Inequality in Aging--and Death

We live in an extremely unequal society which is in a great many ways becoming more so all the time, not least socioeconomically. Those favored by that inequality are on the whole not much troubled by the fact--even from a standpoint of conservative alertness to how extremes of inequality can be destabilizing to a social order. (Those forms of conservatism which entail such enlightened self-interest, let alone noblesse oblige or paternalism, have not been much in vogue with the powerful for a long time--even to the extent of rendering them lip service--as instead those to whom life has been most generous flaunt their selfishness with a swagger that would be unbecoming in a simian.) However, those disfavored by that inequality--the vast, vast majority of even the population of the "First World" most certainly included--are not so at ease with it. Naturally we see constant, massive, effort to both justify that inequality, and at the same time downplay the practical significance of that inequality in various ways, telling us, for example, that the poor are only relatively so, that their sufferings are mainly psychological because society esteems others more than they.

This is, of course, a shabby, cynical and quite stupid evasion because the overwhelming evidence of every type shows that even in the aforementioned First World countries where people stand within the social scale has a determining and often decisive effect on the most fundamental aspects of their life from birth on--starting with the fact that the wealth or poverty of the family they are born into factors into their chances of surviving childbirth and infancy. That same inequality of fortunes has a determining and often decisive effect on the quantity and quality of the nutrition and education they have in childhood and youth--whether they are given mere rudiments in a rudimentary fashion, or permitted the opportunity for more, whether their education is intended to prepare them to give orders or only to follow the orders others give them, with all that means for the formation of their minds. It has a determining and often decisive effect on whether at the end of their formal schooling--what they actually learn in which, contrary to the stupidities spoken by the floggers of meritocratic myth, counts for next to nothing against personal and familial networks and the capital they inherit or raise (Does mommy hobnob with Fortune 500 CEOs through her "charity" work? Do your relatives and close friends have the kind of scratch that will mean you can hope for a couple of million dollars from them with which to get that startup going?)--they will have a fair chance of a career in which they can thrive, or will struggle for a job that will let them do no more than survive (and that if they are lucky). It has a determining and often decisive effect on their options with regard to friends, romantic partners, spouses, their possibilities regarding leisure and culture, recreation and pleasure, the extent to which they will have good health, the rate at which their minds and bodies will age because of the kind of work they are forced to do in order to live and how well or how poorly they can take care of themselves ("What's that in poor years?" is a question we should be asking much more when we hear of chronological ages), and ultimately the length of time they will have on the planet--with the difference here possibly measured in decades rather than years when we compare the least well-off to the most privileged. Only a complete idiot would trivialize all of that--and it is testimony to the number of complete idiots in the world that so many do so, while also significant that when they are forced to face the hard facts those who are not quite complete idiots abandon the trivialization of the lot of the have-nots in favor of a strategy of stony-faced, shrugging callousness, or outright embrace of the (sadly) ever-popular role of apologist for and admirer of injustice, misery and brutality.

Considering that profound womb-to-tomb inequality and all that it means it is the later part of the story that interests me now, and how modern societies are dealing with it amid graying populations, sharpening talk of dependency ratios, and the return of euthanasia to the discourse--and how completely the mainstream ignores the difference between rich and poor when it speaks of them. It is, after all, not the old and rich that those eager to attack pensions and health care system are concerned with taking things away from, but the old and poor whom they see as a burden, especially insofar as they are poor. The working people whose toil has kept the world running and in the process aged them before their time, while also leaving them with very little to offer an employer in their later years, and little to live on when they can no longer work (as they are much more likely than their more affluent counterparts to have spent their most productive years doing the hard, physical, work that only the able-bodied young can do, and never had much chance to learn the more productive sorts of work the old can do, while not having been well-compensated for it)--all as, precisely because of what time and conditions have done to body and mind, they require care if they are to exist at all. Even in the years when they contributed most seen not as makers but takers by the elites who regard themselves as the only ones deserving of the "maker" label, said elites despise them even more when they are less able to make the rich richer, and get nastier still when should anyone protest their making such judgments (demoting those society treats least well from taker to "scavenger," and even to "unhuman"). Thus is it the case that, as a world-breaking pandemic lowers certain inhibitions and the demographic profile skews ever grayer at a rapid clip (in 1980 in North America and Europe the median age was 30.8, in 2023 a decade higher, and the percentage of the population 65 or older doubled from a tenth to a fifth in the same time frame), Mr. Burns-style talk of "death with dignity" returns to the conversation, with Britain's situation seeming to sum it up. Prime Minister Keir Starmer long ago discarded his party leadership election promise to replace the Tories' hated Universal Credit with something like the less ungenerous older system of social provision with all it meant for the right to live--but on his watch Britain's parliament has passed a law recognizing the right of the elderly to die. Rather than respect for the individual's right to determine their fate, especially when they face a situation in which, as the Fat Man explained in Samuel Shem's House of God, modern medicine can keep a person's body alive in the legal sense even as everything that was ever human in them has hopelessly gone forever, Britain's "leaders" seem to be hoping the country's poor elderly will exercise their "right" for the benefit of its rich, as these, like their global counterparts, look forward to living forever.