Older People: Their Place and Contribution in Society

Lord Sutherland of Houndwood Excerpts

Friday 14th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood]

My Lords, I welcome this debate, and its sponsorship by the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury. I do not think that the topic owes anything to his age, or indeed to his changing career pattern. It is a rather fine example of his continuing to do what he has always done with great insight and generosity of spirit: that is, reflect on the human condition. He is also doing what other great theologians have done, and what all wise churchmen must continue to do: recognise that some of the most relevant facts have changed.

We are still the human beings on whom Augustine reflected and Shakespeare mused—the same people whose psychological, social and moral extremities so preoccupied Dostoyevsky. That continues. None the less, there is one empirical fact which is at the centre of today’s debate which has raised the profound questions that we all nibble at.

We are all—or almost all—living longer. How have we come to this? It is not by accident. The numbers are well known and rising exponentially. A faded family photograph I came across the other day tells the story very well. My maternal grandparents had a hard but basically healthy life, but they both died within two years of my grandfather’s retirement age. There was a certain order—perhaps one might say an agreed balance—of birth, marriage, work and children, retirement and death. Life was much harder than in our society, but expectations were limited. None the less, political, social and economic realities gradually evolved over the first half of the last century, in which my grandparents were in their prime, and their continuing wish was that life would be better for “our children” and in due course grandchildren.

However, a change came about in our society. Not an unintended change, but one that came from a variety of sources. Human beings are a clever and resourceful species. We are ingenious and we have created the capacity and technology to extend human life and life expectancy dramatically. We have done that as human beings. Our skills include the capacity for dazzling surgical interventions in the human body in early, middle and late years. They include less showy but even more influential technologies such as the development of penicillin and all its related anti-bacterial comparators, vaccines and ways of boosting the immune system. The benefits of nanotechnology are advancing steadily over the horizon. All of this was accompanied in this country by the rolling out of a universal care system that we know as the National Health Service.

This is good news. As human beings we learnt to balance massive scientific and engineering skills with the compassion to spread the benefits to all members of our community. We found a practical balance in life between technology, economic development and compassion for others—a balance that had to do with the three score years and 10. However, are we now in danger of losing it?

We would be mistaken if we were to think that this was a matter simply of economics and technology. These are tremendously important and they have created possibilities. Beyond that, there is the key question of vision. What vision do we have of human beings and human nature? Perhaps today of all days I can say that it is also a matter of theology and philosophy. Our understanding of what Hannah Arendt called the “human condition” has depended on a set of empirical assumptions that, in general, governed the lives of my grandparents. We are born, we live our allotted span and we die. There was a general assumption that the allotted span was three score years and 10—what we used to call, in a very English way, “a good innings”. Now we do not know, nor do we have a consensus on, what a good innings is. This point was raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews. What is our language, what are our concepts and how do we think about this? This is a fundamental question and I am delighted that it has been raised in this debate. This is not just a matter of longevity and finance.

What are the questions beyond the scope of numbers and pound notes? They are questions for, among others, archbishops and former archbishops. They are questions for many more people than that: for poets, novelists, dramatists and artists, many of whom have risen to the challenge. The Gaelic poet Iain Crichton Smith wrote the most moving portrait of old age that I know. Rembrandt reminds us of the contours and colours of old age, and, descending from the sublime, “Last of the Summer Wine” produces many a wry smile, certainly in my sitting room.

This is culture with a small “c” and culture with a capital “C”. Both are involved if we are to tackle these questions properly. One thing that most of the cultural resources we have at our disposal share is, so far, the perception that longevity is the exception—that at the table the odd man out, or odd woman out, is the old one. This is no longer so; our conceptions have to change. What we have yet to achieve is a balance between youth and age. We have been warned that there would be a problem. I do not know how many of your Lordships recall the remarkable and disturbing story by Oscar Wilde, The Portrait of Dorian Gray. Noble Lords will recall that in this enticing story Dorian Gray lived as man young in appearance, energy and taste, while all the degradations that go with age translated themselves to the portrait in the attic. The portrait aged and the man remained vigorous, apparently living the life of Riley in his youth.

We must learn not to set the horizon of our conceptions as three score years and 10. Until we take the portrait out of the attic, there will be a dark space in our culture. That is how we think about age; it is pushed upstairs and hidden in the attic. Until we remove it from the attic, there will be a dark place in our culture that we cannot find words or thoughts to deal with. What must we do? As older people—and we have all confessed to that—we must not wait for things to be done to us. We must not assume that there is little or nothing for us to do. We must not assume that the only patterns of life are extensions of what we have always done but now do just a little more slowly.

We who are older, and who are experiencing this as a community for the first time in human history, must begin to define what the vision should be. I cannot give it to noble Lords now, although I wish I could, but we must begin to define a new vision of what older people are like and—to repeat a word that I was delighted to hear the noble Lord, Lord Glasman, use in his speech—what it is to flourish in old age. We need to think it through, and that will happen partly through what we do. As I indicated, I see it in the works of filmmakers, dramatists and novelists, and I see it in the connection I have with Alzheimer Scotland for which people volunteer, creating change in and adding value to the lives of others. It is a remarkable thing to see.

Old age is not 30-something lite; that is the Dorian Gray fallacy. Old age is much more than that. The fallacy, however, persists in much of the paradigmatic thinking of contemporary philosophy, and I call on those of us who are engaged in this area to rethink what we used to call our philosophy of human nature and—perhaps this is one for the theologians—to redefine what used to be known as the doctrine of man but is happily now the doctrine of man and woman, and should be the doctrine of older man and older woman.