How should we regard old age?

In the latter half of the twentieth century, with rebellions of youth against "their elders", and whole new ideas arising as ever new layers of Mankind finally achieved something of what they needed to begin to be able to make their own contributions and understanding, a positive "Belief in Youth" came to predominate.

But that has to be a surprising view! For with age people have certainly experienced more, so the long-standing association of wisdom with age seemed reasonable. So why did it happen, and is it a legitimate and better direction to look for answers for the world's problems?

There are good reasons for this change to have occurred, for simply growing older does not automatically ensure increasing wisdom, and crucially, for the vast majority of ordinary people, both their cultural and knowledge deprivation via misinformation from those in control could, and indeed, often did ossify their ideas into ever more conservative, pessimistic and unimaginative ways of thinking. Indeed, the experiences of the majority are rarely of increasing opportunities and success, and much more frequently, of repeated retreats and even defeats of their aspirations. Indeed, their sources of information are quite consciously arranged to have this effect, whether it be in education, news, or even in their entertainment.

And apart from such personal experiences, it has also mattered greatly how many and how deep were the political defeats endured by working people throughout their lives. Sadly, events like the General Strike defeat of 1929 undermined the political confidence in a whole generation. Old age was directed into disillusionment, privileged service or even quiescence.

By the time of my own first consciousness of the world (in the 1940s) my working class parents were (as I only discovered later) stuffed full of incorrect