and pioneering thinkers. He thought they were mostly thinking nonsense. But it was better to come up with bad answers to good questions than to ask no questions at all.
All error, not merely verbal, is a strong way of stating that the current truth is incomplete. The follies of youth have a basis in sound reason, just as much as the embarrassing questions put by babes and sucklings. Their most antisocial acts indicate the defects of our society. When the torrent sweeps the man against a boulder, you must expect him to scream, and you need not be surprised if the scream is sometimes a theory. Shelley,* chafing at the Church of England, discovered the cure of all evils in universal atheism. Generous lads, irritated at the injustices of society, see nothing for it but the abolishment of everything and Kingdom Come of anarchy. Shelley was a young fool; so are these cock-sparrow revolutionaries. But it is better to be a fool than to be dead. It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity.
* Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), considered one of the most eminent of all English poets. In 1811, while at University College in Oxford, he aggressively but anonymously distributed a tract favouring atheism, and was sent down for stubbornly refusing to confirm or deny his authorship to the College authorities. Unrepentant, just a year later he promoted atheism and free love in his first large-scale poetical work, Queen Mab, a Utopian allegory. Shelley died in a boating accident in 1822, aged 29.
