Bruce Alderman is a magnificent and insightful individual, and we had the pleasure at Voicecraft to share in a conversation with him about eldership. He made a critical and powerful point that eldership is not about “being the oldest” or “passing through the most time,” but rather a matter of being able to “inhabit time differently.” This can be linked with the idea of “inhabiting the fullness of time,” the Abrahamic Sabbath, the notion of leisure found in Joseph Pieper, and the like. The elder is not someone who simply knows how to “respond to time” or “get through life,” but the elder is someone who knows the right way to “inhabit” the world. Personally, I found this framing of eldership valuable, for it could be connected with my recent thinking about education starting with Music in Plato.
I
Mr. Alderman was quick to note that eldership is available to anyone of any age, but hopefully those who are older would have learned through their lives about “inhabiting time” particularly well. Inhabiting (which I will capitalize to signify the special sense by which it is intended in this work) is to relate to the Whole and Music of life, and the more one approaches death (which for Heidegger could frame and make Being intelligible), then the hope is that a person would be more capable of living according to that whole. Unfortunately, today, where we are mostly trained to retire when we are older, which is a state in which we consume and do not think (for the only thinking is “technical thinking,” and we are done working). As such, the elder cannot play a role of helping the youth better live and Inhabit better. There is then a break between the young and the old, and neither seem to have much to do with the other. This can lead to social breakdown, generationalism, and worse.
Elders for Bruce Alderman occupy a field in which “time ripens,” language that brings to mind the Festival in leisure of Josef Pieper, and we could generally say that elders help us Inhabit that Festival, which is to say they Inhabit the Music which for Plato all education begins in. As described elsewhere in O.G. Rose, the Music for Plato is a “sense of the Whole,” which is brought out in logic, mathematics, music, beauty, and the like, for in all of these fields we can just “apprehend” there is something into which things can “fit.” We just hear when a musical note is off; we just “get” when an argument makes sense; we just experience something as beautiful without thinking about it; and so on. For Plato, if education doesn’t start with a sense of the Music (and then the Gymnastics to help “condition” us to experience that Music), then students will not know the point of education, and so they will easily not be “intrinsically motivated” to educate themselves. At this point, the project of education will likely fail.
If education is not about Inhabiting the Whole, then education will likely become about “technical knowledge” and information, which arguably the young will always have an advantage over the old regarding. The young tend to be up-to-speed with the newest technology, and if that is what we need to succeed in life (because success in life is “technical mastery”), what can the elderly offer us? If we are not taught in school to focus on Music, then even if the elderly Inhabit, we will not likely see value in that Inhabiting, and so we will not see reason for which we should seek eldership.
What education teaches us is important is what we will learn to direct our lives toward, and where people are not systematically taught to value and seek Music, those who seek Music are seemingly random (those who just happened to experience it due to a devastation, an experience of wonder, etc.). We have not been systematic in assuring everyone experiences Music, and so those who even know about the possibility of Inhabiting are few, which is to say those who could see a role of eldership in Inhabiting is also few. As a result, the elderly see little role for themselves in the lives of the young, and the young see little reason to turn to the elderly for guidance. After all, can the elderly help us with our consulting job or coding? Probably not, suggesting how careerism also contributes to the problem, as school taught us to pursue.
II
We tend today to erroneously associate “knowledge” with “prediction” and being able to tell what will happen next, and since the elderly don’t tend to understand our current technological situation, they are likely “bad at prediction” and identifying the relevant knowledge needed for us to advance in our career. Under this notion of knowledge then, it is the young who know what matters and the elderly who are behind the curve: the class social hierarchy is inverted. In this circumstance, the elderly who might feel they should be respected in being elderly find themselves as basically useless and incapable of any social function, other than being retired and enjoying “their golden years.” The young then pay for their expenses through entitlement programs, and in this the young might feel resentment toward the elderly as the elderly feel disconnected and alienated from the young. This is not a situation which is likely to garner high social capital; in fact, it is likely to lead to social breakdown. Indeed, between the generations, I fear this has happened, and the young now find themselves working all the time, lacking the wisdom of Inhabitance, while the elderly can feel isolated and incapable of adding value. The pain of this difference then causes the generations to avoid another to not feel that pain so pronounced.
It is impossible to know “unknown unknowns,” and I would say it is also impossible to know what the future will hold, especially given the rapid rate of technological change. This in mind, associating “knowledge” with “the capacity to predict” is foolish, as is associating knowledge with “knowing things,” because Artificial Intelligence will always prove superior to us in that regard. Given these realities, school might be setting the young up for failure while at the same time making it difficult for them to relate to the elderly, and for what? My hope is that technological changes may force a reconsideration of Inhabiting (in-habiting, the habits we dwell in and that form us with-in) and Music, but we will see. Anyway, if “having something to offer” entails having knowledge in terms of data and prediction, then the elderly will always be at a disadvantage to the young, and as a result “the young will know everything” for they will know how to “plug-in” to new technologies and the socioeconomic system as a whole. On this point, I would like to make a distinction between Plug-In and Inhabit (between knowing where to “plug-in” to gain our role versus gaining our role and meaning from “in-habiting” whatever is our condition and case).
To Plug-In is to know how “get in” at a local company, how to use technology in a productive way, how to gain connections—it is to know “how to play the game,” per se. Money today tends to go to those who know how to Plug-In, and the successful are seen as those who master Plugging-In. The young are perhaps always better at Plugging-In then the elderly, precisely because the young just naturally grow up with new technology, have their habits and routines formed by the system, and so on, and so a society where all status and praise goes to Plugging-In will be a society that favors the young over the elderly (and where eldership will prove mostly impossible). In this circumstance, social tension could rise because the elderly might feel they should have a social role and be respected, and yet because they don’t Plug-In, they don’t receive this honor. And so they might turn to authority to force respect and acknowledgment, which can then lead to pathological consequences. However, in a society where everyone was trained to believe in and honor the Music, and where the elderly were masters of Inhabiting, the elderly would not need authority because they would be respected and people would want to emergently acknowledge them (to employ Layman Pascal’s useful distinction between “authority” and “respect”). In this way, failure to teach Music and Inhabiting could lead to rivalry and tension between the generations.
If we cannot predict the future, then knowledge based on this pretense is likely wasted. Instead, it would be better if we could Inhabit life in a manner that could prepare us to handle anything life throws at us. This is a far more sensible strategy, and it is the strategy of Inhabiting which is ultimately a strategy of becoming antifragile (to allude to Nassim Taleb). Inhabiting then is to maintain the “clearing” which Heidegger discusses and that O.G. Rose argues is necessary for philosophy to be philosophy (there is an emphasis on Wonder, Clearing, Waiting, and Self-Defense, which is to say on Socrates, Heidegger, Buber, and Hume), and in this Inhabiting we don’t need to predict what is coming next because we are ready for what comes next thanks to our posture of Inhabiting. Eldership is to teach us how to Inhabit the fullness of time, which means whatever time throws at us is something we are ready for; furthermore, if we are connected with the Whole via leisure and training, then it becomes easier not to be swept up in the present moment. Strength and perspective are derived from the Whole, and thanks to this we don’t need to predict the future: we’re ready for it.
Eldership focused on Inhabiting does not need to know or understand the technological situation of the world today, for Inhabiting the Whole is not temporarily conditioned: it is a relation to all of time and all the conditions according to which time might manifest. Furthermore, if Josef Pieper is correct that we cannot engage in work without leisure (only busyness, idleness, and pathology), then without Inhabiting we cannot Plug-In in a manner that isn’t just participating in system “capture.” Our lives will be in service of external systems, States, values, and the like: we will not be able to live lives for ourselves. Learning to “live our own lives” (“intrinsically motivated”) is a profound value elders can add through helping us Inhabit (say through teaching the required meta-skills, perspectives, and the like, as highlighted throughout O.G. Rose), and in fact this would suggest the only possibility of a Game B versus Game A would require mastering Inhabiting, which is what elders are best positioned to teach and share. The fate of eldership then might be tied to the fate of Game A/B—a change in socioeconomics is not possible without Inhabiting, but that would require education to teach Music so that “a shared value of Inhabiting” could be shared through the generations.
On this point, there is a tension regarding how the practices of Dialogos and Integral might spread more broadly and to wider communities, and right now that doesn’t seem possible. Indeed, without shared values, it is hard for a majority of people to experience Dialogos or Integral “as intelligible,” so it would make sense that they don’t value it (and that those who do seem random and those who just happened to encounter the Music for some reason). But if Music was taught as the basis of education for everyone, then there would be a wider spread of “shared intelligibility” regarding the value of Music and Inhabiting, and this would easily make it far more likely Dialogos and Integral could spread. But lacking that “shared intelligibility,” this does not seem possible: Lacan’s “The Real” is just too strong, which tends to arise between “different people” and “others,” which causes social and personal trouble, which people then withdraw from back into their tribes. Economics is the main way we have mitigated differences and “other-ness” through history, but if economics is a self-effacing Game A, this is not an option. But then that requires a more general sense of Music so that Dialogos, Integral, and the like might spread, and if the spread of “Liminal Web practices” is necessary for us to avoid “The Meta-Crisis,” then the lack of Music is a dire problem.
III
A society where the generations are split apart is a society in which the elderly will likely focus on the elderly while the young focus on the young, and if the elderly control politics, social upheaval will become likely, especially if the young determine the only way they can defend their interests is through revolution, which could look like violence, the young simply refusing to have children, and/or the young not playing “the social game” (which increasingly more people seem to be doing). A society which cannot bridge the young and old is destined for demographic wars and generational tension, and this might be a prime reason societies fail. Where though education is about “technical mastery” and knowledge, on what basis can the old and young communicate and seek one another out? What value can the old give the young, and on what basis should the young respect the elderly. And so they just “happen” to stop interacting, not because they necessarily resent one another, but because time is allocated in a manner that leads to a gradual pulling away. And then the politics begins to reflect that “falling apart”…
Authority is today given to those with technical mastery, and so the young are seen as authorities over the elderly—a problematic inversion that raises perhaps the least wise to the highest position of insight. The elderly can feel resentment toward what feels to them to be an improper inversion, and in response they might seek to use authority through guilt, politics, economics, and what have you. Why not? If there is no Whole, no Music, what connects us with others? No, we know better than to directly say, “It’s all against all,” but that is practically how we can end up acting and behaving.
If elders do not focus on Inhabitation, and if education does not start with Music to make eldership intelligible to the young, then social tensions will easily mount between the generations. Furthermore, money flows along the lines of what education has taught us is important, and if we do not value Inhabiting and Music, then money will not go toward making enterprises which favor making them more prevalent. Then world will then lose a sense of Music, and if that Music is needed to avoid “The Meta-Crisis,” we will be in trouble. Furthermore, as described regarding leisure in O.G. Rose, if the Music is connected to the possibility of leisure, and leisure is needed for friendship, then the loss of Music and Inhabiting will correlate with a loss of friendship. And this seems to have occurred, given Lost Connections by Johann Hari. Worse yet, if we are actually Anti-Music in favor of “technical knowledge” and the like, then money will flow against leisure, friendship, etc., meaning money will flow in the direction of our autocannibalism and self-effacement.
Economics often shapes our worldviews far more then we realize, and if money goes toward “technical knowledge,” then even if we say that we know wisdom is important, it will be hard for us to not “practically act” otherwise. Furthermore, if the economic system suggests the elderly are “retired” and are “done with work,” it will be subconsciously difficult for them not to see their role as “getting out of the way” of the rest of the society. Under these notions, a role of eldership seems unlikely, and thus Music and Inhabiting are lost.
The fate of a society is strongly connected in my view to how it uses and employs its human and social capital, and right now the West particularly sees trouble in employing and using the human capital of the elderly, which leads to a decrease in social capital all around. If though the elderly were seen as masters of Inhabiting, and if the young were taught Music to understand the value of Inhabiting, then social capital could strengthen and communal breakdown mend. The elderly and young could better understand one another, helping them live together and wanting to live together, which would also perhaps help economic resources flow between them.
Right now, the elderly tend to have the wealth and assets overall, and for the young to engage in new enterprises, they likely need funding and economic support. But if the elderly cannot understand what the young are doing, precisely because the young might be engage in “technical practices” that the elderly lack understanding of, then the elderly will easily be less eager to share economic resources. However, if the elderly know that the young care about Inhabiting, and if the elderly know that investing in the young will go toward the Inhabiting and Music which the elderly can provide eldership regarding, then the movement of capital could shift. Wealth right now seems generationally captured, but I don’t think that is just because the elderly doesn’t want to share. They simply struggle to understand the world beyond themselves, and so it is hard to know what to fund or how to invest (and they don’t want to unintentionally fund something destructive). In helping bridge intelligibly between the young and old, this could entail economic consequences, helping the generations gain a “shared intelligibility,” making it easier for them to live, work, and invest together.
IV
In conclusion, I am deeply struck by the vision of eldership presented by Bruce Alderman, and I believe he is correct that eldership is about Inhabiting. Without this, a return of eldership seems impossible, meaning we are doomed to suffer the political and economic consequences of generational disconnect. Addressing the problem of eldership is not just a social nicety but an utter necessity, unless that is we want to just keep “coming apart.” However, it has not been until listening to Bruce Alderman that the language of Inhabiting has been introduced to me regarding eldership. Wisdom seemed to be the role of the elder, but “wisdom” is hard to use today without associations and assumptions. Furthermore, “wisdom” isn’t so quickly connected with “leisure” and thus “Inhabiting time differently” to so connect with Music.
With the language of “Inhabiting,” connecting educational reform via Music, “intrinsic motivation,” and eldership has become possible. For that, I am grateful to Bruce Alderman and Voicecraft for hosting the discussion. To Inhabit is to In-habit, to dwell in what forms our habits, and if “we are what we love” (as Dr. James K.A. Smith argues), then if we can love the Music, we will form habits of Inhabitation (and so be in(wardly)-formed accordingly). Eldership is about loving the Music and Inhabiting the Music, and it is the Music which can change the world’s dance.
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Michael Meade says: “In old traditions those who acted as elders were considered to have one foot in daily life and the other foot in the otherworld. Elders acted as a bridge between the visible world and the unseen realms of spirit and soul. A person in touch with the otherworld stands out because something normally invisible can be seen through them.
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"The old word for having a foot in each world is ‘weird.’ The original sense of weird involved both fate and destiny. Becoming weird enough to be wise requires that a person learn to accommodate the strange way they are shaped within and aimed at the world.
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"An old idea suggests that those seeking for an elder should look for someone weird enough to be wise. For just as there can be no general wisdom, there are no 'normal’ elders. Normal bespeaks the 'norms’ that society uses to regulate people, whereas an awakened destiny always involves connections to the weird and the warp of life.
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"In Norse mythology, as in Shakespeare, the Fates appear as the Weird Sisters who hold time and the timeless together.
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"Those who would become truly wise must become weird enough to be in touch with timeless things and abnormal enough to follow the guidance of the unseen. Elders are supposed to be weird, not simply 'weirdoes,’ but strange and unusual in meaningful ways.
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"Elders are supposed to be more in touch with the otherworld, but not out of touch with the struggles in this world. Elders have one foot firmly in the ground of survival and another in the realm of great imagination. This double-minded stance serves to help the living community and even helps the species survive.”
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– Michael Meade, “Fate and Destiny: The Two Agreements of the Soul”
Daniel by serendipity I was just listening to “Agent Swarm”’s introduction to Deleuze ‘s What is Philosophy, which deals with the importance of a perspective D calls ‘old age’ in the work. A time of unchained thought, the witch’s scream, new lines of flight, new potential for evading captures!!! Beautiful! as us this post. As one of a certain age, I have much to say here, most reductively about the ageism we encounter everywhere but in more depth about changes in the experience of prayer and meditation. This post is full of resource for these reflections. Convey my thanks