Available online at www.sciencedirect.com

22 (2008) 115–119www.elsevier.com/locate/jaging

Journal of Aging Studies

Aging in a critical world: The search for generational intelligence

Simon Biggs

Institute of Gerontology, King's College London, 5th Floor, Melbourne House, 46 Aldwych, London WC2B 4LL, United Kingdom

Received 8 August 2007; received in revised form 11 October 2007; accepted 12 December 2008

Abstract

Critical gerontology attempts a radical approach to adult ageing drawing on both the personal experience of older adults andtheir relationship to social and structural inequality. In this paper the author uses personal historical experience to chart a criticalapproach to intergenerational relationships and draw out lessons and new directions for a revitalised critical approach to adultageing. The concept of generational intelligence is introduced, as a joint project with another author, and as a bridge toward futureintergenerational solidarities.© 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Intergenerational; Relationships; Generational intelligence; Insight; Critical gerontology; Autobiography; Identity; Political economy

I have found this one of the most difficult of papers tobegin, perhaps because the task set for us as contributorsis to create some sort of story about how our engage-ment with critical gerontology relates to personalexperience. This is not because I haven't thoughtabout what to write; in fact, I have probably thoughttoo much about it. And while my “take” on adult aginghas always begun from the position of having to locatepersonal experiences within social and historicalcircumstances, I have felt most comfortable workingat the “micro” level of theorising, in other words, theindividual's degree of understanding and reactions toadult aging in themselves and in others. If I have aconceptual starting point, it would be to think aboutways in which social/structural conditions are refractedthrough personal and intergenerational experience. Todo this, I have, in professional life, drawn tacitly on the

E-mail address: simon.biggs@kcl.ac.uk.

0890-4065/$ - see front matter © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.jaging.2007.12.016

point in the life-course personally inhabited to inform anunderstanding of the social experience of aging and ofold age itself. If one is in midlife, for example, that is agood place to start. Whether it is possible, or desirable,to make these tacit starting points explicit is anothermatter, challenging the boundaries of what is personaland what is public, what is known to the self, and what isunknown and nevertheless subjecting it to publicscrutiny. Nagel (1998) reminds us that control of thatboundary is among the most important issues of ourhumanity. And age, as an emotionally charged phenom-enon subject to often unvoiced expectations and taboos,is both liable to manipulation of self-identity throughmasquerade and the unforeseen judgements of others.

Critical Gerontology has also taken as its startingpoint the discovery of the hidden, be these structuralinequalities that present themselves as reasonable andnatural, age prejudices that appear to be facts, or personaldesires that cannot be fulfilled and may not even beraised in consciousness. It also began at a particularsocio-historical juncture, at a time of waning culturaloptimism. By the late 1970's in the United States and

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early 80's in the United Kingdom, a heady mixture ofsocial constructionism, the afterglow of sixties radicalism,and a civil rights agenda provided a powerful analytic toolto assess critically the state of aging in contemporarywestern societies. During this period, the public meaningof “reform,” as used by politicians, was changing. Underthe post WWII settlement, reform had continued in its19th century sense to mean a liberal and progressivedismantling of ancient prejudices and structural inequal-ities. But with the arrival of Ronald Regan and MargaretThatcher, this meaning was reversed. It now becameassociated with the removal of social protections and areturn of established power-bases, usually in the name ofglobal market forces. This transition created significantproblems for mainstream gerontology, which, as RobertButler ( in Moody, 1993) has pointed out, consists of anamalgam of advocacy and science. In the UK, this hadtaken the form of a reliance on “fabianist” reform, a beliefin the continuing forward march of progressive andprimarily welfareist aspirations. The main weapon in itsarsenal had been the persuasion of the political elitethrough a mixture of moral argument and the accumula-tion of evidence of negative social conditions. There isstill an enormous amount of gerontological researchundertaken in the field of health and social care, butfollowing this period, when the political elite effectivelystopped listening, a comfortable gerontological moralismand empirical do-goodism lost its critical force. Today,much of this “what's going on?” research has become“how can we make it work better?” research. In otherwords, it has taken the existing situation as a given, ratherthan as a question that is in itself problematic (One ratherstrange result of this shift has been that the questionof aging has become increasingly narrowed down toproblems of health, while at the same time becoming anavoidance of the existential and social challenges ofadult aging through a focus on consumerism, longevityresearch and continued productivity). Something newwasrequired, and part of that something became criticalgerontology, drawing on neo-Marxist political economy,civil rights movements, and the insight, taken up mostforcibly by political feminism, that the personal was nowpolitical.

In the 1980's, I was working as a communitypsychologist in London's East End, with Mike BenderandAlison Cooper (see Bender, 1976).Wewere trying toextend what seemed at the time to be new andchallenging services to older people, such as counseling,group-work, intergenerational community activities,attempts to change the culture of older people's homes,and staff training in experiential learning. At about thesame time, I began a personal exploration through

psychotherapy and training in psychodynamic group-work and psychodrama. I was also involved in the tradeunion movement and, following the collapse of the UKminer's strike and the turning of many previously radicalpublic sector employers against the movement, changedjobs to work as a policy adviser to the UK Social WorkCouncil. Here, I wrote policy and training material forsocial workers and used many of the techniques I hadlearned from radical mental health to critique how agingwas conceived, almost exclusively in that period, as aprocess of decline. I tried to write material that engagedwith workers' own experiences and made an empathiclink with the experience of aging. Later life felt verymuch a foreign country to me, but one I wanted tounderstand. The object was to deconstruct the “com-monsense” of aging, both at a personal and structurallevel. I read Chris Phillipson's (1982) Capitalism andthe Social Construction of Old Age, which put into anintellectual framework many of the structural compo-nents that were intuitively guiding my own work. Isought Chris out, and we began to work together on elderabuse and other social issues. Such critical initiativesincluded materials on ageism, a social model of aging,the coercive role of retirement, the total institution, andghettoisation of old age. However, a continued erosion ofcollective social movements negatively influenced thegeneral belief that it was still possible to change the“macro” structures of social inequality. Many radicalswere turning inward, thinking of becoming psychothera-pists or counselors, and with my own theorising andtendency to introversion, I followed the same socialtrend.

I remembered, to use Bollas'(1998) term, theunthought known of my own family of origin. Myfather's early life had been marked by an absence offamily: his own grandparents had migrated fromAustria, his father had died when he was four yearsold, and his mother had abandoned him. He was rescuedfrom an orphanage by his paternal grandmother. Mymother's large East-End grandparental family was suchthat when I read Young and Willmott's (1957) seminalsociological study, Family and Kinship in East London,I simply recognised my own, a generation removed. Atthis time I looked to those grandparental generations forrole models. This was probably aided by my mother'stalk about growing up during the London “blitz,” whichseemed a mixture of fear and fun, but always in a goldenpast, and my father's reluctance to speak about the pastat all. My mother idolised her own father, though mymemories were of him as a man crippled by industrialinjuries. He was a family man who fixed the line atFord's automobile factory when it broke down, as well

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as an “iron-fighter” who climbed high buildings and putthe rivets in. Those pictures of overalled men on the cityskyline? I have one of him eating sandwiches highabove the London streets. My grandmother and Ideveloped a mutual admiration society. We all lived inthe same house until I was four years old, and I regularlystayed with grandparents when I was older. So mychildhood was peppered with strong visual memories ofsuch horrors as live eels on their way to becoming themuch overrated “jellied eels” of East-End cuisine, withbits that wriggled after she had chopped them up. I alsohave clear images of my communist uncle, who got mein a corner at mass family gatherings to ask me what“young people” were thinking, and did I know that inthe Soviet Union there were as many female doctors andjudges as there were male? He imported and drove ablack soviet car that resembled a tank and alwaysseemed to be breaking down, but he was not going to letthe capitalists get their hands on any more of his surpluslabour. His generation seemed alive, whereas my after-the-war parents' generation simply wanted peace andquiet.

By the time I was born, we lived in the suburbs, ratherthan the real East End, where my mother's unendingtales of a really great childhood had emerged, and thisprobably added to my sense that life was a mix ofprovisionality and outsidership and that somehowauthenticity had skipped a couple of generations.However, I was left with a deep sense of the reality ofand affection for that preceding generation. I liked them,and while they were quite different from what I hadbecome, I admired them, even though I didn't under-stand them. It took the growth of my own children andthe death of my father and grandparents for me tobecome aware of being part of a distinctive generation—unlike that of my parents, proud of my grandparents'generation, and close, but not too close, to my children's.What is more, by the time I was in my thirties, the advertshad stopped speaking to me anymore. They werespeaking to the next generation.

Back in public space, the return in 1997 of a “new”labour government in the UK was to become a greatdisappointment, even though as a fully paid-up politicalstoic, I had expected little. This was not simply becauseof a continued pursuit of neo-Thatcherite economicpolicies, a tendency toward macho personal stylisationin an attempt not to appear “weak,” and the pursuit ofneo-colonial wars. During this period, it became clearthat discourses of power and assimilation rarely producethe new world that critical gerontologists desire; rather,they shape new thinking to fit the needs of the dominantpower groups. With the 60's generation's “long march

through the institutions,”many of the topics that seemedradical and critical at the birth of critical gerontology—such as abolishing mandatory retirement, focusing onproductive aging, and recognising older people as activeconsumers—had been adopted by the mainstream andshaped to serve new masters. This has meant that anumber of the early critiques are now returned to us andare in need of further dialectical deconstruction if theyare to provide a springboard for future progress.

Also, the world had changed. At the birth of criticalgerontology, the issue of sustainability and environ-mental threat largely consisted of Jaques Cousteaufinding plastic bottles in the middle of the AtlanticOcean; they hardly entered critical discourse. Trulycritical thought was concerned with the exclusion ofolder people from the forces of production (the sameones that had prompted my great-uncle's attempts toprop up the Soviet auto industry). In other words, it wasassumed that the real contest for power lay in theworkplace, and if older people were not in the workplace,they would always be subject to what Peter Townsend(1986) called “structured dependency.” Further, capital-ist production, whilst unpleasant and exploitative, wastaken to be a necessary historical step and an engine forfuture social and economic change. In the 1990's, and asa reaction against this economistic position, the idea thatolder people might, at least in the developed world, exertsome power through patterns of consumption (buoyedup by a historically contingent growth of occupationalpensions), led colleagues such as Mike Hepworth andMike Featherstone to believe that old age might actuallydisappear as a social category (Featherstone & Hep-worth, 1993). Both positions, in the argument betweenconsumption or production as a basis for older people'sposition in society, however, rest on an assumption thatcontinued expansion of industrially based wealth andassociated new technologies will solve the problem ofold age. If it is true that the current world economy hasbecome so toxic as to threaten the global ecosystem, thena critical gerontology must take this on board.

Defining aging in terms of production and consump-tion are currently voguishly interpreted as “productiveageing” and a “blurring” of generational difference andare currently deeply embedded in what could be calledmiddle-of-the-road critical gerontology. Both rely on thecontinued expansion of pre-climate-change economicsystems. Both are based on what could be called a wishto “make ‘em like us” by making more powerful socialgroups value later life on the terms of those groups' ownsocial and life-course priorities, and in terms of solvingthe problems of old age by pretending that there isnothing special to the human condition that older age

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can offer. This new settlement seems, at least to me, tooffer social acceptability to old age by pretending that itdoesn't exist. Older people are to become sociallyincluded by the twin paths of adopting the priorities of adifferent part of the life-course, with arguably differentexistential priorities, and by pretending that meaningfuldifferences between themselves and younger adultgroups are disappearing. Neither does this approachseriously tackle the problem of identities based ondependency, in so far as both paths consist principally ofavoidance of the possibility of a fourth age of decliningcapacity (Baltes & Smith, 2002). Most seriously, bothfail to acknowledge the potential for intergenerationalrivalry that emerges from asking each adult generationto compete on the same turf for approximately the samesocial identity. If these are the conditions upon which anew settlement for social inclusion and anti-ageism isbased, then it will be achieved by an extraordinarycombination of conceptual myopia, social amnesia, andpersonal in-authenticity.

If adult aging is to develop beyond a wish to resembleother parts of the life course, themselves contingent uponan unchanged trajectory of productive and ecologicallydestructive social inclusion, then critical gerontologyneeds to adapt to these changed conditions.

So where does this leave critical gerontology? Thereare critical gerontologists much better equipped than I totackle the macro-structural issues. So in the rest of thisarticle, I will have a go at the personal and interpersonalagenda. In so doing, I will draw inspiration from threethinkers who have played a part in my own intellectualdevelopment and personal insight into the experience ofgrowing older. I begin by paraphrasing Marx and Engels(1888): we can make our own futures, but not necessarilyunder circumstances of our own choosing. Second, I drawon De Beauvoir's (1970) observation that when we areyoung, we can hardly conceive of what it is like to be old,yet the way a society behaves toward its old peoplereveals often carefully hidden truths about its principlesand aims. Finally, I take from Jung (1931) the under-standing that it is a delusion to think that the second half oflife must be governed by the principles of the precedingphase.

First, it strikes me that any critical gerontologist mustgenuinely like something about and see value in theexperience of adult aging and later life. Critical ger-ontology should seek to explore the unique contributionsarising from that part of the life course. It should, then, notattempt to reproduce the priorities of a different part of thelife course but attempt to discover the special properties ofeach and work toward a relationship of complementarity,rather than dominance, between groups who are at

different points in the life course. The phrase “life course”is preferred here to that of culture or cohort, because in thisrespect I am not a relativist, and I do not believe we canexplain the experience of age through social constructionalone. A newly critical gerontology should take biologicalaging, and what is happening to it, as an importantconceptual element in its theorising. It must promoteintergenerational understanding and, increasingly press-ing, be part of a wider project of social, economic andecological sustainability. These solutions do not arisefrom productive aging as work or work-like activity, frompretending that the priorities of youth or midlife are thesame as those of late life, nor from artificially extendingthe life course for a favoured few as promised by bio-science. Genuinely liking older age, then, meansrecognizing its positive attributes, in oneself and inothers, while at the same time realising that contemporarysocial systems rarely allow that value to be allowed intoconsciousness and expressed.

Second, key, for me, is the difficult task of trying toput oneself in the position of the other, and in this caseprimacy would be given to the age-other. To understandwhat aging is like, one must travel to a foreign countrythat he/she may one day inhabit and later, and as with allmigrations, realise that the process has changed oneself.This raises the possibility of achieving some sort ofharmony between generations, reducing rivalry andproviding the springboard for a revitalised criticalagenda. But before we can free our selves of the tyrannyof potential generational conflict, we must recognise ageas difference, as only this allows an acceptance of one'sown unique position, from which it is then possible toenter into a genuine partnership with the other. In termsof age, this is by no means an easy task, especially whenone's culture is moving from a period of age segregationbetween generations to one where it claims there isincreasingly little difference between generations at all.Here I would suggest that we begin to examine whatmight be meant by “generational intelligence.” Explor-ing what this means is something I am currently workingon with Areila Lowenstein (Biggs and Lowenstein, inpreparation). It includes the facility to be reflective and todevelop conscious awareness of one's position in the lifecourse, along with awareness of other generations infamily and cohort terms, as well as the social climate oneis embedded in. As such, generational intelligence refersto the degree to which one becomes conscious of self aspart of a generation, a relative ability to put one's self inthe position of other generations and an ability to act withawareness of one's generational circumstances. In termsof a positive phenomenology, it would allow us to livewith a mature imagination, accept the aging process, and

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contain ambivalence, while acting in a way that enhancesharmonious relations between generations.

Third, as critical gerontologists, it is important to keepin mind that the ground on which one stands is con-tinually changing and that this is part of a dynamic ofpower, which while including age within its effects, iscontingent upon wider social forces and historicalprocesses. New forms of ageism that promoted inter-generational similarity and removed aged-based restric-tions on working life, for example, were welcomed bymainstream gerontology because they seemed to removebarriers to continued social inclusion. They are attractiveto social groups with relatively rewarding occupationsand reasonable levels of remuneration. They fit in withthe demands of the current political elite but forget theyears of social and political struggle that took place toremove the tyranny of work into deep old age. They alsoeclipse the question of what is special about later life andhow it informs the social life course and wider humancondition. The new ageism consists of a willingness toimpose the priorities of one part of the life course onothers, which, just like preceding forms, is internalizedby younger and older adults.

It follows from the above that aging is an inter-generational enterprise which takes place in an inter-generational space. This space is negotiated, and theexperiences of each age-group need to inform thatnegotiation. It is currently fashionable to assume that toprivilege the “voice” of older people is in some way asolution to the contradictions of aging identified bycritical gerontological thought. However, such anapproach is hardly radical and may simply institutiona-lize current common sense, while avoiding criticalengagement. While hearing the often unheard voice ofolder adults in this context is a necessary starting pointfor intergenerational solidarity, giving primacy to thevoice of an undifferentiated grouping called “olderpeople” as those principally able to dictate the meaningof old age is insufficient. Indeed, expecting older adultsto be the sole voice and arbiter of old age can be seen asan abdication of responsibility by other ages. It assumesa privileged ability among older adults to de-mystify agestereotyping, as well as a capacity to recognize and putaside self interest. This is a far more exacting standard ofbehavior understanding than is expected of other agegroups. The roots of critical gerontology are intergenera-tional (Kuhn, 1977), and part of its future should includethe development of ways to negotiate between genera-tions, within communities, in interpersonal behavior andin the development of new processes for research.

A prerequisite for critical gerontology in the 21stcentury would be to enhance intergenerational under-

standing and solidarities under conditions of increasingscarcity and competition between groups, generated inpart by environmental change. In order to confront thischallenge, we will need to critically evaluate the strat-egies that are currently used for social inclusion andexamine how we negotiate the boundaries betweengroups identified by age. A starting point would be torecognise that, while we are all increasingly in the sameenvironmental boat, and this poses a stimulus tosolidarity, recognition of common interest also dependson recognising the special, complementary qualities thateach generational group can bring. We need to redis-cover a ground on which to stand, and part of thatground is to reclaim what is a more grounded andnatural existence, embedded in the existential prioritiesof different phases of the human life course. Once onehas learned how to separate one's identity from that ofothers, it is possible to return to an equal relationship,knowing what one brings and how one can contribute. Iwould argue that contemporary constructions of laterlife continue to fail in providing this for older adults, andperhaps it is time for critical gerontology to identify thatground on which to make a stand.

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