Category: old age and technology

“Like Foreigners in Their Own Country”

I have been thinking a bit about language these days for at least four reasons.  First, I have been taking a French class at the local senior center.  I passed a French translation test for a graduate degree, but that was decades ago, and I never learned to speak it very well.  Second, I have been rereading my old journals, and realizing how much my memories diverge from the words that I wrote down at the time.   Third, I have been dealing with communicating with my grandchildren (ranging in age from five to sixteen) and recognizing that we are seldom speaking exactly the same language.  And, lastly, having embarked on my “rereading” project, I have realized how language changes in the context of its historical period and in the context of the age of the reader.

Learning a new language in old age is supposed to be good brain exercise.  OK – I hope that’s true.  More importantly, spending time with another language’s constructs and idioms makes you realize that all language is more arbitrary than we realize.  It is not only the words that are different, but the structure is also different.  In French, for example, the pronoun “ils” (meaning “they”) applies to groups of men or groups of men and women – even if women are in the majority.  Groups of women (only) are “elles.”  Even one male in the group changes the pronoun.  It makes me pause and consider more seriously the messages encoded in all language.

Reading old diary entries has reminded me of how slippery language and memory are.  It is not unlike the old game we used to call “Telephone” or “Gossip,” where a message whispered in ear after ear in a big circle comes out differently at the other end.   Words that were written down at the time and survive are intact, and I must believe they represent what I experienced at the time.  However, some memories have apparently morphed to become perhaps more interesting or easier to bear.  I have been amazed.

Language changes over time are nothing new.  My maternal grandmother, who never learned to drive, called their car “the machine.”  Movies were “the pictures,” and the radio was “the wireless.”  When her granddaughter took to wearing blue jeans in college, she insisted on calling them “dungarees” and elongated the word so it was clear what she thought about dungarees as female attire.  With my own grandchildren, I am struggling with my pronouns, my technological ignorance, and a lack of words to describe the kind of relationships teenagers have these days.  Some of their truisms drive me to distraction – like “it is what it is” or “whatever.”  And when did wait and sales staff begin to answer any question with “of course”?

Reading old books is a challenge; can we really understand the context – not just of the vocabulary – but of the situation? Of course, one can more properly understand Shakespeare or Chaucer with notes to explain what certain words meant at the time they were written. But can we realize what it might have felt like to be pregnant and unwed at the time of Tess or imprisoned in the England of Moll Flanders?  Also, the age at which we read a book matters.  As I re-read books that I first opened in my youth, I find that they are totally different – because I am totally different?

This is nothing new.  Montaigne (whose essays I have been rereading as part of my “nothing new” project) said that he realized his words were not eternal:

I write my book for few men and for few years.  If it had been durable matter, it would have had to be committed to a more stable language. In view of the continual variation that has prevailed in ours up to now, who can hope that its present form will be in use fifty years from now? It slips out of our hands every day, and has halfway changed since I have been alive.  We say that at this moment it is perfected.  Every century says as much of its own… (Essays, Book III)

In Gulliver’s Travels, Swift has his hero visit the eternal Struldbruggs, who – like poor mythical Tithonus – get old but never die.  After a number of years, however, they cannot communicate with those around them:

The Language of this Country being always upon the Flux, the Struldbruggs of one Age do not understand those of another . . . and thus they lye under the Disadvantage of living like Foreigners in their own Country.

One of the Buddhist daily reminders is that my body will age and decay.  So will my language.  AI wants to bring me up to date; it will gladly edit my work so it doesn’t seem so … old-fashioned.   Incidentally, it would also like to bring Montaigne up to date.  Cosmetic surgery for the written word.  Spare me.  What is all around me might be a “foreign” language, but, again, all the research shows me that struggling to understand a foreign language is good for old people.  And it doesn’t mean I have to give up my native tongue.

For one of my stories that thinks about language, you might try, “Why My Aunt Josie Has a Limited Vocabulary.”  If you want to surprise yourself, look at a diary entry or letter you might have sent about an event that happened a decade or more ago.  Does your memory fit the facts?  And what does that mean?  Should we school ourselves to accept reality or take refuge in our edited memories?

Charlotte Brontë, Luddites, and AI

After Charlotte Brontë wowed her world with Jane Eyre in 1847, she disappointed her reading audience by stepping away from Gothic romance to write Shirley, at least in part about the Luddites of the early 19th century.  (Both books were published under the masculine pseudonym Currer Bell.) The Luddites, you might remember, were a group of craftsmen who were protesting the installation of semi-automated weaving machines, making skilled weavers redundant.  Shirley, as it turns out, is more about gender, class and economic roles and less about the Luddites per se, and yet is a truly wonderful book with notable and quotable insights on all facets of life.  But, in the end, it shows us a world that is capitulating to technology with the same inevitability that our own world is.

I reread Shirley because I was thinking about Artificial Intelligence.  AI is everywhere.  AI is trying to help me (go away!) write this blog.  The very existence of AI makes me doubt the pictures I see and facts I read.  In the past, mechanization and automation have threatened manual workers and artisans the most (think about type setters), but AI threatens the white-collar worker, the computer programmer, the teacher, the content provider.  The Luddites in Brontë’s novel flail against “progress” to almost no avail.   Similarly, it is beginning to look like the creeping hegemony of AI is inevitable.

But back to Shirley.  When the Luddites initially destroy a loom in transit, this message is sent to the mill owner: “Take this as a warning from men who were starving, and have starving wives and children to go home to when they have done this deed.”  And not all the children are at home, as the mills take root and hire the cheapest unskilled labor:

The mill windows were alight [because it was still dark out], the bell still rung loud, and now the little children can running in,  in too great a hurry, let us hope, to feel very much nipped by the inclement air; and indeed, by contrast, perhaps the morning appeared rather favourable to them than otherwise, for they had often come to their work that winter through snowstorms, through heavy rain, through hard frost….

[Later] It was eight o’clock; the mill lights were all extinguished; the signal was given for breakfast; the children, released for half an hour from toil, betook themselves to the little tin cans which held their coffee, and to the small baskets which contained their allowance of bread.  Let us hope they have enough to eat; it would be a pity otherwise.  (from Chapter V)

Our anonymous but omniscient narrator clearly has his tongue in his cheek.  These children never have enough to eat.  And yet the mills expand, the new equipment is finally delivered, and we move from the plight of hungry children to the romantic interests of the local gentry, including the mill owner.

In fact, Shirley ends in a double-wedding and a brilliant future for the local textile mill.  Brontë’s narrator wraps up by looking into the future and telling us about his visit to the area long after the weddings and the new machinery:

The other day I passed the Hollow, which tradition says was once green, and lone, and wild; and there I saw the manufacturer’s daydreams embodied in substantial stone and brick and ashes – the cinder-black highway, the cottages, and the cottage gardens; there I saw a mighty mill, and a chimney ambitious as the tower of Babel…. (from Chapter XXXVII)

Yes, there are worker’s cottages with gardens, but there is also the chimney and the ash in this once green corner of England.

For many years, optimistic thinkers envisioned labor-saving technology as helping to create a kind of utopia, as giving everyone a chance to use their minds instead of their bodies. Manual workers would unbend their backs and pick up a book or a musical instrument.   Eric Hoffer envisioned university-like campuses for adults, freed from the workplace, who wanted to study in any area they were interested in.  Edward Bellamy imagined a world full of music, books, study, and communal dining.  But instead of having technology free us up to use our minds, it appears that we will have no need of our minds – AI will take care of it.   It might also be noted that Samuel Butler and William Morris wrote utopias where technology is strictly controlled for the benefit of humankind.

Just as the pastoral town in Brontë’s book ultimately and inevitably succumbs to the mill, I have recently watched one area of life after another capitulate to AI.  You might look at the front-page article in today’s NYTimes: “AI on Campus Casting Chatbot as Study Buddy.” The most disappointing defeat has been the way AI has been accepted by educators.  “The students are going to use it anyway,” they often plead, “so we might as well encourage them to use it well.”  That might be true, but I’m suspicious that it would be AI doing the “using” and not the student.  If things are made too easy for us, we get soft – in mind and body.  And if we don’t resist AI now, it is unlikely we will have the mental resources to do it years from now.  The Luddites lost and they lost badly.  But, at least, they realized what they were losing.  And they tried to do something about it.

For a story about how artificial intelligence is not always the answer, you might try my “Two New Apps,” or read almost anything by Ray Bradbury.

The Aging Buddha and the Aging-Resistant Tech Boys

The news in the Sunday NYTimes last weekend was challenging, to say the least.  To make it worse, there was an article on the front page entitled “Gilgamesh, Ponce and the Quest to Live Forever.”  Besides the lack of an Oxford comma, the article was just a reminder how hard the tech boys out in Silicon Valley are working to make 90 the new 50, to make their minds outlive their bodies, to challenge nature.  There was an even more alarming article in the New Yorker a few years ago appropriately entitled “The God Pill.”  The tech boys (and this group is mostly male) are treating old age as a disease to be eradicated.  You might think about that.

The death and aging-resistant tech boys seem to be divided into two camps: the Meat Puppets (who think that we can “fix” the biology and thus stay in our bodies) and the Robocops (who think that our “essence” will move to mechanical bodies/brains).  Both methodologies are attracting huge investment from rich people, presumably in lieu of donating money to soup kitchens.

The technology and the money are new (the article says that “any scientific breakthrough that added another decade to global life expectancy would be worth $367 trillion”), but the sentiments are not.  People (again, mostly men like Gilgamesh, Ponce de Leon, and Isaac Newton) have been fighting old age for centuries.  “Do not go gentle into that good night” says Dylan Thomas.  But does warring against the inevitable really change anything?  And at what cost?

The Buddha, that truly enlightened being, grew to be very old – into his eighties we think.  He made adjustments: he taught while lying down because he had a bad back, he had disciples deliver his talks when he wasn’t up to it.  Here is an exchange between the Buddha and his bumbling but lovable assistant Ananda:

Then Ven. Ananda went to the Blessed One and, on arrival, having bowed down to the Blessed One, massaged the Blessed One’s limbs with his hand and said, “It’s amazing, lord. It’s astounding, how the Blessed One’s complexion is no longer so clear & bright; his limbs are flabby & wrinkled; his back, bent forward; there’s a discernible change in his faculties — the faculty of the eye, the faculty of the ear, the faculty of the nose, the faculty of the tongue, the faculty of the body.”  

“That’s the way it is, Ananda. When young, one is subject to aging; when healthy, subject to illness; when alive, subject to death…” (translation by Thanissaro Bhikkhu)

Acceptance that things will change is what the Buddha is preaching.  I recently read an interview with one of my favorite writers, Lewis Mumford, which took place when he was in his eighties and still producing books:

“The really annoying part of the aging process is not what happens externally—one has plenty of time to get prepared for that—but what happens internally,” he says. “One knows one isn’t quite as good. One’s energies are lower. When I was writing my major books, I would do between 3,000 and 4,000 words in the morning, between 8 and 11:30. Now I’m very happy to do 1,500 or 2,000 words.”

“Now I’m very happy to …”  This is an acceptance of reality that is graceful and wise.

The Buddha and Mumford have learned one of the most important lessons of life – to live with and adapt to reality.  I have recommended the Buddha’s five daily recollections before, but one of them is that the body is “of the nature to grow old and decay.”  I would guess that the Silicon Valley boys might delay the inevitable, but they are going to be pretty miserable if they don’t accept it at some point.  And even if they manage to live long, they will still outlive their time – think of Swift’s Struldbruggs, who outlived the language and culture around them and became “foreigners in their own country.”  Trying to talk to my grandchildren, I know what that feels like.

None of this means we have to like everything or anything about old age.  The Buddha spoke the following poem (memorized by the monks and later transcribed):

I spit on you, old age —

old age that makes for ugliness.

The bodily image, so charming,

is trampled by old age.

Even those who live to a hundred

are headed — all — to an end in death,

which spares no one,

which tramples all.

And, as for the tech boys, they might want longevity, but they don’t necessarily want everyone to have it (link here): 

“I don’t think we should have people live for a very long time,” Musk says (in a WELT Documentary interview). “It would cause ossification of society because the truth is, most people don’t change their mind; they just die. And so, if they don’t die, we’ll be stuck with old ideas, and society won’t advance. I think we already have quite a serious issue with the gerontocracy, where the leaders of so many countries are extremely old. Look at the U.S.—its very ancient leadership. It’s just impossible to stay in touch with the people if you’re many generations older than them.”

Like the Struldbruggs.  Or maybe like some of the people Musk has been hanging around with lately.

If you want to know more about the Struldbruggs, try Gulliver’s Travels (Part III, Chapter X), and see if you don’t relate to their feeling of being “foreigners in their own country.”  I also wrote about them in my blog from a few years ago, “Covid-19 and the Generational Wars.”

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Build Your Own World, Create Your Own Day, Construct Your Own Life

When I was young, I thought I would have figured things out by the time I was old.  (Old then being about 50.)  Yet I seem to be fighting many of the same battles with myself that I have been fighting for seven decades.  I know I don’t need another book to tell me how to fulfill my purpose, stop procrastinating, live according to my values and priorities.  I have read a slew of those books and know what it is that I am supposed to do.  That is not the problem.  Actually doing what I know is the best thing is the problem.

Moving closer to my teenage grandchildren and hearing them interact with their parents has been somewhat enlightening in this regard.  The conversation goes like this.  Parent: “Do you think eating all that candy (or staying up late playing video games or spending your allowance on silly things) is a good choice?”  Child: “I know, I know – but I really wanted…” You get the picture.  Many days this same conversation is going on in my head, but both characters are… me.  I know what the good choices are, but as Saint Paul laments in Romans 7:19, “For the good that I would, I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do”.  Or as Ado Annie says in Oklahoma, “I’m just a girl who can’t say no.”

I have won the battle in some cases.  I keep a serious journal and have an exercise routine of sorts.  I take my vitamins and see my dentists and doctors as required.  I make my bed and remember birthdays and get a blog posted a couple of times a month, yet my life is overshadowed by the things I want to do and do not do.

Friends have told me just to climb out from under the guilt.  Retired people don’t really need to do anything, do they?  And yet this is not an answer for me.  I want to end every waking day by being satisfied by what I have accomplished, but I also am looking more closely (than I would like) at the end of my life.  The big deadline looms.

Three pieces of advice have helped me lately, and I am glad to pass them along.  Two are quotes from the Transcendentalists, first from Emerson in “Nature:” “Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house, a world; and beyond its world a heaven. Know then, that the world exists for you: build, therefore, your own world.”  Birds single-mindedly build their nests; we should do the same.  In old age, our nests are for nurturing ourselves and not our babies, they are for cradling us to the end.  No better reason for building your own world.

If Emerson seems to call for too much, Thoreau parses it into to smaller chunks for us to consider.  In Walden, he tries to whittle his life down to the marrow; he trims his expectations to the day in front of him.  “To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.”  Make this day a good one – and our days will add up to a life, a world.   Thoreau’s gentle exhortation has gotten me through some rough patches.

Lastly, I have been reading a wonderful novel, This is Happiness, by Niall Williams.  The book was recommended in a recent NYTimes piece by Ann Patchett and is narrated by a very old man who is recalling the coming of electricity to his Irish village.  Read it to find out if the residents are happier before or after technology catches up with them!  In any case, the seventy-eight-year-old man reflects on this very subject:

Not that you ever quite know what that is [the better version of ourselves], still there he is, that better man, who remains always just ahead of you.  I write this now. Having come to realise it’s a lifelong pursuit, that once begun will not end this side of the graveyard.  With this I have made an old man’s accommodation and am reconciled to the fruits of a fruitless endeavour.

And what are the fruits of this fruitless endeavour?  Perhaps that we affected the quality of our days with Thoreau and built our own (yet imperfect) world with Emerson.  I am happy to make an old lady’s accommodation with these truths.

The Threat of Singularity and the Promise of Perennial Philosophy

As I have aged. the pace of technology has surely surpassed my interest in “keeping up.”  I have been intrigued, however, by the notion of the singularity, which is defined in many ways, but often as “a hypothetical point in time when technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible.” Technology already feels “uncontrollable.”  It forces me to deal with chatbots and answer yes/no questions.  It fights to supplant me.   Even as I write this. Microsoft is pestering me to let its AI “Copilot” help me; it wants to co-opt my place at the keyboard, convinced (and trying to convince me) that it can do whatever it is better than I can.  What AI fails to recognize that it is the doing that matters, not a uniformly “perfect” product.

As I was thinking about this, I was strangely reminded of Aldous Huxley and his “perennial philosophy,” which represents a different kind of quest for doing things in the best way, for improving ourselves, or – more specifically – for living life well.  Seekers for the perennial philosophy pursued ageless universal truths, laws, dharmas, which might enable mankind, individually and communally, to reach their utmost potential.  There was no place in this philosophy for technology or even much science.  It had more to do with getting to know the nature of the kind of beasts we are, the kind of world we live in, and how the two interrelate.  “Know thyself,” said Socrates. 

Huxley’s book was a bestseller in 1945, as shocked and tired people were emerging from the nightmare of WWII.  Reviews were good, with the New York Times noting: “Perhaps Mr. Huxley, in The Perennial Philosophy has, at this time, written the most needed book in the world.”  Perhaps, after Hiroshima and the gas chambers, no one was looking to technology to solve our problems.  In the last 70 years things have changed; we have become beguiled by technology.  As Wordsworth predicted, “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers, / Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”  Indeed.  Our hearts, our minds, and maybe our souls.  We are apparently far more interested in knowing what machines can do for us than knowing ourselves.  Why? It’s easier.

The machines enticed us, seduced us, slowly. Old folks are very much aware of this. When I was a child, technology (in the guise of Western Auto) gave us a big TV with a tiny screen and one to three channels.  It stood in the heart of the house, and we watched it together.  Step by step, it led us to the internet and streaming, and now watching anything is seldom a communal experience.  In my youth, technology gave us one telephone in the center of the house, so that communications were communal (hard on teen-age girls). Now cell phones are stopping any sort of real face-to-face communication.  The internet has made information easier to find, but harder to verify; common wisdom is no longer looked for or found. No wonder they call it the singularity; in wisdom, as in most things these days, we are “bowling alone.”

I think that Huxley’s perennial philosophy is probably the opposite of singularity; it assumes that the answers lie in the truths of the past and not the unknowns of the future, that we can both formulate the questions and find the answers without mechanical help.  The singularity assumes that machines will find the answers, machines which will soon be smarter than us, and that is a scary thought – unless you think that we will always be in control.  Have we ever been in control?  Did we consciously end up with children in their bedrooms sending pictures to strangers and old folks entranced by online “friends” who are trying to scam them?

Literature has long worried over the ascendency of technology.  RUR (Rossum’s Universal Robots) was written by Karel Capek in 1920.  The play warned us not to turn our back on a robot.  Arthur Clark wrote the novel and screenplay for 2001 A Space Odyssey in 1968, based on stories he started in 1948.  HAL (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer) was definitely the enemy by the end.  Technology was much cruder in those days, but people were already concerned. As creatures being slowly ingested by technology, we seem to be less worried now than we were then.  It would seem that HAL has made us fat and happy.  And what is the alternative?  A recent bill putting limits on AI development in California was vetoed by the governor after Silicon Valley got incensed.  There is no hope for such legislation on the federal level. 

The perennial philosophy was defined by Aldous Huxley and others as “a school of thought in philosophy and spirituality which posits that the recurrence of common themes across world religions illuminates universal truths about the nature of reality, humanity, ethics, and consciousness.”  In other words, a search for a commonality in proven human thought, faith, and ethics which could give us clues on the way to live better individually or communally.  But no one thought we could outsource that search, or google it, or that the answer would be a complex algorithm.

Computers are yes/no machines.  In the words of E. F. Schumacher, the real questions of life are divergent rather than convergent problems. Designing a diesel engine is a convergent problem; scientists can work on it and eventually arrive at an answer. AI could do this. How to use such an engine for the benefit of society (i.e., transportation of goods vs. preservation of the environment) is a divergent problem.  Adolescents often think all problems are convergent and often think they know the solutions.  Most old people know that the important questions are divergent and can (and should) be grappled with, but cannot be “solved.” Schumacher reminds us that, again, it is the doing that matters: “Divergent problems, as it were, force us to strain ourselves to a level above ourselves.” 

I appreciate the good that technology has done for us – many of us, including myself, would not still be here without advances in medicine, education, transportation.  But let’s not give away our hearts (“a sordid boon”) – or our lives.  Science may have given us increased longevity, but, as Mary Oliver asks, “What is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”  Show me the answer to that question in an algorithm.