Living in the age of ageism

One of the deadliest forms of discrimination and one that is hardly talked about except in the clichéd and sentimental terms scripted by popular movies is ageism.

I was in my early 20s when I came across Simone de Beauvoir’s The Coming of Age (1970), a book whose compelling argument made me realize that age indeed was a category of discrimination. The book opens with the description of how two thousand five hundred years ago the young and sensitive Shakya prince Siddhartha Gautama is struck with boundless pity at the sight of age and death, something that the innocent savior of humanity had no clue about until that instant in his life.

The disabled, sexual minorities and the poor—all three of whom suffer extraordinary discrimination, at least once in a way have their spokespersons. But, not the aged, who are truly the voiceless of the world trapped in a world of shame and neglect! In fetishizing youth as commodity with economic and social value, global consumerism has turned age into a disposable good meant to be discarded or recycled as moral discourse where age is connected to disease, sin and punishment for past wrongs.

I seriously don’t believe that age is real in the same sense that it is hard for me to accept that sex, race or class are meaningful categories beyond a certain point. To me ageism was invented to justify other forms of discrimination which include violence against women and the young. That age has nothing to do with the emotional contact between people as individuals, I am certain of that.

Ageism paradoxically like sexism, racism and classism punishes where it claims to privilege. Idealization is a form of dehumanization and old people in being idealized as ‘mature,’ ‘responsible’ and the ‘voice of experience’ have been cruelly pushed into a certain pattern of behavior that is expected of them by default. The cage that is built around age is another way of constraining the creative potential of the aged. Likewise, in glorifying youthfulness, age is made to look like a tumor that must be surgically removed in order for one to have a healthy existence.

“Age, I do abhor thee; youth, I do adore thee,” says Shakespeare in one of his lesser known poems, though insights into the nature of ageing are interspersed across his work. Shakespeare recognizes that the invisible barrier separating age and youth will be a singular defining parameter of the modern world.

While modern medicine has contributed to the prolongation of age, ageism works in the direction of emotionally depriving the old, thus preventing them from having a fulfilling life. The popular American TV series of the 80s and early 90s The Golden Girls drives home the point rather well, making the viewer intensely aware of the emotional side of ageing. People are social animals because they are emotional animals. Yeats’ last poems dwell on this aspect of ageing. One of my favorite poems “The Wild Old Wicked Man” is where Yeats touches on the assertiveness of age in its attachment to flesh and blood.

Because I am mad about women
I am mad about the hills,’
Said that wild old wicked man
Who travels where God wills.
. . .
I have what no young man can have
Because he loves too much.
Words I have that can pierce the heart,
But what can he do but touch?’

Why should not old people be mad? After all we are amused and touched when we see a certain streak of madness in children and the young. Why does the madness of the aged embarrass us? If normalcy is a myth to begin with, why should the old be normal in a way that we do not expect of others? Why should the old be rational and well-behaved, clear-eyed and omniscient? Who says that age is about acting “mature?” Who has decided that age is about wisdom or youth is about innocence? Neither of them is true. The homogenization of the aged takes away the human dignity that comes with people being seen as individuals, irreducible to any one category as such. In a poem from the 1919 collection “The Wild Swans at Coole” Yeats mocks some of those pretentions associated with age. The poem is rightly titled: “The Scholars.”

Bald heads forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love’s despair
To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear.

They’ll cough in the ink to the world’s end;
Wear out the carpet with their shoes
Earning respect; have no strange friend;
If they have sinned nobody knows.
Lord, what would they say
Should their Catullus walk that way?

Though the poem is critical of the lack of emotion that the “scholars” have made a way of life by intellectualizing the emotional suffering of the young, the old are not incapable of the youthful joys connected to someone in his or her early years. Likewise, the young are not devoid of the seriousness and sense of purpose so vehemently attached to age. The prejudice works both ways: when old men become “respectable” and “learned” forgetting that they were young once upon a time; when the young reduce themselves to thinking that age is a ghost that must be combated at all costs.

The spirit or the life of the heart has nothing to do with the state of the body. Age is a state of mind or just one of those ideological clubs used to badger people we look at with suspicion or as useless burden. It does not mean I reject the coming of age or I think that my body has not altered my mind since my 20s. It means that I reject the psychological and ethical baggage dumped on my shoulders because I moved from one year to another. I don’t want ageing to be shoved down my throat in the form of learning or respectability because neither of them holds absolute value for me as a person. I need to be accepted and understood on terms that I devise for myself in relation to the rest of the world. Age is not one of the terms that I am remotely willing to consider.

Written in his fifty-ninth year, Bertrand Russell in his 1931 essay “The Menace of Old Age” is critical of the medical developments contributing to the prolongation of age and in fact takes the view that the old will come in the way of human progress which he associates with the young.

“Consequently every increase in medical skill is bound to make the world more and more conservative. Probably in another hundred years most people will be over eighty. They will be doddering, mumbling, and altogether senile, but rich, respected, and powerful. They will hold all the important posts in spite of the eagerness of young men of sixty to replace them.”

With the same note of irony, Russell continues: “I would have them (the old) transported to islands in the South Seas, where there should be no prohibition and a plentiful supply of cigars and where special newspapers should be published under a strict censorship with orders to represent that the world is going to the dogs and that in no respect is the menace of old age any improvement occurring anywhere. By this means happiness could be brought to the declining years of these victims of medical skill without their being in a position to oppress the young or to prevent the world from adjusting itself to new conditions.”

Yet, Russell himself lived a long, active and extraordinarily creative life right into his 98^th year, and his “What I have Lived For” talks of the suffering of the aged. “Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be.” One of those terrible things that make a “mockery of what human life should be” is the treatment given to the aged by their children.

Societies that do not recognize the need for time and space to be given to the ageing are embarking on a suicide mission. People need the love of people and that’s what makes for common humanity. Of course I am happy that there are more and more institutionalized forms of support for those who can afford them at a point in life when one is disabled from functioning practically in everyday life. However, I genuinely feel sorry for the old who must hold on to money or property in order to ensure that their children take care of them or pay those token home or hospital visits which, given the ill-concealed indifference, actually add to emotional grief. At least the poor know their children are attached to them for reasons other than wealth. Despite being evil, poverty is not without blessings.

Individual pursuits are fine to the extent that one recognizes that there is more to life than “success” which is an ambiguous term once you dissociate it from external accomplishments. Individuals ought to measure their success as persons in how they relate to the world around them and not merely to family members or the group one belongs to. There might be no economic or social dividends—but, so what! A fulfilled life cannot be measured only in economic and social terms. Human and emotional dividends are earned through the contribution made by individuals to the goodwill of a society as a whole.

In embracing age as being continuous with childhood and youth and in creating a system of genuine caring by making space for the aged in homes and in social worlds inhabited by everyone else, rather than in hospitals or institutions, we create the goodwill that justifies the need to win the survival battle in the face of a meaningless universe.

Prakash Kona is a writer, teacher and researcher who lives in Hyderabad, India. He is Professor at the Department of English Literature, The English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), Hyderabad.