The World Until Yesterday

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 Verklarung [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.

Devising new living conditions for our elderly, appropriate to the changing modern world, remains a major challenge for our society. Many past societies made better use of their elderly, and gave them better lives, than we do today. We can surely find better solutions now.

PART FOUR DANGER AND RESPONSE

CHAPTER 7 Constructive Paranoia

Attitudes towards danger A night visit A boat accident Just a stick in the ground Taking risks Risks and talkativeness

Attitudes towards danger

On one of my first trips to New Guinea, when I was still inexperienced and incautious, I spent a month with a group of New Guineans, studying birds on a forest-covered mountain. After a week camped at low elevation and inventorying birds there, I wanted to identify the bird species living at higher elevation, so we moved our gear a few thousand feet up the mountain. For the campsite at which we would be based for the next week, I selected a gorgeous location in tall forest. It was on a long ascending ridge at a point where the ridge flattened and became broader, offering lots of gentle terrain nearby in which I could comfortably walk around and watch birds. From a nearby stream, we could obtain water without having to go far. The campsite was at one side of the flat ridge crest, overlooking a steep drop-off into a deep valley over which I would be able to watch soaring hawks, swifts, and parrots. As the place to erect our tents, I chose the base of a glorious giant of a forest tree, with a thick straight trunk covered with moss. Delighted at the prospect of spending a week in such beautiful surroundings, I asked my New Guinea companions to build a platform for our tents.

To my astonishment, they became agitated and refused to sleep there. They explained that the tall tree was dead, so it might fall over on our camp and kill us. Yes, I did see that the tree was dead, but I was still surprised at their overreaction and objected, “It’s a huge tree. It looks still solid. It’s not rotten. No wind could blow it over, and there isn’t wind here anyway. It will be years before this tree falls over!” But my New Guinea friends remained frightened. Rather than sleep in the shelter of a tent under that tree, they declared that they would instead sleep exposed out in the open, far enough away that the tree wouldn’t hit and kill them if it fell.

I thought then that their fears were absurdly exaggerated and verged on paranoia. But as my months of camping in New Guinea forests went on, I noticed that, at least once on almost every day, I heard a tree falling somewhere in the forest. I listened to stories of New Guineans killed by tree-falls. I reflected that these New Guineans spent much of their lives camped in the forest—perhaps a hundred nights a year, or about 4,000 nights over their 40-year expected lifespan. I eventually carried out the math. If you do something that involves a very low probability of killing a person—say, just once in a thousand times that you do that something—but you do it a hundred times per year, then you are likely to die in about 10 years, instead of living out your expected lifespan of 40 years. That risk of falling trees doesn’t deter New Guineans from going into the forest. But they do reduce the risk by being careful not to sleep under dead trees. Their paranoia makes perfect sense. I now think of it as “constructive paranoia.”

My choice of this oxymoronic, seemingly unpleasant term for a quality that I admire is intentional. We normally use the word “paranoia” in a pejorative sense, to include greatly exaggerated and baseless fears. That’s how New Guineans’ reactions to camping under dead trees initially struck me, and it’s true that usually a particular dead tree wouldn’t fall on the particular night that a person chose to camp under it. But, in the long run, that seeming paranoia is constructive: it’s essential to surviving under traditional conditions.

Nothing else that I have learned from New Guineans has affected me as deeply as that attitude. It’s widespread in New Guinea, and reported in many other traditional societies around the world. If there is some act that carries a low risk each time, but if you’re going to do it frequently, you had better learn to be consistently careful if you don’t want to die or become crippled at a young age. That’s an attitude that I’ve learned to adopt towards the low-risk but frequent hazards of American life, such as driving my car, standing in the shower, climbing a ladder to change a light bulb, walking up and down stairs, and walking on slippery sidewalks. My cautious behavior drives crazy some of my American friends, who consider it ridiculous. The Westerners who most share my constructive paranoia are three friends whose lifestyle made them, too, alert to the cumulative hazard of repeated low-risk events: one friend who piloted small airplanes, another who was an unarmed policeman on the streets of