Getting old and being old

Time for some plain speaking

Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the US presidential election has prompted me to write down a few thoughts about getting old and being old. 

First up, I’m going to rant a bit (in classic old-person mode) about how much I loathe the various prissy euphemisms for “old” that appear just about everywhere: “older”, “aging”, “senior” and, worst of all, “elderly”.  I am, of course, aging, as is everyone alive. Similarly, like everyone, I’m older than I was yesterday and older than people who are younger than me.  What no one seems willing to say out loud is that, at age 68, I am old.  As Black and queer people have already done, I want to reappropriate “old”.

It’s not hard to see why people are so timid when talking about getting, and being, old. It is, after all, a journey that has only one terminus. At one time, only a fortunate minority survived long enough to reach old age. But now, most people do, and it would be good if we talked more honestly about it.

As exemplified by Biden’s disastrous debate, growing old is like Hemingway’s description of bankruptcy[1]. It happens two ways - gradually, then suddenly. The process of growing old gracefully involves extending the gradual phase as long as possible, while accepting that it’s happening.

For me, that means, in physical terms, that my running pace isn’t what it used to be, and that I  need to do more exercise just to maintain a given level of fitness. And, I often need an afternoon nap if I am going to maintain the kind of program  I need.

But for someone in the ideas business like me, the real concern about growing old is about what is happening mentally.  The standard distinction here is between fluid intelligence (roughly, the ability to solve novel problems) and crystallised intelligence (the ability to solve problems through accumulated skills and knowledge). Fluid intelligence is said to peak in the 20s, as with young mathematical geniuses, while crystallised intelligence continues improving until the 60s.

Crystallisation has a more negative side, that of being stuck in mental frameworks acquired long ago, and no longer appropriate. This was less of a problem in traditional societies where nothing much changed over time, so that crystallised intelligence could roughly be translated as “wisdom”.  Now, however, knowledge is changing all the time, and crystallised intelligence can easily become rigidity. 

This has long been a hazard for academics, clinging to the ideas which they learned in their early career, and perhaps helped to form, with the result that they resist the inevitable challenges. As Max Planck put it “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it …” This observation has been summarised by the aphorism “Science proceeds one funeral at a time”. 

I’ve seen plenty of instances of Planck’s principle, but there’s nothing inevitable about it. You don’t need lots of fluid intelligence to observe this process, and guard against it. Indeed, one of the benefits of being old is the experience of seeing new ideas arrive, some replacing the old orthodoxy and others revealing themselves as passing fads. One experience of this kind for me was the neoclassical counter-revolution against Keynesian economics in the 1970s. Lots of people who had appeared as unquestioning Keynesians a few years before suddenly became equally unquestioning believers in balanced budgets and rational expectations. The lesson I drew was the need to strike a balance between abandoning your ideas the first time something new comes along and sticking to them unquestioningly.

That’s enough for now. When and if I come back to this topic, I’ll try to write something about some the political and economic aspects of old age.

fn1. Until I checked, I had always misattributed this to F Scott Fitzgerald, who seems more apposite

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