Generational equity in America: A cultural historian's perspective

Abstract

This paper examines the issue of generational equity in America through the lenses of cultural history and social criticism. It argues that generational equity reflects broader problems of contemporary aging policy, whose troubles in turn reflect the decline of American military and economic power, the legitimation crisis of the liberal welfare state, and population aging. The question of justice between the young and the old is also linked to the ‘spiritual situation of the age’—in particular to American culture's inability to provide convincing answers to existential concerns like the quality of life in old age, the unity of the life cycle, and the meaning of aging. Both communitarian and liberal approaches to generational equity presuppose a life course or lifespan perspective, whose unifying ideological power took shape historically in a bourgeois culture that provided widely shared images of the integrity of the life course. The social power of this perspective emerged over the last century, when the U.S., along with other Western democracies, institutionalized the life course by creating age-homogenous schools for youthful preparation, employment for middle-aged productivity, and publicly funded retirement benefits for the aged. The ideal of a society legitimately ordered by the natural divisions of human lifetime is now under siege in large part because its view of old age is neither socially nor spiritually adequate and because the social meanings of life's stages are in great flux. In our century, vastly improved medical and economic conditions of old age have been accompanied by a loss of cultural meaning and vital social roles for older people. The challenges of generational equity, then, involve the distribution of social roles and vital meanings as well as of income and health care. Meeting these challenges will require eliminating the surplus dependency imposed on many older people—strengthening their ability to solve their own problems and contribute to their own communities. Reclaiming older people from social marginality will not solve specific questions of the just distribution of health care resources across age groups. It can help to build a new ‘moral economy’ of the life course, within which the ‘conversation between generations’ can confidently take place.