Senescence, the Last Half of Life

by G. Stanley Hall

Endurance, forethought, strength, and skill.

There is a vast difference between old age as commonly seen and as it should be. The average type of humanity is undergoing a change. Civilization means city-fication and this involves a state of mind very different from that of the rustic. Worry has become the disease of the age as it was not formerly when man’s vegetative nature was stronger. It is a maladie des beaux esprits. We are no longer content to eat, sleep, and sit in the sun. The old always and greatly need grandchildren and it was never so hard to provide occupation for them, for their temptation now is to become self-centered, which is perhaps most common in women. It takes a different form in men superannuated by some automatic rule. Pitiful is the state of those who withdraw from occupations that have required and developed great mental activity.

The young, on the other hand, are less tolerant than formerly of the foibles and frailties of age. We live at such a high speed that it seems slow, if not stupid, and lack of sympathy adds to its burdens. The very idea of the family is declining and there is little left of the old sentiment for the patriarch, so that “the faster we move, the wider must become the gap between the young and those who, like the aged, have ceased to move.” Indeed, old age “is probably less tolerated and less tolerable to-day than ever in the past,” for the old were never so out of it. It might be expected, as death draws near, that religious anxieties would increase, but the contrary is true. Youth was never so unable to apply the principle Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner or to make allowances. So it is the young who worry most about religious matters. “Absence of occupation is not rest. The mind that’s vacant is a mind distrest.”

If the man who has lived solely for sport is ill prepared to meet old age, he who has lived solely for business is still less so. He has had no time to cultivate his more human tastes but has developed his potentialities in only one direction and when superannuation comes his soul is bankrupt. He generally now has money as well as time to spend and so devotes himself to increasing his material comforts in a way that beckons death, because high living is no substitute for high thinking. He should discover the least atrophied of his powers and devote himself to their eleventh-hour development. The man of the modern nervous type should lay up treasure that age cannot corrupt. Herbert Spencer said the purpose of education was to prepare for complete living.

One of the most beautiful and normal attributes of old age is interest in the young, without which age is lonely and life becomes, as the preacher said, “vanity of vanities.” “If old people are confined to the company of other old people, they hasten each other’s downward course.” There was “even a certain psychological truth symbolized in the old idea that the company of a young girl was the best means for the rejuvenescence of an old man.” “Never was the tendency to abandon old age to its own devices so strong as it is to-day.” Spencer thought the care of the aged by their dependents was the fit complement for the care that in earlier years had been devoted to them and regarded the imperfection of this return the great defect of our practical morals. Indeed, the author doubts “whether the aged were ever so much to be pitied as they are to-day.” The psychological needs of old age are greater than ever.

In his Health, Strength, and Happiness,[107] he gives an earnest, practical caution for all, but especially for the aged, to eat less; and particularly so in warm weather. “We dig our graves with our teeth.” Fat is hardly a part of the body at all. Flesh is really muscle, so that the fat man should be said to be losing flesh. “The whole secret of prolonging one’s life consists in doing nothing to shorten it.” The writer profoundly believes in government by the elderly in years and thinks that the really greatest works in many of the most difficult fields have been done by them. He stresses the fact that there is a certain kind of wisdom that nothing but age can bring. He sees the chief cause of senile degeneration in the hardening of the arteries, due to the necessity of disposing of superfluous fat. A man is really as old as his mind and he doubts whether we are producing more really living elderly men and women than did the ancient world. He is bitter in his condemnation of the common phrase, “Too old at forty.”

Bernard Shaw[108] thinks mankind is headed straight for the City of Destruction and can be saved not by eugenics or by a new and better education, as H. G. Wells opines, but by prolonging human life to circa three hundred years. If the length of life were reduced to one-half or one-quarter of what it now is we may assume that our culture and institutions would decline because children could not direct them. It is exactly the equivalent of this that has actually happened, only instead of life being shortened to half or a quarter of its span the problems of life have doubled or quadrupled in magnitude and difficulty so that present-day man is not grown up to them. Trained only to run a motor truck, he is now since the war called on to be an air pilot, and this requires a long and arduous training with a great deal of preliminary selection or weeding out. Thus man must now simply either live a great deal longer or the race will go under.

This can be done and Shaw tells us how. It is simply by wishing and willing it intensely enough and for generations. Lamarck, the first creative evolutionist, devoted his life to the “fundamental proposition that living organisms changed because they wanted to.” They wanted to see and so evolved eyes; to move about and so grew organs of locomotion; the forbears of the giraffe wanted to browse on taller and taller tree-tops and so grew long necks, etc. All this was done by the same phyletic impulsion as now impels us to talk, swim, skate, ride a wheel, etc. We strive at it long and persistently and by and by, presto! the power comes from within because we will it, and it is never lost. In this same way man can and will acquire the power of living several times longer than he does now. As he does so he will put away his present occupations and interests, sports, amusements, party politics, religious dogmas, ceremonies, and indeed most of the things that now interest the populace, and come out into a new adulthood with vastly enhanced powers and a far wider horizon. Those who do this first will become pilots of mankind, which at present seems doomed for want of more wisdom and better leaders. Darwin and especially the Neo-Darwinians who believe in “circumstantial evolution” launched the world on a career of egoism in morals and mechanism in life that has brought it to its present pass and made it forget that all true evolution is from within, vitalistic, and voluntaristic.

Shaw’s drama opens in Eden, where Adam, oppressed by the conviction that he must live forever, first faces the fact of death in finding the putrefying body of a fawn. The gorgeously hooded serpent explains to Eve how she is to renew life by offspring from her body, and because of this she and Adam are assured that they need live only a thousand years. In the next scene Cain the Killer justifies his vocation.

In the second part, which opens in our day, two brothers, one a liberalized clerical and the other a biologist, agree that life is too short to be taken seriously and that neither of them is within a hundred and fifty years of the experience and wisdom they have been sincerely pretending to. To be a good clergyman or biologist requires several centuries. Man now dies before he knows what life or what science is. Indeed, life is now so short that it is hardly worth while to do anything well. Then a past and present prime minister, obviously caricatures of the two most famous men who have lately filled that position in England, enter and try—each according to his method and hobbies—to interest the brothers in one popular cause after another, but in vain; and are finally plainly told that they have not lived long enough to outgrow personal and local prejudices or to see things in their true perspective. The statesmen, failing to find campaign material serviceable for the next election in this new Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas, then ask for a prescription that will prolong their lives and, failing to obtain either, cease to be interested. It does not seem practical to found a Longevity Party and it might be dangerous to let everyone live as long as he wanted to. The statesmen are finally told that as they are incompetent to do God’s work He will produce some better beings who can.