What Can We Learn from Elders?

How we die, similarly to how we treat our elders, is a reflection of our values. In Die Wise, Stephen Jenkinson writes: We inherit a “mandate to make meanings of life by how we live.” And, “the endings of life give life’s meanings a chance to show.”

A friend recently shared this Jared Diamond TED talk. In it, he speaks to one aspect - treatment of the elderly - covered in his 2012 book: The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

His general point is, we have much to learn by looking at “traditional societies”. Diamond lived with and studied contemporary traditional societies for the book.?

Both in this short video, and his book, Diamond describes positives and negatives, and does not idealize traditional societies. Pointing to where some of those he studied do better than mainstream western culture, Diamond says: “Their lives are usually socially much richer than our lives, although materially poorer. Their children are more self-confident, more independent, and more socially skilled than are our children. They think more realistically about dangers than we do. They almost never die of diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and other noncommunicable diseases.”

In regards to treatment of the elderly - the focus of the video - while I appreciate what he was trying to do in calling attention to the elderly and offering up a different vision of how life could be, his perspective sounds dated and, moreover, he dropped the ball on the bigger picture. We must learn from the past, and look to it for inspiration, but adapt those learnings to our current context.

Objectification & Resources: What to Do with the Old Folks?

As we exceed planetary boundaries on a wide number of measures, circularity is one of the fundamental cultural re-conceptualizations obviously necessary to move the “life project”, here on planet earth, forward.?

Many good folk are working to help us transition away from a rapid extraction-to-pollution “throw-away” culture. There are significant infrastructure changes needed. But we also need to change the way we think. In particular, about the large group of things often referred to as “resources”. The etymology of this word shines a bit of light on where modernity has gone wrong. The roots imply more circularity than linearity.

Oxford’s primary contemporary definition is: “Stocks or reserves of money, materials, people, or some other asset, which can be drawn on when necessary.” This usage dates to the 17th & 18th centuries. Coarsely: Something with functional value to be obtained/extracted and then used/spent. However its roots are less extractive, more wholesome. There is an older meaning in English, where the word refers to “restoration”. It comes from Latin via French. In the middle ages (or so the OED tells me) the French word “ressource” meant “help” or “aid”. And a Latin precursor is “resurgere”, which means to “rise again” or “to recover”.

What's my point? Why define "resources" and the concept of circularity?

I’m curious about:

• What we can learn from other ways of living, particularly those most unlike the dominant western model?
• What changes can be made in order to cultivate a culture of wisdom during a time of unprecedented and accelerating change?
• How do we value and best engage our elderly, particularly as the population ages and there become, proportionally, far more older folks?

I am extremely appreciative of Jared Diamond. His book Guns, Germs, and Steel was foundational to my post-school education. But, the thing that bugs me about Diamond in the video is the sense of treating the elderly according to their use value. It's a way of thinking about other beings underscoring much of our contemporary challenges.

Who Needs Grandma When You’ve Got Google?

“Nowadays, when we have more elderly people than ever before, living healthier lives and with better medical care than ever before, old age is in some respects more miserable than ever before. The lives of the elderly are widely recognized as constituting a disaster area of modern American society.”

3 reasons Diamond gives for the low status of elderly in the US are:

• The “Protestant work ethic” subtly informs us that people who don’t work shouldn’t be respected??
• Our cultural emphasis on self-reliance and independence has us look down on those who are not
• The “cult of youth” removes all but the young and beautiful from our media landscape

In observing the differences between the US today and traditional societies, Diamond calls out a few key differences. On the positive end, we are, on average, living longer lives. But, aside from the low status alluded to above, Diamond suggests the reasons the elderly in the US are worse off than those living in the best examples of traditional societies include:

• There is less intergenerational living; more people live alone.
• Since so much of our social life and sense of self worth gets caught up in our work, retirement often imposes significant social and psychological loss.
• Due to widespread digital access to information, we no longer need to rely on the elderly as sources of practical information.?
• As well, due to the rapidity of change, they can’t be relied on for practical information, at least related to contemporary technology

This may all be true, but there is a great opportunity to learn.

The Wise Counsel of a Cherished Elder

Diamond offers some suggestions for what to do with the elderly I’m sure they were well-intentioned and directionally correct, but, at least in the talk, they are weak and uninspiring.

Appreciating the importance of wisdom over knowledge, building a concept of eldership, and engaging in rituals designed to support growth and maturity, are all areas where our modern world has something to learn from traditional and indigenous cultures, and each intersects with the opportunity that is our elderly.

The Dagara people of Burkina Faso are a fascinating example. Malidoma Somé’s book Of Water and Spirit speaks to the significant rituals of initiation meant to train humans to eventually become elders.

We need to reimagine rights-of-passage for ourselves and our children. Properly done and observed, initiations help us let go of attachments that don’t serve us while fostering new perspectives.

Much of what we've lost in the form of our traditional institutions and shared ceremonial practices has be a structure for moral thinking. We can’t go back to what was, but we should borrow to create new forms of ethical scaffolding. Simply holding a concept of eldership is an improvement on a culture that fetishizes youth, and where the new and shiny obscures the deep and meaningful.

Wisdom is not practical knowledge. Rather, wisdom concerns itself with the application of practical knowledge. Google (or Chat-GPT), gives us knowledge but it can become unmoored outside a context of wisdom. Experience helps make us wise. True elders are those who have both gained some degree of wisdom and have set about sharing it.

Mentorship combines eldership and wisdom. Mentorship improves on direct subjective experience by offering us a way to better harvest our learnings and extrapolate them to related but different situations. Mentorship offers a witness to our being, doing, and becoming (our thoughts, choices, and actions) that helps nuance and steer experiential learning.

So, if you’re young, or even not so young, seek out a wise mentor and engage them. If you have some experience, something to give back, please share it with us.

Thank you for reading this. I didn't expect to write it. More to come.