Читать книгу Aging - Harry R. Moody - Страница 64

Our society confronts the challenge of drawing a large population of healthy elders into the social order in a way that productively uses their capacities. Our task will be to envision what influences such a large contingent of elders will have on our society as healthy old people seek and even demand more vital involvement. Some attributes of the accrued wisdom of old age are fairly generally acknowledged and respected. If recognized and given scope for expression, they could have an important impact on our social order. We suggest the following possibilities.

Older people are, by nature, conservationists. Long memories and wider perspectives lend urgency to the maintenance of our natural world. Old people, quite understandably, seem to feel more keenly the obstruction of open waterfronts, the cutting of age-old stands of trees, the paving of vast stretches of fertile countryside, and the pollution of once clear streams and lakes. Their longer memories recall the beauty of their surroundings in earlier years. We need those memories and those voices.

With aging, men and women in many ways become less differentiated in their masculine and feminine predilections. This in no way suggests a loss of sexual drive and interest between the sexes. Men, it seems, become more capable of accepting the interdependence that women have more easily practiced. Many elder women today, in their turn, become more vigorously active and involved in those affairs that have been the dominant province of men. Some women come to these new roles by virtue of their propensity to outlive the men who have been their partners. Many younger women have made a similar transition by becoming professional members of the workforce. These women seem capable of managing parenting and householding along with their jobs, particularly if they have partners who learn cooperation in these matters as an essential component of the marriage contract.

Our subjects demonstrate a tolerance and capacity for weighing more than one side of a question that is an attribute of the possible wisdom of aging. They should be well suited to serve as arbiters in a great variety of disputes. Much experience should be a precursor of long-range vision and clear judgment.

The aged have had a good deal of experience as societal witnesses to the effects of devastation and aggression. They have lived through wars and seen the disintegration of peace settlements. They know that violence breeds hatred and destroys the interconnectedness of life here on our earth and that now our capacity for destruction is such that violence is no longer a viable solution for human conflict.

Ideally, elders in any given modern society should be those who, having developed a marked degree of tolerance and appreciation for otherness, which includes “foreigners” and “foreign ways,” might become advocates of a new international understanding that no longer tolerates the vicious name-calling, depreciation, and distrustfulness typical of international relations.

It is also possible to imagine a large, mature segment of the aging population, freed from the tension of keeping pace with competitors in the workplace, able to pursue vigorously art activities of all varieties. This would bring an extraordinary liveliness and artfulness to ordinary life. Only a limited portion of our adult population now has either the time or the money to be involved in activities of art expression or as appreciative supporters of the performing arts. Widespread participation in the arts is possible only if children are encouraged to develop those roots of imaginative play that arise from stimulating sensory experience. Elders learn this as they undertake to open these new doors of experience and could promote the inclusion of the arts in the educational system. The arts offer a common language, and the learning of that language in childhood could contribute to an interconnection among the world’s societies.

The development of a new class of elders requires a continued upgrading of all facilities for the health care and education of people at all stages of life, from infancy to old age. Organisms that are to function for a hundred years need careful early nurturing and training. Education must prepare the individual not only for the tasks of early and middle age, but for those of old age as well. Training is mandatory for both productive work and the understanding and care of the senses and the body as a whole. Participation in activities that can enrich an entire lifetime must be promoted and made readily available. In fact, a more general acceptance of the developmental principle of the life cycle could alert people to plan their entire lives more realistically, especially to provide for the long years of aging.

Having started our “joint reflections” with some investigation of the traditional themes of “age” and “stages,” a closing word should deal with the modern changes in our conception of the length and the role of old age in the total life experience. As we have described, modern statistics predict for our time and the immediate future a much longer life expectancy for the majority of old individuals rather than for a select few. This amounts to such a radical change in our concept of the human life cycle that we question whether we should not review all the earlier stages in the light of this development. Actually, we have already faced the question of whether a universal old age of significantly greater duration suggests the addition to our cycle of a ninth stage of development with its own quality of experience, including, perhaps, some sense or premonition of immortality. A decisive fact, however, has remained unchanged for all the earlier stages, namely, that they are all significantly evoked by biological and evolutionary development necessary for any organism and its psychosocial matrix. This also means that each stage, in turn, must surrender its dominance to the next stage, when its time has come. Thus, the developmental ages for the pre-adult life stages decisively remain the same, although the interrelation of all the stages depends somewhat on the emerging personality and the psychosocial identity of each individual in a given historical setting and time perspective.

Similarly, it must be emphasized that each stage, once given, is woven into the fates of all. Generativity, for example, dramatically precedes the last stage, that of old age, establishing the contrast between the dominant images of generativity and of death: one cares for what one has generated in this existence while simultaneously preexperiencing the end of it all in death.

It is essential to establish in the experience of the stages a psychosocial identity, but no matter how long one’s life expectancy is, one must face oneself as one who shares an all-human existential identity, as creatively given form in the world religions. This final “arrangement” must convince us that we are meant as “grandparents,” to share the responsibility of the generations for each other. When we finally retire from familial and generational involvement, we must, where and when possible, bond with other old-age groups in different parts of the world, learning to talk and to listen with a growing sense of all-human mutuality.

Source: Vital Involvement in Old Age: The Experience of Old Age in Our Time by Erik H. Erikson, Joan M. Erikson, and Helen Q. Kivnick. Copyright © 1986 by Joan M. Erikson, Erik H. Erikson, and Helen Q. Kivnick. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.