It happens to many a graduate, applying for a first job, that there is a requirement that immediately aborts all prospects: experience. The fallacy should not be too difficult to spot. If a new entrant is not entertained because he lacks experience, he is denied all further opportunity of acquiring it!
But the very premise should be questioned: Is it in fact true that experience makes all the difference? I want to steer clear of the other extreme—denying the importance of experience. It is important. A bungling neophyte bungles things precisely because he is new at the job and is learning the ropes. But in due time, she will learn and might make the difference between the sheer repetition and monotony that those with nothing more than experience have to their credit.
Invention and discovery occur precisely because one is willing to break with experience and with habit. All the pivotal points in cultural evolution and history occurred when people mustered the courage to depart from experience and to dare the untried. Experience is comforting and assuring, because one merely repeats what has been from the beginning and threatens ever to be until the consummation of time!
Whether it be in science, in academe, in political life or in the more quotidian concerns we humans have, the dogged determination to keep to experience stultifies. We insist that aspirants to public office bear the weight of experience—but when we have more of the same decadence that has afflicted us for so long, we whine. But is that not the result of the idolatry of experience that has become the new religion? What a conflicted lot we indeed are.
Experience, Richard Posner writes, is many times our unwillingness to correct our mistakes and sheer inertia of what has been. It is the encrustation of habit, and not all habits are good. The preference for one with experience, who knows how to get things done, is deleteriously many times also an option against that necessary boldness that alone can promise a new way of doing things.
Persons with a more scholarly inclination who pursue advanced studies are often derided for being “too theoretical,” lacking in experience. That is exactly what their contribution consists in: the introduction of theory, of novelty, that can break the habits that weigh down, the repetition of the same. It is those who have given themselves to the examination of new and varied theories who can nudge us from out of the rut with which we have become so comfortable.
Of course, people with plenty of theory who “lack experience” because they have not been given a chance at it are a threat to the guardians of an established order. This is one of the reasons that the mantra about “the virtue of experience” is enunciated with unction very close to religious fervor. It is actually the line of defense that the present occupants of position and the beneficiaries of privilege defend with all their might against the intrusion of those who offer a new way of doing things, a new mode of thinking of things.
Of those who braved the perils of the sea to discover new worlds, there will be enough naysayers who always called out to them: “Turn back”—because returning to what one has been used to is the safety of mediocrity. But, with the courage that makes all novelty and the evolution of our species possible, these persons of discovery would insist: “Forge ahead.”
rannie_aquino@sanbeda.edu.ph
rannie_aquino@csu.edu.ph
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