What to do with older people?
In short, the status of old people in modern Western societies has changed drastically and paradoxically within the last century. We are still grappling with the resulting problems, which constitute a disaster area of modern life. On the one hand, people live longer, old people enjoy better physical health, and the rest of society can better afford to care for them than at any previous time in human history. On the other hand, old people have lost most of the traditional usefulness that they offered to society, and they often end up socially more miserable while physically healthier. Most of you readers of this book will face or already have faced these problems, either when you have to figure out what to do with your own aged parents, or when you become old yourself. What can we do? I shall offer a few suggestions from my personal observations, without pretending that they will solve this huge problem.
One suggestion involves a renewed importance of the traditional role of old people as grandparents. Until the Second World War, most American and European women of child-bearing age remained home and took care of their children. In recent decades young women have increasingly joined the workforce outside their homes, motivated by interest, economic necessity, or both. That creates the problem of child care familiar to so many young parents. While they attempt to cope by various combinations of baby-sitters and day-care facilities, difficulties with the reliability and quality of those expedients are common.
Grandparents offer advantages for solving the baby-sitter problem for modern working couples. Grandparents are highly motivated to care for their own grandchildren, experienced from having raised their own children, able to give quality one-on-one undivided attention to a child, unlikely to quit on short notice for a better job, willing to work for no pay, and not prone to complain about pay or bonuses. Within my own circle of friends are grandfathers and grandmothers retired from many work backgrounds—physicians, lawyers, professors, business executives, engineers, and others—who love being regular care-givers for their grandchildren, while their daughters, sons, sons-in-law, and daughters-in-law hold jobs outside the house. These older friends of mine have taken on roles equivalent to those of !Kung grandparents minding grandchildren in camp, freeing up their own children to go off hunting antelope and gathering mongongo nuts. It’s a win-win situation for everyone involved: for the grandparents, the parents, and the child. But I must add a cautionary note: now that married couples often wait until their 30s or even their early 40s to become parents, the grandparents in turn may be in their late 70s or early 80s, and losing the stamina required to keep up with a young child all day long.
A second suggestion involves an upside to rapid technological and social change. While that change tends to make the skills of the elderly obsolescent in a narrow sense, it also makes their experience valuable in a broader sense, because that experience encompasses conditions unlike those prevailing today. If similar conditions should recur in the future, today’s young adults will lack personal knowledge of dealing with them. Instead, the people with the most relevant experience may be the elderly. Our elderly are like the 80-year-old Rennell Island woman whom I met, survivor of the island’s hungi kengi, whose knowledge of which fruits to eat under starvation conditions may seem useless and quaint—until the next hungi kengi strikes, when she alone will know how to cope.
Out of innumerable other possible examples illustrating that value of the memories of the elderly, I shall mention two vignettes from my own experience. First, the professor who was my tutor at college was born in 1902. I recall him telling me in 1956 how it felt to be growing up in an American city while horse-drawn transportation was being replaced by motor vehicles. My tutor and his contemporaries were at the time delighted by the change-over, because they saw that cars were making the city much cleaner (!) and quieter (!!), as horse manure and the clickety-clack of horses’ hooves against the pavement disappeared from the streets. Today, when we associate motor vehicles with pollution and noise, my tutor’s memories seem absurd, until we think of the broader message: technological change regularly brings unanticipated problems in addition to its anticipated benefits.
My other vignette took place when my then-22-year-old son Joshua and I discovered that our dinner companion at a hotel one evening was an 86-year-old ex-marine who had participated in (and was willing to talk about) the American assault on the beaches of Tarawa Atoll in the Southwest Pacific Ocean on November 20, 1943, against ferocious Japanese resistance. In one of the most fiercely contested amphibious landings of the Second World War, within three days and within an area of less than half of a square mile, 1,115 Americans and all except 19 of the 4,601 Japanese defenders were killed. I had never heard the story of Tarawa’s horrors first-hand, and I hope that Joshua will never experience such horrors himself. But perhaps he and his generation will make better choices for our country if they have learned from survivors of the last world war over 65 years ago what it was like. These two vignettes illustrate why there are programs bringing together elderly people and high school students, for the students to hear and learn from vivid accounts of events that may prove to hold lessons for them.
My remaining suggestion is to understand and make use of the changes in people’s strengths and weaknesses as they grow older. At the risk of overgeneralizing about a vast and complex subject without presenting supporting evidence, one can say that useful attributes tending to decrease with age include ambition, desire to compete, physical strength and endurance, capacity for sustained mental concentration, and powers of novel reasoning to solve circumscribed problems (such as the structure of DNA and many problems of pure mathematics, best left to scholars under the age of 40). Conversely, useful attributes tending to increase with age include experience of one’s field, understanding of people and relationships, ability to help other people without one’s own ego getting in the way, and powers of synthetic interdisciplinary thinking to solve complex problems involving multifaceted databases (such as the origin of species, biogeographic distributions, and comparative history, best left to scholars over the age of 40). These shifts in strengths result in many older workers choosing to devote more of their efforts to supervising, administering, advising, teaching, strategizing, and synthesizing. For instance, my farmer friends in their 80s spend less time on horseback and on tractors, more time making strategic decisions about the business of farming; my older lawyer friends spend less time in court, more time mentoring younger lawyers; and my older surgeon friends spend less time doing long or complex operations, and more time training young physicians.
The problem for society as a whole is to use older people for what they are good at and like to do, rather than requiring them to continue to put in the 60-hour work weeks of ambitious young workers, or else going to the opposite extreme of stupidly imposing policies of mandatory retirement at some arbitrary age (as remains regrettably widespread in Europe). The challenge for older people themselves is to be introspective, to notice the changes in themselves, and to find work utilizing the talents that they now possess. Consider two examples involving great musicians, both of them introspective honest people who spoke openly about what types of music they could or couldn’t write in their old age (Plates 40, 41). The composer Richard Strauss’s opera librettist, Stefan Zweig, described their first meeting, when Strauss was already 67 years old: “Strauss frankly admitted to me in the first hour of our meeting that he well knew that at 70 the composer’s musical inspiration no longer possesses its pristine power. He could hardly succeed in composing symphonic works like Till Eulenspiegel and Tod und Verklärung [his masterpieces of his 20s and 30s] because pure music requires an extreme measure of creative freshness.” But Strauss explained that he still felt inspired by situations and words, which he could still illustrate dramatically in music, because they spontaneously suggested musical themes to him. Hence his last composition, completed at age 84, and one of his greatest achievements, was his Four Last Songs for Soprano and Orchestra, with a subdued autumnal mood anticipating death, unostentatiously rich orchestration, and quotations from his own music of 58 years earlier. The composer Giuseppe Verdi intended to end his musical career with his sprawling grand operas Don Carlos and Aida, written respectively at ages 54 and 58. However, Verdi was persuaded by his publisher to write two more operas, Otello at age 74 and Falstaff at age 80, often considered his greatest works, but in a much more condensed, economical, subtle style than his earlier music.