2 - On Not Knowing How to Feel

Summary

Cultural criticism produced under the aegis of the ‘positive ageing’ movement draws a clear line of separation between the general social picture of late life, made visible in statistical data from the social and medical sciences, and the potential quality of our lives as we inhabit them. For the quantitative researcher, understanding old age entails tracking collective patterns of experience and examining the social structures shaping those patterns. That work is essential to social gerontology and geriatric medicine. In outline, its key observations are familiar to everyone: increasing care needs and burdens across the developing world; frailty, dementia, isolation; historically high life expectancy, of late plateauing, and in the US and UK now decreasing. There are more pleasant stories to tell – marriage and co-habitation among those over sixty-five have risen in the UK, for example, somewhat mitigating exposure to loneliness – but, even where guided by the insights of positive gerontology, the quantitative research concentrates on general social trends and their implications for policy-making. The contrary choice to downplay the data and focus on individual exceptions, qualitatively apprehended, is characteristic of much writing about old age in the humanities, especially dominant in literary and cultural studies and in creative arts today. There is an obvious cultural rationale: a corrective offered to ageism; welcome encouragement for personal optimism.

It is in this context that I go back to an essay first published in 1999, and familiar to philosophers of old age, though little discussed beyond philosophy: Mary Mothersill’s Presidential Address on “Old Age,” delivered to the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in Washington, DC in December 1998. The relevance of that lecture, written at a moment when the influence of the ‘successful’ and ‘productive ageing’ movements on gerontology had become evident, and the concept of ‘positive ageing’ was quickly gaining institutional traction, is that it identifies a difficulty peculiar to the subject of old age for which, Mothersill argues, neither ‘positive gerontology’ nor the more ‘negative’ gerontology it substantially displaced has an adequate answer. The difficulty arises from the mismatch of perspectives between what we know about old age based on the data (quantitative information that dominates the demographic and public-policy conversation) and our first-person outlooks.