People react very differently to the process of ageing. Some people shy away from old age for as long as they can and eventually spend it reflecting on times when they were physically and mentally stronger and more independent. For others old age is embraced as a new adventure and something to look forward to. In this book psychoanalyst Danielle Quinodoz highlights the value of old age and the fact that although many elderly people have suffered losses, either of their (...) own good health or through bereavement, most have managed to retain the most important thing – their sense of self. Quinodoz argues that growing old provides us with the opportunity to learn more about ourselves and instead of facing it with dread, it should be celebrated. Divided into accessible chapters this book covers topics including: the internal life-history remembering phases of life anxiety about death being a psychoanalyst and growing old. Throughout _Growing Old_ the author draws on both her clinical experience of working with the elderly, and her own personal experience of growing old. This makes it an interesting read for both practising psychoanalysts, and those who wish to gain a greater insight of the natural progression into later life. (shrink)

In this essay, I account for what we mean by old, what it means to grow old, and what we might mean by a shared achievement in the case of growing old together. I turn to the phenomenology of Alfred Schutz for some early insights on the shared time embodied in growing older together and how a ‘werelationship’ shored up by this temporal structure is the foundation for constituting the social world. I follow Schutz’s attempt to use this (...) temporality to describe the case of making music together and conclude that what Schutz calls growing older together is not the same as growing old together which is necessarily embodied in a way his account of making music together is not. I give an embodied, enactivist account of making music together as a performance and, drawing on recent work by Shaun Gallagher, offer an aesthetics of growing old together as a performance enacted by individuals whose intimate engagements in that performance accomplish the shared achievement of growing old together. (shrink)

This essay considers how normal aging might over the long run be thought of as undermining to “thinking as usual” in a society undergoing rapid social change. Informed by the phenomenology of Alfred Schutz, the criteria for thinking as usual are considered. Derived from his essay “The Stranger,” these criteria were developed by Schutz about the experience of an immigrant stranger approaching a new culture. Here it is argued that they might also help us better understand the experience of aging. (...) It is suggested that in the context of social change older people can, under the right circumstances, feel like strangers in the culture they have known all their lives. (shrink)

In the early 1990s, Microcebus murinus, a small primate endemic to Madagascar, emerged as a potential animal model for the study of aging and Alzheimer’s disease. This paper traces the use of the lesser mouse lemur in research on aging and associated neurodegenerative diseases, focusing on a basic material precondition that made this possible, namely, the conversion of a wild animal into an experimental organism that lives, breeds, and survives in the laboratory. It argues that the “old” mouse lemur model (...) can be considered as an eco-zootechnical acquisition. This is shown by examining how, since the early 1970s, French mouse lemur researchers have articulated colony productivity and viability with the influence of environmental factors on the demographics and physiology of the species. The appearance and maintenance of a growing number of old mouse lemurs in French research facilities are related to three developments: the application of the ecological notion of “social stress” to the understanding and management of the behavior of the captive population; the experimental demonstration that a variety of seasonal physiological changes in the species were influenced by the photoperiod; and the related attempt to accelerate aging in mouse lemurs through the manipulation of annual light conditions. (shrink)

Timeless wisdom on growing old gracefully from one of ancient Rome's greatest philosophers Worried that old age will inevitably mean losing your libido, your health, and possibly your marbles too? Well, Cicero has some good news for you. In How to Grow Old, the great Roman orator and statesman eloquently describes how you can make the second half of life the best part of all—and why you might discover that reading and gardening are actually far more pleasurable than sex (...) ever was. Filled with timeless wisdom and practical guidance, Cicero's brief, charming classic—written in 44 BC and originally titled On Old Age—has delighted and inspired readers, from Saint Augustine to Thomas Jefferson, for more than two thousand years. Presented here in a lively new translation with an informative new introduction and the original Latin on facing pages, the book directly addresses the greatest fears of growing older and persuasively argues why these worries are greatly exaggerated—or altogether mistaken. Montaigne said Cicero's book "gives one an appetite for growing old." The American founding father John Adams read it repeatedly in his later years. And today its lessons are more relevant than ever in a world obsessed with the futile pursuit of youth. (shrink)

This volume brings together chapters about aging in many non-Western cultures, from Africa and Asia to South America, from American Indians to Australian and Hawaii Aboriginals. It also includes articles on other issues of aging, such as falling, dementia, and elder abuse. It was thought that in Africa or Asia, elders were revered and taken care of. This certainly used to be the case. But the Western way has moved into these places, and we now find that elders are often (...) left on their own or in institutions, as younger people have migrated to other cities and even countries. Grandparents often find themselves being parents to their grandchildren, a far cry from the kind of life they believed they would have as they aged. This book will explore all these issues and will be of use to students and researchers in this relatively new field. (shrink)

Every winter in the classical period, on a specifically chosen day, Athenians gathered together to mourn the men who had died in war. According to Thucydides, the bones of the dead killed in that year lay in state for two days before being carried in ten coffins organized by tribe to thedêmosion sêmawhere they were buried and then a speech was made in honour of the dead men by a man chosen by the city. As his description makes clear, this (...) ceremony was a public event attended not only by citizens and foreigners, but also by the female relatives of the dead men. Other sources report that thepolemarchosput on theagônfor those who died in the war and these contests included musical, athletic and hippic competitions. The war-dead also received sacrifices. The occasion combined burial with cult and games usually afforded to the divine, although how exactly this combination worked in practice is not clear because Thucydides, our single best source for the Epitaphia, focusses on the burial and the oration given by Pericles in the winter at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War. (shrink)

Ethical challenges are traditionally described in a negative light, even though moral conflict can express the individual ability to perceive when something is not working and promote change. The true question, therefore, is not to how to silence moral conflict but how to educate it. Although the need for ethical support of health- and social-care professionals in elderly care is clearly perceived, there is no universal method for providing effective interventions. The authors hypothesize that adequate training sessions can help care (...) professionals enhance this skill, once clear goals and specific educational techniques are set. This research tests the hypothesis on twenty care professionals working in acute and residential care settings for the elderly, building on the ethics round method. Mixed methods drawn from literature and the experience of educators were adapted to meet different educational goals. Moral issues can hardly be removed from a context characterized by increasing demand and decreasing resources, but they can be recognized and addressed with common efforts, a critical attitude, and a growth mindset. Enhancing these skills in qualified workers can help them accept the reality of work, release pressure, and identify common team goals. Introducing these skills before graduation can help future workers avoid unreal expectations and reduce frustration and early job quit rates. (shrink)

One argument which is frequently levelled against the enhancement of human biology is that we do not understand the evolved function of our bodies well enough to meddle in our biology without producing unintended and potentially catastrophic effects. In particular, this argument is levelled against attempts to slow or eliminate the processes of human ageing, or ‘senescence’, which cause us to grow decrepit before we die. In this article, I claim that even if this argument could usefully be applied against (...) attempts to enhance other human traits, it cannot be valid in the case of attempts to enhance the various processes that constitute senescence. I begin by reviewing the biology of ageing to show how it consists of a number of unrelated traits. Then, following the arguments of a number of evolutionary biologists, I explain that every one of these traits is a product of evolutionary ‘neglect’ rather than ‘intent’. Finally, I consider the strongest version of the argument against enhancing senescence, which acknowledges these facts about the evolution of ageing but insists that we have nevertheless have prudential reasons to avoid enhancement wherever there is some uncertainty about the genetics or evolutionary function of a trait. I provide two reasons for rejecting this version of the argument as well, even in the case of human senescence, where such uncertainty is currently significant. (shrink)

Healthcare counts as a morally relevant good whose distribution should neither be left to the free market nor be simply imposed by governmental decisions without further justification. This problem is particularly prevalent in the current boom of anti-ageing medicine. While the public demand for medical interventions which promise a longer, healthier and more active and attractive life has been increasing, public healthcare systems usually do not cover these products and services, thus leaving their allocation to the mechanisms of supply and (...) demand on the free market. This situation raises the question on which basis the underlying preferences for and claims to a longer, healthier life should be evaluated. What makes anti-ageing medicine eligible for public funding? In this article, we discuss the role of anti-ageing medicine with regard to the scope and limits of public healthcare. We will first briefly sketch the basic problem of justifying a particular healthcare scheme within the framework of a modern liberal democracy, focusing on the challenge anti-ageing interventions pose in this regard. In the next section, we will present and discuss three possible solutions to the problem, essentialistic, transcendental, and procedural strategies of defining the scope of public healthcare. We will suggest a procedural solution adopting essentialistic and transcendental elements and discuss its theoretical and practical implications with regard to anti-ageing medicine. (shrink)

The Bayesian maxim for rational learning could be described as conservative change from one probabilistic belief or credence function to another in response to newinformation. Roughly: ‘Hold fixed any credences that are not directly affected by the learning experience.’ This is precisely articulated for the case when we learn that some proposition that we had previously entertained is indeed true (the rule of conditionalisation). But can this conservative-change maxim be extended to revising one’s credences in response to entertaining propositions or (...) concepts of which one was previously unaware? The economists Karni and Vierø (2013, 2015) make a proposal in this spirit. Philosophers have adopted effectively the same rule: revision in response to growing awareness should not affect the relative probabilities of propositions in one’s ‘old’ epistemic state. The rule is compelling, but only under the assumptions that its advocates introduce. It is not a general requirement of rationality, or so we argue. We provide informal counterexamples. And we show that, when awareness grows, the boundary between one’s ‘old’ and ‘new’ epistemic commitments is blurred. Accordingly, there is no general notion of conservative change in this setting. (shrink)

Essential skills and attitudes necessary for active citizenship need to be cultivated as early as prekindergarten. This exploratory study investigated if three and four-year olds could be actively engaged in social studies practices through inquiry learning in a school garden. Eleven children openly interacted and conducted personally-driven investigations on a daily basis in the school garden located on their playground over nine-months. Three interviews with children, teacher observation notes, and lesson plans were analyzed to discover whether NCSS preK-12 learning themes (...) (2010) for the social studies curriculum could be correlated with garden inquiries. Three prevalent NCSS themes surfaced from data analysis with Civic Ideals and Practices, People, Places, and Environments, and Time, Continuity, and Change being most prevalent. Results imply that working in a school garden through inquiry learning can foster the development of democratic competencies and thus, could be used to design C3 lessons for preschoolers in the garden. (shrink)

Prevalent narratives of agricultural innovation predict that we are once again on the cusp of a global agricultural revolution. According to these narratives, this so-called fourth agricultural revolution, or agriculture 4.0, is set to transform current agricultural practices around the world at a quick pace, making use of new sophisticated precision technologies. Often used as a rhetorical device, this narrative has a material effect on the trajectories of an inherently political and normative agricultural transition; with funding, other policy instruments, and (...) research attention focusing on the design and development of new precision technologies. A growing critical social science literature interrogates the promises of revolution. Engagement with new technology is likely to be uneven, with benefits potentially favouring the already powerful and the costs falling hardest on the least powerful. If grand narratives of change remain unchallenged, we risk pursuing innovation trajectories that are exclusionary, failing to achieve responsible innovation. This study utilises a range of methodologies to explore everyday encounters between farmers and technology, with the aim of inspiring further work to compile the microhistories that can help to challenge robust grand narratives of change. We explore how farmers are engaging with technology in practice and show how these interactions problematise a simple, linear notion of innovation adoption and use. In doing so, we reflect upon the contribution that the study of everyday encounters can make in setting more inclusionary, responsible pathways towards sustainable agriculture. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Growing Up: Seeing Myself for Who I Am and Loving ItKerry MagroLast weekend, I traveled to see my cousin. He had graduated from St Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore and was being ordained as a Roman Catholic priest. The event was attended by many of my family members. Several of the littlest attendees struggled with all the commotion, some were said to be shy, some didn’t want to be (...) crowded, and parents and caregivers did what they could to make it easier on them. Watching those kids trying to cope with a family event, which was different and a bit confusing, brought back a flood of memories of my own childhood. Nothing was simple about my childhood.My life has been “interesting” for sure. As a young child I faced many challenges. Until the age of two and a half I was nonverbal. Even though later I would gain speech, my developmental delays and sensory integration dysfunction issues caused great [End Page 202] difficulty for myself and my parents. I was evaluated by professionals and was diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder–pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified (PDD–NOS) at the age of four.Thoughts of that difficult time filled my head when watching the children at this family function. My uncles, aunts and cousins couldn’t possibly know my struggles in those years. They weren’t present for all the interventions and therapy sessions I endured. Today, they don’t see me as someone different or disabled. I still have some obstacles to overcome in my development but rather than bemoan where I am or where I have been I have chosen to accept myself as I am. Although some may say I have a disability I choose to embrace my abilities and to celebrate them. I’m glad I’ve stayed on a path that has led me to become an independent adult. I am now a national motivational speaker, a Master’s graduate, owner of a non–profit corporation and soon to be an author.But what about this word “disabled”? Since I was six years old I seemed to have been tagged with this word by those around me. They all considered autism as a disability. I didn’t even know I had autism until I was 11. But I was very aware of people defining me as being disabled. It had to be the reason I was being placed in Special Ed classes, for the hours I had to travel to doctors and therapies: occupational therapy, physical therapy, speech therapy. I was being called disabled and I didn’t know why. Of course the signs were there for me that I had a problem. In daycare many things confused and frightened me: loud noises, wind, water, transitions. I cried constantly, a lot more than everyone else. I had terrible tantrums (lying on the floor kicking and screaming) to the confusion and consternation of the adults and caregivers around me. I attended two different daycare centers and was asked to leave both of them. I couldn’t even make the transition from the door of a daycare center to my parent’s car without fighting, screaming and crying uncontrollably.It’s now hard to believe that my difficulty with sensory integration dysfunction, transitions and social interactions lasted for almost 15 years of my life. During those years there were many confusing, frightening and painful episodes for me, my parents and others around us.Like most kids with these types of deficits, we tried to find splinter skills to help me compensate. I have hyper–mobility of the joints making buttoning and fine motor tasks almost impossible. I also have dysgraphia, which makes it difficult for me to hold a pen or pencil to write. Even with therapy I never learned to ride a bicycle. One bright side to the hyper–mobility was being able to learn to type 100 words per minute.My sensitivity to water, wind and loud sounds was extreme. I fought my parents each time they tried to get me into the bathtub. I hated going on the swings because I couldn’t feel my feet on the ground... (shrink)

Digital media, such as cellphones and tablets, are a common part of our daily lives and their usage has changed the communication structure within families. Thus, there is a risk that the use of DM might result in fewer opportunities for interactions between children and their parents leading to fewer language learning moments for young children. The current study examined the associations between children’s language development and early DM exposure.Participants: Ninety-two parents of 25months olds recorded their home sound environment during (...) a typical day [Language ENvironment Analysis ] and participated in an online questionnaire consisting of questions pertaining to daily DM use and media mediation strategies, as well as a Swedish online version of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory, which includes a vocabulary scale as well as a grammar and pragmatics scale.Results: Through correlations and stepwise regressions three aspects of language were analyzed. The child’s vocabulary was positively associated with interactional turn-taking. The child’s vocabulary and grammar were negatively associated with the likelihood of parent’s device use during everyday child routines and the amount of TV watched by the child. The child’s pragmatic development was also positively associated with the parent’s device use in child routines but also with the parent’s joint media engagement, as well as the child’s gender.Conclusion: Our study confirms that specific aspects of the 2-year old’s DM environment are associated with the child’s language development. More TV content, whether it is viewed on a big screen or tablet, is negatively associated with language development. The likelihood of parents’ use of DM during everyday child routines is also negatively associated with the child’s language development. Positive linguistic parental strategies such as interactional turn-taking with the child, JME, and book reading, on the other hand, are positively associated with the child’s language development. (shrink)

Before engaging with the already intensive and still increasing personal branding activities in many fields of practice, a scholarly approach would call for a more specific definition of the concept of personal branding processes and the resulting human brands. A multi-step analysis of the growing body of literature on personal branding is employed, integrating a framework that covers six key research streams of personal branding, (1) terminology and definition, (2) underlying theories, (3) classes and categories, (4) benefits, (5) antecedents, (...) and (6) key ingredients and applications, complemented by challenges the domain of personal branding has to cope with. The analysis shows that personal branding is an interdisciplinary concern, which is still in its infancy and in which universally valid personal branding frameworks or even theories cannot be identified yet. Personal branding appears as a source for new academic impulses, as it may sensitize scholars to opportunities for intensifying collaboration with practitioners and with other academic domains to enrich and disseminate knowledge in their fields. (shrink)

An advantage of a typical growing block theory (GBT) or moving spotlight theory (MST) is that it can easily account for tenseless or tensed truths involving past entities. The paper indicates what is required for such an advantage is that a particular like a rock doesn’t change its status of being a rock when turning past from being present. But a typical GBT or MST, which implies that a particular’s turning past from being present doesn’t make a physical difference, (...) faces a series of problems. The paper then regards the exclusion of the implication of making no physical difference by a typical GBT or MST as the second requirement for being a tenable GBT or MST. It’s difficult to satisfy both requirements – even Miller’s (2019) MWT fails to do so. The paper shall reveal how a GBT can satisfy both requirements. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Old Orders for New Ecology, Animal Rights, and the Poverty of HumanismCary Wolfe (bio)Luc Ferry. The New Ecological Order. Trans. Carol Volk. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.1Early on in The New Ecological Order, the French philosopher Luc Ferry characterizes the allure and danger of ecology in the postmodern moment. What separates it from various other issues in the intellectual and political field, he writes, is thatit can call (...) itself a true “world vision,” whereas the decline of political utopias, but also the parcelization of knowledge and the growing “jargonization” of individual scientific disciplines, seemed to forever prohibit any plan for the globalization of thought.... At a time when ethical guide marks are more than ever floating and undetermined, it allows the unhoped-for promise of rootedness to form, an objective rootedness, certain of a new moral ideal.[xx]As we shall see, for Ferry—a staunch liberal humanist in the Kantian if not quite Cartesian tradition—this vision conceals a danger to which contemporary European intellectuals are especially sensitive: not holism, nor even moralism, exactly, but that far more charged and historically freighted thing, totalitarianism. Ferry’s concern is that such “world visions,” incarnated in contemporary environmentalism in movements such as Deep Ecology and ecofeminism, threaten “[o]ur entire democratic culture,” which “since the French Revolution, has been marked, for basic philosophical reasons, by the glorification of uprootedness, or innovation” [xxi]. Ferry’s thesis—it becomes quite explicit in his comparison of environmental legislation under the Third Reich with tenets of Deep Ecology in the book’s second section—is that Deep Ecology and its ilk have moved in to occupy the space left open by the passing of the political imaginaries of fascism and communism, so that denunciations of liberalism (and its corollary in political praxis, reformism) may now be unmasked for what they are: critiques “in the name of nostalgia, or, on the contrary, in that of hope: either the nostalgia for a lost past, for national identity flouted by the culture of rootlessness, or revolutionary hope in a radiant future, in a classless and free society” [xxvi]. To which Ferry responds—literally—“Grow up!” Late in the book, he tells us that we must see through “the adult development of the secular and democratic universe” [137] by rejecting totalizing revolutionary visions of the sort purveyed by Deep Ecology, and by adhering instead to liberal reformism, “the only [End Page 21] position consistent with leaving the world of childhood” [138].Ferry is certainly right to draw our attention to the often uncritical nostalgia and romantic holism of some varieties of environmental thought—problems that have been noted before by critics from points on the map very different politically from Ferry’s avowed liberal humanism. And it is certainly understandable, given the historical context, that he would join a long list of other European intellectuals in pointing out the manifold dangers to democratic society of totalizing moral schemes—dangers often represented for liberal intellectuals like Ferry by the rise of the Greens in European politics. 1 We do well to remember, too (as Fredric Jameson and others have pointed out), that for European intellectuals such as Ferry, liberalism retains, for understandable historical reasons, a viability and a promise about which many American intellectuals are skeptical or even jaded. European intellectuals, conditioned by the experience of fascist authoritarianism and the strong but problematic presence historically of the Communist party in social and intellectual life, may find in liberalism a refreshing and indeed radical democratic openness and dynamism, while American intellectuals, conditioned to the absence of any other major political contenders, have long since grown accustomed to liberalism as the name for that “end of ideology” position which, as Jameson puts it, “can function more effectively after its own death as an ideology, realizing itself in its most traditional form as a commitment to the market system that has become sheer common sense and no longer a political program” [249, my emphasis].But in defending democratic difference, everything hinges, of course, on precisely how such terms are framed and how difference is articulated—an index of which often may be found in how its imagined... (shrink)

Throughout the Old Testament, the stories, laws, and songs not only teach a way of life that requires individuals to be moral, but they demonstrate how. In biblical studies, character ethics has been one of the fastest-growing areas of interest. Whereas ethics usually studies rules of behavior, character ethics focuses on how people are formed to be moral agents in the world. This book presents the most up-to-date academic work in Old Testament character ethics, covering topics throughout the Torah, (...) the Prophets, and the Writings, in addition to the use of the Bible in the modern world. In addition to Carroll and Lapsley, contributors are Denise M. Ackermann, Cheryl B. Anderson, Samuel E. Balentine, William P. Brown, Walter Brueggemann, Thomas B. Dozeman, Bob Ekblad, Jose Rafael Escobar R., Theodore Hiebert, Kathleen O'Connor, Dennis T. Olson, J. David Pleins, Luis R. Rivera Rodriguez, J. J. M. Roberts, and Daniel L. Smith-Christopher. (shrink)

Inequality isn’t just for the young anymore. People over age sixty-five face large and growing inequalities in health, wealth, work, and family. The widening gap between better- and worse-off older Americans has begun to undermine legal institutions that once worked to correct inequality, including Social Security, Medicare, private pensions, and family law. In this Article, I briefly document the inequalities that have transformed old age in the last fifty years and then analyze three common justifications for reform: budget solvency, (...) inequality, and progressivity. I show that each of these falls short of the kind of principled justification that will be needed to justify cutting benefits, raising taxes, or both. (shrink)

This Comment treats each of Spinosa, Flores, and Dreyfus's three subjects ?entrepreneurship, democratic activity, and cultivation of solidarity ? in turn. Though marred by inattention to moral consequences and an accordingly unjustified meliorism, the authors? insights reaffirm and strengthen a number of convictions obscured in current political?theory debates. In particular, their account of the virtuous citizen, and of a variant of solidarity which grows out of such citizens? activity, deserves recognition. The basic contention that humans are ?at their best? when (...) self?consciously engaged in transformative activities is accepted, with the essential caveat that such activity can only be sustained for relatively short periods of time by individuals and polities alike. (shrink)

This research investigates 3- and 5-year-olds' relative fairness in distributing small collections of even or odd numbers of more or less desirable candies, either with an adult experimenter or between two dolls. The authors compare more than 200 children from around the world, growing up in seven highly contrasted cultural and economic contexts, from rich and poor urban areas, to small-scale traditional and rural communities. Across cultures, young children tend to optimize their own gain, not showing many signs of (...) self-sacrifice or generosity. Already by 3 years of age, self-optimizing in distributive justice is based on perspective taking and rudiments of mind reading. By 5 years, overall, children tend to show more fairness in sharing. What varies across cultures is the magnitude of young children's self-interest. More fairness (less self-interest) in distributive justice is evident by children growing up in small-scale urban and traditional societies thought to promote more collective values. (shrink)

This article examines the current state of end-of-life care in internal medicine wards in Israel, through an analysis of medical practice and the existing legal framework. The authors demonstrate the processes that lead chronically ill, elderly patients to perceive death as an unexpected phenomenon that is to be avoided at all costs. This perception stems, among other things, from the lack of public debate on questions relating to the end of life and the dominant cultural expectation that physicians provide curative (...) interventions. This results in a dearth of palliative care for the elderly along with a growing number of medical interventions that are of questionable value. The authors propose an alternative approach that highlights individual well-being and that demonstrates the potential areas of intervention by which death can be transformed into an expected and acceptable occurrence for the old and infirm. This approach allows patients to avoid unnecessary interventions and to reduce the burden of responsibility on family members and physicians, who are currently being called on to make end-of-life choices under exigent circumstances. We present these dilemmas by focusing on typical cases of incompetent elderly patients when there is no clear documentation of their wishes regarding treatment, and when their families do not have a coherent perception of what they may have wanted or of the care that would be most appropriate for them. We conclude with a call to action that highlights the need for greater awareness—through public discourse and private discussions—of end-of-life medical choices before the onset of ill-health and incompetence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Utopian Enterprises: Growing Up with Star TrekMark Jendrysik (bio)It might be hard to imagine today, when new Star Trek entertainment product seems to be everywhere, that there was once a time when Star Trek meant the seventy-nine episodes of the original series and nothing else. And it might be hard to imagine a time when episodes of a television series had to be watched at one particular time, (...) with no guarantee those episodes would ever be seen again—before the VCR, before streaming, when you had to race home and not miss a moment of the program. When Star Trek came on at 4 p.m., I sat glued to the TV, hoping my mother wouldn’t call me to dinner until 5. You might also remember telling friends who missed the program about the plot and experiencing the Rashomon effect as debates raged about what happened or did not happen on the show the afternoon before.In this article, I try to reconstruct the experience of watching Star Trek (“the Original Series,” or TOS, not that we called it that) for the first time as a child in the mid-1970s. This will be a reconstruction in Margaret Atwood’s sense of the term. I cannot at this distance of time be certain that my recollections have not been modified with the knowledge of years, or by a desire to make the experience of Star Trek perhaps more central to my life than it [End Page 359] was at the time. I will also reflect on Star Trek as a utopian and anti-utopian artifact. I do this because it seems to me that the Original Series has become the object of various caricatures that don’t do justice to the complexity and ambiguity of the program.Sci-fi in a Simpler Time?I ask you, if you are old enough, to cast your mind back to a time when Star Trek was not a multiplatform cultural juggernaut. I was born in 1964 and, perhaps predictably, I was enthralled by the space program as a child. After all, I grew up in the waxing years of the space race, just after Alan Shepard made his orbit around Earth. I was five years old when Neil Armstrong made his famed walk on the moon. The moon landings and Skylab missions provided hours of respite for my mother, too, as I sat glued to the television listening to Walter Cronkite’s calm voice. I read issues of National Geographic about the space race until they fell apart. I read all the books in my school’s library about space. A picture book with an introduction by Werner Von Braun showing future space habitants seemed to present an obvious future path for humanity.1 My friends and I were firmly convinced that one day, and soon, we would go live and work in space!By the early 1970s I had become a big fan of science fiction. In that simpler time sci-fi meant my Uncle Tom’s collection of anthologies that he had left at my grandmother’s house. On many afternoons in her sunroom, I tried to work through stories that were more than a little above my reading level. Poul Anderson’s story “The Queen of Air and Darkness” (1971) made a particularly strong impression on me in its treatment of colonialism and resistance (not that I would have used those terms at the time). Isaac Asimov’s Y/A2 book series Lucky Starr: Space Ranger (1952–58) was another favorite. I was enthralled with the stories set on Mars, Venus, and across the solar system. When I met the author in 1974, he seemed embarrassed by my love of these fairly slight works that he had published under the pseudonym “Paul French.” When I asked him to sign one of my “Lucky Starr” books, he laughed and said something like “those were a long time ago.”Sci-fi also meant movies that showed up on our local independent television stations, often as part of programs with titles like “Sunday Adventure Theater.” My friends and I became quite the connoisseurs of various voyages to the... (shrink)

Within affluent societies, people who grow up in deprived areas begin reproduction much earlier than their affluent peers, and they display a number of other behaviors adapted to an environment in which life will be short. The psychological mechanisms regulating life-history strategies may be sensitive to the age profile of the people encountered during everyday activities. We hypothesized that this age profile might differ between environments of different socioeconomic composition. We tested this hypothesis with a simple observational study comparing the (...) estimated age distribution of people using the streets in an affluent and a socioeconomically deprived neighborhood which were closely matched in other ways. We were also able to use the UK census to compare the age profile of observed street users with the actual age profile of the community. We found that people over 60 years of age were strikingly less often observed on the street in the deprived than in the affluent neighborhood, whereas young adults were observed more often. These differences were not reflections of the different age profiles of people who lived there, but rather of differences in which residents use the streets. The way people use the streets varies with age in different ways in the affluent and the deprived neighborhoods. We argue that chronic exposure to a world where there are many visible young adults and few visible old ones may activate psychological mechanisms that produce fast life-history strategies. (shrink)

I, too, belong to the "old three classes."* At the age when I should have been in college, I went to Yunnan to dig ditches. This was bad for me; but worse, still, it caused my parents great anxiety. It has been said that worrying about their children took years off the lives of the parents of educated youth who were sent to the countryside, and that is how it was in my family. Parents always try to protect their (...) class='Hi'>growing children, and to be powerless to do so during that exceptional decade meant they had a lot of worry. As an adult, I have had pangs of conscience about this, and especially so when my father passed away. When I think about the details, of course, it was not my fault; but those feelings never go away. (shrink)

Raimund Pousset gives in this essential a concise account of senicide, the modern form of cultural killing of the elderly. He sheds light on both the history and the current situation of an ancient method. Practiced for millennia almost everywhere in the world, this custom of actively disposing of old 'useless' people or passively putting oneself to death is increasingly being revived today. Senicide is a nameless and silent scandal in our modern, enlightened society. The author wishes to bring this (...) silent death into the focus of a mindful professional public, for the segregation of old age and the avalanche of costs in health care suggest that senicide will continue to grow in sad significance. (shrink)

In 2003, The Guardian newspapers ran an article with the headline, “Prospect of babies from unborn mothers.” A team of Israeli researchers had been attempting to grow viable eggs from the ovarian tissue of aborted fetuses for use in fertility treatments such as IVF. The rhetoric of “unborn mothers” poses new challenges to the liberal feminist discourse of personhood. How do we articulate the ethical issues involved in harvesting eggs from an aborted fetus, without resurrecting the debate over whether this (...) fetus is a full-fledged person with, for example, rights to non-interference or freedom from harm? Can we coherently defend a woman’s right to terminate pregnancy without relinquishing a feminist position from which to critique the use of aborted fetuses in certain experimental procedures? In short, what happens when the “new” discourse of reproductive technology intersects with the “old” discourse of abortion? (shrink)

The funeral procession of Sheng Xuanhuai – the renowned Qing scholar-official, financier, and “father of Chinese industrialism” – meandered through the streets of Shanghai on 18 November 1917. The funeral was a grand event, one that was purportedly documented in film, later to be distributed as the first “news short-film” in China. TheNorth China Heraldreported on the event in some detail, at times in rather florid language, and suggested that “the cortege was splendid and impressive, bringing back the days of (...) the Manchu emperors. The ceremonial costumes, the musical instruments and much more of the accoutrements dated back to the days of the Empire”. And indeed, the procession included a variety of ritual customs and insignia from Qing times: imperial banners, ancestral tablets, Buddhist and Daoist priests, paper artifacts, and much more. Simultaneously, nonetheless, other kinds of participants and objects – new and not of imperial pedigree – were part of and intermixed with the older materials: certificates of rank were carried on cars; boy scouts and college students marched alongside the priests; many of the participants arrived by train ; and as the Shanghai portion of the procession ended, it continued by steamer to Suzhou. The conclusion of theNorth China Heraldaccount, however, seems to have emphasized a dichotomy of old and new rather than a joyful mix of the two:Hundreds of men, dressed in the ancient costume of the old dynasties, bore a strong contrast to the eight behind them, sons of intimate friends of the deceased. They were on horseback and wore high silk hats, frock coats and white breeches tucked in riding boots.Truly the passing of the old and the entering of the new. This view – the old giving way to the new – was not just an off-hand journalistic analysis; it was part of a larger discourse about the nature of modernity, about progress, and about the relationship between East and West. By the early twentieth century, China was often perceived by most Westerners and Chinese alike as traditional, backward, and weak. It was, thus, commonly stated that the old was giving way to the new, should be giving way to the new, or was bound to give way to the new, if China was to survive. This kind of discourse was put forward by both Western and Chinese writers, who embraced this linear, progressive, view of the relationship between the old and the new, well before Sheng's funeral or the Qing's demise. In the aftermath of that demise, the New Culture Movement began to grow and seek solutions for the old-new nation's crisis. The Movement's rhetoric in particular advanced the need for the triumph of the new, and journals, such as New People, New Tide, or New Youth served as media for extending such views. (shrink)

The ‘dignity and worth of the human person’ emphasised in international human rights instruments resonate strongly in relation to the world’s ageing population, which is projected to be the fastest growing population group in the world and often among the most vulnerable. While elderly persons as a group are heterogeneous and their socio-economic life situation varies significantly between individuals, the need for universal support mechanisms such as non-contributory old-age benefits have been recognised by many states, and currently, over 100 (...) countries around the world provide some form of social pension targeted towards the elderly populations. This article appraises a sample of these old-age pension schemes from the perspective of the right to social security, with particular emphasis on the dignity and worth of the human person as espoused within the international human rights regime. (shrink)

Some old problems going back to Immanuel Kant about the nature of mathematical knowledge can be addressed in a new way by asking what sorts of developmental changes in a human child make it possible for the child to become a mathematician.