The age of wisdom: why our elders were the best of us in 2020
Among the many effects of the pandemic is the attention that has been given to senior citizens, who have been disproportionately affected by death and illness from Covid-19. Broadly speaking, the focus has revealed two opposing impulses: to protect and to abandon. But neither reaction necessarily involves respect for the older population.
One of the hallmarks of western modernity is the celebration of the new and a concomitant devaluing of the old. It’s all part of a highly successful system of thought, at least in material terms, that prioritises progress over tradition. Inevitably, the new is associated with youth, the outdated with age. Thus the solemn duty of the elderly is to get out of the way, and allow the next generation to make its mark.
Taken to its extreme, this kind of thinking views the pandemic as a natural culling process. Former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott (63) found himself in hot water when he suggested families ought to be allowed to make elderly relatives as comfortable as possible while “nature takes its course”.
But at what point does an elderly life become expendable, and what constitutes elderly? Last week, Condé Nast announced that, at 71, Anna Wintour, the veteran Vogue editor with permafix sunglasses, is to take control of global content for the company that prides itself on spotting new trends. Angela Davis, the black radical activist, made it on to Time’s list of the 100 most influential people at the age of 76.
Mick Jagger, that eternal symbol of snake-hipped revolt, is 77. He hasn’t made a great record in decades but few of his fans are eager for him to seek comfort while nature has its ruthless way. The Rolling Stones, featuring Charlie Watts (79) on drums, were due to tour North America last summer but had to cancel as a result of the pandemic.
Another rock star who tours so much that he seems to be without a home is the Nobel laureate Bob Dylan. His last album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, released in June, constitutes one of his many returns to form over a 60year career. He will be 80 in May, but he can still conjure musical and lyrical innovation from simple forms that in younger performers can seem tired and predictable. When you look at his evolution into a wryly sagacious nonstop performer, it almost makes sense of those enigmatic and oft-quoted lines from My Back Pages: “Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now”.
Dylan is a year older than Joe Biden (78), who, despite the tireless squealing of Donald Trump (74), will become the 46th president of the United States on 20 January 2021. Yet the fact that the presidential campaign was fought by two septuagenarians is widely seen as a sign of the weakness of the American political system, a predicament to be lamented and corrected. Biden has been mocked for his mental lapses and speech gaffes, with the implication that “the leader of the free world” is an undeclared dementia case. But Biden, a self-described “gaffe machine”, has a history of foot-in-mouth moments going back five decades.
The Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, is 80, while Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, is 78. Janet Yellen, who is lined up to become the next Secretary of the Treasury, is a sprightly 74. Critics say that the American political system is now reminiscent of those stiff-faced gerontocracies that used to dominate the Soviet and Chinese politburos during the heyday of the cold war.
But does age have to signify sclerotic conservatism and a lack of imagination?
There’s little doubt that Trump has been a malign force in American and international politics, but he has also been radical, if only in his neglect of governmental duty. What he could never be accused of is possessing an excess of maturity. No one can look at his behaviour and wish that it were morechildish.
It’s a scientific fact that, by and large, we lose capacity in certain mental functions – like memory – as we get older. The compensation is that, notwithstanding Trump’s example, experience brings wisdom. One academic study showed, for example, that people aged between 60 and 82 were better at a number of economic tests than the under-30s – these included financial literacy, debt literacy and loss aversion.
It would be strange if it were otherwise. Age not only confers a greater accumulation of experience but also a larger context in which to evaluate events. Every generation believes that it faces unprecedented challenges, which is in a sense true. But troubling and inhibiting as the coronavirus pandemic has been, it’s not quite world war two – and there’s something to be learned from those who have lived through both.
Which explains why 91-year-old Martin Kenyon became an internet sensation after he received the Pfizer/BioNTech coronavirus vaccine. Interviewed by a CNN reporter, Kenyon, who knew both Martin Luther King and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, was admirably matter-of-fact about a vital process that has been relentlessly attacked by conspiracy theorists.
By the same token, the old can survive the kind of attention that can destroy the young. When The Testaments, the long-awaited sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, was published last year to a global fanfare, its author Margaret Atwood (81) was asked what it was like to be the subject of such rock’n’roll-style idolisation. After noting that, unlike many rock stars, she hadn’t yet died of an overdose – “There’s still time,” she quipped – she said it made little real impression on her but that it would be ruinous for a 35-year-old writer. “Where do you go from there?” she asked. “In my case, we kind of know the answer. We know the plot.”
The received wisdom is that novel writing is a young person’s game. But Julian Barnes (74) is still going strong. Philip Roth wrote some of his finest work in his 70s. Joyce Carol Oates (82) shows no signs of letting up. And they’re all the junior of Edna O’Brien, who turned 90 last week.
In science, too, there are inspiring counter-examples to senescence. Last year, John Goodenough (98) won the Nobel prize for chemistry 33 years after leaving Oxford University for the University of Texas to avoid retirement. “It’s foolish to make people retire,” he said.
In a way, these people defy the prescribed rise-and-fall arc of an active life, in which we peak in middle age and begin the descent into an inert dotage or irrelevance and obscurity. They are veritable and, indeed, venerable role models, and it has been shown, in yet another study, that such models positively influence our attitudes towards age.
The age prejudice against which they work falls most visibly on women who, in the eyes of film and TV executives, are expected either to disappear from public view after the age of 40 or undergo defacing cosmetic surgery. It was good, therefore, to see Sophia Loren (86) return to film last month in the aptly titled The Life Ahead.
It’s shocking just how surprising it is to see older women on screen occupying the place long reserved for older men. Next year, Dame Helen Mirren (75) will be seen in The Duke – a film based on the true story of a taxi driver who stole a Goya portrait of the Duke of Wellington from the National Portrait Gallery and announced he would return it only if the government invested more care in the elderly. The sentiment hasn’t gone out of date.
Human beings, alas, are not like the freshwater polyp hydra, which, owing to a lack of an obvious ageing process, has been described as “biologically immortal”. Like Prufrock, we grow old, we grow old.
And as a nation and globally. we are getting ever older. The average lifespan in the UK is now 81. There are about 12 million Britons aged 65 and over.
If the world’s human population is ever going to stop growing, we will have to get used to a larger role for the aged. It doesn’t have to be a tale of woe and misplaced hearing aids. George Bernard Shaw maintained that we don’t stop playing because we grow old. We grow old because we stop playing.
This year, with all the masks, and lockdowns and self-isolations, it was made very difficult to play. All the more reason to commend those who have maintained our spirits by living long enough to know that this, too, shall pass.