If there’s two commonly used personality attributes which can mean whatever the fuck the user wants them to mean, in order to denigrate, acknowledge, or praise a given person, they have got to be common sense and maturity. In most of the cases it’s used as a crude way of falsifying something, either to save time and energy, though my own suspicions are that in most cases, it is a deep-seated intellectual cowardice, and accentuates a lack of clarity about what’s wrong or right about some proposition or action, you just “know” by intuition.
Beginning with common sense, you can observe a few usages:
- Knowing facts like Earth going around the sun. Basically vary with time as heliocentrism was discovered much later.
- Knowing certain rules and conventions. Pretty similar to the first, vary in space, time and culture.
- The ability to deduct and reason fairly simple results and their corollaries. This is the most sensible one, yet rare to see.
On to maturity, the vaguest praise, a self-serving fiction and the highest form of passive condescension, can be seen used thusly:
- Conformity to norms, rituals and taking glory in being the least common denominator.
- Taking your own stance if it’s the “right” thing to do. Point being that you will find the same person say both of these points. Basically the dichotomy of putting the needs of others before one’s own, and having the spine as well as instincts to make decisions which may be harsh to other. In short, whatever the fuck the user wants it to mean, just to reinforce his opinion. People will pick the definition that fits their opinion.
- The quantity of experience you have. Well, this is the most distasteful one, authorities use it all the time. “I have been in this industry for 20 years; I have 3 degrees in fuckery from the University of Fuckbuckets.” Also used as a defense mechanism when one’s weiner isn’t endowed.
- The quality of experience you have. This is rather reasonable. It doesn’t always have to do with age, but rather the experiences of a person and what he makes of them to broaden his world view. This is rather reasonable, although still very vague. A crude and pointless compartmentalization, but I think we get the point across that it’s a form of wisdom, if not the same thing.
The derogatory inflection aside, my point is that maturity is not just a function of chronological age, but the diversity of experiences and one’s sensitivity to them. Experiences convolve with sensitivity to create wisdom. When maturity is defined on many cultural biases, you know it’s just bullshit made to look down on or glorify certain types of personas. It may be immature to openly burp in a culture while taken as a compliment by the chef in some other culture. We can’t have maturity differ in space and time.