Our elderly

In our Western Society we are totally absorbed with YOUTH.  We therefore view elderly as non-contributors to our society.  This accounts for much of the lack of respect we have for the elderly.  We western societies lack a sense of gratefulness for what our elderly have given us in terms of achievements.  This leads to some thing we ought to think about!

Consider computers, wireless, radio and digital encoding.  It is frankly a matter  of fact that the next generation of computers are merely built upon past achievements.  The Internet seems pretty cool, but without past achievements it would not even exist. Right now I’m working on my new Laptop, which is on my dining room table, connected to the wireless network in my house.  Do I owe Marconi and Tesla (now dead) an unending debt of gratitude? Yes!  Because without Tesla I would not have an outlet to plug on the wall my laptop into and without Marconi there would be no wireless.

 Consider the fact that strange men running around with pocket protectors and slide-rules put a man on the moon.  Today we think that pocket calculators and space shuttle flights and remote probes to the outer planets are cool, but they are just further developments of the technologies of those with the pocket protectors and slide rules. In fact, it took over 20 years for a space probe to reach Uranus and it missed its intended target 20+ years later by only a few Kilometers.  I guess what I’m saying is: it’s not the further developments that are of value, so much as the first invention of the technology.  We have little respect if any for the first inventions, we think them crude, primitive and not very cool.  But if you think about it for a while, the cool stuff is built upon the primitive and it is the primitive that is of real value, because it is from scratch, so to speak.  With a little more respect for past achievements will come respect for those who accomplished those achievements, in short the elderly.

Eastern societies are quite different, they honor their past and respect those who created that which we have today from the past.  Here in the west we honor the newest and the most sophisticated (complex).  But in the east they honor more the oldest and the simplest realizing that without the simple there is no complex and without the old there is no new.

It is not so much a matter of duty to the elderly as respect.  If one thinks on Kantian morality, duty and respect are in some ways linked.  It’s not so much a matter of what we ought to do, as a matter of attitude which gives us the impetus to do what we ought.