The Future of the Aged
From BERTRAND DE JOUVENEL
MEN have always desired a long life. This used to be an infrequent achievement; its becoming ever more frequent is a notable feature of our general progress. Nowadays a man or woman aged fifty-five can look forward to 'many returns': but how 'happy'? This poses a problem which must increasingly request our attention and efforts.
Our institutions are not in a process of adjust- ment to a longer lease of life; in many ways it is the reverse. -While our advancing society 'pro- duces' ever more 'elders,' it has ever less use for them. According to UN demographers, 9.5 per cent of the population of Europe in 1960 were aged sixty-five or more (the estimate for Africa is 2.6 per cent). The estimate made for France by our experts is that by 1985 people aged sixty-five or more will form 11.3 per cent of the population.
What will the condition of these people be? A miserable condition in material and moral terms, unless we actively attend to it. If we-consider all the more notable trends of our time, we find that they conspire to a relative 'pushing-down' of the elders, who come to constitute the true lower class of our workers' society, the non-working class.
Older people have the lowest incomes; retire- ment means an abridgment of income; they have the lowest social significance. since that signifi- cance is afforded by the part played in the pro- ductive process; they are inarticulate, dispersed and unorganised: but even if they were organised, their supposed 'pressure group' would be very poor in means of pressure: of course they cannot strike.
But even before reaching this depressed situa- tion after quitting work, ageing workers undergo a process of social depreciation. We are no more a society of routines, better mastered as one has practised them longer, but a society of new pro- cesses, where it is an important asset to have enjoyed the most recent formation. We are a society of ceaseless change where it is a major disability to lack flexibility, adaptability; and this is a faculty the weakening of which occurs quite early.
Studies have been made of the evolution of talent as a function of age in first-rate personali- ties. However much authors of such studies may qualify their findings and stress variance, what makes an impression is one simple statement emerging. This simple statement is that the 'optimum' of talent is reached around the age of thirty-five, after which there is a progressive decline.' Whether valid or not, this finding has impressed employers of talents and skills : though not prone to apply it to themselves, they do in- creasingly apply it to employees. It is because of their sensitivity to this relative disparagement of older workers that unions lay such stress on seniority rights.
The general belief that workers (and I mean people who are professionally active, at whatever grade and in whatever capacity) lose value as they gain years, militates in general towards the lowering of the retirement age. We used to think of such lowering as a good and progressive measure: many of us have changed our minds thereupon, considering that such retirement en- tails not only the snapping of companionships,
PARIS
7 hea, we're going to be replaced by a machine.'
and the loss of a role played in society, but also a sharp drop in the man's standard of life. Cer- tainly we must seek to lessen this drop by an increase of the share of national income going to retired people. But arithmetic teaches that such increase can benefit the individual pensioner the less, the more the proportion of pensioners in the population increases. This proportion increases 'naturally' as an ever greater fraction of the population is aged sixty-five or more. (I take this figure arbitrarily for purposes of illustration; obviously we add to the difficulty of the problem if we also increase the proportion of the retired as it were 'artificially,' by lowering retirement age.) We can, of course, state that we shall improve the ratio between the income of the retired and that of the man in activity (this we must do) even though life lengthens and while lowering the age of retirement. Such statements cost nothing, but I am afraid we shall find it quite impossible to carry out this good intention. Nor shall we find any great concrete will to carry it out in the society of today. It would be utterly unfair to tax our contemporaries with selfishness; on the con- trary, it seems to me that they are passionately concerned to do the best for others; but the others who are foremost in their minds are the children—their own, and other people's children.
I doubt whether devotion to one's own children has ever before in Western society been as wide- spread and intense as it is today. But, beyond that, we are possessed by the excellent feeling that we stand collectively in loco parentis to the whole succeeding generation. As individuals and as a nation, what we think of first and foremost is to equip the coming generation, to endow it, to prepare for it a way of life much superior to the present. This I regard as a very good disposition, to be applauded and enhanced. But, like all good things, it has its counterpart. Our thoughts are so much addressed to those who come after us that we have little attention left for our pre- decessors. The substitution of the two-tier family for the three-tier family is not only observable in housing, it has psychological aspects.
A revolution of age classes has occurred. It was easy to speak of 'a proud old age' in the case of the farmer who remained, to his last gasp, master of the land he had tilled, of the house where his children and grandchildren were born, who directed the labours of his sons and took some share in them according to his forces, who was the patriarch, listened to when he told tales of old times to children, or gave to the adults advice grounded upon his experience. Standing in so commanding a position, the patriarch was prone to be domineering, arbitrary, and per- versely conservative; that social transformation has toppled him from it should, on balance, be accounted a gain.
But has he not been toppled to a position of excessive inferiority and indignity? What place has he in this advancing society which, marching to the future, has little regard for past labours? What the older people receive is thought of less and less as the due of their achievements, more and more as mere provision for their needs. And other claims have precedence.
I can here but briefly indicate the two main directions in which French minds are moving: firstly, to afford opportunities of employment suit- able to ageing people, in order that they may still feel in the thick of things and, with this in view, maintain the flexibility of workers by periods of education, possibly every two years; secondly, for those who are beyond any such possibility of integration, to organise a social life remedying their isolation.
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