When Jared Diamond, the geographer and best-selling author, first got a television, it had three knobs that you would twist to change channels and adjust the volume. When the 75 year-old UCLA Professor recently upgraded, he was confronted with multiple 41-button remote controls and forced to call his younger family members to consult on how to turn the thing on.
This is a prominent and unfortunate cultural narrative of the elderly in today’s world – the when-I-was-your-age, get-off-my-lawn caricature – but couldn’t older people be tapped for more meaningful, more integrated contributions to society?
Diamond certainly believes so. In his lecture to the Skeptics Society in Pasadena on Jan. 5, he drew from decades of field work with the world’s tribal cultures to offer lessons for how we might improve the integration of older people into American society. With continued improvements in medicine, more people are living longer, well past their years of peak productivity.
Homo sapiens has lived in small tribal groups for the majority of its existence, “until virtually yesterday measured on the timescale of our biological evolution,” as Diamond notes. Only in the last 11,000 years have we collected in cities and accepted the presence of strangers in our midst.
And in a world obsessed with and commercially driven to embrace the new, there is value in reflecting on the past. This, of course, is the rallying cry of all historians, but Diamond is able to compress the sprawling landscape of world history into easily digestible case studies and takeaway messages.
To Diamond, our neglect of the elderly stems from an inability to identify aspects of life for which older people are uniquely well suited. After all, once your value to the greater good wanes, it’s easy to argue that you’re the last in line when the going gets tough.
There are ways to improve the economic utility of the elderly. Physical traits like strength, stamina, and dexterity, as well as some mental faculties involving novel reasoning, decrease with age. But other marketable qualities are enhanced: Older people tend to have a better understanding of the diversity of human experience and interpersonal relationships, are less ego-driven, and can integrate disparate data sets with greater fluency. These skills make the elderly better at supervising and strategizing – positions of leadership that reflect the phrase “tribal elder.” Wresting decision-making power from young men in particular, could lead to more considered, less-impulsive societal choices. (This argument has also been made to support more women at higher levels of leadership.)
Grandparents are also “increasingly useful for offering high-quality child care,” says Diamond, as more mothers re-enter the work force. As seen in many tribal societies, they “offer superior, motivated, experienced child care,” and are less likely to quit the job in pursuit of better pay or benefits.
These measures of productivity are financial, but there are other metrics of value. The elderly have, by definition, lived through different historical periods than younger people, and can provide accounts and advice based on such experiences. For example, the Great Depression, World War II, and the debate over using the atomic bomb were unique periods in our history, and “most of our current leaders and voters have no experience in any of those things,” says Diamond. Living memories of the moral, logistical, and financial challenges associated with such events may help in our handling of similar situations in the future. (This utility has become less significant with the advent of information storage in books and on the internet, but it remains important nonetheless.)
Despite the fact that more people are living longer than ever before, Diamond contends that “old age is in many respects more miserable than ever before,” and “a disaster of modern American life.” Hopefully, by looking back into our roots as a social species, we selectively incorporate promising tools for integrating the elderly into society. It’s a recent challenge, evolutionarily speaking, but one whose solution offers immense potential for improving societal health and productivity.
