In many societies, the power that the old generation thereby exercises is so strong that the society’s government becomes described as a “gerontocracy”—i.e., tyranny by the elderly. Examples include again the ancient Hebrews, many African herding societies, many Aboriginal Australian tribes, and (closer to home for my book readers) rural Ireland. As summarized by Donald Cowgill, “Here [in Ireland] it is customary for an older man to retain ownership and control of the family farm until very late in his life. Meanwhile his sons continue to work as unpaid family laborers, totally dependent upon the farmer for economic support and unable to marry because of the lack of an independent means of supporting a family. In the absence of a definite and unambiguous system of inheritance, the father may play one child against another, using the prospect of inheritance as ‘a form of blackmail’ to keep the children (in their 30’s or 40’s) submissive to his will. Ultimately he may turn the farm over to a son, being careful to reserve the ‘west room’—the most spacious and best furnished—for himself and his wife and to provide for financial support for the rest of their lives.”
In light of our own familiarity with the power that the elderly enjoy in our society through their property rights, we can now better understand our error in our initial surprise at the fact that the elderly in traditional societies succeed in enforcing food taboos and access to young wives. When I first heard of those customs, I found myself wondering, “Why doesn’t an individual young tribesman just grab and eat food delicacies like marrow and venison, and marry a beautiful young woman of his choice rather than wait until age 40?” The answer is: he doesn’t, for the same reason that young adults in our society rarely succeed in seizing property from their parents against the parents’ will. Our young adults don’t, because they would be opposed not just by their weak old parents but by our entire society that enforces the rules. And why don’t all young tribesmen rise simultaneously in revolt and say, “We are changing the rules, so that from now on we young men can eat marrow”? Young tribesmen don’t, for the same reason that all young Americans don’t rise in revolt and change the inheritance rules: in any society it’s a lengthy, difficult process to change the basic rules, old people have plenty of leverage for opposing rule changes, and learned deference and respect for the elderly don’t vanish overnight.
Better or worse today?
Compared to the status of the elderly in traditional societies, what has changed today? One set of factors has changed enormously for the better, but many other factors have changed for the worse.
The good news is that older people enjoy on the average much longer lives, far better health, far more recreational opportunities, and far less grief from deaths of their children than at any previous time in human history. Life expectancy averaged over 26 First World countries is 79 years, with the highest expectancy being 84 years in Japan—approximately double the value in traditional societies. The well-known reasons for this surge in lifespan are public health measures (such as provision of clean drinking water, screening of windows, and immunizations) to combat infectious diseases—plus modern medicine, more efficient food distribution to combat famine (Chapters 8 and 11), and (believe it or not, even despite two world wars) proportionately reduced death tolls from war in societies with state government compared to traditional societies (Chapter 4). Thanks to modern medicine and means of travel, old people can now enjoy a much higher quality of life today than in the past. For example, I recently returned from a safari in Africa on which 3 of the 14 other participants were between 86 and 90 years old and still able to undertake moderate walks. Far more people live to see their great-grandchildren—57% of those American men and 68% of those American women who live past the age of 80—than in the past. Over 98% of First World babies survive infancy and childhood, while the proportion is as low as 50% in traditional societies. Hence the formerly common experience of grieving over the death of one’s child is now rare in the First World.
Offsetting that good news is much bad news, some of it a straightforward consequence of demography. The ratio of old people to children and productive young workers has soared, because birth rates have dropped while survival rates of the elderly have risen. That is, the population pyramid is becoming inverted: we used to have lots of young people and few old people, but at present we have lots of old people and fewer babies. It’s no consolation to us of the current generation to reflect that it won’t be so bad 80 years from now, when today’s shrinking cohort of babies finally becomes a shrinking cohort of the elderly. For instance, the percentage of the whole population that is at least 65 years old is now only 2% in the poorest countries, but 10 times higher in some First World countries. Never before has any human society had proportionally so many old people to deal with.
One obvious negative consequence of those demographic facts is that society’s burden of supporting the elderly is heavier, because more older people require to be supported by fewer productive workers. That cruel reality lies at the root of the much-discussed looming crisis of funding the American Social Security system (and its European and Japanese counterparts) that provides pensions for retired workers. If we older people keep working, we prevent our children’s and our grandchildren’s generation from getting jobs, as is happening right now. If, instead, we older people retire and expect the earnings of the shrinking younger cohort to continue to fund the Social Security system and pay for our leisure, then the financial burden of the younger cohort is far greater than ever before. And if we expect to move in with them and let them privately support and care for us in their homes, they have other ideas. One wonders whether we are returning to a world where we shall be reconsidering choices about end of life made by traditional societies—such as assisted suicide, encouraged suicide, and euthanasia. In writing these words, I am certainly not recommending these choices; I am instead observing the increasing frequency with which these measures are being discussed, carried out, and debated by legislators and courts.
Another consequence of the population pyramid’s inversion is that, insofar as older people continue to be valuable to society (e.g., due to their long and varied experience), any individual old person is less valuable because so many other old individuals offer that same value. That 80-year-old Rennell Island woman who remembered the hungi kengi would have been less useful if there had been a hundred other hungi kengi observers still alive.
Aging plays out differently for men and for women. While women in the First World enjoy on the average longer lives than do men, that of course means a much higher likelihood of a woman becoming a widow than of a man becoming a widower. For instance, in the U.S. 80% of older men are married and only 12% are widowers, while less than 40% of older women are married and over half are widows. That’s partly because of longer female life expectancy, but also because men tend to be older than their wives at the time of marriage, and because widowed men are more likely to remarry (to considerably younger new wives) than are widowed women.