The ambiguity of age-consciousness

There is striking evidence that later life can be a vantage-point from which fruitful developments can be expected, both for the protagonists and for others. This is not to claim that older age is always enjoyable, nor to deny the challenges and vulnerabilities that attach to this stage of life as they do to preceding ones; it is merely to stress that it is important. Hence gerontologists display and discuss compelling reasons for expecting vibrancy and insight from older age. Yet at the same time they note that common discourses and major social practices fail to support this expectation. This is not centrally a question about individuals’ personal attitudes towards older people. Survey evidence indicates that these are often on the whole positive, and a variety of experiences by or in the company of frail older people suggest that members of other generations can take active pleasure in their company. The point is, rather, that such attitudes do not effectively translate into political and public culture and policy; they fail to allow older people systematically to feel senses of agency and self-respect, fading them into the background of everyday attention. In other words, major forms of social exclusion revolve around denying meaning to people and processes involved in ageing.

This predicament cannot be repaired in the absence of accepted public languages on a significant scale that accord status and interest to older people: that establish the compelling interest of what they do, feel and think, and pay adequate attention to it. In the absence of discursive practices of this kind, children and adults who are not yet ‘old’ find it hard to formulate why they should expect to gain from the views and company of older people. Nor do the common practices of contemporary social life encourage older people themselves to anticipate that they will have significant experiences to enjoy and convey, or to express this anticipation readily in words. Ancient rhetoricians emphasised techniques for bestowing ‘presence’ on salient parts of an argument, making it vivid and meaningful for those who heard it; arguments without presence will be ignored.