TOWARDS OLD AGE
15th June 2003
Here are some thoughts from an old atheist - by which I mean one who has been sceptical of religions since boyhood back in the 1930's and who is likely to remain so. Religion has no first-order appeal to me but, at second order, I am interested both in religious ideas, as ideas, and in the reasons why people hold to them and, very often, seem to benefit from them and very often seem to hurt themselves and other people because of them.
I face two pitfalls. Inevitably what I say is taken from life but I must avoid mere autobiography in this essay. Secondly, while I think the problems of old age are onerous, I must seek to be other than purely negative and, above all, to avoid the vice of self-pity.
Two problems of old age seem to be insuperable. One of them is general deterioration of bodily and mental function - loss of stamina, sensory failings loss of short-term memory and so on. The other is the irreplaceable loss of one's much valued contemporaries. There is no realistic way of dodging these difficulties; one has to learn to accept them in as contented a manner as one can.
Let us clear away some of the rubbish that has accumulated around the idea of old age. Then let us try to identify some of the real problems facing old age anyway and some problems facing old age in contemporary western society particularly.
Then let us consider possible ways of easing those problems. We may even get around to anticipating some basic cultural shifts that might, advantageously, take place in the longer term future.
The rubbish!.
First, there never was a Golden Age to which we should try to revert and there is no convincing reason, in my opinion, to hope for an even more Golden Age at some level outside of the normal run of human life from birth to death. Birth is the time when one starts to learn to be a person and death is, effectively, the point at which no further direct mutually positive interaction with other people is possible (even though mere survival may still be ongoing, perhaps artificially). The 'good old days' is a false notion - all we can say truly of some aspects of the past is that they were, in many ways 'the more manageable old days'.
'Eternal bliss' in the next world, in some supposed heaven, is a mere supposition and, likewise, Eternal Torment in the other department of the supposed next life is equally a mere supposition (and a pretty sick one at that). Eternal anything is a truly dreadful prospect.
Celebrity Worship, Youth Worship Glamour Worship and Wealth Worship - seem to have taken over from a fading religious view of things. People seem to prier false gods to no god at all - in any precise meaning of the word 'god'.
Language is a telling commentary on the cult of Youth Worship. 'Old' is now a dirty word when applied to people and, because of this, the silly euphemism 'elderly' has displaced it. To be old is to be of no great use nowadays so let us cover up our disdain by re-branding 'old' as 'elderly'. (We used to have a thing called the Old Age Pension but its name was changed to Retirement Pension. It so happened that, for perfectly good family reasons, I retired from full time employment
during my forty-eighth year and so I submitted a tongue-in-cheek request for the Retirement Pension. It turned out to be the Old Age Pension in disguise and I have received it, gladly, since I became sixty-five).
I am proud to be old - a fact arising simply from the fact that I was born rather a long time ago but to be old has one undeniable disadvantage - the progressive loss of much valued contemporaries. These, because of the generation gap, cannot be replaced by much younger people. It is simply not possible to have known and valued a thirty year old for fifty years no matter how valuable a person the thirty year old may be. Old age is necessarily a lonely business. That is inevitable and has to be accepted.
I am glad that my life has been at the time that it has been because I think that my lifetime has been spent under better conditions than my grandfathers endured and that my grandchildren may well have to endure. I have lived in a little window of civilised opportunity but I fear that the glass of that window is beginning to crack. I hope I am mistaken in this pessimism.
Now for the real problems as distinct from those created by fashion and by incipient depression and those unrelieved by undemanding religion. Let us turn to realities and away from current trendiness and fading past trendiness and from refusal to accept the inevitable.
The first real problem is that society changes much more rapidly than was formerly the case. The traditional role of old people had been to help guide the rising generations in the ways of the world. But, in a rapidly changing world, people of my generation have little of practical interest to pass on. The generation gap is a gap of reciprocal incomphrehensability; we do not hear their needs and they do not hear our hard won lessons from life and no amount of mutual good will solve this problem of 'the dialogue of the deaf'. To become mature is, in a too rapidly changing world, now to become obsolete. Old people are at worst ill-treated and, less unacceptably, relegated, in many cases, to the status of living wallpaper.
The second real problem is that of ever-increasing longevity. This is resulting in a society containing disproportionately more old people and, given, the cult of Youth Worship, an increasing proportion of people who tend to feel that they have no positive function left. They are called upon to exist but to give no trouble; they feel themselves to be, and indeed sometimes actually are, being transformed from solutions into problems. Of course, good will eases matters enormously and those of us, like me, who enjoy a lot of good will are fortunate indeed. But 'fine words butter no parsnips'.
The economic and political fallout from increasing longevity is roughly 1) that pension provision and health care for the old will be an increasing drain upon national resources - and people fight over resources - and 2) in the fight over resources the 'grey head vote' will become increasingly weighty - unless democracy is overcome by a dictatorial version of the Cult of Youth.
There is, I fear, no ready solution to this problem of the 'demographic time bomb'. But an attitude of empathy with old people (rather than an attitude of patronising toleration) would help. The cults of Youth Worship. Celebrity Worship and Glamour Worship - to say nothing of Wealth Worship - must be fought against. Just because 'god' is, for many people, a dead duck is no good reason for setting up false gods like Youth, Glamour, Celebrity and Wealth.
What is needed, and what cannot be legislated for, is mass voluntary euthanasia. When one feels, probably rightly, that one is, to other people, more of a problem than a solution then that is the time for the plastic bag, the alcohol and the barbiturates. A joyous honourable suicide is not usually what people have in mind. They have in mind life-support machines and the more or less grudging admission that grandad has passed his 'sell-by' date. One thing we ought to retrieve from the 'good old days' is the honourable recognition that enough is enough.
The question is not yet a real one for this basically contented and very fortunate old man but - barring accidents - it is coming. No longer is pneumonia 'the old person's friend'. I am not in my second childhood messy eating, ga-ga chatter and evident unawareness of what is going on around me - no I am not in second childhood but I am beginning to be aware of a testing time of, to coin a phrase, second adolescence - a time of some emotional turbulence which will indeed make me a problem for others rather than any sort of solution for them.
I claim no uniqueness in this general feeling of turbulence; I think it is a general phenomenon among old people who have perhaps lived too long in a world that changes too fast.
I have been dealt a good hand by life but, increasingly, I see the past as something to value. The present as basically more to me than merely bearable but the future as something to fear. We have to accept death as a natural part of the ways things are and a good death (or, in the Greek word, Euthansaia) has to become as acceptable and guilt-free as any other of life's crunch points.
E.S.