Diminishing older people
Diminishing older people
silence, occlusion and ‘fading out’
This chapter explores deeply-buried attitudes undermining both the significance of older people’s contributions to society and the struggle for language they face. Both relativism and hyper-rationalistic neo-liberalism make it impossible to see life-courses as offering insights of significant value. Even those who support ethical stances often misinterpret them as matters of mere preference or choice - leaving social and political decisions to be dominated by technical experts. This denies authority and interest to reasoning about the social and political world; it destabilises the conception of wise thought, even though the idea of ‘wisdom’ continues to play a persistent part in everyday life and in understanding older age. Key advantages include its capacity to absorb and analyse diverse aspects of the human condition: ethical discourse, the sociality of thought, the absence of certainty in private and public life, and the varieties of significance attributable to experience.
Keywords: stereotypes, relativism, rationalism, neo liberalism, expertise, wisdom, human condition, sociality of thought
Policy Press Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.