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February 2006— The reality of aging
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Nothing is more modern than aging. In all but
the most recent chapters of the human story, only a tiny minority
could expect to live for more than 50 years, let alone past
65. It is true that the rise of complex civilizations, with
their accompanying social inequality, meant that the well-fed
few could expect to live much longer than the masses whose
labour supported them. Some even lived past the biblical three-score
and ten: the Emperor Augustus, a man of frugal habits, lived
to be 77. Nonetheless most of the subjects of the Roman Empire
were dead before they were 30. Even those who survived the
hazards of childhood could count themselves lucky to see their
40s.
Scarcity often begets value. In the pre-literate world of
a Stone Age tribe, or even in a medieval village, the elders
were valued as living archives, the repository of the myths,
customs and laws that gave meaning to life and a sense of
identity to the group. When writing arrived, documents produced
by the temple or the palace took over much of this role in
complex societies. More: the document writers soon did their
best to monopolize knowledge of the past. To control a society's
collective memory is a long step toward controlling the society
itself. (There was a joke in the former Soviet Union, "We
are certain of the future. It is the past that keeps changing.")
It is only in relatively recent times, and with marked reluctance,
that authorities of state, church and party have opened most
of the historic past to free investigation.
The spread of written records meant that the aged lost the
status that came from being the bearers of oral tradition.
Their subsequent fate has been determined by the cultural
differences between the great literate civilizations. Confucian
thought unequivocally placed elderly males on a pinnacle of
status and power, with profound consequences for the civilizations
of East Asia. Generations of elderly male visitors to China
have been agreeably surprised by the deference paid to their
grey hairs. Hinduism sees old age rather as a stage when a
man, his duties as husband and father done, is free to devote
himself to the acquisition of spiritual merit, ideally by
becoming a sanyasi, a Hindu ascetic. A somewhat similar
tradition of study and devotion in the last years of life
exists in Judaism. In the West, in general, attitudes have
been much more ambiguous. The Fourth Commandment told Jews
and later Christians to honour their father and - notably
-- their mother too, and while no one can measure compliance
with this precept it is hard not to think that its influence
has been far reaching. At the same time, Western writers have
been acutely conscious of the physical decline associated
with aging. Homer's heroes repeatedly say how much they prefer
a glorious death in battle to the slow decay that otherwise
awaits them. Shakespeare wrote memorably of "sans eyes,
sans teeth, sans everything," and while this may be the
view of the bright young people in the Forest of Arden rather
than Shakespeare's own, there is no doubt that outliving one's
physical abilities was something dreaded by almost everyone.
Not without reason. Those who outlived their strength could
expect to be dependent on their children if they were lucky,
beggars if they were not. All over Western Europe there stand
little groups of almshouses - perhaps ten or twelve small
dwellings around a chapel, where a fortunate few of the deserving
poor could end their days in security. They are a tribute,
not only to the Fourth Commandment but in a backhanded way
to the longstanding strength of the "nuclear" family
- parents and children only - in Western Europe. Civilizations
where the "extended," multi-generational, multi-sibling
family was the norm had less need of almshouses.
*
These conflicting attitudes of respect, distaste and fear
are still with us today, often in the same mind. Yet the reality
of ageing is changing with extraordinary speed. The planet
holds far more over-60s than ever before, and they are increasing
rapidly. In the developed democracies they are, as a group,
enjoying better health, longer lives and more financial security
than ever before. They also have growing political and economic
clout.
Around the year 1750 the population of the world began to
grow steadily, especially in Europe and China. Why this happened
is much debated. A warmer climate and the introduction of
new crops may have had something to do with it. Medical advances
and government policies definitely had nothing to do with
it, at least in the initial stages of growth. But whatever
the cause, humanity was launched on the demographic revolution
which has since engulfed the whole planet and only begun to
slow in our own time. Everywhere the pattern has been the
same: the high birth rates of earlier times continue and even
rise, accompanied by a fairly steady drop in the death rate
as better diets, public sanitation and since 1800, the control
of epidemics come into play. Last comes a drop in the birth
rate as urbanization and industrialization make multiple-child
raising both expensive and (as a form of old-age pension)
unnecessary. Taken together the last two trends produce a
rapid increase, both absolute and relative, in the numbers
of the elderly. The traditional demographic age graph of a
rather skinny pyramid has become something more like a bumpy
column. This is most evident in the developed world, but it
is happening even more rapidly in industrializing countries
such as China or Brazil.
Demographic predictions have a mixed record of success, but
it is hard to see this increase in the numbers of the aged
altering in the coming decades, especially since it is to
some degree self-perpetuating. An older population will also
be a stable or even a shrinking population, as the percentage
of fertile women falls and (for somewhat different reasons)
the number of children in a family drops. The native-born
populations of Germany and Japan, among other countries, are
already declining amidst unprecedented abundance - something
that would have been utterly incomprehensible to our forebears
who lived in a simpler world where more food meant more babies
growing up. Some estimates predict that by as early as 2050
the over-60s may then be more than 20 per cent of the total,
almost two billion people in all.
As noted, the consequences are immense. Public policy, economic
life, social attitudes and even the natural environment are
already profoundly affected. The care of the elderly, especially
the very old, is a growth industry almost everywhere. Their
exceptional need for medical care threatens the financial
viability of public health plans. A recent study estimates
that on present trends, publicly funded health care will cost
Canadians 11.3 per cent of Gross Domestic Product in 2050,
up from 6.3 per cent in 2001. (For Newfoundland and Labrador
the 2050 figure would be 24.5 per cent, which is surely unsustainable.)
Public and private pension plans and the rules governing retirement
are already being redesigned to fit new demographic realities.
The direct and indirect investments intended to support the
elderly represent a growing proportion of equity and bond
markets. Increasingly, it is the managers of these great agglomerations
of savings who decide the fate of corporations, as a J. P.
Morgan once did. Thus it seems likely to be the aging, not
the meek who will inherit the earth. For the natural environment,
a stable or falling population should mean less human pressure:
fewer malls and subdivisions, fewer fields paved over (although,
unless carefully managed, increased demands for tourism and
outdoor recreation will work against this trend). To indulge
optimism a little further, perhaps architects, decorators
and furniture designers will be less prone to assume that
everyone is an athletic 25 year old, able and willing to bound
out of a Barcelona chair and welcoming the sight of a 1,500-foot-long
airport corridor with nowhere to sit down. If they don't,
legislation will do it for them.
Far-reaching those these changes are, they are all manageable
by public policy or private enterprise provided we have the
collective will to acknowledge and deal with them. Moreover,
there is every reason to suppose that the will can and will
be found. The elderly vote more often than their younger contemporaries.
They have the time not simply to go to the polls but to understand
what the issues mean for them as pensioners, investors and
medical patients. As a result, it is a brave, perhaps a suicidal
politician who touches the social programs intended to support
citizens in the final decades of their lives. In Canada recent
years have seen a steady growth in public health spending
and a relative stagnation in spending on education, especially
higher education. Whether or not this is a good thing can
be endlessly debated. What is hard not to believe is that
it has something to do with the fact that pensioners vote
while by and large, students do not.
The elderly are also an increasingly important market. Not
only are their numbers growing, both social policy and a long
period of economic growth mean that they have much more money
to spend than their grandparents did. The marketing industry
has responded with campaigns targeting those over 50 or over
60. The increasing fragmentation of the mass audience by the
multiplication of television channels and specialized magazines
has been both the result of this change and a contributor
to it. No longer do older citizens appear only in advertisements
for denture cleansers and antacid pills. Healthy, happy people,
grey-haired but active, well but comfortably dressed, clearly
enjoying life and looking forward to more of it, can be seen
nightly selling goods and services from snow blowers to cruise
ships.
This is a significant change in the visual landscape. The
marketing industry began by selling social status. Anyone
with the necessary funds could use the same face cream as
a countess or be the first on the block to own a Cadillac.
This is still a powerful motivator, as can be seen from the
substantial value of luxury brand names and the finely tuned
efforts to increase sales without diminishing exclusivity.
Status, however, has been joined by two other motivators,
the twin values of youth and newness. The value set on youth
certainly owes something to the relative scarcity of young
people; in a cautious, well-insured, middle-aged world, the
vitality and optimism traditionally ascribed to youth (though
not always detectable in today's young people) are powerfully
attractive. The predominance of the young in visual media,
however, is undoubtedly owing to the belief that their sexual
attractiveness will rub off on whatever is being sold. The
cult of the new is a more purely artificial creation. It exists
to convince consumers to replace goods they already own. The
fashion industry in particular exists, not so much to clothe
people but to persuade them to stuff more items into what
may already be decidedly full closets.
The rights and wrongs of these phenomena can be debated.
Wearing new and smart clothes is an innocent pleasure open
to almost everyone. The cult of youthfulness for its part
undeniably has some positive results. The widespread acceptance
of the idea that a healthy diet and physical activity can
make life more enjoyable in all its stages is undoubtedly
a major gain. Its shadow is a reluctance to accept the realities
of aging and thereby to profit from all that this act in the
drama has to offer. It is hard, too, to doubt that the relentless
emphasis placed on youth, newness and sexual attractiveness
by the media have done much to strengthen negative attitudes
to the elderly. In public discourse, on the one hand, their
political importance alone certainly ensures that they are
treated with scrupulous respect. Advertisers have risen to
the challenge with clichés such as "senior citizens"
and "the golden years" which, like all such forms
of Newspeak, suggest the reverse of their ostensible meaning
and barely serve to mask much more negative feelings expressed
in private - or, significantly, in public by stand-up comedians
who specialize in saying what politicians cannot. "Past
it," "lost it," "over the hill" --
these phrases and a hundred more like them conjure up a picture
of bodily and mental decrepitude, the polar opposite of the
glowing faces and taut bodies we see in ads every day. "The
old" and "the elderly" are not much better.
They powerfully suggest a group that is collectively a social
problem rather than a social asset.
Whether the new market clout of the elderly will change such
attitudes remains to be seen. They are unlikely to disappear,
however, because they are ultimately rooted in the natural
human fear of death. In North American society this takes
a particularly acute form. We are encouraged to believe that
there is a remedy, known or to be discovered, for every human
ill, yet no remedy is likely to be found for death, ludicrous
experiments in deep freezing notwithstanding. Again, our intense
individualism means that the end of an individual life is
overwhelmingly final. Past generations could take comfort,
when the end was near, in the thought that family, clan, dynasty,
tribe or city would go on and that their life had been a meaningful
part of a larger whole. Though few would have expressed it
with Burke's eloquence, they would have agreed with him that
society is a contract between those who are living, those
who are dead and those who are to be born. In a time like
ours, when ads proclaim "It's all about ME!," such
a belief seems archaic, even quaint. Believers in the great
religions have of course traditionally seen death as a door
rather an end, but such evidence as we have - and it cannot
be anything but imperfect - suggests that belief in immortality
is neither as widespread nor as firm as it seems to have been
in times past.
In response, we push death to the frontiers of our consciousness
and do not welcome reminders of its presence. Our society
is remarkable for the extent to which we have abolished all
forms of public mourning. Victorians wore black for a year
and pulled down their blinds until the funeral was over. People
saved all their lives to have the biggest, splashiest funeral
possible, and other people earned their livings by walking,
with suitably grief-stricken countenances, in the funeral
processions of people to whom they were completely unrelated.
Nowadays even the procession of cars with headlights on is
disappearing, perhaps because they are usually on anyway.
Grief and bereavement, for many raised in the Christian traditions
at least, have become private matters, to be shared only with
close family and friends. Whether this makes them any easier
to deal with may be doubted. Funerary rituals may seem absurd,
but their universality through history and around the world
suggests that they are powerful aids to coping with the inexorable
fact of death.
*
To repeat, changing negative attitudes will not be easy.
Perhaps the most effective counter to them will simply be
the numbers of elderly people for whom, cliché though
it is, these really are the best years of their lives. For
the growing numbers of the elderly who have reasonable health
and financial security, aging may well bring physical pain
and emotional loss, but it also brings a priceless opportunity
to reflect, to remember and to understand, free of the insecurities
of youth and the preoccupations of middle age.
This is the time to do all the things that earning a living
left no time to do, to enjoy the life of dignified leisure
that, through most of history, has been the privilege of the
few. For those fortunate enough to have grandchildren, they
can enjoy what is perhaps the most rewarding of human relationships,
enriching for both sides and largely free of the stress that
comes with parental responsibility. For many too this is the
time to give something back to society: the elderly volunteer
out of proportion to their numbers. That many of the elderly
can reasonably expect to lead such a life after retirement
is surely one of the greatest, and most underrated, achievements
of the developed democracies. Of course we are still some
way from perfection. Too many of the elderly are still poor,
still without needed care, still alone at the end of their
days. Whether we can continue to be even as successful as
we have been while the numbers of the elderly increase, only
time can tell. But more than enough has been accomplished
to help us see human life as a whole, in which each stage
brings its own dangers, drawbacks and blessings, and where
the last act crowns the work.
***
Published by RBC Financial Group. All editions from the RBC
Letter collection are available on our web site at www.rbc.com/responsibility/letter.
Our e-mail address is: rbcletter@rbc.com.
Publié aussi en francais.
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