How do I talk to my conservative grandsons who dismiss my politics as fuzzy thinking? | Leading questions

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How do I talk to grown grandsons who have different political beliefs and dismiss mine as fuzzy thinking, since I am old?

They are conservative and believe

they “pulled themselves up by their bootstraps”. They didn’t. They had parents and family and help with university. They are lovely men and kind to me, but I cannot converse with them on the issues of the day.

They have had setbacks, but nothing that makes them realise how very difficult life can be. I want to tell them that they cannot always control life, and also that I disagree with them. What can I say?

Eleanor says: You said you want to tell them you disagree, so I’ll join you in treating that as the starting point, though lots of people you talk to about this might knowingly say, “don’t try” or “keep politics away from the dinner table”. Yours was a strategic question; given you want to tell them you disagree, what can you say?

Reading your letter I kept thinking of the aphorism teachers sometimes go to: “I can explain it to you, but I can’t understand it for you.”

So much of what informs our politics is whether we understand what certain things are like. Not whether we know they happen, but whether we understand what it’s like to experience them; to be properly sick, poor, afraid, confronted with change we can’t control, in a war, out of money, working manually, in a long strike, aspirational, safe, full, fed. We spend a lot of time dissecting politics in terms of beliefs – the what – but I think a neglected part of our political differences are whether we know how these things feel.

It sounds as though that’s part of what you think they don’t understand; what it’s like to really be down, out, or both. And the trouble with that sort of knowledge is you can’t get it from someone telling you. Having someone describe these things to you is not the same as actually experiencing them yourself. “I can explain it to you, but I can’t understand it for you.”

That’s not necessarily a barrier to mutual respect, as long as we know what we don’t know. But maybe that’s the problem: they don’t know how much knowledge they’re missing.

Another thing teachers sometimes go to is that you have to experience your own incompetence to be motivated to correct it. You have to be unable to solve the maths problem; unable to build the carton that will keep the egg safe. You have to be confronted with the fact that you cannot produce an answer. Is there anything you could do to show them the depths of what they don’t know; any question where they’d be unable to produce any answer, not even a wrong one? Could you show more of “what it’s like” – the knowledge you have and they don’t? Tell them about things you’ve seen, things people you know have seen? I was thinking of this during recent commemorations of HIV/Aids: how many of us know what it’s like to go to 40 funerals in a year, or how to convince a hospital to let you in when they don’t allow same-sex partners? What might the equivalent “what it’s like” be for the vulnerabilities you want them to understand?

At a minimum, those explanations of why you see things the way you do might help them treat your experience as credentials rather than fuzzy-mindedness.

You don’t want to interact with each other just like generational stereotypes: “You kids you haven’t seen anything”, “You oldies are living in memory.” And you can’t give them your experience, or anyone else’s. But you can help them stop seeing their own lives as a complete political theory.