The elderly
While I was visiting a village on the Fijian island of Viti Levu, I fell into conversation with a local man who had visited the United States and told me his impressions. There were some features of American life that he admired or envied, but others that disgusted him. Worst of all was our treatment of the elderly. In rural Fiji old people continue to live in the village where they have spent their lives, surrounded by their relatives and life-long friends. They often reside in a house of their children, who take care of them, even to the point of pre-chewing and softening food for an old parent whose teeth have been worn down to the gum-line. In the United States, though, my Fijian acquaintance was outraged that many old people are sent to retirement homes where they are visited only occasionally by their children. He burst out accusingly to me, “You throw away your old people and your own parents!”
Among traditional societies, some accord their elderly even higher status than do Fijians, allowing the elderly to tyrannize their adult children, to control the society’s property, and even to prevent young men from marrying until their 40s. Others accord their elderly even lower status than do Americans, starving or abandoning or actively killing them. Of course, there is much individual variation within any society: I have several American friends who put their parents into a retirement home and visit them once a year or never, and another friend who published his 22nd book on his 100th birthday and celebrated the occasion in the company of all of his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, whom he also saw regularly throughout the year. But the range of variation among traditional societies in their normal practices of eldercare exceeds even the range of individual variation in the United States. I don’t know any individual American whose devoted care of his aged parents goes as far as pre-chewing their food, nor any who has strangled his aged parents and been publicly commended as a good son for doing so. The lot of the elderly is widely acknowledged to be often miserable in the United States. Is there anything that we can learn from all that variation among traditional societies, both as to what we could emulate and what we should avoid?
Before I proceed, let me deal with two objections that are often raised. One is that there isn’t a universal definition of the age at which one becomes “old”: that, too, varies among societies and with one’s personal perspective. In the United States the federal government in effect defines old age as beginning at age 65, when one becomes eligible for Social Security. When I was in my teens, I looked up to people in their late 20s as being seemingly at their peak of life and wisdom, people in their 30s as already middle-aged, and anyone from about 60 onwards as old. Now that I am 75 years old, I regard my 60s and early 70s as the peak of my own life, and old age as likely to start sometime around 85 or 90 depending on my health. In rural New Guinea, however, where relatively few people reach the age of 60, even 50-year-olds are regarded as old. I recall arriving at a village of Indonesian New Guinea where, when the local people learned that I was (then) 46 years old, they gasped out “
The other objection is related to that first objection. In countries where life expectancy is under 40, one might imagine that almost no one reaches old age as defined in the United States. Actually, in almost every New Guinea village where I have made inquiries, even if few people survive to 50 and anyone over 50 is considered a
How can we account for the wide variation among societies in their norms for treating the elderly? Part of the explanation, we shall see, involves variation among societies in material factors that make the elderly more or less useful to the society, and that make it more or less feasible for younger people to support their elderly. The other part of the explanation involves variation among societies in cultural values, such as respect for the elderly, respect for privacy, emphasis on the family versus the individual, and self-reliance. These values are only partly predictable from the material factors that make old people useful or just a burden.
Expectations about eldercare
Let’s start off with a naive expectation about eldercare. Although the expectation is obviously incomplete, formulating it will nevertheless help us by forcing us to ask why and in what respects it breaks down. A layperson with a rosy view of life might reason: parents and their children do and should love each other. Parents devote their best efforts to their kids and make sacrifices for them. Kids respect and are grateful to the parents who raised them. Hence we expect kids throughout the world to take good care of their old parents.
A naive evolutionary biologist might reach that same heart-warming conclusion by a different chain of reasoning. Natural selection is about passing on genes. The most direct way for people to pass on their genes is through their children. Hence natural selection should favor parents whose genes cause them to behave in ways that promote the survival and reproduction of their children. Similarly, cultural selection is about passing on learned behaviors, and parents serve as behavioral models for their children. It therefore makes sense for parents to make sacrifices for their kids, even to sacrifice their own lives, if they thereby promote the survival and reproductive success of their kids. Conversely, older parents are likely to have accumulated resources, status, knowledge, and skills that their kids haven’t yet accumulated. Kids know that it’s in their parents’ genetic and cultural interests to help their kids by passing on those resources, status, knowledge, and skills. Therefore, kids reason, it’s also in the kids’ interest to take care of their elderly parents so that the parents can continue to help them. More generally, in a society of inter-related individuals, one expects the younger generation as a whole to take care of their elders, who share culture and many genes with members of the younger generation.
However, we know that these rosy predictions are only partly true. Yes, parents usually do take care of their children, who in turn often take care of their parents, and the younger generation as a whole often takes care of its elders. But these conclusions don’t hold for at least some kids in most societies, nor for most kids in some societies. Why not? What was wrong with our reasoning?
Our naive error (which evolutionary biologists now avoid) was that we failed to consider conflicts of interest between generations. Parents shouldn’t always make unlimited sacrifices, kids shouldn’t always be grateful, love has its limits, and people aren’t Darwinian calculating devices that constantly evaluate optimum transmission of their genes and culture and behave accordingly. All people, including old people, want a comfortable life for themselves, not just for their kids. There often are limits to the sacrifices that parents are willing to endure for their kids. Conversely, kids often are impatient to enjoy a comfortable life. They reason, quite correctly, that the more parental resources that the parents themselves consume, the fewer resources will remain available for the kids to enjoy. Even insofar as kids do behave instinctively as Darwinian calculating devices, natural selection teaches us that kids
Why abandon or kill?
In what sorts of society “should” (by this reasoning) and do children (and the younger generation in general) neglect, abandon, or kill their parents (and the older generation in general)? The many reported cases involve societies for which old people become a serious handicap endangering the whole group’s safety. This situation arises under two different sets of circumstances. One set applies to nomadic hunter-gatherers who must
