Tame the cultural dominance of chronometric age
We assume that age indicates some stage in a uniform, logical process of human life. But it is only a measure of time since birth
Jan Baars, Professor of Interpretative Gerontology at the University of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht and author of Aging and the Art of Living
My encounter with the work of professor Jan Baars happened by chance, but his words captured me immediately with their ability to illuminate some ideas we take for granted. Professor of Interpretative Gerontology at the University of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht, in the Netherlands, Baars is the author - amongst other titles - of Aging and the Art of Living, a book that explores the meaning of aging in Western culture.
Of course, he’s not the first one to write about this subject, and you might be wondering why I find his ideas so revolutionary. The thing is that he lays bare the “rules” that govern our relationship with time and the way we are using time to frame aging. One step back: we do not know that time “is” and therefore we resolved to measure it in order to “grasp” it. And, generally speaking, we measure time with space. Think about the movement of the hands on the watch dial to make a very simple example or the gravitational movement of dead bodies in the solar system from which our chronometric time originated. The relationship we build with this arbitrary, but universally adopted, measure is filled with cultural meanings and it’s precisely in this space that Professor Baars has something very interesting to say.
In your book, you wrote about chronometric time in relation to age. Can you tell us about it?
Time is only a measurement. Specifically, it is a chronometric measure, whereas age is only the time since birth, within some very broad developmental frames such as childhood, adulthood and the terminal phase of life. Culturally, we assume that time is chronological and that “age” indicates some stage in a uniform, logical process of human aging. But age is only a measurement of time since birth. Our culture bridges the gap as if there would be a logical and natural connection between the age of somebody and certain characteristics.
This concept of aging is universally adopted. Why did it become so popular?
Western societies have seen a bureaucratic reorganization of the life course during the 19th and 20th centuries, in which age plays a crucial role in defining childhood, adulthood, and old age. One of the results of this chronometric ordering of human life, beginning with prenatal care and continuing through childhood, with its age-related structuring of schools and curricula, has been a growing awareness of one’s own and other people’s age. After childhood, age begins again to play an important role in the labor market particularly after, as soon as people pass the age of 50 or even 40.
Moreover, the aging populations of Western societies have in recent decades led to intensive public debates about dependency-ratios, health-care costs and life expectancies that would be related to “age.” Much research on older people or human aging is intended to inform governments about the effects of age-related phenomena since these may have consequences for age-related or duration-related legislation.
So, while the chronometric time is a homogeneous unit of measure, we assume erroneously that age is an indicator of the aging process?
Age, as time since birth, is not a reliable indicator of aging. Biodemographic research informs us that life expectancies in affluent societies have almost doubled over the last 150 years. After the initial decline in infant mortality, there has been a further boost: most of the additional years added to life since the last decades of the 20th century were realized at older ages. This might already suffice to question the view that people’s “age” in itself would represent an adequate assessment of their potential, health, or life expectancy.
Moreover, there are still major differences in healthy life expectancies within these affluent countries. This underscores the fact that, in a broad sense, socio-cultural contexts play a major role in aging. These contexts are crudely represented by national averages that hide important internal differences. For instance, one important differentiation of national populations in terms of aging is birth cohorts: people who are born in the same year or cluster of years.
Whereas it was assumed for a long time that intelligence would decline at a more or less fixed age, researchers such as Paul Baltes and Warner Schaie found in the 1970s important differences between people of the same age, depending on their birth cohort. But even birth cohorts are far from homogeneous and are partly torn apart by socioeconomic inequalities in income and wealth, which appear to have major consequences for the ways in which people age and result in major differences in morbidity and mortality. So how can chronometric age (as time since birth) be an adequate indicator of aging processes? It is not, it just measures them.
Does this question our standardized and standardizing idea of age?
There is reason to doubt whether age is really the “independent” or even “explanatory” variable that public discourse, or even scientific research on aging, assumes it to be, leading to the question of whether and how the age-related definitions of these populations might make sense. Concepts used in the discussions of “aging societies,” such as “age-structure,” “birth cohorts,” “age groups,” “age norms,” “age grading,” “dependency-ratio,” “age-cost profile,” and “age-associated diseases,” have become so common in aging studies from demography to economics, from epidemiology to life course or life span paradigms that their specific meanings and assumptions are rarely questioned.
If chronometric time and age are so inadequate in explaining the dynamics of human aging, would it not be better to base our assessment of the age of a person on clocks that are intrinsic to human aging?
This interesting question has been explored by several authors. Such an intrinsic clock might make it possible to assess a functional age that would indicate precisely the relative state or phase of the human organism on a scale that ranges from birth to death. It would require – at least in a biological or, more generally, a functional perspective – the establishment of clear indicators of “normal” functioning for different stages or functional ages. These differently marked ages could then be located on a continuum as subsequent stages of a structured development towards a state of adult “normality,” followed by a declining movement away from it.
This would have to go beyond biomarkers such as the aspartate racemization in the teeth, which is used in forensics to assess the age (as time since birth) of a body. Such biomarkers do not represent “age” as the functional state of the whole organism, so we still don’t understand why one person aged 60 dies within a year, while another aged 82 lives for another twenty years. We tend to simplify and think about a human being as an entity, but in fact things are much more complicated than this.
Can you tell us more?
The intrinsic age of the human organism could dissolve into a multitude of intrinsic ages: lung capacity, maximum heart rate, hearing sensitivity - as many as there are organs and other identifiable subsystems in the body. From a functional perspective, the complicated processes of human senescing in cells, tissues, organs, or different parts of the brain may each have specific dynamic properties, but these dynamic properties include an openness to the environments inside and outside the human body, extending from personal lifestyles to ecological or social contexts in a broad sense. Emerging research from ecological developmental biology on the social organization of genetic expression (epigenesis) demonstrates how complex these interactive processes are. Such interactive processes of aging defy a general logos and must be discovered in their specificity, and in the course of this discovery chronometric time can only function to measure specific durations.
This means that, while the earth or the moon are not known to engage in active explorations of their environments and therefore, their rigidly regular movements can be a measure of chronometric time, the same doesn’t apply to our species. As humans grow up, the interactions of three factors result in an early decline of developmental regularities undermining the concept of objective stages: first, the formative influence of contexts in a broad sense, like nourishment, care, family, education, ecological environment, material and immaterial resources; secondly, specific genetic endowments and finally, personal agency.
Developmental regularities are still strong in embryological phases, although even there contextual influences will have their impact. But in childhood and adult life these regularities begin to decline rapidly. Comparative research on aging identical twins has demonstrated that genes account for approximately 30% of developmental outcomes in old age; the remaining 70% is a playing field of contexts and personal agency.
Established that chronological age is only an index, you pointed out that our focus on measuring time has some cultural side effects.
As we said, chronometric age is nothing more than a measurement of the amount of time that has elapsed since birth, but its cultural dominance impacts on our experience. As we get better and better in measuring the time with atomic clocks and move goods, people, and ideas around the world always faster, we are experiencing an acceleration in our life. When this acceleration meets chronometric time, we assist to the emergence of two paradoxes. The first one is “premature cultural senescing,” in which individuals live longer but are called old at an earlier age, think about the job market we talked about before. The second one is the desire to stay young but grow older, a need met by the anti-aging industry that promises to maintain youth. Caught between the desire of a longer life and infinite youth, our culture tries to control our finitude and vulnerability that, instead, are the source of our spontaneity, discovery, creativity, and uniqueness.
