At the opposite extreme from this strong status of the elderly in traditional patriarchial societies is their status in much of modern American society (with conspicuous exceptions among some immigrant communities that retain traditional values). To quote Cowgill’s list of depressing attributes, “We associate old age with loss of usefulness, decrepitude, illness, senility, poverty, loss of sexuality, sterility, and death.” Those views have practical consequences for the job opportunities and medical care of older people. Mandatory retirement ages were until recently widespread in the United States, and they are still widespread in Europe. Employers tend to consider older people as set in their ways and less manageable and teachable, hence employers prefer to invest in young employees who are considered more flexible and more easily trained. In an experimental study carried out by Joanna Lahey for Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research, responses to false résumés sent to prospective employers and differing only in the applicants’ names and ages revealed that a woman aged 35–45 applying for an entry-level job is 43% more likely to be called for an interview than an applicant 50–62 years old. The explicit hospital policy termed “age-based allocation of health care resources” is to give younger patients priority over older patients whenever health-care resources are limited, on the grounds that medical time, energy, and money should not be invested in saving elderly lives written off as “fragile and failing.” Is it any surprise that Americans and Europeans, even already in their 30s, respond by investing much money of their own in measures to preserve a youthful appearance, such as hair dyeing and plastic surgery?
At least three sets of values, some of them shared with European society, contribute to this low status of the elderly in modern America. One set, emphasized by the sociologist Max Weber, is the work ethic, which Weber stressed in connection with John Calvin’s form of the Protestant Revolution, and which Weber formulated especially with regards to Germany, but which is more broadly relevant to modern Western society. At the risk of reducing his long and complex books and articles to one sentence, Weber may be said to have viewed work as the central business of one’s life, the source of one’s status and identity, and good for one’s character. It follows that retired elderly people who are no longer working lose their social status.
A more specifically American set of values is a cluster related to our emphasis on the individual. That individualism is the opposite of the emphasis on extended family discussed above for many other societies. An American’s sense of self-worth is measured by his/her own achievements, not by the collective achievements of the extended family to which he/she belongs. We are taught to be independent and to rely on ourselves. Independence, individualism, and self-reliance are all praised as virtues, and the opposite traits of dependence, inability to stand on one’s own feet, and inability to take care of oneself are disparaged. In fact, for Americans a dependent personality is a clinical diagnosis used by psychiatrists and psychologists, and labeled Mental Disorder number 301.6 by the American Psychiatric Association, to identify a condition requiring treatment, whose goal is to help the regrettably dependent individual achieve the American virtue of independence.
Also part of this American value cluster is our emphasis on individual privacy, an unusual concept by the standards of world cultures, most of which provide little individual privacy and don’t consider it a desirable ideal. Instead, common traditional living arrangements consist of an extended family inside a single dwelling, or a group of huts or shelters around a single clearing, or a whole band sleeping in one communal shelter. Unthinkably to most modern Americans, even sex between a couple traditionally goes on with a minimum of privacy. The couple’s hammock or mat is visible to other couples, and the couple’s young children may be sharing the same mat but are merely expected to close their eyes. Our neolocal residence pattern, according to which children upon reaching the age of marriage set up their own private household, represents the opposite extreme from that traditional arrangement in which privacy is minimal.
Care for the elderly goes against all those interwoven American values of independence, individualism, self-reliance, and privacy. We accept a baby’s dependence, because the baby has never been independent, but we struggle against the dependence of the elderly who have been independent for decades. But the cruel reality is that old people eventually reach a condition in which they can no longer live independently, cannot rely on their own abilities, and have no choice but to become dependent on others and to give up their long-cherished privacy. Dependency is at least as painful for the elderly person involved as for the middle-aged child who watches it happening to a formerly self-reliant parent. How many readers of this chapter have known an elderly person who insisted out of self-respect on trying to continue to live independently, until an accident (such as falling and breaking a hip, or being unable to get out of bed) made the continued independence impossible? American ideals push old Americans to lose self-respect, and push their younger care-givers to lose respect for them.
The remaining distinctively American value creating prejudice against the aged is our cult of youth. Of course, this isn’t a completely arbitrary value that we happen to have adopted as a cultural preference for no good reason. It’s indeed true that, in this modern world of rapid technological change, the recency of young adults’ education makes their knowledge more up-to-date and useful for important things like jobs, and for mundane challenges of everyday life. I at age 75, and my 64-year-old wife, are reminded of this reality behind our cult of youth whenever we attempt to turn on our television set. We grew up accustomed to television sets with just three knobs, all located on the set itself: an on-off button, a volume control knob, and a channel selector knob. My wife and I can’t figure out the 41-button remote now required just to turn on our modern television set, and we have to phone our 25-year-old sons to talk us through it if they don’t happen to be at home with us. Another external factor favoring our cult of youth is the competitiveness of modern American society, which gives an advantage to younger people blessed with speed, endurance, strength, agility, and quick reflexes. Still another factor is that so many Americans are children of recent immigrants who were born and grew up abroad. Those children saw that their older parents couldn’t speak English without an accent and actually did lack important knowledge about the functioning of American society.
That is, I don’t deny that there are some valid reasons for modern Americans to value youth. However, our cult of youth spills over into spheres that seem arbitrary and, in some cases, seriously unfair. We tend to consider young people beautiful or handsome, but why should yellow, brown, or black hair be admired as more beautiful than silver or white hair? Television, magazine, and newspaper advertisements for clothing invariably depict young models; the thought of advertising a man’s shirt or a woman’s dress with a 70-year-old model seems strange—but why? An economist might answer that younger people change and buy clothes more often, and have less developed brand loyalty, than do older people. By that economic interpretation, the ratio of 70-year-old clothing models to 20-year-old clothing models should be roughly equal to the ratio of clothing purchases and brand changes by 70-year-olds to clothing purchases and brand changes by 20-year-olds. But the proportion of clothing purchases and brand changes by 70-year-olds surely isn’t as close to zero as is the proportion of 70-year-old clothing models. Similarly, advertisements for soft drinks, beer, and new cars invariably feature young models (Plate 23), although old people also consume soft drinks and beer and buy cars. Instead, pictures of old people are used to sell adult diapers, arthritis drugs, and retirement plans (Plate 24).