[The Culture of Narcissism by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

208 : The Culture of Narcissism doctor may some day hope to do something about." Falsely attributing to modern medicine an increase in life expectancy that actually derives from a higher standard of living, it assumes that medicine has the power to lengthen life still further and to abolish the horrors of old age.* By the year 2025, Rosenfeld believes, "most of the major mysteries of the aging process will have been solved." In spite of their differences, the medical and social solutions to old age ha\e more in common than first appears. Both rest more on hope—and on a powerful aversion to the prospect of bodily decay—than on critical examination of evidence. Both regard old age and death as "an imposition on the human race/' in the words of the novelist Alan Harrington—as something "no longer acceptable." t What lies behind this loathing of the aging process, which ap- * Most historians and demographers now believe that improvements in diet, sanitation, and general standards of living, nor improvements in medical technology, account for the increase in life expectancy since the eighteenth century. The superficially plausible explanation of the decline in mortality accepted by Rosenfeld and other technological determinists—that it derived from improvements in medicine—was "so completely demolished by Thomas McKeown and R. G. Brown in 1955," in the words of William L. Langer, "that it has since been generally abandoned by other students of the problem." Whatever those students think about the real cause of the population explosion, they agree in discounting the influence of medicine. Recently McKeown has estimated that between 1848 and 1971, vaccination against smallpox accounted for only 1.6 percent of the decline in the English death rate. Even antibiotics, which have undeniably influenced the mortality rate, were not introduced until the 1930s and therefore could not have contributed to a demographic revolution that had been in progress since the eighteenth century. t Advocates of the social theory of aging could easily agree with Harrington's description of its symptoms and the fear they evoke—"the fear of losing our powers and being left alone, or in the hands of indifferent nurses, and knowing that the moment must come when we will not see the people we love any more, and everything will go black." But whereas Harrington turns for "salvation" to "medical engineering and nothing else," insisting that "our messiahs will be wearing white coats," those who regard aging as a social problem argue that "losing our powers," "being left alone," and being handed over to "indifferent nurses" are experiences needlessly inflicted on the aged by a callous society, and made still more painful by old people's unthinking acceptance of the social devaluation of themselves.

The Shattered Faith in the Regeneration of Life : 209 pears to be growing more and more common in advanced industrial society? Narcissism and Old Age Obviously men have always feared death and longed to live forever. Yet the fear of death takes on new intensity in a society that has deprived itself of religion and shows little interest in posterity.

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