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To give me an idea of how many of you here
may find what I'm about to tell you
of practical value,
let me ask you please to raise your hands:
Who here is either over 65 years old
or hopes to live past age 65
or has parents or grandparents who did live
or have lived past 65,
raise your hands please. (Laughter)
Okay. You are the people to whom my talk
will be of practical value. (Laughter)
The rest of you
won't find my talk personally relevant,
but I think that you will still find the subject
fascinating.
I'm going to talk about growing older
in traditional societies.
This subject constitutes just one chapter
of my latest book, which compares
traditional, small, tribal societies
with our large, modern societies,
with respect to many topics
such as bringing up children,
growing older, health, dealing with danger,
settling disputes, religion
and speaking more than one language.
Those tribal societies, which constituted
all human societies for most of human history,
are far more diverse than are our modern,
recent, big societies.
All big societies that have governments,
and where most people are strangers to each other,
are inevitably similar to each other
and different from tribal societies.
Tribes constitute thousands of natural experiments
in how to run a human society.
They constitute experiments from which we ourselves
may be able to learn.
Tribal societies shouldn't be scorned
as primitive and miserable,
but also they shouldn't be romanticized
as happy and peaceful.
When we learn of tribal practices,
some of them will horrify us,
but there are other tribal practices which,
when we hear about them,
we may admire and envy
and wonder whether we could adopt those practices
ourselves.
Most old people in the U.S. end up living
separately from their children
and from most of their friends
of their earlier years,
and often they live in separate retirements homes for the elderly,
whereas in traditional societies,
older people instead live out their lives
among their children, their other relatives,
and their lifelong friends.
Nevertheless, the treatment of the elderly
varies enormously among traditional societies,
from much worse to much better
than in our modern societies.
At the worst extreme, many traditional societies
get rid of their elderly
in one of four increasingly direct ways:
by neglecting their elderly
and not feeding or cleaning them until they die,
or by abandoning them when the group moves,
or by encouraging older people to commit suicide,
or by killing older people.
In which tribal societies do children
abandon or kill their parents?
It happens mainly under two conditions.
One is in nomadic, hunter-gather societies
that often shift camp
and that are physically incapable
of transporting old people who can't walk
when the able-bodied younger people already
have to carry their young children
and all their physical possessions.
The other condition is in societies
living in marginal or fluctuating environments,
such as the Arctic or deserts,
where there are periodic food shortages,
and occasionally there just isn't enough food
to keep everyone alive.
Whatever food is available has to be reserved
for able-bodied adults and for children.
To us Americans, it sounds horrible
to think of abandoning or killing
your own sick wife or husband
or elderly mother or father,
but what could those traditional societies
do differently?
They face a cruel situation of no choice.
Their old people had to do it to their own parents,
and the old people know
what now is going to happen to them.
At the opposite extreme
in treatment of the elderly, the happy extreme,
are the New Guinea farming societies
where I've been doing my fieldwork for the past 50 years,
and most other sedentary traditional societies
around the world.
In those societies, older people are cared for.
They are fed. They remain valuable.
And they continue to live in the same hut
or else in a nearby hut near their children,
relatives and lifelong friends.
There are two main sets of reasons for this variation
among societies in their treatment
of old people.
The variation depends especially
on the usefulness of old people
and on the society's values.
First, as regards usefulness,
older people continue to perform useful services.
One use of older people in traditional societies
is that they often are still effective
at producing food.
Another traditional usefulness of older people
is that they are capable of babysitting
their grandchildren,
thereby freeing up their own adult children,
the parents of those grandchildren,
to go hunting and gathering food for the grandchildren.
Still another traditional value of older people
is in making tools, weapons, baskets,
pots and textiles.
In fact, they're usually the people who are best at it.
Older people usually are the leaders
of traditional societies,
and the people most knowledgeable about politics,
medicine, religion, songs and dances.
Finally, older people in traditional societies
have a huge significance that would never occur
to us in our modern, literate societies,
where our sources of information are books
and the Internet.
In contrast, in traditional societies without writing,
older people are the repositories of information.
It's their knowledge that spells the difference
between survival and death for their whole society
in a time of crisis caused by rare events
for which only the oldest people alive
have had experience.
Those, then, are the ways in which older people
are useful in traditional societies.
Their usefulness varies and contributes
to variation in the society's treatment
of the elderly.
The other set of reasons for variation
in the treatment of the elderly is
the society's cultural values.
For example, there's particular emphasis
on respect for the elderly in East Asia,
associated with Confucius' doctrine
of filial piety, which means obedience,
respect and support for elderly parents.
Cultural values that emphasize respect for older people
contrast with the low status of the elderly
in the U.S.
Older Americans are at a big disadvantage
in job applications.
They're at a big disadvantage in hospitals.
Our hospitals have an explicit policy
called age-based allocation of healthcare resources.
That sinister expression means that
if hospital resources are limited,
for example if only one donor heart
becomes available for transplant,
or if a surgeon has time to operate
on only a certain number of patients,
American hospitals have an explicit policy
of giving preference to younger patients
over older patients
on the grounds that younger patients are considered
more valuable to society
because they have more years of life ahead of them,