In the September 2020 issue of Harper’s Magazine, Andrew Cockburn writes about the appalling negligence shown toward the elderly in American nursing homes. The COVID-19 pandemic has momentarily cast light on shadowy practices that have been left to fester over decades of changes to Medicare and Medicaid, and the growing rapaciousness of private equity firms. Nursing homes have become ripe for financial exploitation because of the general isolation and helplessness of the population. While many vulnerable populations have been affected by the pandemic in a mismanaged country such as the United States—prisoners, meatpackers, teachers, to name a few—the aged stand out. Cockburn observes: “As Simone de Beauvoir once wrote: ‘By the way in which a society behaves toward its old people, it uncovers the naked and often carefully hidden truths about its real principles and aims.’ The virus, it could be said, has made these truths self-evident” (49).
Late-stage capitalism produces, exploits, and discards old people. This position at the crumbling margins of social identity is not natural. It is produced by systems which seek to maximize output of goods, energy, and labor, with minimum input of those very same things. While many groups are harmed by these practices—those sidelined by race, class, sex, geography, and ability—the aged, occupy a unique position in society, insofar as senescence is the future that awaits us all. As Beauvoir states succinctly in The Coming of Age (La vieillesse) “Die early or grow old: there is no other alternative” (283).
The metaphor of entropy offers a framework for understanding some of the ways these abuses operate. Thermodynamics was born in the mid-19th century out of the study of the efficiency of machines, ultimately proving the impossibility of perpetual motion. The law of entropy measures how much thermal energy is unavailable for work in any given closed system. As a scientific law, entropy shows how time not only moves forward, but also why systems degrade without external contributions of energy. While it can be staved off locally through systemic borrowing, on a universal level, entropy increases without exception. As the origin of entropy emerged as a law describing the increase in energy unavailable to do work, studying the aged is particularly salient in showing one of the more destructive aspects of what I see as the simultaneous acceleration and denial of entropics.
Capitalism necessitates maximum extraction of energy from labor with minimum input for rejuvenation and sustenance. Neoliberalism demands that individuals take moral responsibility for their own upkeep while denying the systemic barriers prohibiting shared care and equitable distribution of resources. The elderly—particularly in the United States—are created as a class to be exploited and ultimately discarded. Responsibilization—making individuals responsible for the situation produced by economic structures—and the refusal to acknowledge and address systemic obstacles to care intersect in the exploitation and erasure of the aged.
As some contemporary disability theorists observe, given enough time, disability is inevitable. What awaits all of us is what Robert McRuer’s Crip Theory names, the “disabled community to come.” Although written in 1970, Beauvoir studied the lived experience and cultural production of the elderly in The Coming of Age and came to the same basic conclusion. Calling the lot of old people in the 20th century “scandalous,” she finds the general indifference toward elder abuse “astonishing, since every single member of the community must know that his future is in question” (216). Beauvoir highlights the repudiation of this inevitable future by expressing amazement at the mistreatment of the elderly by those who will, if they live long enough, one day find themselves in the same position. Or, as McRuer frames it, “if we live long enough, disability is the one identity we will all inhabit” (198).
Beauvoir attributes this denial to a kind of self-defense mechanism. The flat rejection of a shared human experience can be explained existentially by the fear that the other—that which limits yet defines us—inspires in patriarchal capitalist cultures. Like the feminine, old age is repugnant and abject. Yet, unlike the feminine, it crosses all borders of race, gender, and class. Beauvoir therefore studies the ways in which the aged are produced by culture so as to be its other—at once dejected and yet wholly necessary to provide the borders of social and material identity. Even more mistreated than women as described in The Second Sex, society produces and subsequently neglects the elderly, creating a group as the “other” in order to justify the systematic exploitation and abandonment of it. “As far as old people are concerned,” she writes, “society is not only guilty but downright criminal. Sheltering behind the myths of expansion and affluence, it treats the old as outcasts…condemned to poverty, decrepitude, wretchedness and despair” (2). While this cannot serve as a blanket statement applicable to all societies, it applies to wide-spread phenomena in modern America.
Whether through the intensification of work extracted from less productive bodies, the withdrawal of all money from retirement or social security, or the proliferation of companies, programs, and products solely devoted to anti-ageing propaganda, we are witness to a round-the-clock demand for vital energy that tolerates nothing short of complete commitment. Certainly, as Karyn Ball observes, the lived experiences of ageing, losing abilities and capacities, fatigue, illness, and social vulnerability, produce feelings of depletion and exhaustion. Human bodies are not infinitely resilient or adaptable, yet we live under a formulation of the body as human motor, an ideal perpetual motion machine. Moral condemnation falls on less-than maximally producing and self-reliant individuals. If one is not born fully able-bodied, then one is treated as a “drain” on the system—forced either into the abject shame of social scorn and dependency, or into producing and consuming in order to “justify” one’s place in the social network. If one is perceived to be an able-bodied worker, one is expected to continue on this path of maximum output until death—a notion wholly irrational and antithetical to the entropy law. Bodies, like all systems, eventually run out of energy to maintain themselves at maximum levels. In a deeply embodied sense then, modern labor expectations flaunt a direct denial of entropics, simultaneously forcing declining bodies to compulsory capacitation, and people in poorer economic brackets into maximal spending of limited wealth.
Beauvoir did not envision the ways in which capitalism would morph to fight against its own inherent entropy by demanding the extension of labor beyond standard retirement and the predatory practices seeking to exploit the assets of the elderly. The current shifts in American politics to consolidate wealth into the hands of a privileged—and distinctly ageing—few function as an open acknowledgement of systemic collapse and the cynical disavowal of that very knowledge. The so-called Baby Boomers—much maligned by the younger and less materially secure generations—are a constant lightning rod in the face of a tumultuous political and environmental situation. Although this generation is distinct in that it grew into adulthood during a time of national prosperity and relative social security, this population does not wholly experience privilege. Whether through racial or class exclusion that barred access to this wealth, or through the loss of savings due to the chaotic machinations of an avaricious market, or simply through the cruelties of medical and housing establishments that mercilessly extract money out of the elderly, the Boomers are the canaries in the coal mine of a culture that both accelerates and refuses to acknowledge entropic decline. These practices generate a vulnerable aged population that is paradoxically slandered as a threat to resources, while relentlessly badgered into spending what diminishing resources it has.
The real aims of American labor practices appear in the postponement of retirement to an indefinite future as well as the poor pay and working conditions in which the elderly often find themselves. Jessica Bruder’s 2014 article, “The End of Retirement,” explores the grueling and uncertain situation facing many American seniors who, after long lives of work, are unable to afford to retire—ever. Her analysis of the working aged—those who must continue to labor until they die (or become physically unable to)—connects to Beauvoir’s observations on the aged in France and elsewhere in the developed world of the 20th century. In an era of disappearing pensions, wage stagnation, and widespread foreclosures, Americans are working longer and leaning more heavily than ever on Social Security and temporary employment. Many workers, who once thought they would be able to retire, find themselves in a devastating situation, one in which they must work until they are no longer are able to—leaving them susceptible to homelessness, untreated illnesses, and ignominious death. In this reality, those who should be cared for as they are no longer able to be fully able-bodied workers, must take on limited seasonal work and physically taxing and low-paying jobs for minimum (or less than minimum) wages. Ageing bodies across the political, gendered, and racial spectrums become less capable of work regardless of their privileges or lack thereof. However, the unending demand to work places a disproportionate burden on those workers who exist in lower economic brackets, and who have largely engaged in already physically taxing and punishing labor throughout their lives. This is an extension of what Lauren Berlant would call, “slow death.” In a blatant display of capitalism’s war against entropy, the aged, disabled, and economically disadvantaged have every last ounce of available energy worked out of them—oftentimes to the point of literal or psychic death. Not only are most ageing bodies expected to work longer, with less social and financial support, they are also required to maintain health by their own actions or be judged as disappointments by an entropy-averse culture. Denied material support as they age, they are additionally taxed with spending dwindling material resources in maintaining the veneer of total health and fitness (see, for example, Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2018, Natural Causes). As Jasbir K. Puar observes succinctly, “Debility is profitable to capitalism, but so is the demand to ‘recover’ from or overcome it” (153).
There is no single factor that determines what it means to be aged. Beauvoir writes that a person’s ageing and decline “always takes place inside some given society: it is intimately related to the character of that society and to the place that the individual in question occupies within it” (37). Yet, the experience of ageing (or the possibility of ageing to come) is shared by all human beings. What is needed in the face of the gross abuses to the aged is to recall what Beauvoir emphasizes and modern disability studies highlight—everyone, given enough time, will be disabled. Those affected are not part of an unusual or special class of people to be drained and discarded but it is all of us. Those who refuse to recognize this all but ensure their own wretched future.
To counter the widespread fear of ageing, societies must do what is available to fewer and fewer aged people: provide a safe and secure retirement, relatively free from financial fears, with the availability of social and creative activities. Such a goal would reposition decline as something akin to rest and leisure. Although this situation has never been universally available, it should not be seen as impossible, even as late-stage capitalism renders it unrealistic for anyone other than the overly-privileged. Failure to address the feverish acceleration of entropic practices through the abhorrent abuses of the most vulnerable members of society is not only morally reprehensible, but also directly hastens societal and world destruction. If the COVID-19 crisis has revealed anything, without care and direct action, such failures are sure to multiply. Since this future awaits us all, we should do something about it.
The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on women in the history of philosophy, posts on issues of concern to women in the field of philosophy, and posts that put philosophy to work to address issues of concern to women in the wider world. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Adriel M. Trott or Associate Editor Julinna Oxley.
Shannon M. Mussett
Shannon M. Mussett is professor of philosophy and associate chair at Utah Valley University. This piece is excerpted from her manuscript, Entropic Philosophy, due out in 2021 with Rowman & Littlefield Press.
