Growing Older and The Value of Intergenerational Bonds

My grandmother and my mother in Dera Ghazi Khan, Pakistan, 1970s.

Note: This post uses inclusive language, replacing the term "elderly" with terms like “older generations” or “older people.” An exception is the word, “elder,” which, to my mind, connotes seniority and esteem rather than stereotypes of frailty.

I.

I never got to know my grandparents properly. As migrants who moved to the Gulf state of Kuwait in the early 80s, my parents rarely returned home to Dera Ghazi Khan, a city near the Indus River in southwestern Pakistan. My mother tells me that I was especially fond of my grandmother. One of the last memories I have of my grandmother is from my final visit to see her when I was about four years old. Most of my recollections from that time are nebulous and scattered, but I remember that I combed her hennaed hair and that she wore a floral mauve kameez as she sat on her day bed in the bright courtyard of her house. She died the following year.

I now know my grandmother’s life was full of tribulations. Her first husband died of tuberculosis when he was just eighteen. Many of her children died in their infancy. She was impoverished for much of her life, and she lived through historical wars. What did she make of these experiences, I wonder? Having survived pandemics, independence from British colonialism, and the partition of India and Pakistan, what could she have taught me about resilience? If she had lived beyond her 70s, long enough for me to ask her questions about life, what might she have imparted to me?

I am profoundly uncomfortable with the fact of growing old. Having been born a migrant who never returned home, cut off from former generations, old age has always felt distant, something that happens to other people. As I begin to recognize for the first time in my life signs of aging in my own body, I realize that old age is something I, too, may be destined for. But when I think of the coming decades, I am troubled by an impending future I don’t understand. If I had more than a few scattered images of my grandmother, if I had been able to witness how she navigated her life, I think what now strikes me as uncanny about aging would affect me differently.

II.

It is true that the lives of migrants are often fragmented, detached from former generations. But intergenerational ruptures have sources that go beyond migration.

In the Netherlands, where I live, and probably in the U.S. as well, deep divisions between generations extend down to the manner in which cities are organized. The layout of Amsterdam means that anyone who cannot occasionally sprint while walking (let alone someone who uses a wheelchair) needs to think twice before navigating the streets, given the narrow pedestrian paths, the quickness with which traffic signals turn from red to green, and the overall frenetic pace of the city. Large parts of the city, I imagine, are simply inaccessible to a whole subset of the older (and disabled) population. There is a hidden cartography here that separates people by age and ability.

This pre-existing segregation has intensified during the pandemic, throughout which the needs and interests of the aged have been regularly dismissed. The older population is habitually described—whether flagrantly or tacitly—as the surplus and excess of society. In 2020, a popular Dutch radio host argued that older people are comparable to “dry wood” which the “scythe” of the virus cuts through most easily. According to this framing, the especially high death rate among the older people may be tragic, but it is simply nature taking its course. Many have argued for shifting the effort away from safeguarding the old generation from the virus, as they are destined to die soon anyway. Rather than this population, it is the economy—and the productive bodies that run and primarily benefit from it—that should be prioritized.

Public discourse regularly normalizes mass death among older populations. That neoliberal policies have shrunk public spending on provisions for the vulnerable (e.g., reduced spending on nursing homes), that infrastructure for protecting this population during the pandemic has been inadequate (e.g., care homes were not given proper masks and personal protective equipment), and that deliberate policies (e.g., herd immunity) have put this population in harm’s way has rarely been addressed. These policies explain the frequency and potency of COVID-19 among older populations. These policies rather than the virus have produced mass death. They have also created insurmountable divisions between the old and the young with the interests of the young pitted against older generations. In order for the young generation to live “freely,” without the inconvenience of masking, for instance, it is their elders who have to risk potentially deadly exposure to COVID-19.

Neoliberal rationality, as Wendy Brown tells us, transforms everything into the image of the economy. With its emphasis on economic self-interest, neoliberalism casts aside considerations of the common good, destroying social cohesion and democratic politics along the way. Neoliberal public policy reflects this underlying rationality. Treated as a homogenous demographic unit, older individuals are understood primarily in light of their economic value. In this picture, as long as they do not interfere with our economic self-interests, whether older generations live or die matters little to the rest of society. But we are not the one-dimensional homo oeconomicus, neoliberalism takes us to be, market actors interested primarily in “maximis[ing] their capital value” (p. 31, p. 22). Public policy and its fixed assumptions may cast older individuals as economic liabilities, but these individuals are our relatives, neighbors, friends, and teachers, individuals with whom we stand in living and moral relationships. Public policy that took this fact seriously could not countenance our treatment of older generations during this pandemic.

But it is not just neoliberalism on its own that can explain to us why old age has come to stand for little more than futility and decay. It is also because Western philosophy offers us few reflections that would deepen our perspective on aging.

III.

Turning to Western philosophy, we find philosophers have a great deal to say about death but very little about growing old. To Martin Heidegger, even death is incorporeal, expressed in abstract terms as the ontological condition of finitude rather than the end of an individual and embodied life. It is perhaps for this reason that Heidegger’s conception of finitude does not foreground the death of the other, those loved ones whose finitude matters to us. The beginning of life in birth, too, has hardly ever been part of the picture. Even Hannah Arendt, perhaps the only Western philosopher who treats birth as philosophically significant, considers it in an immaterial and bloodless sense, as natality, a ghostly counterpart of the intensely embodied experience of actually giving birth. In fact, Arendt’s degradation of birth in its embodied sense and her extolment of the comparably empty concept of natality betray, among other things, her latent misogyny. This should come to us as no surprise, given Arendt’s glorification of ancient Athens and its inequalities.

Philosophy’s overall silence about aging and old age is also rooted in the fact that these experiences are irreducibly embodied. The way I was birthed, the way my body ages, and the way in which I will die are all contingent matters; philosophers, on the other hand, are after the essential. But it is not clear to me what birth, aging, and dying mean when they are removed from their context in our actual lives.

Although the body haunts the work of Western philosophers in one way or another, it is not until the work of phenomenologists, such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, that the body begins to play a decisive role in the understanding of the self, the other, and the world. Leaving behind the realm of the immaterial and essential also means acknowledging a whole host of corporeal experiences, including aging.

Yet even phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty generally remain silent on aging. Once we turn to the subject that is at the center of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, it is easy to see why. His embodied subject is not pulled short by the environment. There is, as he puts it, an intimacy between the subject and his world, with the subject “gearing into” the world and the world “soliciting” the subject. The relationship between this embodied subject and the world is, in short, seamless. In truth, this sort of intimacy is not available to everyone, as critical phenomenologists have argued. Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions reveal that the subject at the heart of his phenomenology is a young, able-bodied man. His account fails to consider that for the gendered, raced, disabled, or aged body, our prejudiced world can be obtrusive and difficult to navigate.

IV.

There are, however, a few exceptions to philosophy’s overall silence on aging, for instance, Martha C. Nussbaum’s Aging Thoughtfully. A much earlier and striking exception is Simone de Beauvoir’s The Coming of Age.

In this sprawling work of over five-hundred pages, de Beauvoir mounts a moving critique of how societies cast the older individual as “no more than a reject, a piece of scrap” and older generations as “walking corpses” that burden society with nothing of their own to offer (p. 6). However, instead of treating old age as undifferentiated, a general existential condition that afflicts all people alike, she makes clear that we grow old in particular social environments, which give aging its sense and significance. De Beauvoir’s account, therefore, abounds with examples from her own life, empirical and ethnographic studies, as well as illustrations from literature and politics.

As de Beauvoir points out, experiences of aging are various, but they are all largely dependent on how one’s age intersects with one’s overall social position. While older people are often treated as objects of derision at worst or pity at best, we forget that they, too, are subjects embedded in this world, agents who can exercise their freedom meaningfully. Depending on their social position, it might be possible for some elders to engage in meaningful projects, i.e., “devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work” (p. 540). Those elders belonging to “exploited classes,” forced to secure basic necessities even in their old age, are excluded from the pursuit of meaning that makes any life worth living.

The onset of old age is, similarly, determined by one’s station in life: a miner grows old sooner than an aristocrat. And while the privileged may experience the physical and mental decline that comes with old age, owing to social and economic advantages, they may be “weakened by age” but not degraded or “lessened by it” (p. 543). The tribulations of old age, therefore, are not fateful necessities; older people, as de Beauvoir might have argued today, die needlessly from COVID-19. Her analysis would ring all the truer in light of the differential distribution of death among sub-sections of the older population, with fatalities consisting disproportionately of the economically under-privileged and non-Western migrant populations in much of Western Europe.

Even an older person’s perspective on their past and future is partly determined by their social situation. De Beauvoir’s perspective on the temporality of aging is based on the extant state of affairs. It can be boiled down to the following line: “A limited future and frozen past: such is the situation that the elderly have to face up to” (p. 378).

Although it is true that the future imposes limits on an older person, as death is close at hand, de Beauvoir rightly points out that “[o]ur projects may aim at goals that lie beyond our death” (p. 379). These projects allow us to have a sense of a future that extends beyond our literal death; they include establishing and deepening relationships in the present that will have a meaningful influence on those who live on after one’s own life has come to an end. But such projects require that older people are not segregated in our cities and our institutions from the rest of society. We think that the death of our physical bodies is a hard limit. As Beauvoir shows us, however, it is social and not literal death that imposes hard limits on the future for those who are socially exiled, condemned with other “unproductive” bodies to the scrap heap of society.

The past, too, is open to interpretation in light of new experiences and engagements. The past is frozen and reified, however, if one’s present experiences are static, if one does not have the occasion to revive the past, to retell it under the light of the present. So long as older people are largely segregated from the rest of society, they are condemned to memories that are “set and fixed,” without the replenishment that new experiences grant the past.

De Beauvoir does not leave us without alternatives. She counsels us to question the idea that all old age requires is that we shore up our finances and secure retirement plans in preparation. We will discover, de Beauvoir tells us, that this alone will not endow our lives in old age with meaning and direction. She tells us that setting ourselves up for old age requires that we “live a fairly committed, fairly justified life” in the present and grow old in this committed way. But contrary to liberal perspectives that place the onus exclusively on the individual, de Beauvoir does not let society off the hook. “Old age” she tells us “exposes the failure of our entire civilization” (p. 543). For old age to be understood differently, our whole life needs rethinking. It is because we are already exiled in part, remote from each other, because we do not share in a truly collective life, that we can be banished from social life in old age.

V.

Consider a different social world, one in which older generations play a decisive role in society, where they are not the first to be sacrificed to any crisis, the “dry wood,” the superfluous masses who by general consensus are little more than an economic burden. Consider a world in which it would be quite ordinary for older people to participate in our institutions, to be at our universities, to mingle with the young in our cafés. Like de Beauvoir, I am not naïve about old age: the illnesses and decline that old age brings about cannot entirely be assuaged through participation in social life. But if this decline cannot be entirely allayed, we can at least ensure that it is not senseless and brutal. This, however, requires a society that is firmly intergenerational. Without a chain of generations that bind the past, present, and future, we condemn older generations to the void.  

But we also condemn a part of ourselves. When I think of my grandmother, who died when I was only four years old, I know that with her I have lost a portion of my past. I know my world would be different if I had gotten to know her, that her presence would have bestowed on my life an entire dimension of meaning and sense that it now lacks. I know I would have asked her what it feels like to grow old and what she thought about her own past, its tribulations and its exultations. I know her answers would have made aging less daunting for me. When I think of my social environment in Amsterdam, I realize I don’t have an intimate relationship with a single person who is older than their 60s, for this is a city that alienates generations from each other by design. Without elders, it is as if I have emerged from the world yesterday. My own relationship to the past becomes tenuous and scattered. “When it is our elders that die,” de Beauvoir tells us, “it is our own past that they carry away with them” (p. 366). Routes of intelligibility and meaning that would be available are foreclosed not only for you and me but for those who live on after us.

In this era of COVID-19, societies that are sacrificing older generations for the supposed interests of the young are grievously mistaken. If the interests of young people truly matter to us, it is also for their sake that we should safeguard older generations. For a meaningful existence in this world, the young depend on the survival and wisdom of the old.

*

I would like to thank an anonymous friend who is a carer in Dundee, Scotland for conversations that deepened this piece. I would also like to thank my partner, C. Skirke, and my friend M. Cornell, for their incisive comments. Lastly, and as always, deep thanks to my co-editors, Jeremy and Katherine.

~

This is an installment of Into Philosophy.