The necessity of elders

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This article was published 17/01/2024 (939 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There are many people in our world who claim to be leaders, but they are rarely also regarded as elders.

It’s not gender or age, position or political power, that makes someone an elder. Elders can’t choose themselves; they have to be recognized, or chosen, by the community.

Nor are elders — unlike far too many of our leaders — necessarily old and male. Wisdom wears no age or gender; it may be found among the young, and wherever we have the eyes to see it.

It is unfortunate that leaders are usually not elders, because the leadership of our society might then make better choices — for the benefit of the community and not just for themselves or their political party.

I want to step back from an easy litany of our current leaders’ faults and mistakes, however, and consider a larger question: Where have all the elders gone?

In an oral culture, where everything isn’t written down, knowledge and wisdom are passed down from generation to generation. If one or two generations fail in that responsibility, then the lessons of a thousand generations can be lost in the blink of an eye. The elders are not the only ones with that knowledge and wisdom, however. Instead, their role is to make sure every generation understands its relationship to both its ancestors and its descendants.

Yet who are the knowledge keepers, the wisdom keepers, in our communities today? And when they speak, does anyone listen anymore?

For that relationship to our ancestors, we only need to look at the elderly in our communities. Yet too many spend their days alone in their own apartments or houses. Those in personal care homes at least have some contact with other people, through the staff who provide that care, but there are never enough volunteers, and the staff are always fewer than needed to spend quality time with their residents.

There is such a wealth of knowledge and wisdom among them, however: the life experience that still remembers a world war; what it was like to come to Canada as a refugee or immigrant; what it was like to live on a farm; or what it was like to be taken from your family and sent away to a residential school.

As a historian, it is painful to think how much of that knowledge and wisdom is being lost, every day, because it is not recorded or written down. Even within families, there is no time in our busy lives simply to sit and hear the stories of the elderly. A story shared with anyone is never entirely lost, but — as a society — we are hemorrhaging stories faster than ever before.

Worse are the lessons that are also being lost, lessons learned the hard way, which we will instead have to learn for ourselves — the hard way.

How many remember the sound of a dictator’s voice, knowing what will surely come next, if some politician is given a chance at wielding power? How many know what it feels like to live with growing intolerance, disrespect for differences, as groups are targeted because of their race, ethnicity or religion, knowing what will surely happen if that tide does not change?

How many remember the sights, the sounds, and the smells of war — how their experiences haunt dreams and flash into memory — while others glibly talk about the impossibility of finding a pathway to peace, and how war is inevitable?

We can learn the consequences of the choices we are considering, just by listening to the elderly, to those who have already lived through what will surely also happen to us, if we don’t learn their lessons.

And then there is our relationship to the next generation — the children or grandchildren, whether our own or someone else’s.

We should be ashamed of what they will think of us, 20 years from now, when they look back at the foolish, thoughtless choices we are making today, but we are not. We are not only ignoring the stories and examples of our elderly, we are also failing to consider the future circumstances of our youth.

So, where have all the elders gone, those people who not only call us to remember the past, but who challenge the choices we make today, on behalf of the next generation who will inherit our consequences?

Perhaps if we had leaders who did these things — who made choices with intelligence, integrity, and compassion — in time, the community would recognize them as elders, too.

Peter Denton writes from his home in rural Manitoba.