Back in 1987 David Gutmann, a professor of psychiatry and education at Northwestern, published Reclaimed Powers, with a subtitle "Toward a New Psychology of Men and Women in Later Life." It was published by Basic Books, a pretty big, commercial house. The book was not widely reviewed, however, and never attained the status of a must-read classic even in its own field--gerontology--let alone social science in general. I think that's too bad.
Even though its subject matter was hardly in my own field, I read it anyway because I have long believed that one has to balance depth and width in one's reading about human society and culture if one is not to make foolish mistakes of narrowness and myopia. I read it probably in 1988 or 1989, when I had not yet turned 40 years old. Now I am on the other side of 59; and I read it again just this month. What a difference twenty years can make when it comes to understanding and appreciating a book, particularly when it is this book. When I read it the first time, I understood it intellectually, in my head, but I failed to feel it. I was too young. When I was 38, my three children were 8, 4 and 2, and my wife was still capable of bearing children. As you will see, this matters.
So what, basically, did Gutmann argue? He argued that, contrary to common conceptions, when people reach a post-parental age they do not hurtle toward decline and death in a catastrophic spiral, but rather acquire new capacities to discern and act. There is developmental growth in the third third of life just as there is in the first and second thirds. He argues further that this is not culture-bound, but universal. It is organic, biological in the individual because the social character of the species has made it so through the slow but steady and inexorable exertions of evolution. These powers of the third third of life are functional in evolutionary terms, in other words; that's why they exist: They have been selected for.
Gutmann apparently understood a long time ago that the infamous nature-nurture debate is a sterile, misleading miasma of ignorance. When one is dealing with an inherently social species, like all primate species, it is not an either/or proposition. Nurture, via culture, is not separate from "nature" but co-dependent with it. Human societies perform certain functions via cultural constructs that are species-functional, and over time these functions shape societies' individual members. Groups of early humans who did not manage to create culture--shared, idealized understandings of forces acknowledged to be loose in the world--were at a severe survival disadvantage and in fact did not survive or did so only at the margins. Hence the recent argument by Nicholas Wade, for example, that religion exists today because it was species functional: By advancing culture it advanced cooperation and morale, hence providing advantages to the groups that developed it to higher levels than other groups. Anyway.....back to Gutmann.
Now what, specifically, is the evolutionary purpose of third-third of life developmentalism? It has to do with parenting. Gutmann argues that humans make a basic trade-off: Because our babies are born stupid and helpless, parenting (what Gutmann calls the parental emergency) takes longer and requires more sacrifice than it does in other species. But it pays off because, over the long run, relying on the development of the neocortex to produce new learning is much more effective an evolutionary strategy than relying on habitual, instinctual old learning, as in most animals.
Gutmann argues that effective human parenting is inherently difficult, however, for it must provide not only physical but also emotional security for the psychologically malleable child. Parents need help in coping with their protracted burdens, and with the personal sacrifices they must made to meet them. They get this help, he argues, in two ways: women get the help they need via the extended family in traditional folk cultures, and men get the help they need through the vehicle of culture.
The extended family helps women to sublimate their capacity for aggression, and culture helps men sublimate their longing for autonomy. Key to both are grandparents, or what Gutmann calls emeritus parents. Grandparents not only teach their own children how to be parents when instruction is required, but they reinforce the larger structures--extended family and culture (mainly religion)--that help buffer the extraordinary demands of parenting. This transgenerational conception of parenting animals who depend on the new learning of the neocortex allows Gutmann to state: "We do not have elders because we have a human gift and modern capacity for keeping people alive; instead, we are human because we have elders."
More than that, Gutmann argues, psychiatrist that he is, male and female children are socialized differently as they practice up, so to speak, for their roles as mothers and fathers. This development, like all human development, goes through three stages: surgent, active and sculpted. Girls lose their "tom-boy" aggressiveness, their future-oriented instrumental capacities and turn inward to hearth and home. They become gentle and more docile. Boys learn to live at the perimeter, the dangerous outskirts of the village; they become aggressive protectors of the inside. As parents, they continue these roles in active and then sculpted, institutionalized ways that, while they vary in appearance from culture to culture, are universal in the critical function they perform. Females becoming nurturing mothers, fathers warrior protectors of their wives and children.
Ah, but when kids grow up and leave the nest and the post-parental phase of life dawns, these tendencies are reversed. Men gradually become more withdrawn, gentle and passive, more present than future oriented. They regain the part of themselves they muffled during the parental emergency. Woman, on the other hand, because more assertive, more aggressive, more outward- and future-looking, also regaining the part of themselves they muffled during the parental emergency. In a sense, in older life men and women exchange roles, but as they do they gain, or regain, abilities to see and understand that make them ideal grandparents and pillars of the larger society.
Reclaimed Powers is a serious, social science book, with field-work-derived data explained in it. It most likely won't serve you well as a beach book in the weeks and months ahead. If you want to understand the data Gutmann draws on and how he draws on it, and if you want to go beyond the bare summary of his argument I provide here, you'll have to read the book. But you must know that in describing the new developmental capacities of the third third of life Gutmann also draws on ethnography and folklore in a most charming and illuminating way. Just about every culture, he points out, tells stories of strong older women--whether as scary witches and demons in the afterlife, or as priestesses, sexy nymphs and the like. There are also universal folk tropes that describe the occult, mystical powers of "strange" old men. Gutmann doesn't quite make this point explicit, but I will make it for him: Young men are creatures of the spacial frontier, out on the perimeter protecting the village or raiding other villages. Old men are also out on the frontier, but the frontier of time, not space. Gutmann beautifully describes the pre-literate mind as being all about boundaries, and of course this is confirmed brilliantly in the work of the late Mary Douglas (Purity and Danger, 1966, in particular).
The universality of these cultural representations, Gutmann says, proves how deep these tacit social understandings go, and shows that they are species-wide and evolutionarily driven. It can't be just coincidence that so many pre-literate cultures with no contact among them all hatch images of old men and old women that are discernibly, typologically so similar. How can it be that just about every traditional society, for example, has the figure of the matriarch, the assertive older woman, who owns the key to the pantry and acts through her eldest son--and terrorizes his wife, her daughter-in-law--to wield social power? This is no coincidence, though I suspect someone intimately familiar with endogamous Pashtun or Arab societies would have an easier time recognizing these idealized characters than most modern Westerners.
The most interesting part of the book is in some ways the least developed. But this is not Gutmann's fault. He had to present his methodology and his data, as all social scientists must, and like a good social scientist he was reluctant to go too far beyond where his data allowed. Speculation is fine, to a point; yet I find Gutmann's end-of-book speculations ripe for further thought and development. (So I asked him, now 85 years old, to do that, and he has agreed to do it in The American Interest; I look forward to this.) So let me characterize these speculations.
First, since Gutmann insists that the capacities of the third-third of life are species-engrained, he wants to know what happens when those surgent urges no longer have the psychosocial "space" of the traditional folk society in which to play out. What happens when there is no village housing the extended family, so that the surgent may become active and then sculpted within the social matrix? What happens when the historically natural kin-contiguity of the three-generational family falls to the nuclear family and the community-sundering mobility of modern societies? What happens when religion is no longer at the center of culture? What happens in secular cities to the active developmentalism of the third third of life? Does it still get sculpted into institutional form, or does it wither, become displaced or distorted?
Without going into detail, Gutmann argues that in those circumstances--most characteristically defined by secular cities--in which there is no outlet, no psychosocial space for the role of emeritus parents, older people, especially men, tend to lose a sense of purpose, to lose their sense of dignity and, rather too often, their sanity. Gutmann, it is fair to say (though he is not explicit on the point), sees dementia as a more complex ailment than does a conventional gerontologist--as a social condition of the soul as much as an individual condition of the body. But he goes further: He argues that in societies where elders cannot play the role for which evolution has shaped them, children suffer too--indeed, everybody suffers. Here it is worth quoting Gutmann at some length:
...the "natural" form of human governance. . . is gerontocracy: matriarchy for the extended family, elder patriarchy for the more public and ritual side of traditional folk life. . . . [C]ulture is a system of shared understandings: of what is good and bad, possible and impossible, thinkable and unthinkable. . . . A culture is a system of idealized understandings. Ultimately, culture is what you will die for, or what you will willingly send your sons to die for. It is this idealized and enduring aspect of culture that older men represent, making it real for themselves and their people. More specifically, older men are best equipped to identify themselves with the founding or origin myths of their culture.. . .Culture is the unique meaning of an otherwise ordinary society.
What Gutmann is doing here is establishing the links between the role of male gerontocracy, religion and the capacity for culture in a society. No old men in positions of respect and religious dignity, he essentially says, no culture--no shared sense of social origins and understandings. Culture has to be sacralized, one way or another, to be effective. He goes on:
Via the elders, the mythic past and the mundane present are interpenetrated, and the climate of mythic origins is brought forward, into the here and now. . . .The traditional older man, by tending culture, serves society as much as he is served by it. He preserves culture by making its mythic armatures real and available for the larger group. Older men thereby help to provoke the experiences upon which social bonds are based: experiences of automatic familiarity, of common membership in a unique collectivity. For when separate individuals hold the same ideas, they become familiars to each other, automatic comrades, even though they are not directly known to each other.
What happens in secular cities? We see examples not, says Gutmann, of changed cultures but of no, or less, culture. There are fewer shared understandings. There is no sacralized means of producing common ideals except--Heaven forbid--politics. Modernization and urbanization, for various reasons the book explains, erode the conditions under which gerontocracy can perform its age-old functions for society. We are deculturized. Despite the psychiatric language, you will get the idea:
When urban culture loses its power to bind and transform narcissism in all age groups to the collective weal, egocentricity increasingly becomes the general coinage of social relations. The aged, who depend on the goodwill and the inner control of younger, stronger individuals, as well as on external controls that are maintained by a strong cultural consensus, suffer accordingly.
In other words, the phrase "urban jungle" is not just a metaphor. Despite the apparent thickness of civilization in an urban environment, in a deculturized city individuals are limited by fewer, not more, social constraints.
Deculturation has broad social implications. Gutmann argues that the egalitarian ideal can eventually bring about consequences that destroy the founding culture--and here Gutmann echoes somewhat some of the arguments of Daniel Bell and others in describing the cultural contradictions of capitalism. The impulse to equality, he says, which first aimed to end restrictions on ordinary human rights, "ends by politicizing the complaint against existential restrictions." The result is that values are no longer thought of as objective, or as having a validity outside of the moment. "In recent times," said Gutmann,
the process of value formation has been democratized, taken out of the institutional province and given over to the individual. Moving thus, from the social to the personal sphere, values lose their shared and objective character, to become private and subjective. In effect, we have democratized and relativized the process of value formation to the point where each citizen is conceded the right to decide personally what values should be and by what standards the individual should be judged. Outside of a courtroom, the assertion 'I'm just doing my own thing,' comes to be the ultimate justification for any kind of behavior.
Gutmann then describes the congealing potential of strong culture--where a great deal is shared among members of a society--and contrasts it with those not of a different but of a weak culture. Under conditions of deculturation,
narcissistic preference dictates lines of affiliation. I can extent the awareness of familiarity and selfness only to those who are like me in the most concrete, asocial, immediately sensible respects; those who share my skin color, the same body conformation, the same genitalia, the same sexual appetites, and the same age group as myself. In effect, with deculturation, the principles of association are no longer based on shared standards but instead become racist, ageist, sexist and homoerotic.
In short, more "progressive", individualist "culture" actually sets the stage for a far less liberal society. Of course we already know that the postmodernist emphasis on "narratives" in which only women can understand women, whites whites, blacks blacks, gays gays and so on resembles nothing more than the racial "essences" theory of fascism. So Gutmann's observation should not surprise us. Indeed, we should be able to see that the relativization and democratization of value production has not led to a more tolerant society; it has led rather to a more atomized one. We have not replaced an intolerant, narrowly defined culture with a wider, more tolerant one; we have replaced it with less culture altogether. We have reduced what we hold in common, and so forced ourselves back onto narrower bands of consanguinity. We are thus almost all now hyphenated Americans as a result. That is how people speak and think in these recent decades, especially in our cities, and now you can see why. Still don't believe it? Walk though any American center city area with your eyes wide open, and you will believe.
Gutmann also is able to explain why the dethronement of the elders leads to a rash of social maladies far beyond the pale of gerontology:
Because they are no longer legitimated by some sacred principle, cultural rules themselves come to be regarded as restrictions, as arbitrary games, rather than as routes to power, personal significance, and self-esteem. Soon enough it becomes apparent, particularly to the young, that honor and conformity are incompatible, and that power is to be gained through antisocial rather than prosocial acts. As the rebel and psychopath acquire glamour, the social order, which depends on automatic trust among strangers, is increasingly compromised.
The aged suffer particularly from this as they lose their special developmental milieus, their special bases for self-esteem, and their traditional character as hero, taking on their modern character, as victim, instead. But it is not only the aged who suffer. The revolution against gerontocracy, Gutmann points out,
intended to liberate the young, ends by putting children at risk. The two great social structures, extended family and culture, that protect and generate strong elders, are precisely those that protect human parenting and underwrite healthy children. By providing meanings that compensate for deprivation, culture helps make the human family and adequate human parenting possible. Given a strong culture, young adults will routinely, even cheerfully, enter into the chronic emergency of parenthood. . . . But as culture loses the capacity to endow deprivation with significance, children . . .are among the first to suffer from the primary narcissism and aggression, released by deculturation, that the elders once helped hold in check. . . . [T]he unsupported, isolate nuclear family no longer remains a staging ground for child development, but instead too often becomes the setting for child abuse, physical as well as emotional.
I think there may be implications to Gutmann's analysis that he himself does not cite. For example, many scholars have argued that the inability of modern secular and highly urbanized societies to reproduce themselves, and so fall into demographic crisis, is related to the economics of raising children, about which William McNeill has written so brilliantly. But the freakonomics fad notwithstanding, economics is not, as usual, capable of fashioning a whole explanation for any broadly social phenomenon: Parenting in current circumstances in the secular West is not only expensive, it is very difficult and even dangerous when attempted by the socially and culturally unbuffered nuclear family. And so Gutmann is able to conclude, "When the elders are diminished, much of our common life is eventually diminished with them. And as undisguised narcissism tends increasingly to become the coinage of social relations, all unproductive, dependent cohorts--children, the handicapped, the aged--are put at risk. . . . Geronticide and infanticide, elder abuse and child abuse, predict to each other across societies."
Of course they do; and humans have tended not to like either form of murder, which may well be one reason our distant ancestors favored farming villages over hunter-gatherer existence, because the former did not require abandoning the very old, the very young and the weak. And now we can understand better why Abraham Joshua Heschel used to insist that one judge any society by how it treats its very old and its very young, because he too realized that these were inextricably linked.
Let's end now with one last remark from Gutmann, after which he will have earned a well-deserved rest from speaking:
Ultimately, children are the major victims of the indulgent, revisionist, relativistic games that we play with our culture. . . . In our haste to be modern, in our revolutionary rage against tradition and gerontocracy, we have brought down the fathers and humbled the aged. In so doing, we are also bringing down the culture that sustains us all.
Again, I think the potential to speculate beyond Gutmann's last sentence back in 1989 is irresistible. What, specifically, might the signs of a culture brought down be?
Why do we have a society in America that undervalues thrift and savings, and a set of financial and economic elites prone to generate chaos because they have forgotten the difference between getting rich and producing wealth?
Why do we have such astronomically high divorce rates and populations of single-dwellers? Why more broadly do affluence and loneliness walk hand in hand, giving rise as they go to our substance abuse contagion? Why do so many people, again primarily urban dwellers, seem unable to delay the gratification of any desire and so give rise to legions of otherwise decent people who can imagine abortion as a form of casual birth control?
Why can we not, in an age that claims to be environmentally aware, take inter-generational responsibility seriously--just look at the deficit and national debt? Why can we not resist the urge to marketize any gadget or gimmick no matter how little we have thought about the consequences?
Could it be that we have shattered the transmission belt by which basic values are passed down in sharable form in our society, severed that gossamer thread of memory which preserves what we have learned over the generations? Indeed, have we fallen big time for the biggest con there is--indulgence masquerading in the garb of personal "liberation"? Have the baby-boomers perhaps failed ever to grow up? Are they stalled in a kind of permanent adolescence, the most selfish and clueless generation in American history?
I am still a big Dylan fan, but I have to note that we were once told that "The Times They Are A-Changin'", and also not to trust anyone over 30. Well, the times have indeed changed, and now we can hardly trust anyone at all. Go find a sad old man and do something to make him happy, to respect his dignity. You'll feel better, too.
