Everyday philosophy

Google honoured Confucius’s birthday on 28th September with a special doodle on its website. This looks like sound business sense, given the sage’s advocacy of elder-veneration and the demographics of our ageing population. Taking a longer view, more than half the babies born this year will probably live for over a century. If trends continue, kowtowing to the elderly will be de rigueur in politics.



This is not, however, good news for anyone drafting a national pension policy. George Osborne’s party conference announcement that the Tories would like to extend the retirement age by a year may cost them the votes of disgruntled seniors, many of whom won’t willingly work extra months simply to top up plundered coffers. Can ancient philosophy offer any consolation where politicians can’t?

The Roman orator and philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero, writing at the pre-retirement age of 62, narrowed down the presumed vicissitudes of ageing to four: withdrawal from active employment; decline of the body; loss of enjoyment of most physical pleasures; proximity to death. He offered some consolation on each of these scores. Old people can get by doing less; their bodies and minds needn’t decline dramatically if they exercise them; they can focus on friendship and conversation rather than baser physical pleasures; and besides, he over-optimistically concluded, the soul is immortal, so death shouldn’t worry us.

To enjoy these anticipated decades of chat and conviviality, though—as Osborne might point out—we will need more cash in our senescence than the state seems able to provide. Sadly, forcing us to delay retirement is unlikely to yield the necessary returns, but it could at least offset the first two of Cicero’s downsides: unemployment and physical inactivity. As for fretting about imminent death—there’s not much anyone can do there. Given the impoverished final years that some of us will be facing, death’s chilly shadow may come as consolation. With hindsight and the wisdom that accompanies great age we will, no doubt, find ourselves wishing that someone somewhere had heeded Confucius’s profound injunction: “When prosperity comes, do not use all of it.”