Relax – you’re getting older every day
Having posted on Monday about the civic university I duly spoke at the event this morning. Sadly, the post didn’t elicit any comments but the speech went down OK.
Today I am again looking for helpful thoughts ahead of a speech tomorrow at an event to launch Age UK, which describes itself as ‘the new force combining Age Concern and Help the Aged’.
Age UK is launching an agenda for later life based around six challenges for government:
• Equal respect
• Support to be independent
• Enough money
• Feeling well
• Taking part locally
• Thinking global
(if you don’t understand what this all means you’ll have to read the full report)
I find it hard to disagree with anything in the Age UK document. I like, for example, the recognition that overall things have got better for older people. But rather than getting into the policy detail, I intend to use my 15 minutes to explore the question: ‘what is our core narrative about population ageing’. There are many difficulties about developing such a narrative.
First, there is what might be termed the psychological challenge. As I have written before, young people have unrealistic, and unduly negative, views about ageing. This is partly because we are bad at thinking about preparing for the long term (which is why, for example, the new Personal Accounts system for pensions will seek to overcome our hard-wired inertia by opting savers in and requiring those who don’t want to participate to opt out). We are also inaccurate in thinking about our future state of mind. We think that being old is like being young but with an older body. In fact, we adjust our expectations and desires as our circumstances change, and people over sixty are amongst the most contented in society. These weaknesses in our imagination are then compounded by the reliance of consumer marketing on using sex to sell. This reinforces the sense – which is also probably innate in the species – that people are of less value when they have passed the peak of sexual virility.
Second, there is what might be called the identity challenge. Despite the argument made brilliantly recently by David Willets that demography determines politics and policy, opinion surveys show that generational status is a pretty weak basis for solidarity, in comparison to ethnicity, class or place. Also, while we can talk about feminism or gay pride, the things that older people tend to think they have in common (the likelihood of needing care for example) are those they would rather not experience. Indeed, while we may talk about respecting the elderly, those who can afford it spend more and more time and money trying to avoid admitting their age.
Third there is the related political challenge. The case for society investing more in old age requires us to amplify the drawbacks of ageing while the call to confront ageism rests on painting a more positive picture.
In terms of campaigning, there is a relationship between age and issues held in common, for example, being retired, relying on pensions, needing long term health care. But arguably in these cases older people have as much in common with people who are not old (e.g. poor pensioners and other benefit recipients, elderly infirm and younger disabled) than with people of their own age but in different circumstances.
So, how does Age UK, or anyone else for that matter, develop a narrative and a social movement out of this difficult mix of issues? I can’t pretend I have a comprehensive answer but I would start with our psychological hang-ups.
Most of us will be as contented in older age than when we were young and more contented than in middle age. But both our hang-ups, and the way society treats vulnerable older people, mean that we dread getting older. This means we live our lives with a shadow hanging over us, like trying to enjoy your lunch when you’ve got root canal surgery in the afternoon. So – and this is the key point – ageism doesn’t just impact the old, it diminishes our sense of well being throughout life.
If I had Age UK’s marketing budget I would spend it on positive images of older life. I would tell people that they are likely to get happier over sixty. I would playfully point out that it is much more enjoyable being a grandparent than being a parent. I would have a poster of a hassled middle aged person trying to juggle work and family and with little time for personal development or giving back to society, alongside pictures of older people enjoying themselves, engaged, using their wisdom and continuing to develop. The slogan would be ‘relax – you’re getting older every day’.
Politically, it is by showing that getting old can be fun that we underline how unacceptable it is that so many older people are denied the opportunities of the third age by poverty, isolation and inadequate care.
Or perhaps we should simply rely on Plato “Old age has a great sense of calm and freedom; when the passions relax their hold, then we are freed from the grasp not of one bad master only, but of many.”
Empathic enlightenment
One of the privileges of my job is that I get regularly to chair lectures. Over time you start to notice patterns, albeit pretty obvious ones. Technology related events tend to attract younger people while lectures with more of a focus on manufacturing or business are a bit older. Ministers and shadow ministers are more likely to attract senior people from public and third sector organisations.
The weather makes a difference; too cold and wet and people don’t venture out, too sunny, and they choose an early evening drink over sitting in a lecture theatre. Audiences prefer informal discursive styles of presentation, they like to be engaged and have plenty of time for questions.
So when the lectures team warned me last night that Jeremy Rifkin would go well over our preferred lecture time of 25 minutes I was concerned that the Great Room might get restless. I need not have worried. Rifkin spoke, largely without notes, for fifty minutes. And when he finished he received what was, to my reckoning, just about the most sustained applause I have heard for any speaker in my three years at the RSA.
Rifkin has written a very long and full book, The Empathic Civilisation, with a simple core thesis: we are in a race against time; will our capacity for empathy with those with whom we share the biosphere (human and non-human) save us from our potentially disastrous tendency to consume more energy at each stage of human development? The way out of this conundrum, says Rifkin, is to move from finite energy sources to distributed renewable systems.
These are not the idle speculations of an impractical visionary. Rifkin is a key advisor to the European Union. His book combines a passionate call for new ways of generating energy with powerful arguments about human nature and economic development. All major stages in human development have, he argues, been accompanied by new more intensive energy systems and new modes of communication which widen the boundaries within which human beings can exercise their ‘soft wired’ capacity for empathy. We now have the capacity for biosphere-wide empathy and we are going to need it if we are to accomplish the shift from carbon based energy. Hope, he says, lies with the young; the internet and new forms of education can lead to a step change in how they think about themselves and relate to the world.
Rifkin is critical of aspects of what he sees as enlightenment thought. These include the emphasis on the individual, the assumption that systems are best understood by breaking them up into their constituent parts rather than exploring them as integrated wholes, and the Cartesian separation of mind and body. However, his aim is to reform not to abandon the enlightenment project.
Before the lecture he told me about a Council of Europe project about reclaiming and redefining the enlightenment. Given that the RSA’s newly launched strap line (now to be seen behind the splendid new coffee station in John Adam Street) is 21st century enlightenment, I was keen to explore partnership.
Like many, I suspect, I often engage, as a matter of politeness, in business card swapping, only to find them dog eared weeks later in my wallet or jacket pocket. But Jeremy Rifkin’s card has been wedged in the corner of my computer screen. As soon as I’ve got through the five speeches I have scheduled this week (one down, four to go) I’ll be taking up his offer to explore how the RSA could become the UK partner in a debate about the kind of enlightenment Europe needs now.
The 21st century civic university
It’s a bittersweet moment when one finds an idea one has been nurturing has already been developed by someone else. I felt this when doing some preparation for an event this week hosted by the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education, called ‘Leading cities – place based leadership and the role of universities’.
On the basis, admittedly, of limited knowledge I have developed two opinions about links between universities and the towns, city or region they inhabit: first, these links tend to be limited and ad hoc; second, there is an inverse relationship between the academic standing of a university and its enthusiasm for such links. Indeed it almost seemed to me that (apart from high tech spin-offs) the elite Russell Group universities perceived anything but the most superficial local links as undermining their aspiration to be seen as leading edge global institutions.
This impression was in part confirmed by ‘Re-inventing the civic university’ an excellent pamphlet commissioned by NESTA and written by Professor John Goddard. He too bemoans both the weak links in most places and the tendency to assume that civic relationships are much more relevant to the ‘post 1992’ universities. However, Goddard’s pamphlet is also a very positive contribution to the debate, exploring the many different dimensions of university-city links and providing powerful case studies from Newcastle and Michigan showing what is possible when university leaderships commit to engagement.
John Goddard is also the joint author of the report which provides the basis for this week’s event: ‘researching and scoping a higher education and civic leadership development programme’. Predictably, perhaps, the report finds that one of the biggest barriers to better partnership is the complex and cumbersome management structure of universities (yes, even more complicated and opaque than local authorities). It is one thing, the authors say, to get vice chancellors and pro vice chancellors signed up to partnership, it is another entirely to make this concrete and meaningful at a faculty or departmental level.
My only quibble with the Leadership Foundation report is with its proposed development programme. This seems to be largely based on a fairly traditional model of training, away days and visits. Instead, I think the Foundation should develop an innovation group in which selected universities and cities sign up to focussing on the development of a particular aspect of civic partnership and then support, and learn from, each other through the innovation process. This approach is suited to an area like this in which there is a wide variety of areas to be addressed, for instance:
• The role of universities in civic leadership
• Strengthening the links between place and university applied research
• Initiatives to promote access and inclusion
• Links around business and product development (although this is already a well-trodden area)
• Academic and student civic volunteering
• Universities and local public sector innovation
As John Goddard argues, many of our most established universities were created by civic leaders who saw advanced learning as critical to their city’s future and the aspirations of its people. The old polytechnics used to be part of the local authority. But centralised assessment, subject silos, the globalisation of elite higher education and competition within the sector have tended to erode these links. Now is the time for the emergence of a new model for a 21st century civic university.
It’s a great idea. If only I’d had the gumption to do something about it when it occurred to me!
A funny thing happened on the way to inclusion
My amateurish meanderings around evolutionary psychology have provoked a limited, albeit high quality, response. So, in a desperate attempt to boost my numbers over the weekend I will revert to what has been a more popular topic; terrible jokes.
On Wednesday and Thursday I chaired the National Digital Inclusion conference. This was my third time and on each occasion we have managed to make the conference have a stronger activist feel. This year, ahead of the unveiling of an action plan by the Digital Inclusion Champion, Martha Lane Fox, we asked delegates to come up with twenty promises. The grand winner, judged by among others Shadow DCMS Secretary Jeremy Hunt and Prof Tanya Byron, was a commitment by Peabody and Southern housing associations to get all their sheltered housing residents on line.
But neither this and the other nineteen ideas, nor all the speeches and workshops, will be what is remembered from the two days. Oh no! The conference was held at Vinopolis, the wine museum and venue near London Bridge. And so it was incumbent on me to litter (which given its connotations of rubbish is the right word) the proceedings with puns. In ascending order of brilliance here they are:
‘ I do hope this conference will see the issue of inclusion approached with real claret – e’
‘ It’s workshop time. Let’s Rioja ‘nd roll’
‘ I want us to avoid jargon, speaking in terms that would appeal to white vin man’
‘ Sorry you had to queue in the cold to get in. A woman in a sequin jacket was moaning at me. I didn’t mind. I’m rather partial to a sparkling whine’
‘ We had hoped Lord Mandelson would join us today but he insisted if he had he would have required a special entrance for members of the House of Lords; the Peer door. It is a pity because our delegates from Paris would have enjoyed it for, as we all recall, the French adore Peer door.’
‘ I worry that we make too sharp a distinction between the on line and the off line. For those in areas with slow connections the feeling is of being semillon.’
I did ask the thousands of Tweeters and bloggers following the conference for their own ideas. But the only one who replied admitted his mind had gone blanc.
Maybe digital includers don’t drink wine, maybe it was the way I told them, or maybe (but this is preposterous) the jokes aren’t actually that funny. Anyhow, I may not have got many laughs at the conference, but I’m glad to let my readers begin their weekend with a smiling face. After all, not too have shared these comic treasures with you would have been very Chablis.
The ‘don’t trust the boss’ gene?
Another in my series ‘pop evolutionary psychology for scientific imbeciles’. Or as someone put it to me the other day ’the charming thing about your blog, Matthew, is that while other people use theirs to display their knowledge, you use yours to parade your ignorance’.
There is a lot of research out there on how we are shaped by social norms. Take for example Mark Earls’ book ‘Herd’ which shows how following the crowd explains most human behaviour. It isn’t a surprise we’re like this. After all, other species do the same. Birds flock, bees swarm, when one sheep starts running they all do.
But human beings seem to have another, opposite, instinct. There appears to be a part of the brain which responds to the message; ‘don’t trust the boss’. It’s the part which lights up when – during a meeting discussing a plan from central Government, the council or company head office – someone stands up and alleges that the truth isn’t being told, or the decision has already been made, or ‘the secret plan is…’. It’s the part that makes us susceptible to conspiracy theories, despite the tenuous nature of the evidence underpinning them.
The reasons most frequently offered for this suspicion of authority are political and sociological: It represents a loss of trust or legitimacy and it is connected to a long term decline in deference and tradition in society. We also know that attitudes to authority are to some extent innate, with people having a more or less ‘authoritarian’ personality.
When we are deciding whether to follow or to rebel we try to base our response on rational judgment. But, it is often impracticable for us to find out enough to make an evidence-based judgment (think of how many of us now feel about climate change science) and both the compliance and resistance instincts have a strong emotional power. But while we have the compliance response in common with the rest of the animal kingdom, the resistance/suspicion reaction seems uniquely human.
It could be argued that it is entirely a cultural phenomenon. Sociologists, like Anthony Giddens, argue that the decline in deference is a key characteristic of modernity. But doesn’t the attraction of ‘don’t trust the boss’ feel like it has a deeper, more visceral, basis?. Like many other ‘natural’ instincts it can lead to bad judgement, eccentricity or madness if we have an excess. Paranoia can be a pathological version of ‘don’t trust the boss’.
Could it be that the possession of a certain level of natural suspicion towards authority – albeit unevenly distributed through the population – has played a vital evolutionary role? After all, in the hundreds of thousands of years of our evolution – when there weren’t many human beings around and our future flourishing was far from certain – there must have been plenty of leaders who were mad and dangerous: the kind of person who would lead their tribe to disaster or say God had demanded a mass suicide pact. Has the survival and evolution of the species rested on our innate ability to be suspicious of authority?
Of course, it will be argued that at some times in recent human history – think of the Third Reich – human beings seem to have abandoned this instinct. True enough but – as the theory predicts - this has led to disaster and, also, this is why authoritarian regimes adopt totalitarian methods: they know any dissenting voice will be likely to strike an emotional chord.
Of course, I am not quite so stupid as not to know that the question of authority and obedience has been the subject of much brilliant analysis from historians, philosophers, social psychologists, sociologists and political scientists (Hobbes, Adorno, Diamond, Arendt, Milgram to name just a few different perspectives) but what about the genetic/evolutionary account? Can someone refer me to the book (or, even better, the easily digestible article) I need to read?
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