Tag: progress

Turning Things Upside Down in Old Age

Young people look forward – forward to the day when they can carry a cell phone, drive, leave home, marry, have children. There is a long and hopeful future ahead of them. On the other hand (according to Victor Hugo), elders live in “a cottage with a balcony on the edge of the abyss.”

Old peoples’ future is not nearly so long as their past, so they tend to look backwards – a reversal that happens sometime in our late sixties (in my opinion). Events, creeping mortality, and the mirror all jostle our perspective until it… flips. From that point, it appears that we are looking at the world from a different angle than other, younger people. One is reminded of Lewis Carroll’s poem:

“You are old, Father William,” the young man said,
“And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head—
Do you think, at your age, it is right?”

“In my youth,” Father William replied to his son,
“I feared it might injure the brain;
But now that I’m perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again.”

Old people may be forever standing on their heads. This is not such a bad thing. G.K. Chesterton talks about the value of seeing the world upside down (literally):

If a man saw the world upside down, with all the trees and towers hanging downwards as in a pool, one effect would be to emphasize the idea of dependence. There is a Latin and literal connection; for the very word dependence only means hanging…. But the point is this: that whereas to the normal eye the large masonry of its [the town of Assisi’s] walls or the massive foundations of its watchtowers and its high citadel would make it seem safer and more permanent, the moment it was turned over the very same weight would make it seem more helpless and in peril. It is but a symbol; but it happens to fit the psychological fact.

Needless to say, the turning of the world upside down more or less voids the idea of progress. I have talked about progress elsewhere, but it is worth noting again that after the midpoint of life (the peak of Dante’s parabola), the human body is not progressing; the modern aging person lives with the myth of progress while living… the opposite.
But there is hope. Dante describes an upside down world in his Inferno – one goes down only to come out on the other side:

You were there as long as I climbed downward.
When I turned myself round you passed the point
To which all weight on every side pulls down.

And now you come under the hemisphere
Opposite that which domes the vast dry land:
There, beneath its pinnacle of sky… (Canto XXXIV)

Dante and Virgil, of course, emerge in Purgatory, which is not yet heaven (but is far nicer than hell). Remember when you were very young and thought you could dig a hole to China? If you could have done so, you would have tunneled down to the center of the earth and then started going… up. There are also the mythological upside-down trees of the Bhagavad Gita and Norse sagas.

This ability to look back is a blessing of old age. In Mrs. Dalloway, we find this passage:

The compensation of growing old…was simply this; that the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained – at last! – the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence, the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.

And in All Passion Spent, Lady Slane calls “looking back on the girl she had once been” as the “last, supreme luxury…. She could lie back against death and examine life.” Old age has its benefits.

And where do we old people come out in our upside-down world? Hopefully, with a new perspective. I love to hike and I have often noted that when going the opposite way I usually travel on a loop, it almost seems like a different path! In retrospect, we may see events in our lives from the standpoint of how they came out rather than what the intention was. We are more likely to forgive mistakes (our own and others – for who could bear the past without forgiveness?) and learn the lessons we missed in our initial shame and regret. From this new standpoint, we also realize that what we thought was good fortune was often disaster in disguise. All this makes us less sure that we know all the answers, but perhaps more sure about what the important questions are. Maybe we are on Hugo’s porch hanging over the abyss, but – nevertheless – we are enjoying the long view down.

And it is just not our personal story; we have lived long enough to see changes in our world. Our generation has seen technology emerge around us and then submerge us all. We have seen what is commonly called progress, but, in retrospect, we are not entirely sure how progress should be defined.

This week’s story, “Two New Apps,” is about technology and love and truth. Enjoy.

 

The Notion of Progress and the Reality of Aging

How does aging fit in with the narrative of progress in which we are immersed? One can wonder about what progress really is or means (G. K. Chesterton: “Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always changing the vision”) or marvel at the reversal of the Enlightenment period from the old story of decline from the Golden Age to expectations of ever-better lives, technologies, civilizations (J. B. Bury: “Between 1690 and 1740 the conception of an indefinite progress of enlightenment had been making its way”). Regardless of how we define it or how it arrived, we now live in a world that sees itself as progressing; we participate in a world that expects people to improve themselves; we flail around in a world that offers us visions of innovation and perfectibility.

Humanity did not necessarily start with a progress narrative; ancient stories often depicted a fall from a golden era (think Eden or the Golden Age (which the Greeks said were followed by the inferior Silver, Bronze and Iron ages). In this old story, the trajectory of a human life followed the pattern of the cosmos. Childhood and youth were a kind of Eden; loss of innocence was followed in a few years by many other losses. With the Enlightenment and the advent of a progress narrative, humanity found optimism in a future which included scientific advancement and expanded life spans. Things were only going to get better. Celestial immortality was replaced by the hope of infinite mortality. Yet, people still age. More slowly, perhaps, and certainly for a longer time span than did our ancestors. And yet – we age and wane in a world that does not seem to have a narrative of decline.

What does one do with a body (despite periodic repairs in organs and skin tone) which is on a downward trajectory? And what about the mind that might be wiser, but is slower and more forgetful? What do we do with the discrepancy between the decline of the individual body and the ideology of progress? The “ideal” of the Enlightenment was progress; this collective advancement was hard to reconcile either in fact or metaphor with the reality of the aging of an individual. And no one seems to want to help us (other than by selling us things to make us look or feel younger). We are exhorted to keep up with things, stay busy, see the world, look younger, eat strategically and beat the odds. The day comes, of course, when we can’t keep up, don’t want to be busy, look old, and face undeniable omens of mortality. And often the terminology used is that of failure: “She’s losing her fight against gravity.” “He doesn’t even try any more.” “She wears old lady clothes.” “She’s given up.”

I am no Luddite. Science has certainly given us longer and healthier lives, but it has not given us an allegory, a template, for growing old. Science does not grow old; it renews and adapts itself continually. Technology, science’s step-child, not only moves steadily forward, but is commercially insistent that we all come along for the ride. If we cannot keep up, we are “behind the times.” How can we be behind the times we are living in? And if we are (and see this week’s story, “The Needs of the Living Organism”), is that entirely a bad thing? Might those outside the circus be the only ones who can see objectively the frenetic activity in the three rings under the big top? Might we not appreciate this as a good place to be? (Think of Lear’s plan for his old age at the end of the bard’s play – but more on King Lear next time.)

When I left the commerce of the working world, I was relieved I would not have to learn another computer update, not have to adjust again to whole new ways of getting the job done. My generation – who entered the work world before computers and just slightly after Xerox machines – adapted to a great deal and did it well. But is learning a new technology really a growth experience? Given a choice in old age, might we not want to spend our time learning other things? Or reflecting on what it means to have spent so much of our lives learning and adapting to ever-changing tools – and wondering whether that effort minimized our better understanding of what those tools were used for. We might decide the Enlightenment notion of progress is something we can transcend; indeed, it might be one of the things that old age is for.