Extremely young humans aren’t able to effectively advocate for themselves. They might not have the language, cognitive ability, knowledge, or physical ability to communicate their needs, leave a dangerous situation, or alert authorities if they are being harmed.
Older adults are often in a similar situation. For example, a nursing home resident might not be able to march over to the local police department to report abuse by a care taker.
Both the very young and very old are dependent, to a large degree, on living in a culture where their welfare is valued.
So what about care culture? It is people who are between the ages of ~20 and ~70 that really shape the culture. They are the voters, the business leaders, the educators, the activists, etc. 100% of these culture-shapers have been very young humans in the past, and none of the people I am talking about have yet been a very old human. Thus, they have already finished with one of these two periods of time where their well-being is dependent on others. They (possibly) still have the other in front of them.
Based strictly on the information above, I would have predicted the culture would more strongly advocate for the old than the young. Your future self will likely directly benefit from a culture that takes care of older adults, but will not directly benefit from caring for the young. Yet, Scott’s description of nursing homes (quoted below) is pretty consistent with things that I have heard:
Most of the doctors I have talked to agree most nursing homes are terrible. I get a steady trickle of psychiatric patients who are perfectly happy to be in the psychiatric hospital but who freak out when I tell them that they seem all better now and it’s time to send them back to their nursing home, saying it’s terrible and they’re abused and neglected and they refuse to go. I very occasionally get elderly patients who have attempted suicide solely because they know doing so will get them out of their nursing home.
At the same time, the west is basically baby worship culture. We are horrified by any mistreatment of children. There is cultural pressure for parents to make their kids the central focus of their lives.
If we are going to care more for one group than the other, why babies/kids?
Some ideas:
- Darwinian reasons: more important to care for young because they, and not older adults, can get genes into the next generation. (I don’t love this argument)
- Middle-age adults are the ones who would primarily be responsible for the care of older adults (their parents, etc). These middle age adults might have already raised kids, and now feel done with care-taking. So they just allow themselves to imagine that nursing homes aren’t that bad. (I kind of like this argument)
- People don’t think much about their own future as older adults who will need help. They just hope it won’t happen to them, but don’t give it much thought. (probably a contributing factor)
Other ideas?
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