Gerontocracy is as old as the world. For millennia, to greater or lesser degrees, it has been the default principle of governance, from ancient Greek city-states to the Soviet republics. Though there have been exceptions, when you look for gerontocracy today, you find it everywhere – aged men and women at the helms of states the world over.
The presidential contest in the United States this year is likely to pit two decrepit men against each other. Were the incumbent to win, he would be eighty-six by the end of his second term. Nor is the aging of politicians restricted to the chief executive of the country, or even an American syndrome. Paul Biya, president of Cameroon, recently celebrated his ninetieth birthday (he was born the same year as California senator Dianne Feinstein, who died in office in September), making Michael Higgins, president of Ireland, appear sprightly by comparison at eighty-two.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. At the birth of political modernity, the French revolutionaries explicitly targeted the empowerment of the elderly: what came to be known as the ‘old regime’. They sought not only to overthrow aristocrats in the name of common people, and fathers in the name of sons, but more broadly to tame the age-old commitment to gerontocracy for the sake of the younger majority. In the decades that followed, after any revolutionary challenge, one counterrevolution after another has restored the authority of elders, and displaced the youthful pretenders.
The indefinite extension of lifespans since the advent of modern medicine in the nineteenth century, combined with much more impregnably defended property, has made the youthful gains of early modernity all but vanish in our time. This extends far beyond the hoarding of political power. The choicest parts of the world’s richest cities, according to demographers, are dense with aged residents. In countries such as the US, where mandatory retirement is lacking, universities have become senior centers and care homes, while a whole generation of younger scholars and intellectuals have been blocked from progressing in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Culture may appear to be a bastion of the young, but it hardly compensates for political and financial power.
Men no longer drop dead as readily as they did a century ago, and can remain in charge for what seems like forever. If modernity has meant challenging the elderly, demanding that they share their power and resources, then our postmodern age is one of their most successful re-enthronements.
What was gerontocracy in premodern times? Elders have turned to the forces of magic and mythology to secure deference from those strong enough to challenge them. ‘Respect for old age has resulted from social discipline,’ observed the sociologist Leo Simmons, an early surveyor of ethnographic literature. ‘There are no signs of deep-seated “instinct” to guarantee to elders either homage or pity from their offspring.’ Instead, the younger generation have had to be domesticated and manipulated into self-constraint.
In early human societies, this approach was remarkably successful – rarely did any cultures recount mythic traditions that emphasized the decrepitude of the aged. A proverb from the Hebrew Bible holds that ‘gray hair is a crown of glory’. In Works and Days, the Greek poet Hesiod may have defined his own age – the iron age, fifth in his scheme of decline – as one of dishonor toward elders, but by and large, culture decreed, longevity brought only gifts of wisdom and experience. When Knud Leem, a Norwegian priest and linguist, visited the Sami people in the eighteenth century, he learned how the old men, when they were too infirm to work, could walk from farm to farm, staying at each for six nights with full bedding and board. Traditions like this span early human history, where cultural programming seems to have almost always resulted in the elderly getting more than their share, until their deaths earned them continuous veneration in the form of ancestor worship.
In 1965, the English social anthropologist Paul Spencer published one of the richest examinations of a thorough-going gerontocracy.For more than two years in the late 1950s, Spencer lived among the Samburu, a group of livestock-herding nomads in north-central Kenya. Samburu males were organized according to ‘age-sets’, each of which lasted twelve to fourteen years. The cohort of males of a given age-set advanced together up the ladder of power. Before entering your age-set, you were a boy. After circumcision, you became a young man, a member of the moran class, and at around thirty years of age – if you had survived that long – you finally became an elder for life. Samburu society was structured for your benefit.
The Samburu age-set system didn’t apply to women because society was organized around accumulating them as the basic currency of wealth and power. They were circumcised at the same age as boys, but they were denied marriage partners in their own age group. Men were not allowed to marry daughters of men in their own age-sets, which meant that there was always a generation gap or more between men and their wives.
Spencer told the story of Nirorol, a sixteen-year old girl, who was arranged to be married as a second wife to a man in his early fifties. Nirorol was genitally cut and harangued into accepting her fate. She was ‘inert’ for most of the time that Spencer observed her. The ritual reminded Spencer of Cold War brainwashing. The men of Nirorol’s own age, barred from marriage themselves, provided the entertainment for the ceremony, performing a mock denunciation of the groom and the elderly class as a kind of youth protest. But Nirorol had no alternative: ‘She was nothing more than a pawn in the hands of the elders,’ Spencer wrote.
It was also tyranny, Spencer declared, for the young men. Their lives were on hold until their late twenties and early thirties (not unlike, Spencer ventured, deliberately stunted public-school boys of his native England). Before that, Samburu youth whiled away their time on long expeditions or fighting in wars. Curses also guaranteed that they conformed to the social norms. According to Spencer, the Samburu were fixated on the role of fortune (good or ill) in their lives – all the more so when an elder intentionally doomed a young man. He could throw soil toward an insolent upstart, symbolizing anthrax infection, or a piece of string, in the shape of a viper. These curses were universally believed in. In a society as small and cohesive as the Samburu, there were simply no young skeptics prepared to buck the power of their elders.
One of the major differences between the gerontocracies of premodern societies and the gerontocracies of the contemporary West is that our premodern precursors often had a special mechanism for dealing with old people who faltered. Quite simply: they killed them.
In 1890, James Frazer – author of the landmark anthropological study of comparative religion, The Golden Bough – came to the conclusion that our ancient predecessors were in many respects wiser than us. They knew that gerontocracy was an age-old form of human organization, and they often embraced it, but they also put limits on rule by the old, especially rule by the faltering and senile, who were not only dispossessed of their power, but also often marked for death at an appointed time.
Frazer focused on the riddle of the ‘king of the wood’, or rex nemorensis, an archaic survival of uncertain origins that lasted through Roman times. According to the poet Ovid and the traveler Pausanias, the king lived in a pristine sanctuary on the northern shore of Lake Nemi, about twenty miles from Rome. As king, he had to fight all comers, and to lose the combat meant certain death and his replacement by the victor. ‘Kings had to be killed so that they could live forever,’ Frazer wrote.
Scottish by birth, Frazer would achieve improbable but significant fame from generalizing about ‘primitive religion’ without ever leaving his armchair. His manic zeal and penchant for conjecture made him an embarrassing forefather for the specialists who followed him. Nevertheless, Frazer amassed a huge trove of anthropological evidence from across the globe, including details of the widespread practice of killing elders, and not merely powerful ones. In 1932, Edward Moffat Weyer Jr, observed that Indigenous hunters living on the Diomedes, two islands in the Bering Strait between Alaska and Russia, would regularly kill off their elderly. He described an older Indigenous man who could no longer contribute ‘what he thought should be his share as a member of the group’. The elder proceeded to follow custom: ‘He asked his son, then a lad of about twelve years old, to sharpen the big hunting knife. Then he indicated the vulnerable spot over his heart where his son should stab him.’ The first try missed, though the knife went deep. The father, teaching one final lesson ‘with dignity and resignation’, instructed his son to aim higher. It worked. ‘The patriarch passed into the realm of the ancestral shades.’ The circumpolar people known as the Inuit provide especially rich examples of senicide using methods such as stabbing, hanging or strangling, or simply abandonment in an igloo to freeze or starve to death.
For non-modern peoples, and in many places around the world, unassisted suicide was the most common exit strategy. If elders could not manage to off themselves, they could be put to death by their own family. (Otherwise, an ethical act undertaken for the common good could escalate into endless feuding.) The practice was a kind of socially delivered euthanasia for those who were simply too costly to keep alive. According to a story related to eighteenth-century Lutheran missionary and merchant Niels Egede, one old woman in Greenland reportedly offered to pay a friend to be taken to the cliff favored by suicides. She could not make it on her own. Generously, her friend – what are friends for? – led her to the precipice for free.
Killing the elderly wasn’t just the preserve of peoples in harsh climates. Ancient Greeks believed that in Hyperborea, the blessed and mythical land to the north, old age was not tolerated. It was always sunny there. But unlike Florida – or other collective senior zones where the average age is far higher than the surrounding regions – when anyone in Hyperborea reached the age of sixty, they were taken to the city gates and executed. In the recorded history of the Roman republic and empire, old people were not generally killed, though they began to be stripped of public duties when they, too, reached sixty (which seems to have been the mandatory retirement age in the ancient world). No one has been able to disprove (or prove) the story that it had once been customary in the early years of Roman society for elders no longer fit for life to be led to the Milvian bridge and unceremoniously thrown off.
As long as aging involves the accumulation of power in our families and politics, the problem of entrenched power remains. In recent decades, the problem of old women, too, has appeared as an unexpected by-product of the feminist demand for political agency. Men long ago proved that with great power can come great irresponsibility, and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s decision to remain in office until her late eighties, preventing President Obama of an opportunity to appoint a new, progressive judge, shows that the same is now true of powerful women.
Having long ago given up the old remedies of alleviating the weight of the old on society, we are left with the problem our ancestors solved in what now seem like alien and unacceptable methods. There would seem to be only two ways to counter gerontocratic rule. One is to arrange more predictable and reliable succession schemes. In theory, democracies are supposed to provide them, but in practice they often feature the same kinds of dynastic and familial incumbencies as the age of chiefs and kings. And even when not conducted through bloodlines, the advantages of incumbency frequently mean election to perpetual office, when no time limits are set. Whether in politics or in private, few give up power if they aren’t forced to do so – especially when they fear the alternatives are irrelevance and neglect.
Age maxima for political office, mandatory retirement in the professions, forced transfer of property and wealth: all have been proposed as ways to blunt our descent into deeper gerontocracy. Yet because old people – through voting patterns and parties and organizations that cater to them – have outsized authority to block such changes, only intensified organization among the young will make such changes possible.
There is a more radical approach: to root out the foundations of gerontocracy tooth and nail. Society could be organized to equip children for their future, to encourage youth to make their mark, and to build social support for men and women in their prime. After that, there would be caretaking and memory, playing for time in the face of inexorable decline, necessary death, and ultimate oblivion.
Photograph © Drew Angerer / Getty Images, US Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell during a 2023 news conference in Washington, DC. McConnell froze and stopped talking at the microphone and was escorted back to his office
