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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
September 17, 2006
The aging child
Before “modern medicine”, or whatever it was that increased our longevity -- I suspect elementary hygiene had more to do with it -- people didn’t expect to live to ninety. Some did, and some stayed sharp the whole course, but they must have seemed like freaks of nature. Thomas Aquinas died at 49, Shakespeare around his 52nd birthday, to name two oldies off the top of my head, whose accomplishments should have required additional lifetimes. I think of them now that I’m 53, and have myself accomplished approximately nothing.I sometimes wonder if the slower pace of our lives can be attributed to our extended lifespans, on the principle C. Northcote Parkinson observed in the British civil service: “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.” We think we live at a quicker pace today, but we look only at the diurnal sequences. Superficially, life is made more frenetic by such postmodern inefficiencies as the suburban sprawl that creates interminable rush hours, or the taxation system that presumes “normal” women will now work for money as if they were men. Or the proliferation of “leisure industries” that bring the deadline pressure of the working life into our vacations, with planes to catch and so forth. Although the average postmodern human (posthuman modern?) is usually rushed, he may well live his life through without any sense of satisfaction or accomplishment from any credible deed. True, we are intensely busy at any moment, but so are hamsters on a treadmill. People who lived shorter lives, had to get on with them. They measured their distances along the ground, not by the dials on their exercycles. It was not uncommon for people in their later teens to behave like adults; to be finished with school and out earning a living. Whereas today, schooling often extends to middle age, and I know people my own age who still haven’t seriously considered growing up. In that antediluvian age -- which is to say, before the “flood” of postmodernity -- not growing up wasn’t an “option”. Men worked, or they starved. Or worse, they watched their families starve, which is actually more painful. By the time they were married, they were ready to cope with responsibilities, for they had long since grasped the relationship between food, shelter, and labour. Being adult, and having no opportunity to cultivate narcissism, they could also grasp the relationship between the survival of the race and the begetting of children. That former relationship still exists, but with its sharp edges smoothed. In the contemporary nanny state, people work, not to live, but to improve their “standard of living” or “quality of life”. After deducting both the visible and invisible taxes, our governments allow us to keep about half our wages, to spend as we please. The essentials being no longer at issue, the spending is directed towards minor luxuries. On the analogy of hamsters, we get better water bottles, or move into a bigger cage. But the pressure to provide those essentials -- thanks partly to technology but mostly to moral decline -- has been relieved. Today, we excuse almost any sort of childish whining, regardless of the whiner’s age, and have developed a massive welfare system so that those who need a parental provider, may become wards of the state. The rest of us work the more frenetically to “raise” these people; and as I’ve mentioned, women just like men, to keep those tax revenues topped up, and the government in a position to dispense its favours among the other special interests of a whinging electorate. Verily, whole political parties have been built around servicing this human propensity to declare, “I have a problem, and you must solve it.” The NDP, for instance, focuses exclusively on this, though to some degree all the political parties are forced by competition to play the same game. (You have kids, and they’re in your way? So why hasn’t the government supplied us with adequate daycare, huh? Huh?) It is a continuous process by which we transfer our adulthood, or the possibility of our adulthood, to agencies that assume numinous roles, and we may now grow old without the risk of growing wiser. I think one of the reasons for the collapse of religious observance, is the development of this strange “cargo cult”, in which prayer is replaced by whining and voting. The God to whom we once turned for favour, has been replaced by Kafkaesque government agencies, that do not demand we be good or industrious, or even reasonable. They only demand the sacrifice of our adulthood. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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