Part Five: The Social Organs of Seniority

18
Up and Down The Age Scale

For what is man?

First, a child, unable to support itself on its rubbery legs, befouled with its excrement, that howls and laughs by turns, cries for the moon but hushes when it gets its mother's teat; a sleeper, eater, guzzler, howler, laugher, idiot, and a chewer of its toe; a little tender thing all blubbered with its spit, a reacher into fires, a beloved fool.

After that, a boy, hoarse and loud before his companions, but afraid of the dark; will beat the weaker and avoid the stronger; worships strength and savagery, loves tales of war and murder, and violence done to others; joins gangs and hates to be alone; makes heroes out of soldiers, sailors, prizefighters, football players, cowboys, gunmen, and detectives; would rather die than not out-try and out-dare his companions, wants to beat them and always to win, shows his muscle and demands that it be felt, boasts of his victories and will never own defeat.

Then the youth: goes after girls, is foul behind their backs among the drugstore boys, hints at a hundred seductions, but gets pimples on his face; begins to think about his clothes, becomes a fop, greases his hair, smokes cigarettes with a dissipated air, reads novels, and writes poetry on the sly. He sees the world now as a pair of legs and breasts; he knows hate, love, and jealousy; he is cowardly and foolish, he cannot endure to be alone; he lives in a crowd, thinks with the crowd, is afraid to be marked off from his fellows by an eccentricity. He joins clubs and is afraid of ridicule; he is bored and unhappy and wretched most of the time. There is a great cavity in him, he is dull.

Then the man: he is busy, he is full of plans and reasons, he has work. He gets children, buys and sells small packets of everlasting earth, intrigues against his rivals, is exultant when he cheats them. He wastes his little three score years and ten in spendthrift and inglorious living; from his cradle to his grave he scarcely sees the sun or moon or stars; he is unconscious of the immortal sea and earth; he talks of the future and wastes it as it comes. If he is lucky, he saves money. At the end his fat purse buys him flunkies to carry him where his shanks no longer can; he consumes rich food and golden wine that his wretched stomach has no hunger for; his weary and lifeless eyes look out upon the scenery of strange lands for which in youth his heart was panting. Then the slow death, prolonged by costly doctors, and finally the graduate undertakers, the perfumed carrion, the suave ushers with palms outstretched to leftwards, the fast motor hearses, and the earth again."

Though he wouldn't lay claim to being an ethologist, Thomas Wolfe captured the essence of a male's life history in this passage from You Can't Go Home Again.

There is a fallacy, in the concept of the individual, which implies unity and permanence. We are not objects as much as processes - not the same today as we were a decade ago, nor even yesterday. The elements that were us a few years ago are mostly dispersed. But most importantly we change socially. Our appearance, tone of voice, carriage, quickness of movement, gait all affect (if not determine) the nature of our social interaction. These changes through time are not just simple artifacts of aging, but are products of our social evolution.

Among the vertebrates as a group, probably no other ingredient of social hierarchy is as important as age. With age there comes increasing experience, strength, and, most importantly, the psychological advantage of being first. You can see this best in herds of hoofed animals, which are led by an old cow or ewe. Even the young, strong males and females in their prime grew up with the image of the old girl as the dominant and carry this through long after they have become her physical superiors.

There are many similar analogies among human beings. No matter how high one rises socially, he will always be subordinate to his elementary school teachers. Fellows two or three years ahead of me in school, whom I knew very well, I still hold in sophomoric awe, though time has obliterated the actual years' difference between us. Second-year girls infrequently date first-year boys, even though their ages overlap so that some sophomore girls are actually younger than many freshmen. This age aspect of social hierarchy always makes for awkward relationships when a younger man is appointed boss or foremen on a construction job, or rises faster among professionals even though it may be widely acknowledged that he is the most capable.

According to the human survivorship curves and our knowledge of peak sexual interests, men logically should marry women slightly older than themselves. But because there is so much status tied up with courtship, it is seldom ever done. The relationships between age and status in our lives are not altogether rational.

Valerius Geist found that mountain sheep of certain age groups were more prone to wandering than others. The very young didn't wander much. It is to their advantage to remain near the protection and experience of older sheep. The ones who wandered most were the mature male sheep who occupied a subordinate place in the community. The more dominant males and most females remained tied to the traditional and familiar areas. The females, the very young, and the dominants had something to lose directly by moving - reproductive potential, their lives, and reproductive license, respectively. But the sexually mature, yet subordinate, males had little to lose and perhaps something to gain by stumbling into a new social situation.

My point is that different social strategies may be selected for during different parts of the ontogeny - the life span. A number of authors have commented on the tendency to have more derring-do or "begeisterung", as Lorenz calls it, during the late teens, and to become more conservative when one gains stature in the community.

As we go about our daily rounds we symbolically move up and down the age scale, depending on our situation. A young woman teacher in her late 20's gets up in the morning, speaks in medium to high tones with her husband, growls in low gutteral tones at the kids - "Get dressed or we'll be late again." At school she assumes an aloof air with her class and speaks in a medium-deep, well-metered and enunciated tone, with head, back, and shoulders erect. But at lunch with the girls her voice rises and her shoulders and hands are mobile as she relates an incident. She has to speak with the county superintendent, however, that afternoon, about an incident relating to student discipline. Her voice is high and soft, brows up, and shoulders slumped slightly forward in the chair.

We all do this, in some form or other, all the time. As children we grew accustomed (conditioned, if you will) to body movements and voice tones varying predictably along the spectrum of authority. As adults we still use those same avenues. We retreat into childhood (our major experience with life as a subordinate) every time something in our adult lives causes our status image to slip. Cecco Angiolieri da Siena said it in a sonnet about 700 years ago:

"When I behold Becchina in a rage,
Just like a little lad I trembling stand
While master tells him to hold out his hand."

Likewise, we race ahead and become wizened patriarchs when our status is given a few boosts.

Looking at the same phenomenon in a different way from the psychodynamics of development, Eric Berne in Games People Play proposed:

That every individual has had parents (or substitute parents) and that he carries within him a set of ego states that reproduce the ego states of those parents (as he perceived them), and that these parental ego states can be activated under certain circumstances (exteropsychic functioning). Colloquially: "Everyone carries his parents around inside of him."

That every individual was once younger than he is now, and that he carries within him fixated relics from earlier years which will be activated under certain circumstances (archaeopsychic functioning). Colloquially: "Everyone carries a little boy or girl around inside of him."

Psychiatrists rely heavily on where we place ourselves in the age spectrum in relation to others. It is the basis of Transactional Analysis. The concept of regression in animal behavior also relates, whether in the dilute gestures we have been discussing or in the more extreme pathologies, to a retreat into a more submissive - sometimes a more dependent - social posture.

Our flexibility along the scale of age and status signals is limited to a great extent by the fixed signals of our anatomy, which brings us to another quite different aspect of our ontogenetic social signals. Like many other mammals and especially many other primates, our social posture is reinforced by specific social organs of age.

Gorillas and baboons look to the degree of physical change as a measure of age, because indeed these are more socially important. "Time of puberty" is more socially meaningful than an arbitrary number like eleven years.

Actually, all societies still operate this way. Seldom do we know the age (in years) of many associates and people with whom we deal, but rather react to the organic signals of age. In man and some other species there is an entire, complex program of physical changes in one's social signals, with some parts occurring at different times, at different rates, and with different degrees of precision. There is a rapid change in the development of social organs at puberty (because of the critical change in reproductive status). Other than this, there appears to be a graded sequence throughout the rest of life.

Some of the changes occurring with age are certainly part of the senescence phenomenon. However, many of the changes classified as by-products of age degeneration seem to be part of the graded changes social paraphernalia. Balding, graying, voice changes, skin coarsening and the like, rather than being simply deterioration symptoms, also seem to be important parts of the age-related status shifts, and there is a mechanism to select for these traits.

Shown is the continuum of physical status signals expressed along the age gradient in humans-- from puberty to old age.  A number of signals are involved, such as neck, nose, beard and eyebrow size, degree of balding, graying and wrinkling.  It is difficult to show some others, such as pigmentation, oiliness ond odor.

Among human beings and many other groups, status is not simply a product of fighting ability, nor is net reproductive performance based simply on one's early sexual vigor. Rather, it includes providing for family welfare, correct decision-making based on experience, and continuing to reproduce throughout one's later years. Perhaps in early societies, and surely today, elders have high positions not only because of their accumulated information and experience, but also as a result of longer periods to collect the paraphernalia that symbolize status, and hence privilege. Seniority systems and forms of gerontocracy probably stretch well back into our simian ancestry. Physical changes reinforce a social position that is based directly or indirectly on seniority. If this is so, having organic symbols of age past maturity could increase the total effect of status signaling, resulting in one's likelihood of maintaining a dominant position and an increase in lifespan. A longer life in turn would increase the likelihood of a greater genetic contribution to the next generation (more wives, greater possibility for remarriage in a monogamous situation, prolonged care for offspring and their offspring, and so forth).

In most early human cultures, social position must have had a fairly gross effect on differences in reproductive success. Though modern cultures have blurred these (and in some cases reversed them) it has not been long since they were very real.

Though our lives are a continuum of change, we can speak of the age spectrum in blocks of time which have some physical, physiological, and psychological identities. Presumably they were a product of different selection pressures acting during each period. I have separated the stages of life into six different categories. Admittedly, each could be further subdivided and there is a gradient across almost every limit. Rather than using numbers or names with complex connotations, I have used name analogies from the life stages of other mammals to freshen our view. In each group I have suggested some of the selection pressures affecting behavior and social anatomy and have drawn a rather subjective curve of the degree of change in social paraphernalia. Just for discussion purposes, I also listed approximate ages in years when the transitions take place; these are somewhat culture- and environment-specific and should only be taken as general figures.

All this is very superficial, of course, but I do believe that as a species we do go through physical and behavioral changes which are adaptive for each general age class. The powdered bloom of light smooth skin is replaced by coarse hair and a greasy corncob complexion. The sideburns, chin and corners of the mouth sprout fur, which eventually develops into thin wispy cornsilk and later becomes a coarse mat of wire. Foreheads become higher and greasier, necks thicker, shoulders broader, and appendages hairier.

Among all of these changes in our social organs, there are two evolutionary themes: (1) the incorporation of senescence features into earlier age groups as symbols of the rank generally associated with seniority and (2) the incorporation of youthful features into later age groups as attractant devices, based on our attraction to children. These processes and their interaction are the subjects of the following chapters.