De Senectute

At work about a month ago, I had the great pleasure of working with an extraordinary, and yet very ordinary, ninety-two-year-old gentleman.  You would have never guessed his age, to look at him--he looked at least ten years younger than that.  (I told him he looked like he was just seventy.)  He was courteous, humble, and sociable, his mind clear as crystal and sharp as a knife.  This gentleman was only the latest of the many elderly folks I have known or met in my lifetime.  Something about this particular gentleman, however, gave rise to an entirely new and rather frightening question in my mind concerning old age.

At first, my thoughts were rather comforting: I merely wondered whether his good-natured attitude was the result of the wisdom gained from many years of life.  It is comforting to think that most people, even those who seem to be ruled by their passions, will "grow up" sooner or later.  And it seems logical, since we know that the strength of one's senses and bodily appetites tends to decrease with old age.  Could it be that in growing old, people become kinder in spite of themselves?

Then I had a second thought, a much more frightening one.  Maybe his good nature is the result of his upbringing.  That would make sense, too--perhaps more sense.  Cicero, in his De Senectute, or On Old Age, writes, "[T]o deserve all these compliments of mine, old age must have its foundations well laid in early life."  I may have taken that quote a bit out of context; I'm not sure.  But Cicero also emphasizes that the complaints many make about old age are due to deficiencies in character, not to old age itself.  And if that can be applied to the virtues of old age--amiability and wisdom, for example--then it seems that Cicero would not attribute the wisdom of the elderly simply to their having experienced many things.  And neither should we.

Now, the ninety-two-year-old gentleman I met grew up in an earlier time--in his case, the 30's and 40's.  People were raised differently back then.  The situation of children in "civilized" countries today is something unique, never seen before in history--and very different from ninety years ago.  And I don't mean that in a good way.

If wisdom in old age comes more from upbringing and personal character than from simply growing old, then I am afraid to imagine what our generation will look like in old age.  Our current situation gives little evidence that we'll be anything other than a bunch of unprecedentedly self-seeking, arrogant, unintelligent, isolated, cranky old coots, either ironically trying to avoid death at all costs while having our bodies cosmetically altered to death and starved to death on obsessive health food diets, or else euthanizing ourselves willingly at the first sign of decaying physical health.

Allow me to insert some humor into the midst of this gloom--writing about obsessive health food diets made me think of the first part of this video:

Comedy Central

Sorry about that distraction...  Oh yes, as I was saying: if one's attitude and demeanor in old age is exclusively (or primarily) dependent upon one's personal character (in which one's childhood upbringing plays a critical role), then I am terrified at the thought of my generation sixty years from now.

Another possibility, of course, is that the unwise have attempted to slouch through life without good habits of personal character or much genuine intellectual activity, and upon reaching old age, have reduced themselves to a state of dependency and been largely relegated to nursing homes where no one sees them, leaving only their wiser peers (the ones we help cross the street every day) in circulation, as it were, to deceive us into thinking that all elderly folks are like them.  If this is the case, our future is even bleaker than we had thought: if previous generations were that bad, we can hardly imagine what ours will look like.

I think, though, that some combination of these factors contributes to a person's attitude in old age.  For now, I remain hopeful that there is something about growing old that mellows a person, brings greater wisdom (though it be only human wisdom), and makes one kinder, all forecasts to the contrary notwithstanding.