Senescence, the Last Half of Life

by G. Stanley Hall

The state also subjects youth and enforces rights of property and person to which the young have to be broken in. All kinds and degrees of apprenticeship and the age and meaning of attaining majority are prescribed. In many lands the parents control the marriage of their offspring as they do property and the older make and administer laws for the younger. After all these forms and degrees of servitude of the younger to the older it is no wonder that the former not only very often show symptoms of revolt all the way from the cradle to complete maturity but, along with gratitude and respect, also cherish, if more unconsciously, an enmity that they can neither entirely express nor control against all kinds of masters, perhaps especially when their power and authority begin to wane with age. The push of the advancing upon the retiring generation is not consciously to feed fat such ancient grudges by subjecting elders in their turn as they were once subjected and yet there is a deep and persistent sense, which even psychology has but little realized, in which every advance in history, every insurrection or rebellion, every protestant movement against the established order or custom, and every reform in religion, politics, or life generally is only an expression of the eternal revolt of youth against age, of which the extreme reaction of parricide is the symbol but which is the deep psychogenetic root of every degree of failure in care and respect. LeBon[202] sees and well presents the insurrectionary tendencies rife in the world to-day but does not realize the extent, nor does he find or seek the ultimate cause, of the present universal “revolt.” Thus the aged everywhere still suffer from the imperfections with which they and even their remote forbears exercised the parental function.

On the other hand, it should not, of course, be forgotten that there is always the more obvious and countervailing tendency to respect parents as age brings the insight that in what they compelled and forbade they were wiser than we, and to feel grateful that they did not leave us to follow our own sweet wills. Just so far as we come to realize not only how they lived for their children and did so wisely and well we both love them more for all they did for us, and, if we are wise, we realize that their counsels may still be helpful and we draw the moral that there is always somewhere a wisdom superior to our own, an experience from which we may profit, and an authority somewhere to which we must always remain docile and toward which our proper attitude is that of a loyalty that is essentially filial. It is of this impulse that all kinds of ancestor worship are belated expressions, while at the same time it is compensatory for all ill wishes and treatment directed toward them while they lived. In a finished civilization the old will enjoy their full meed of reverence while they are yet alive and every sort of post-mortem canonization will be seen to be only the symbol of a devoir present.

Perhaps in the large Aristotelian sense of the word politics is, par excellence, the work of and for old age. Statecraft must look not at the transient fluctuations of current and popular opinion but must look beyond the present or the next election, must rise above the selfishness of party interest and look to the far future. It must think not in terms of the exigencies of the hour but of decades and generations and not of local or partisan but of national and humanistic interests. From the patriarchs down the old have been the wisest shepherds of the people and if young men have succeeded in diplomacy it is because they have been prodigies of precocity who have also devoted themselves to the intensive study of history, which is at best only a proxy for experience. To have read ever so exhaustively of a war of a century before, for example, can give the young student no such sense of its horrors, nor of the urgency of using every honorable means of averting it, as to have actually lived through it with a vivid personal memory of its incidents. Veterans of old wars would be cautious about entering new ones.

Thus it is well that the old are with us “lest we forget” and in exigencies we often turn to them if living and read and quote them with respect long after they are dead. Great statesmen are those who have not only identified themselves with the past, present, and future of the nations they serve but beyond this have felt themselves charged with the interests of mankind as a whole. We surely need all possible ripeness of knowledge and maturity of judgment in this field and if the span of experience personally demanded by leaders could have been a full century, many of the great disasters that have befallen the race might have been avoided.

The fact is that, as the Athenians seemed to the old Egyptian priest who had known of Atlantis, we are all children who have to play the rôle of real adults because the latter have not yet arrived, so they we have come to think ourselves really mature.

Again, if the young are the best advocates, the old are by nature the best judges. They can best weigh facts and ideas in the scale of justice. The moral faculties ripen more slowly. Thus the old can best supplement the technicalities of law by equity and give ethics its rights in their verdicts. They should be the keepers of the standards of right and wrong and mete out justice with the impartiality and aloofness that befit it. Even in private life we have a judicial function, which, though often ignored and even resented, is also often sought and respected if we have the tact to praise and do not become censorious. Our approval or disapproval, even if mild and unspoken, may count for more than is admitted or even realized by our family and friends.

Such philosophy as my life and studies have taught me begins and ends in the thesis that the supreme criterion of everything, including religion, science, art, property, business, education, hygiene, and every human institution and everything in our environment, is what it contributes to make life longer, fuller, and saner, so that each individual shall live out more completely all the essentials in the life of the race. If the best survive, it is not the good but the bad and unfit who die young. To have lived long but narrowly is just as bad. Both have really only half lived and it is just those who have failed of realizing their full humanity in this life that most feel the need of another and imprecate the cosmos as having cheated them if it has not provided one. A rich old age is thus the supreme reward of virtue. Thus what is education but fitting us for a more advanced stage of life. It consists largely in giving to the young the products of older minds and thus advancing our mental age beyond our years. Childhood longs to die into youth and youth into maturity and so the latter in its turn should long to pass away into age. And how childish much in the adult world seems to those who have achieved the true sagehood of age; and how unripe, full of folly, vanity, error, and passion! How little the world has realized its debt in the past to aging men and women in whom knowledge has ripened into wisdom and how much more age owes and will yet give to the world when human life becomes complete and realizes its higher possibilities!

Now, too, many of those who attain advanced years are battered, water-logged, leaky derelicts without cargo or crew, chart, rudder, sail, or engine, remaining afloat only because they have struck no fatal rocks or because the storms have not quite yet swamped them; or, to change the figure, because they have withered, not ripened, on the tree. How many of us really ought to be dead because we are useless to ourselves and to others. It is because there are so many such that the rôle assigned to the best of us is often so hard and so repugnant to our nature and to our needs. Hence it comes that we are not only handicapped but are sorely tempted to accept a sham old age that is false to all the best that is in us, instead of justifying and illustrating a better one.

Thus, in fine, all not later than the fourth decade or whenever they note that their youth has fled or that any of their powers have begun to abate, should not only boldly face the fact that they are aging but begin serious preparations for old age, so that this stage of life be not only happier but more efficient than it is and that it render to the world a service never so needed and never so possible to render as now. Men and women in all the earlier and often in the later postmeridional phases of life are cowards in facing for themselves and arrant tricksters in deceiving others about their physiological and psychological age. If all the psychic energy now directed to concealment, pretense, and the maintenance of illusions here were put to better uses, then health, prolongation of life, and efficiency in later decades, to say nothing of happiness, would be greatly increased. The dawn of adolescence, like that of senescence, has its peculiar possibilities and its very trying probationary years before the age of nubility; but youth always has the advantage, if it will only utilize it, of the counsels of those who have weathered its storm and stress. There is a vast amount of wreckage from which puberty often suffers. The old, however, have no older initiators into the last stage of life and must find or make their own way as best they can. But they should realize that all the fluctuations and circumnutation phenomena they experience in the middle decades of life are gropings toward new adjustments in the domain of hygiene and morale that are necessary when their income of vital energy does not quite balance its expenditure. All these phenomena are really only labor pains by which nature is trying to bring into the world a new and higher and more complete humanity. To repeat, our function is to finish a structure that still lacks an upper story and give it an outlook or conning tower from which man can see more clearly the far horizon and take his bearings now and then by the eternal stars.

The old who are really so, who are not merely spent projectiles, relics, vestiges, or ruins that time has chanced to spare, do sometimes attain vision and even prophetic power, and their last real words to the world they are leaving are not like the inane babblings of the dying, which friends so often cherish, but are often the best and most worth heeding by their juniors of all their counsels. Some have told us that if the long-awaited superman ever arrives, he will come by way of the prolongation of adolescence and others have said it would be by the fuller maturity of man in his prime. No doubt both these stages of life would be enriched and potentialized, but his first advent and his greatest improvement over man of to-day will be in the form of glorified old age. Nietzsche was right in making Zarathustra old and he himself was the overman whose message he brought to the world. He was intent on the future of man and not on his present, still less on his past. Thus the ideal old man will be chiefly concerned for what is yet to be. Whatever he knows of history, he is more concerned with the better history not yet written because it has not yet happened. If he thinks of his childhood and his forbears, he thinks still more of posterity. His chief desire is to see the young better born and better provided for so as to come to a fuller maturity.