PROVIDING GRATUITOUS advice, at any time or to anyone, is a risky, thankless and sometimes perilous endeavor, especially at the beginning of a new year when the air is filled with delusional resolutions, most of them frivolous or unachievable.

Most advice-seekers are really seeking little more than approval of a decision they had already reached. Receiving unsolicited advice is still worse: It is painfully intrusive, demeaning and akin to un-requested herpes. And expecting gratitude for rendering advice, whether solicited or not, is much like tossing a daisy petal into the shaft of a coal mine and expecting to hear an echo.

Many who are mentors, counselors or elders are wise enough to refrain from offering advice. They have learned through bitter experience that to give counsel is to be held responsible for any future event. Bernard Shaw once declared: “I’m not a teacher; only a fellow-traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead — ahead of myself as well as you.”

Advice, of course, comes in a tapestry of forms, intensities and persuasions, anything from a kindly hint to an implacable warning. At the voluntary end of this spectrum is the “gentle recommendation,” typically whispered and couched in avuncular words that reek of faltering resolve; this is followed by “counsel,” the kind of advice offered by physicians to their patients carrying the unspoken weight of professional authority and a hint of unspecified complications in the future; then there is the “earnest suggestion,” providing just an intimation of menace; and finally there is “guidance,” “directive” or “advisement,” each akin in spirit to a court order, and conveying an unspoken threat of scriptural commandment.

There had been a time in the past when giving advice was both obligatory and expected at assigned intervals in a child’s life. Youngsters anticipated a paternal advisory lecture upon entering public bathrooms, puberty, high school, the military or any new or untested enterprise. Typically, it was listened to with an inattentive ear, especially when the advice approached subjects such as venereal misadventure. Indeed, active scorn rather than indifference confronts most attempts at offering advice. In truth, such advice is about as effective as lecturing famished crocodiles on the spiritual merit of carrots.

Some bodies of advice have become immortal, such as the advice, disguised as a blessing, rendered unto Laertes by Polonius before beginning a voyage (Hamlet, Act I, Scene III). This exhortative advising contains such suggestions as “Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice: Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment.” And later, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be: For loan oft loses both itself and friend, and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry. This above all — to thine own self be true; And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

In retrospect did all of this sound, poetic advice do any good ? Polonius was killed by Act III and Laertes by Act V.

Advising, like wearing kid gloves to church, has now gone out of style. Indeed, the giving of advice is currently considered in bad taste, and in the same moral category as cannibalism. In decades past, advice may have carried a figment of enduring, righteous truth. However, our future in the 21st Century, as Yogi Berra once proclaimed, ain’t what it used to be. Great empires are now crumbling; Detroit is no longer the global center of the automotive industry; the New York Yankees now watch the World Series on their home TV; and Mumbai is turning out more movies than Hollywood. An unstable global community is changing at a breathless pace, not only in velocity but in direction, and only the foolhardy or the evangelists will even consider providing advice in such a chaotic world.

Advising newly elected presidents of the United States can be both presumptuous and foolhardy as well as intolerably arrogant. Yet there are Americans whose entire adult lives have been invested in analyzing the social and medical burdens that plague a substantial fraction of global humanity. These professional observers make no claim to infallibility but their voices of experience deserve a hearing.

No one will doubt that over one-third of the world’s humanity is deprived of much of its adulthood, living, on average, about 26 years less than the typical American; nor can one doubt the indisputable differences in life expectancy within the United States. The Harvard School of Public Health, perhaps the world’s leading institution for graduate studies and research in international public health, had recently asked its faculty to advise the new president on ways to fight health inequities both locally and internationally.

Is it likely that the new regime will heed this carefully offered advice? Probably not. James Hagerty, President Eisenhower’s press secretary, remembered his isolated experience with the accepting of advice. “One day I sat thinking, almost in despair; a hand fell on my shoulder and a voice said reassuringly: ‘Cheer up, things could get worse.’ So I cheered up and, sure enough, things got worse.”

Stanley M. Aronson, M.D., a weekly contributor, is dean of medicine emeritus, Brown University ( smamd@cox.net).