In praise of the aged

Old people belong to the present, not to the past

Somehow, old people are always with us. Despite their individual tendency to expire, the elderly as a class never quite die out. And it’s only ever a matter of time before the young find out the awful truth about where the neverending supply of old people comes from.

Ageing is wrapped up in tragedies, like life in general. But also like life in general, it’s a blessing, not a curse – especially, as the proverb reminds us, compared to the alternative. More than that, old people are a blessing to the young. They provide love and encouragement, practical guidance and perspective. More axiomatically, they are a source of wisdom. And not just ancient wisdom, but living knowledge.

Two Old Ones Eating Soup (Goya, c. 1819–1823)

People who lived through the turbulent 20^th century, or at least its latter half, are an invaluable supplement to anything we can read about it. Their memories of another way of life, of whole other ways of thinking, are an incredible living resource for anyone with the sense to make use of them. (I say ‘they’, even as edge towards their ranks. Some of us might stagger cluelessly through much of our lives, but we still know a thing or two after half a century of it.)

So how is it that something that should be so obvious, that is so axiomatic, also seems so countercultural? I mean, the wisdom of the old? Those pitiable refugees from the benighted past? With their reactionary politics, their outdated attitudes, their failure to get it? They can keep their wisdom! Our culture values youth over age, the new over the old, the present over the past.

Sometimes there’s an ambiguity, though. Is it the particular character of the past that is at fault? Racist and sexist, analogue and offline, generally unenlightened? Or is it that novelty has a virtue of its own, like youth itself? That youth brings vitality, passion and moral clarity, while age means deterioration and decay? In which case, are the enlightened people and ideas of the 2020s destined by the 2050s to become the outdated, reactionary people and ideas of the past?

‘I hope I die before I get old,’ someone once sang. Someone who is now 80. And therein lies more than an irony. It’s not just that, 50 years on, old Roger Daltrey happened to be an outspoken supporter of Brexit, and as such – from the perspective of those who disdained it – an all-too typical representative of ‘his generation’. It’s also that his generation started it. They handed a loaded gun to their own future detractors.

‘We don't trust anybody over 30’

The idea that young people are the ones who really ‘get it’ and whose opinions really matter – and that to be old is to be stale and irrelevant – is unmistakably a legacy of the baby boomers. In the postwar West, it is perhaps true that successive generations of young people have rebelled against the social attitudes and musical tastes of their parents and grandparents. But the mythologisation of this process into something like a universal law was the work of the boomers, albeit one enthusiastically taken up by subsequent generations, mine included.

Zooming out to the big picture, though – historically and globally – it is obviously not true that the kids always rebel against their parents. In most societies, young people seek recognition as adults – often through rites of passage that are themselves passed down through the generations – so they can participate fully in the society shaped by their forebears. The norm is for the young to claim their inheritance, not to trash it.

It’s true that the young have often played an important role in transforming societies, sometimes even through revolution, but typically they have done so alongside their older peers in pursuit of political ends shared by very differently defined demographics. When generational politics have come into it – most notoriously in the Chinese Cultural Revolution – things have not gone well.

The multifaceted Western boomer ‘revolution’ of the 1960s also took an explicitly generational form. As the American radical Jack Weinberg famously said, ‘We don't trust anybody over 30’. This is arguably why the movement failed where it had merit and succeeded where it did not. A rebellion against the stultifying conformism of the postwar order turned its fire on traditional institutions like the family and religion with little nuance or discrimination – dare I say the virtues of age? – and in doing so undermined the most important bulwarks against the encroaching logic of the market. Thus, a supposedly anti-capitalist movement only accelerated the corrosive effects of capitalism on social solidarity.

At the same time, its anti-traditional, rationalistic and individualistic orientation reinforced the technocratic logic that dominated the increasingly bureaucratic state as well as the burgeoning corporation. No wonder many of the movement’s leaders went onto become successful politicians, business leaders, law partners and university administrators. The architects of the 21^st century’s own brand of stultifying conformism.

This will seem unfair. The boomers also challenged real injustices and largely won equality for women and minorities. They deserve credit for that much at least. (Which is more than can be said for my Generation X peers who succeeded them in positions of influence.) Conservatives who blame ‘the sixties’ for the state we’re in today are rightly challenged to say where they would draw the line. Do they want to turn the clock back on women’s equality and the decriminalisation of homosexuality? Overwhelmingly not.

The issue is not so much what happened in the sixties as the pattern that was set: the contempt for the past and the ambiguity about what’s wrong with traditional ways of seeing things. Older people today who ‘don’t get’ the trans phenomenon are often compared to their forebears who objected to gay liberation. ‘Progress’ is thus cast as a virtue in itself. But is it? If the acceptance of homosexuality is to serve as a paradigm, we should be clearer about what it meant or means. Is it acknowledging that being gay or lesbian is a normal variation in human sexuality that can be more or less accommodated within traditional norms? Or is it wielding queerness as a battering ram against the very idea of norms? These are two very different ideas.

The problem with a generational conception of progress is that it’s always going to put a premium on novelty. On the next frontier. It has no stable conception of the good life against which to judge whether something amounts to progress or not.

This is why it is useful to have a sense of what past generations valued. Whether we agree with it or not, it at least gives us something to think with. Books provide an invaluable window into the past, but the elderly are the closest thing we have to living eye witnesses to older ways of thinking, which is something else entirely.

Now, older people – and perhaps especially the boomers, for obvious reasons – are often reluctant to seem judgemental. You have to watch their expressions carefully, but if you do, you find they don’t always think what you think they think. You can learn a lot.

The past in the present

In his inaugural lecture as Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University in 1954, CS Lewis offered himself not merely as an authority on his subject, but as a specimen, one of the last ‘native speakers’ of what he called Old Western Culture. As such, he was probably less worried than some of his successors about seeming judgemental, but what he really had in mind was the kind of thing he would tell students and fellow scholars ‘without knowing he was telling’ them.

Lewis believed the gulf between himself and succeeding generations was unusually, even uniquely, significant. Born in 1898, his education and reading made him even ‘older’; effectively a lost native of a civilisation that went back millennia but, he argued, had disappeared over the course of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. The political, artistic, religious and technological changes had been unprecedented. (Whether a greater gulf lies between 1954 and our own time might be the subject of a future essay, but I am doubtful.)

Nevertheless, even natives from less distant shores can be valuable specimens. And surely one of the great virtues of the university even now is the opportunity for the young to learn from older scholars who learned from others who learned from others going back through the generations. Ideally, at least, knowledge of the past and of past ways of thinking and understanding is thus passed on through a kind of apostolic succession.

Of course, many disciplines proceed through innovation, new ideas superseding the old, but it is surely a mistake to imagine that is the only worthwhile model of scholarship, or that we have nothing to learn from ‘outdated ideas’.

Some argue for constantly updating reading lists in the arts and humanities on the grounds that nobody reads outdated science textbooks. The two things are not the same, of course. But if anything, perhaps people should read old science books, and at least try to ensure the thinking they embody – even if misguided – is not lost to us forever.

Indeed, some disciplines don’t really progress at all, at least in their own terms. The paradigm of scientific progress is often misapplied to philosophy and especially ethics. People fault Plato and Aristotle, for example, for not ‘knowing’ slavery was wrong, as if later generations discovered the wrongness of slavery in a laboratory or a seminar room. As if its eventual abolition had been an intellectual achievement rather than a social and political one, one premised on the development of society to a level at which the abolition of slavery was thinkable in a way it was not in the ancient world but certainly was by the time of modern slavery in the Americas. (In ancient slave societies, the unfairness of slavery might indeed have been apparent to many; of course, we no longer tolerate any kind of unfairness.)

Importantly, it’s not only knowledge that is passed from one generation to the next, in universities and elsewhere. It’s also social and cultural attitudes and political ideas. Including woke ones, the latest iteration of a tradition that goes back at least to the 1960s. But even the boomers learned from their elders, from generations shaped in part by the experience of two world wars, and perhaps less enamoured than CS Lewis of Old Western Culture or its complicated legacy. Meanwhile, the youthful Red Guards danced to a tune called by the septuagenarian Chairman Mao.

Young people don’t invent their ideas out of nothing. Ultimately, just about all ideas come from old people, inherited and developed from even older people. The only question is which old people you take your ideas from. Tip: the ones who imagine themselves to be young or on the side of the young in a generational war are the worst old people.

It's not unusual to hear older people lamenting that, ‘our generation has made a mess of things’, and putting their hopes in the young to save themselves and the planet. To use an old-person word, this is tripe. Like young people throughout history, young people today need all the help they can get. Those of us who still can should stand up for old people, not only so they can sit down – and not only because we owe it to them, though we do – but because as long as they are with us, they have so much to offer. Sometimes by providing wisdom, admonition and even leadership. And sometimes just by being here.