Theodore Roszak is professor of history at California State University, Hayward, and the author of the The Voice of the Earth: An exploration of ecopsychology, The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the sexual psycology of science, and Longevity Revolution: As boomers become elders. His fiction includes The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein and most recently The Devil and Daniel Silverman, which will be published in January 2003. He is 68
WHEN my home state of California established an official Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem in 1987, it became the butt of jokes around the world. Could making people feel better about themselves actually reduce social ills such as crime, drug abuse and teenage pregnancy? It seemed too simplistic to be true. But now we have good reason to believe that an improved self-image can bring great benefits – at least for one long-suffering minority.
Research published this month suggests that people who are upbeat about ageing may live longer. Becca Levy, an epidemiologist at Yale University, and her colleagues studied the results of a questionnaire circulated some 23 years ago by researchers in Ohio that asked people if they agreed with statements such as, “As you get older, you are less useful.” They then looked at the subjects’ subsequent lifespans. They discovered that, having accounted for other factors such as health, age, gender, loneliness and socioeconomic status, people who had a positive perception of ageing lived 7.5 years longer on average than those who subscribed to a negative stereotype. That’s a bigger gain than you’d get from lowering your blood pressure or cholesterol levels, or even from never having smoked (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol 83, p 261).
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But as Levy points out, her study has its downside. It underscores how demoralising the experience of ageing has become in the Western world. Both physically and psychologically, industrialisation has punished no group more severely than the elderly. Lacking agility and stamina, the old were the first to be ejected from the industrial workforce. Then, as the scattered and powerless dependents of hard-pressed children, they were the last to be granted any form of social security. Until well into the 20th century, most of what we thought we knew about old people came from studies of dispirited survivors confined to workhouses or nursing homes, human refuse heaps whose residents, unsurprisingly, showed up as a drain upon the wealth of nations.
As recently as 1975, the American gerontologist Robert Butler, writing on the plight of the elderly, called old age “a tragedy”. Butler’s book won a Pulitzer Prize, but he could offer no good answer to the question he raised in the title: Why Survive?
This dismal perception of old age underlies the increasing alarm about the growing size of the world’s elderly population. Looking into the future, worried economists and politicians see a “grey wave” of decrepit paupers and greedy geezers descending upon us, a dependency load they believe the working population will never be able to support. Ben Wattenberg of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC calls global ageing “the real population bomb”. As he puts it, “I am not a catastrophe-monger, but it is a hell of a lot bigger problem than too many people.” Similarly Peter Peterson, Secretary of Commerce under President Nixon and now head of the ultra-conservative lobby group the Concord Coalition in Washington DC, warns that unless we do something quickly (like rationing health care to those over 75), people everywhere will find themselves living in “a nation of Floridas”. What could be worse?
Critics like Peterson believe the greying of the modern world may lead to warfare between young and old. They fail to see that it stems not simply from what the old are doing – living as long as medical science will let them – but from what the young are not doing, namely reproducing in sufficient numbers to keep population levels stable. It seems we need another baby boom to avoid a population crash. UN forecasts predict that, over the next two generations, four out of every five women in the world will have two children or fewer, well below the replacement rate (91av, 20 July, p 38).
As things now stand in the developed world, every sucessive younger generation will form a smaller part of the total population. But every child born into that baby-busted future will inherit a life expectancy that grows longer by two years per decade. The Harvard demographer Joel Cohen, who expects societies everywhere – including many Third World countries – to continue making “Methuselah’s choice” (smaller families, longer lives), predicts that by 2050 there will be three Americans over the age of 60 for every one below the age of four.
Conservatives are especially dismayed by the rise of the wrinklies, though their fears are more ideological than economic. They recognise that the cost of providing pensions and healthcare for an ageing society will dramatically inflate the cost of welfare-state programmes. In the US, a new school of “generational accountants” has reached apocalyptic conclusions about ageing, predicting that this liability will devour all public revenues and burden future generations with a tax load amounting to 70 or 80 per cent of their earnings. The Institute of Public Policy Research in London has similarly described Britain’s pension plan as “unsustainable”.
Fears like these are already producing policies to boost birth rates. In Japan, where the fertility rate is down to 1.38 children per woman, the toy manufacturer Bandai is offering its workers a million yen for every baby born after the family’s second child. The government is supplementing these bonuses with childcare subsidies. The Germans are offering similar inducements to curtail their birth dearth. And the Czech Republic is running anti-contraception ads advising couples to “stop taking care”.
It is not difficult to understand why a greying population should worry even fair-minded observers. We are entering terra incognita. Our species has never lived in societies where there were more people above the age of 50 than below. In times past, such a demographic distribution would unquestionably have been unaffordable. But then there was no chance of such numbers surviving into old age. Along with the newborn, they were the first to be carried off by famine, pestilence, harsh weather and social disruption. It was only when we entered the later industrial period, at the start of the 20th century, that the basic economic condition of the elderly changed for the better. The essence of industrialism, after all, is the replacement of human labour with machine power, to such an extent that finding jobs to offset technological unemployment is a persistent social problem.
Once one grasps these basic facts, the ageing of modern society begins to look more like a triumph than a tragedy. Another small history lesson may be in order here. Think back to the days of the dark Satanic mills. The best estimates we have tell us that average life expectancy in the early 19th century in new factory towns such as Manchester was 17, a figure that reflects a horrendous rate of infant mortality. Were we better off then, when so few lived long enough to retire? Move along 100 years. Should we have halted the progress of medical science in 1900 when average life expectancy in Western Europe reached 45? Move forward another two decades to the first great discoveries of modern nutrition. Should we perhaps have suppressed research on vitamins in order to shorten people’s lives and save their pensions?
You see the problem. Antipathy towards ageing involves the absurdity of calling into question the one indisputably good thing science and technology have brought us: longer, healthier lives for more and more people. This is not the result of some grave social miscalculation or of a single breakthrough we might now look back upon and wish away. It is the very logic of progress, the outgrowth of countless discoveries and heroic hard work on the part of scientists, reformers, public-health crusaders and do-gooders over the past two centuries. I would not be surprised if one day historians viewed the industrial revolution as the prelude to the longevity revolution that has been moving in tandem with every scientific advance. Seen in that light, longevity isn’t a cost – it’s a benefit we have paid for with every measure we have taken to make life safer and healthier.
And not simply for the old. Longevity begins in the womb. People who live longer start out as healthier babies. Connect that with another irresistible social movement – the liberation of women – and you begin to appreciate how deeply rooted the longevity revolution is. As women in industrial societies have gained access to more education and better careers, they have inevitably delayed childbearing or skipped it altogether. This is exactly what environmentalists have been crusading for ever since Paul Ehrlich began warning us about overpopulation in the 1960s. What Ehrlich and other alarmists could not foresee was the possibility that fertility and longevity are sociologically linked in ways that work to make the world’s population smaller and older.
Even now, as the demographic evidence piles up, few environmentalists have registered the connection. Perhaps that’s why they seem as troubled by the grey peril as any free market economist. One environmental spokesman I know has actually advocated “ecological suicide” – whereby people voluntarily bow out when they get to 75 – as a way of purging the planet of its ageing members.
Increasing longevity and decreasing fertility have gone hand in hand for some time. In this broader historical context, the baby boom of the post-Second World War period stands out as an aberration. But that aberration, once it embedded itself in our mass media and popular culture, created the impression that the world is, or should be, getting younger. Who could imagine that Mick Jagger or Bob Dylan would turn grey and wrinkled?
Thomas Frank, the marketing analyst, believes the 1960s and 70s were an entrepreneurial watershed. That’s when the business world achieved “the conquest of the cool”, by which he means a permanent stake in the purchasing power of the younger generation. For hucksters like Frank, 18 to 35 still rules the marketplace. In one respect he is right. “Cool” conquered our culture so totally that even intelligent observers failed to note the obvious: that given enough time – say 40 or 50 years – a big younger generation cannot help but become a big older generation.
Besides the long-term environmental benefits that zero-growth population would bring in terms of saved resources and reduced pollution, we are only just beginning to appreciate the ways in which the longevity revolution will enrich our lives. Perhaps most significantly, it will recognise healthcare as the most advanced stage of industrialisation, at last giving us a benign and humane use for our technological power. Our growing dependence on medical services for old and young alike will become what investors and workers understand the economy to be. We will view the needs of patients the way we once viewed the needs of drivers when we were a young, automotive society spreading into the suburbs. As we move out of the fast lane, we may identify “NAL”, the national life expectancy, as our leading economic indicator.
As for the cost of social programmes for the elderly, the fertility-longevity connection gives us an obvious trade-off. A birth dearth means fewer children and so lower costs for their needs. That’s an immense saving. Babies are expensive because they are total dependents. Older people are not. The entire thrust of technology has been to turn hard labour into head labour. The result is an economy in which people can serve longer. The old, far from being wholly dependent, are already staying on the job longer because so many jobs require less physical prowess. In the US, the fastest-growing employment sector is workers over 50, many of them working part-time in retail or services. Either for love or money, baby boomers are expected to work well into their seventies.
As they do so, we will reap the incalculable benefit of their skills throughout a longer active lifetime. Once again, if we free ourselves from the negative stereotype of ageing, we can begin to see the experience of our older population as one of our few increasing natural resources. Think what it will mean when the Edisons and Einsteins of the future, the doctors and technicians, the artists and engineers, have 20 or 30 more years of life to give us.
If I were asked to predict how the longevity revolution will play out over the next century, I would focus on the baby-boom generation. It is, after all, the boomers’ destiny to herald the new senior dominance. The spoiled brats of the sixties, they are usually credited with being an assertive and self-indulgent bunch, the generation that blithely redefined youth back in the glory days of Carnaby Street and the Summer of Love. They didn’t vanish in a puff of smoke after Woodstock.
Now, even as they turn grey, they seem determined to make the most of it. Witness how boomer women have reconfigured menopause into a “growth experience”. The male menopause is now coming in for the same narcissistic examination. Workshops in memory and cognitive vitality are proliferating and there are rumours of a senior Olympics. How long before we have bestsellers about the joy of arthritis? Let nature take its course, and I suspect the boomers will have little difficulty turning old age into an interesting adventure – and just possibly a noble calling.