I was only a boy when I first began protesting against the idiocy of so much of the folk wisdom handed down to us. Proverbs, adages and aphorisms (‘a pithy observation that contains a general truth,’ says my dictionary) are recited to children by grown-ups, often in a singsong, holier-than-thou voice; and I couldn’t help noticing that many were quite evidently untrue, contained thoroughly bad advice, and some nuggets of supposedly sage proverbial wisdom are flatly contradicted by other nuggets of sage proverbial wisdom. I started taking a note whenever my attention was caught by yet another glaringly obvious example of a proverb, sanctimonious or trite, that was just plain wrong.
If we all seized the moment every time some hare-brained move occurred to us, we’d be in deep trouble
Last week I heard a politician, taken to task for the pettifogging nature of some initiative or other they were trying to trumpet (probably involving potholes), retort: ‘Yes, but every little helps.’ It doesn’t, or not much. If it’s only little then its value is only little. Lao Tzu was not wrong to say that ‘a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step’ but omitted to mention that there remain, after that first step, at least 1,999,999 steps further to take, and you’d be well advised to think about that before putting your best foot forward.
Adding Lao Tzu and ‘every little helps’ to my list, I noticed, already on it, ‘pennies add up to pounds’. Same mistake. True, 100 pennies do add up to a pound, but then what have you got? A pound. Continue saving until you’ve got 300 pennies and you might be able to afford a cup of coffee. The piggy-bank mentality should not be encouraged in children: they need the instinct to make money work for them.
Perhaps you’d like to see a sample of similarly bad advice from my list, and maybe even compile your own…
A stitch in time saves nine. It may, but if a problem is structural, deep-seated or progressive, mending each visible manifestation is precisely the wrong approach. Once the cuffs begin to go, it may be time to buy a new shirt.
I want doesn’t get. Oh yes it does. This advice, handed out to children who keep demanding things, is designed to encourage a supine passivity. On the contrary, kiddo, wail and scream, beat your tiny fists against the bars of your cot until mummy gives in. I want does get, and there’s no better advice for later life. Children should be encouraged to counter ‘I want doesn’t get’ with ‘If you don’t ask you won’t get’.
Patience is a virtue. Like ‘Good things come to those who wait’, such advice will leave you hoping to catch the waiter’s eye while everyone else pushes in. Likewise, ‘You can’t hurry love’ rather depends on your age. Lower your sights! Impatience is a wonderful spur to action.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be. Prim, tight-fisted and ultimately impoverishing advice. There is pleasure in lending, and profit in incurring sensible debt. Capitalism depends on both.
Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me? Wow! How wrong can you be! This advice, no doubt intended to console, runs against all human experience.
The Lord will provide. No He won’t. How many millions on our planet must starve before we face the truth that the Deity, if there is one, has no safety net in place for humanity? After Lisbon’s great earthquake in 1775, Voltaire wrote an entire satire, Candide, mocking the idea that ‘All’s for the best’.
Dreadful things happen, and God is not necessarily moving in mysterious ways.
Take no thought for the morrow, for the morrow will take care of itself. Really? Is that your experience? It certainly isn’t mine. I can’t imagine what Jesus was thinking in the Sermon on the Mount with all that stuff about the lilies of the field managing without toil or spinning. That’s fine for lilies, but not for you or me. Compelling evidence that Jesus was a real person who did exist is that some of what he’s reported to have preached is such obvious nonsense that the Church is most unlikely to have invented it.
Carpe diem. If we all seized the moment every time some hare-brained move occurred to us, we’d be in deep trouble. ‘Look before you leap’ is to be preferred. Moments, when seized, may come apart in our hands.
Never say never. This bears its refutation in its own construction. ‘Never’ can be an anchor saving us from temptation to drift. I will never vote Labour. Hold me to it.
A problem shared is a problem halved. No. A problem shared is a problem doubled. Keep your problems to yourself. Sharing them just adds to the number of people burdened by a worry. The advice is often accompanied by the instruction ‘Don’t bottle things up’. How many Christmases have been shattered, how many birthday dinners ruined, by somebody’s decision (often lubricated by wine) to ‘seize the moment’ and let everyone know what’s bugging them (usually somebody else). The modern fashion, encouraged by therapists and analysts, for spilling out one’s anxieties or resentments is unhelpful, morbid, self-pitying, and can prove incendiary. By all means bottle things up, and fit a cork.
You make your own luck. I hate this one, beloved of successful self-made men and business-school bores. Mrs Thatcher coined a variation. Told she’d been a lucky girl to have done so well in her exams, she squeaked: ‘I wasn’t lucky, I deserved it.’ The idea that success comes through effort, and luck plays no part, has a corollary: that failure is a person’s own fault. Thus we allay our own concealed anxieties about the plight of the poor. But people may be knocked down by sheer bad luck or a terrible start, and struggle ever to get up again. If we must rely on aphorism, how about ‘There but for the grace of God go I’?
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