Come of Age (Stephen Jenkinson)
OVERVIEW
Today there are more old people per capita than ever before in history. We have advanced medical technology that extends lives, we have knee and hip surgeries, the leisure sciences, retirement communities. So, with our unprecedented ability to get old, why are there so few elders? For all the 70+ somethings occupying society, do any of us feel there is a commensurate abundance of wisdom in our midst? Come of Age by Stephen Jenkinson explores what elderhood should be, and why it’s suspiciously absent at a time when we might expect it to be flourishing.
Culture sets the stage
The dominant culture of North America (the “West”) stands most culpable. Jenkinson’s previous book, Die Wise, focused on the West’s cultural aspects of independence, autonomy, and competence-addiction as the key ingredients to our modern death anxiety. Come of Age focuses, rather, on our love affair with potential. Western culture is in thrall to change and innovation and novelty. We want progress, we want more. We tell our youth: “you have your whole lives ahead of you,” because that’s where life lives, in the unlived “ahead,” our tomorrows possessing more value than our yesterdays. In the West, we live exclusively in the future tense.
The consequences of this cultural arrangement are more easily ignored by those of us who imagine we have many tomorrows still to live. But if all our potential and value lives in our futures, then what potential and value do old people have? We don’t say to our grandparents “you have your whole lives ahead of you.” Their lives are mostly gone, aren’t they?
Jenkinson asks harder questions still. What exactly do our ever-lingering lives do for the world?
What of the natural order is served by Western humans living ever longer, drawing down ever more by living our intransigent and unsustainable ways of life that grant this very protracted life span? Do you see wisdom rising from the ash heap. . .? Do you see anything sustainable coming from it all, for humans or for the world. . .?. He wonders: Do you remember any item from your consuming life that took on greater value in the cultural or spiritual or consumer economy as soon as there was more of it?
A culture of future-bound value and excess begets the belief that longer lifespans are better while simultaneously creating a world in which it often feels value-less to be old… the oldest among us somehow both victim and winner of the time lottery.
The collateral damage
An important casualty of this cultural mindset is the tolerance for loss –for endings, limits, boundaries, and restraint. We take and take and take, on and on and on in an endless linear accumulation – a relentless, consuming momentum that propels us to the promises of tomorrow. There is nothing natural or wise about this circumstance, nothing cyclical or sustainable. We are apex predators who chafe against limit and who cling with a vice grip to our possession of the world, from our first day to our last. And this is why our culture is strangely absent of elders. If elders are to be found among the elderly, and the elderly have the same expectations as the rest of us (expectations of more), from where would wisdom come? The boomers are also riding that wave of dominion and limitless potential promised to them. A senior cohort that has been honed by Western culture and entitlements, that is still striving for the same, cannot be a source of anything different, certainly not of tempered wisdom.
Reflecting on indigenous wisdom by comparison, Jenkinson muses that Western culture is actually the “utter voiding of culture, masquerading as the best of cultures.”
Cultures are cultured not because they have more books, or more leisure time, or more well-being, but because they have glimpsed the deep unwelcome consequences the concentration of too many people visit upon the place they claim to love as their home. . . Societies are brought to the tempered achievement of “culture” by seeing and learning the end of what they hold dear, and then by entering into a self-governance of restraint and obedience to limit. . . Being willing to live with less, to be less – not all – of what you can be, that is how cultures serve their world. Without the tutelage of limits and endings, you have no elders to practice and incarnate the wisdom of “enough”. . . no record of noble restraint that would make of you an ancestor worth claiming. . .
We have fewer elders than ever before because we are living longer. That’s the thread I am pulling. That’s the poorly kept secret of the age. Something about the suspension of limit and ending compromises the function of elderhood, even the appearance of elderhood, because there is something about limit and ending that conjures elderhood from age.
Everyone is living a death-defying, survive-at-all costs mentality… all of us balking at the suggestion that there may be such a thing as “your time to die” or that there should be limits to our mortality. And when the oldest among us have the same expectations as the youngest, wherever would we find an enlightened alternative?
What an elder is
So, what must we do to become elders? Elderhood asks that we end our “endless wager on more,” the perpetual drawing down from the future. It asks that we be not something more (of the same), but something else. For an elder, Jenkinson sees not “growth without limit,” but rather someone who is deepened by diminishment. An elder is someone who abides by endings and ebbings – someone who has turned from more toward enough. That is what the Western world needs. That is the wisdom we are so sorrowfully lacking. Elders are the “incarnation of endings, fraying, failing at eternity.” The extinction of potential, the resolution to stop asking: “what’s in it for me?” The end of future fantasy – a willingness instead to be bound by time. The elder’s job is not to prevail, it is to wane, and then to end. That is the example that elders can set for us, the remedy to our present insanity of potential and “never enough.” No longer looking toward the future as an entitlement, and instead showing us how to be complete… to be content, fully realized. An elder can teach us the value and worthwhileness of finitude.
But elders cannot appear on their own, they must be conjured by our seeking them out. There need to be willing recipients of elderhood for elderhood to be summoned. Only if we agree our current circumstances are disturbed, only if we agree we need something else (something wiser), can a wiser message be received. The wiser message is probably that we are claiming and consuming our way to extinction, that the “survive at all costs” mentality is costing us something, and that we have a broken relationship with time. The wise message will certainly ask us to consider our relationship with death and mortality. It will ask us to humbly make room for ancestry and wild places, to re-evaluate what is valuable, and to question if lifespan is the same thing as life, and then: who is more life more valuable for?
WHAT NOW? (actions for mortal atheists)
Taken together, Come of Age and Die Wise paint the following picture: there are too many of us, we live too long, and we refuse to accept limits of any sort… especially limits to our mortality, which has disastrous consequences for the planet and the well-being of our communities. But Jenkinson is purposeful in his refusal to take this to any actionable conclusion. Should we stop trying to cure cancer? Should we treat illnesses? – maybe only certain illnesses? If I’m over the age of 70, should I refuse aggressive medical interventions, and should they be refused to me? Is any prolongation of life at issue, or only in certain circumstances? I love the poetry of Jenkinson’s call to be “bound by the obligation to not outgrow what sustains [us],” but the distillation of that wisdom into something practical will likely feel controversial (if not outright appalling) to most readers. Maybe that’s the point, that our culture has made the prospect so unthinkable that we can’t even consider the potential truth of the thing. Perhaps that’s why Jenkinson avoids any prescription for action, given that even the theoretical consideration is so contentious.
In that spirit, the only “what now” I would offer is to reflect on how untethered we have become from limit, and what the consequences of that boundlessness might be.
IN SUM:
Is this book entirely secular? No.
If I had to describe the book in one sentence? We have an abundance of old people but an absence of elders because there is a scarcity of wisdom (people who are setting a wise example in their living and dying).
Who should read this book? Fans of Die Wise.