Age and Me-ness

02 Jul Age and Me-ness

Fred Newman disliked being called wise. He thought wisdom implied knowing and, he believed knowing was, at this point in history, a dead end at best, and most often destructive. (He and I did write a book entitled, The End of Knowing, after all!) And yet, I have to admit that when I was rereading the following excerpt from his book, Let’s Develop! I was momentarily struck by how wise it was! (Sorry, Fred.)

As people age, they often (although not always and not necessarily) become increasingly attached to, or over-identified with, societal rules. In doing so, ironically, they make themselves more easily definable as “old” — a societal category which, in our culture, has primarily negative associations and consequences.

Age — just like time itself, by which it is conventionally measured — may be useful for administrative purposes, but as with all the other societal categories it sharply limits the possibilities for human growth. Attach some chronological label or identity tag to a human being — “teenager,” “middle-aged,” “senior citizen” — and you’ve determined everything from what they should wear, to how they should walk and talk, to how often they should have sex and with whom.

The funny thing is that while age seems absolutely “objective” — simply a matter of fact, like whether you were born on May 12, 1959 or January 8, 1932 or March 17, 2009 — this superimposition of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades and centuries onto the seamless totality of life is actually quite arbitrary. And it’s inextricably connected to the equally arbitrary societal construction of the individuated self. Isn’t it just as true to say that we’re all three billion years old, which is when life began on earth, or a million years old, which is when homo sapiens came on the scene? From that vantage point, the commonality among all of us heavily outweighs the trivial differences between those of us who are in our twenties and those in our seventies or eighties.

But in our Western culture, it’s the individualistic differences that are made to count for so much. Aging is related to as taking us nearer and nearer to the precipice of death. This is at least slightly odd, since death is the normal state of affairs; from the vantage point of the human species, someone of 85 is not discernibly nearer to it than someone of 25. So we live “for the moment” (even if that moment was in the past) — as the passive, alienated consumers of time rather than as the active co-producers of history.

When you stop to think about it, it’s obvious that most of history is made without us — before we arrive and after we leave. Each of us is “here” for a relatively brief moment. So why should “I” be so presumptuous (self-centered) as to construct my religions and my science and my psychology from “my” point of view?

In social therapy, we don’t regard “me” as insignificant — quite the contrary. We simply don’t define significance in terms of “me”; we don’t take “me” to be the measure of all things. It’s not a moral issue; too much meness, like cholesterol, just ain’t healthy for ya.

Excerpt from Chapter 14: Who Do you Think You Are? Fred Newman. Let’s Develop!: A Guide to Continuous Personal Growth.