retire at an arbitrary age (e.g., 65 or 60) when they would like to continue working, are capable of doing so, and may in fact be at their peak of productivity. But there seems no reason to object to people having at least the option of retiring, and having the government provide a mechanism (based on their own earnings during their working lifetime) for supporting them economically if they do choose to retire. However, one has to recognize and solve a new problem created by retirement: the problem of severing one’s life-long work relationships, and thereby falling deeper into the social isolation already arising from neolocal residence and mobility.
Yet another modern institution that solves long-standing problems of the elderly while creating new problems is the specialized facilities where old people reside and are cared for separately from their families. While monasteries and convents took in some old people already in the distant past, the first known public old folks’ home was established in Austria under Emperor Maria Theresa in 1740. Such facilities are of various types and go under different names, including retirement homes, retirement communities, nursing homes, and hospices. All of those facilities serve to deal with the modern demographic realities of more old people alive, fewer adult children potentially available to care for them, and most of those adult children working outside the house and unable to attend to an old person during the day. When facilities for the elderly work well, they can provide a new set of social relationships to replace the life-long ones lost when the old person moves into the facility. In many cases, however, they contribute to social isolation of the elderly by furnishing a place where aged parents can be left by their children and have their material needs met with more or less adequacy, but where their social needs are not met because their adult children (knowing that those material needs are being met) visit variously once a day, once a week, once a year, or never, within my circle of acquaintances.
Looming behind this increasing social isolation of the modern elderly is that they are perceived as less useful than were old people in the past, for three reasons: modern literacy, formal education, and rapid technological change. We now store knowledge in writing, and so literacy has virtually abolished the role of old people’s memories as the formerly dominant means of storing knowledge. All functioning state societies support educational systems, and in the First World school attendance of children is nearly mandatory, so that old people as a group are no longer a society’s teachers as well as no longer its memories. As regards technological obsolescence, the snail’s pace of technological change in the past meant that technologies learned by a person in childhood were still being employed unchanged 70 years later, so that the technological skills of an old person remained useful. With our rapid pace of technological innovation today, technologies become outdated within a few years, and the training that old people received 70 years ago is useless. Just to mention an example from my own experience, when I was going to school in the 1940s and early 1950s, we employed four methods for multiplying numbers: memorizing multiplication tables, which we used to multiply small two-digit numbers and obtain exact answers; long-hand multiplication on paper to obtain exact answers, but tedious for numbers of more than four digits; slide rules, to obtain quick answers accurate to about three decimal places; and tables of logarithms, to obtain answers accurate to four or five decimal places fairly quickly. I became proficient at all four methods, but all of those skills of mine are now useless, because my sons’ generation uses pocket calculators yielding answers accurate to seven decimal places within a few seconds. My abilities to build a vacuum-tube radio and to drive a manual-shift car have also become obsolete. Much else that I and my contemporaries learned in our youth has become equally useless, and much that we never learned has become indispensable.
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
