Apparently they can now cure ageing, but are the social side-effects worth the risk?

THE last rock concert I covered involved the Rolling Stones at Edinburgh’s Murrayfield Stadium. To say I was reluctant doesn’t describe my mood on the night. I had taken an oath, citing good taste and common sense, that I would cease to write about “pop” on my 30th birthday. When you find yourself grumbling because everyone in the hall wants to stand when perfectly good seats have been provided, it’s time to quit.

My son, though, was keen to claim the spare Murrayfield ticket. With all the heartlessness of youth, he has a policy towards aged rock legends. He even has a list, the See Them Before They Croak list, which he is working through steadily, the ravages of time and advances in medical science permitting. Where the Stones were concerned, he wanted to see what all the fuss might once have been about.

Mercifully, they were pretty good, all things considered. But one of the things to be considered that night was the refrain going through my head. “Silly old fools,” it said. To a teenager, such a thought was probably immaterial. In that world, who isn’t old? We were viewing a superannuated blues band through different ends of the telescope. Talking ’bout degeneration, as it were.

I probably don’t have anything left to say about rock and roll that would be worth hearing. The Stones, though, are still going, still suckering punters the world over. Last week they provided the half-time entertainment at the Superbowl – shamelessness was ever their asset – and the refrain in my head changed slightly. “Mick Jagger is 62,” it said, adding: “Sixty two!”

Why should it matter? Bluesmen, if black and obscure, are ancient almost as a matter of tradition. The best novelists are barely hitting their strides in their 60s, and doing their best to forget the jejune stuff they turned out in their 20s. Picasso burned with creativity in his 80s. These days, only athletes are past it at 35, and even that rule can be breached: West Ham’s Teddy Sheringham, still scoring goals in the Premiership, will shortly turn 40.

Politics possibly presents an odd case. Is Menzies Campbell too old to lead the Liberal Democrats? Is David Cameron too young to lead the Tories? The optimum age is hard to identify. Did the world fret because Reagan was getting on a bit, trembling finger hovering over the nuclear button, or because, self-evidently, he had mislaid several important marbles? In 1951 Churchill once again became prime minister at the age of 77 and nobody – save those who knew the truth – worried about his faculties. Today, with life expectancies increasing, smart opinion still has it that 60-something Ming might have arrived too late on the scene.

All previous yardsticks for ageing have become unreliable. Some will eagerly offer the cliché that deems 50 to be “the new 40”. Others will say that Campbell and Jagger – near contemporaries, astoundingly – should really be putting their feet up. The Japanese artist Hokusai once claimed that he only began to master his craft when he reached his 80s. Today, in a Western world in which pensioners almost outnumber children, we remain youth-obsessed.

If you believe the government actuary’s department, some adjustments are about to become unavoidable. By 2074, so it reckons, Britain will boast 1.2 million centenarians. If nothing else, sales of the Stones’ back catalogue are guaranteed for a few more decades. Yet if you set the prediction against a falling birth-rate, a picture of society begins to emerge that few of us would recognise.

Put aside actuarial caution, indeed, and you have a prediction from the Demos think-tank: it says that life expectancy could increase to 150 within three decades. Just to set a few pulses really racing, the big brains even guess that someone already living might make it to 1000. Plenty of time for another Lib Dem leadership contest, then.

Obvious question: how should we feel about all of this? Most of us probably entertain the hope that by surviving to 150 we might just be able to afford a decent pension. Others might not fancy spending decades of drool while Hibs continue to fail to win the Scottish Cup. Do we really want to more than double the allotted biblical span? Most would say not, but most, I’m prepared to bet, are lying.

After all, the predictions of increased life expectancy do not presume incapacity. We know as much from experience in the here and now. People are already living longer, but they are also healthier, wealthier and more involved in the world than their parents or grandparents. I may have missed the reports, but I don’t recall 70-year-olds in the 1950s running marathons. Such a feat is, today, almost taken for granted.

So what if – forgive the second appearance of the miserable cliché – 100 becomes the new 60? First, inevitably, children will cease to be at the centre of society. Secondly, work patterns will change. The developing world might take a few decades to catch up, but the process is already in train. Even as Western life expectancies are predicted to rise, the global population is set to stabilise, and perhaps to decline. Octogenarians will be valued employees, not burdens, as we now presume to believe, on the young.

We read of “smart pills” to keep brains ticking over. We hear of electronic implants to keep bodies attached to souls. We already witness an obsession with delayed ageing in everything from diet plans to exercise to cosmetic surgery. We want more time. The smart folk now say we are about to have that time in abundance. Age, they report, is just another disease, and curable. What about that?

Clearly, if it involves me reviewing a Stones concert in 2026, a few objections will be lodged. If it implies a society that prefers conservatism to creativity and the occasional rebellion the game will have been worth less than the candle. If it invokes the myth that age and wisdom are always conjoined I might have a word or two to say, if spared. But if it means centenarians saying that they are too busy to fight a stupid war this week, or that they remember only too clearly where the last political rebranding led, or that they have had it up to here with fads and social trends, I might just take the pills.

 

 

 

The point of age, the single thing with which youth cannot compete, is memory. You may not be three times wiser at 150 than you were at 50, but your stock of remembered experience has increased vastly. The world itself is altered. A mediaeval peasant, for whom “the big Four Oh” did not involve a comedy greetings card, could not afford to hang around. When time is short, the very shape of existence changes. In contrast, the first generation of British pensioners who stopped associating retirement with death inherited another, and very different, universe. Now, we are told, our prospects exceed every fantasy.

Some people will always be a waste of time, and space. I may well be one of them: thank you for your call. But what does it profit a man if he lives to 150 and still thinks “something ought to be done” about immigration? Venerable dunderheads remain dunderheads. Science may well have the capacity to keep us jogging along for a few extra decades, but unless and until we learn to keep on learning such blessings will be squandered.

Robert Frost, himself the possessor of a very decent life-span, once wrote a short poem saying – I paraphrase – that he had never dared to be radical while young for fear that he would become reactionary when old. We do not need Demos or the government actuary to tell us that life-spans are increasing rapidly. Such, irrespective of corporate greed and deceit, is at the heart of the pensions crisis. What we do need, nevertheless, is a reversal of the question. Thus: if “old” is to become commonplace, what becomes of youth, and all the word implies?

Do we have the prospect of a world in which 80 is merely middle-aged, or are we approaching a society in which the values and attitudes of the elderly will predominate? Should 50-year-olds begin to behave like teenagers? If so, how are a diminishing band of actual teenagers supposed to occupy their time?

I’ll take one of those smart pills now, nurse, and hope I die before I get carbon-dated.

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