There’s No Shame in Getting Older

T he World Health Organization is currently celebrating the Decade of Healthy Ageing, producing numerous reports on the problems faced by elderly people in youth-oriented Western societies. The WHO intends to tackle what it regards as the problem of “ageism” in the way it tackles everything else: from a social democratic perspective, treating the elderly as the latest minority group in need of special favors.

But while the WHO’s misguided cure for ageism essentially amounts to raising everyone’s taxes in order to subsidize pensioners, the diagnosis itself is not without merit.

When I was a child, it was fashionable among older people to say that youth is a mental state — that having a youthful mind is fundamentally what makes one young. Strictly speaking, it was nonsense, but since the aim was to encourage older people not to lose heart as they became weaker and more frail, I accepted the statement’s value. But more than 40 years later, I’ve been diagnosed with sciatica, I have the temperament of a gremlin caught in the rain, and nothing and nobody is going to convince me that aging is merely an attitude.

If one looks at old photographs of their family members who were 40 in the mid-to-late 20th century, many would get the impression that they were actually 60. That’s because today, the West has conditioned itself to avoid the outward signs of aging — sometimes to unhealthy extremes. We dress as though we were younger, apply cosmetic treatments for every minor flaw, and when those are no longer enough, resort to AI filters so that our photo albums continue to portray us as 30-somethings — even if we need a walker once the photo shoot is over. The glorification of eternal youth and the disdain for old age have been marching hand in hand for years to bring us to this point.

Paradoxically, there have never been so many elderly people in the world. And the elderly’s share of the global population is set to continue rising: According to the UN’s World Population Ageing 2019 report, by 2050, 25 percent of the population of Europe and North America is expected to be aged 65 or older. And yet, never before have people been so stigmatized simply for refusing to erase the marks of age from their bodies. Social media, of course, amplifies the idea of youth as a valuable form of social capital that must be protected. Young people are overrepresented on social-media platforms, just as they are in the entertainment industry.

In Ancient Greece, the culture from which Western civilization ultimately derives, the elderly were venerated and regarded as wise, as reflected in Plato’s association of old age with maturity of judgment. There is something mythical about this idea, of course, because we all know remarkably bright young people and elderly people who are anything but wise; indeed, some famous families demonstrate well that lack of wisdom can transcend age (just look at the Bidens). Yet the role of the elderly remains important, and attempts to marginalize them, as though old age were something shameful, impoverish us. A society that grants too much influence to the young at the expense of the old eventually loses its balance. It becomes more susceptible to radicalism, to foolish decisions driven by instinct, to unrestrained ambition, and to manipulation by those who pull the strings of social engineering. Perhaps we have already reached that point.

What does a culture lose when it ceases to regard old age as a source of symbolic authority? What do we miss when we elevate youth to be the final destination rather than the starting point?

Let us look at those moments in history when the elderly enjoyed the authority, respect, and standing they had earned. I mentioned classical antiquity earlier, but there is no need to go back that far. In the United States of the 1990s, it was still common to find elderly figures serving as role models in music, film, and literature. But today, sadly, influential elderly people seem to appear mainly in the race for the White House — which may be the one place we do not necessarily want them.

Scientists often point to the astonishing balance that God built into nature; consider Isaac Newton’s view that the harmony and precision of the celestial orbits reveal the work of a supreme and intelligent Creator. This God-given equilibrium is true of society as well. The young bring enthusiasm that older people sometimes lack, but the old bring the composure, patience, and wisdom that help the young restrain their impulses and mature with practical judgment and intelligence. Disrupting that balance is a recipe for serious social dysfunction.

Sociological literature, moreover, has much to say about the ways in which our appearance attempts to convey a message about ourselves to others. This applies not only to clothing but also to the way we style our hair, how we shave, or even the ease with which we submit our noses to the plastic surgeon’s knife. Zygmunt Bauman, in his theory of “liquid modernity,” found something deeply disordered in this obsessive pursuit of beauty: “Beauty has suffered the same fate as all the other ideals that used to motivate human restlessness and rebellion,” he writes in Wasted Lives. “The search for ultimate harmony and eternal duration has been reinterpreted simply as a misguided preoccupation. Values are values insofar as they are suitable for instant, on-the-spot consumption.”

While respecting individual aesthetic choices, it is tragic that only a minority are willing to accept the challenge of aging without concealing the marks that life leaves upon the body. Sociology argues that these trends reflect deeper movements that affect our innermost selves. “Identity over time is a fundamental trait of the person as we understand it; moreover, it presupposes self-attribution,” Roger Scruton wrote in On Human Nature. “The concept of identity over time is vital for our interpersonal relationships. By holding each other accountable, we assume an identity in relation to the person we were in the past.”

And this doesn’t even venture into the realm of illness and suffering, which would inevitably lead us to the subject of euthanasia laws, and to the manner by which the elderly’s inevitable loss of the physical and mental capacities of youth is increasingly being used as a pretext by some of the most immoral governments to put the elderly to death. In countries like Canada, the Netherlands, and Belgium, social pressure toward assisted suicide is already growing to levels comparable to those faced by mothers carrying babies whose lives are not expected to be saved. Growing pushes toward euthanasia, of course, conveniently serve to ease the burden on pension and social security systems. The takeaway here is clear: Social democracy is a wolf in sheep’s clothing that always ends up leading somewhere sinister.

The proscription of the outward signs of old age represents a betrayal of what the fathers of conservatism believed kept a society alive. “Society is indeed a contract,” wrote Edmund Burke in Reflections on the Revolution in France. “It is a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” Everyone must be present when that contract is signed.

Finally, we cannot ignore that behind the fear of old age lies a fear of loneliness. That, too, is a ticking time bomb. One way or another, we are all contributing to the West’s march toward its great frustration: There are more old people than ever before, yet a greater desire than ever to deny the tragic beauty of old age.

There is a greater need than ever for the virtues of the elderly — wisdom, experience, and composure. Yet we idolize the defining traits of youth more than ever before — immediacy, instinct, and instant gratification. Youth is all well and good, but the real achievement of the game of life is growing old with dignity.