Insurance companies do not benefit from hiding behind meaningless names. In mediaeval times, when universities were first invented, Studia Generali was the name given to the courses they offered, which were very different from what universities teach today, in that they were an introduction to universal knowledge, to all the information then available. The Generali Group could make use of that coincidence, and other insurance companies could begin to choose names which reveal what really distinguishes them. To become a customer of Generali could mean being a member of a new kind of institution that is dedicated, in addition to its more prosaic commercial activity, to broadening people’s horizons and freeing them from parochial illusions.
Insurance companies are among the richest but also most secretive institutions in the world. Generali’s assets include ownership of some of Europe’s most important historical monuments. The company would become much more than a business if its customers could feel that by investing in it, they are performing a cultural act, and becoming guardians of their heritage too, raising the level of appreciation of that heritage, particularly if that included festivities which reasserted the vanished identification of insurance with sociability, and provided occasions for forging social and intellectual links between customers, shareholders and employees. The impersonality of modern business is a new phenomenon that goes counter to all traditional wisdom.
There is no need to treat office employees like caged animals, let out only occasionally for business-related meetings or training; and no need for that training to be so narrowly focused. Corporate universities are indeed sprouting everywhere, but they are still pale imitations of real universities, because their mission has not gone beyond producing measurable increases in profit, rather than enlivened minds. They have not yet expanded their ambition to include encouraging serious general reflection on broader issues, on how work and business could be reinvented to meet more of humanity’s ideals, so that outsiders would want to attend and listen and participate, and the reward would be that they would acquire a reputation as institutions which the public values quite apart from the products sold.
Gambling is another unrecognised competitor of insurance premiums. As people become disappointed that their ambitions will not be fulfilled, gambling offers the delightful fantasy of being able to retire immediately. Gamblers are spending an estimated thousand billion U.S. dollars annually worldwide, roughly as much as the global expenditure on military defence, and gambling is expanding faster than insurance: in France, for example, stakes have doubled in real terms in the past twenty-five years. Between 1 and 2 per cent of GNP is devoted to gambling in different European countries, and seemingly more in China and Japan. Insurers, however, would be able to have many more winners; they are not funeral undertakers; they serve the living, and they are able to devote a significant slice of their profits to finance scholarships, travel and adventure for the young, not just the token sums they now allocate in the name of corporate social responsibility.
Woody Allen once said, ‘There are worse things than death. If you’ve ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman, you know exactly what I mean.’ If the insurance industry contributed more to helping people to help one another, not just anonymously by pooling their premiums, but by increasing their mutual understanding, they would give a new direction to the fight against fear. The famous phrase ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself’ is not a solution. Fear cannot be permanently destroyed, but it can be smothered or forgotten when minds become wholly absorbed in new and exciting adventures. That is why insuring against fear is not enough, and why insurance companies are incomplete, and why there is a future for those of them that open up new opportunities to the isolated, the worried and the hopeful.
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Is remaining young at heart enough to avoid becoming old?
THE BRAZILIAN ARCHITECT Oscar Niemeyer (1907–2012) continued designing amazing buildings and going to his office every day until his death at the age of 104. Did he set a model for those afraid of growing old?
Niemeyer knew what he wanted at a young age and remained steadfastly loyal to the values he embraced then. Professionally, he wanted to liberate architecture from the stranglehold of the right-angle that kept buildings square. Why could houses not have curves, he asked, like the landscape, and flowers, and women, and everything else in nature; why could it not aim at beauty instead of ‘structural logic’ and ‘functionalism’, why could it not be in harmony with nature, and instead of reproducing monotonous glass boxes, why could it not ‘astonish’?
Architecture was, for him, an art, whose purpose was pleasure, and he remained an ‘artist in concrete’ all his life, devoted to ‘pure invention’, showing the miracles that could be achieved with reinforced concrete. Being an artist meant that he had the freedom to design as he pleased. His response to those who expressed puzzlement at the look of his buildings was: ‘You have never seen a shape like this before.’
However, he wanted not only to produce art but also to ‘change society’, to end inequality, injustice and poverty. He joined the Communist Party and never changed his mind about it, even when it grew old and feeble. But he combined his belief in the brotherhood of man with a profound patriotism; he was deeply attached to Brazil, furious when foreigners bad-mouthed it, insistent that what faults it had were due to its being a new country, and therefore full of promise, destined to achieve, after centuries of exploitation by Europeans, what old civilisations, encumbered with rigid traditions, could not: it was the land of the future.
At the same time, he maintained an interest in all forms of ‘humanism’. ‘For me, reading is fundamental. Never underestimate the importance of reading: it’s necessary to always read, especially about subjects not related to the profession . . . never let the more technical disciplines weaken or negatively influence creative intuition.’ And writing was equally necessary. He designed in words as well as in drawing, alternating between the two.
When asked what his priorities were, however, he always placed family and friends first. A family was ‘a lifelong friendship . . . We are all very close, we stick up for each other.’ He remembered with pleasure his upbringing, when parents did the talking and children respectfully obeyed, and in later years he handed over the running of his architectural practice to one of his five grand-daughters. His autobiography is a long paean of praise for his friends, and how they were all wonderful, each in a special way. ‘Life is more important than architecture . . . Life is to know how to behave, to take pleasure in being amiable and just . . . Life is a woman by your side.’
Two years after his 75-year marriage ended with his wife’s death, he married again, at the age of ninety-nine. The benefit of old age, he said, was that it produced serenity. ‘In the past I often clashed with those who rejected my ideas as an architect. Not anymore. After all, they are defending what they have achieved over the years as good professionals. Time goes by, and I welcome all kinds of architecture.’ It was the same with the endless disagreements within the Communist Party: ‘There were so many different and controversial characters that only the common denominator of great friendship could hold us together . . . As I age, a warm feeling of fellowship is taking over my heart, overcoming old resentments, I am seeing the good side in everybody.’
Is that the wisdom that only old age can achieve? No, it was only a pretence. Niemeyer was tormented by the brevity of life. ‘Death was a constant concern . . . When I was a young man of only fifteen, I was anguished to think of man’s destiny . . . Over time, these thoughts have occurred with increasing frequency . . . I have tried to cast aside the disturbing thoughts that so afflicted me when I was alone. I wore a mask of youthful optimism and contagious good humour. I was known as a high-spirited and spontaneous personality, a lover of the bohemian life-style, while deep inside I nursed tremendous sorrow when I thought about humanity and life.’ Only the constant company of friends could banish this gloom, and the tragedy of old age was that old friends p
assed away. Despite his atheism, he did not discard religion’s preoccupation with death. Art was his salvation. But art that is the expression of a single imagination is the art of solitude.
Niemeyer loved the optimism of communism, its conviction that a better world was possible and imminent, and its ability to recover from all disappointments, just as Christians have remained undismayed by the repeated postponement of the Messiah’s return. But deep down he did not believe that it was possible to change people much; despite his dedication to creating a better world, there was a ‘fatalism’ in him that he only sometimes acknowledged: life is ‘what destiny gives us’. Despite his patriotism, he did not believe that Brazil deserved its ‘stereotypical image of a friendly, uncomplicated society’, and he asked: ‘When shall we transform Brazil into a land of friendship and solidarity? Our labouring brothers are getting poorer all the time.’ Worst of all, they did not share his grand vision: ‘Our people live in such abject poverty that our poorest brothers just want a small lot where they can build a miserable hut.’ When asked why he designed mainly grand public buildings, he said the poor who passed by could be invigorated by their beauty, which meant ‘strange and unforeseen forms’. He was more cautious than Le Corbusier, who insisted that the purpose of architecture was to change life; he preferred to say it was to give pleasure by creating beauty. But there were limits to ‘the power of beauty’.
Niemeyer’s response to disappointment was generosity. He loved helping others; even if his gifts did not make any permanent changes, at least they gave a moment of happiness. He had ‘a lifelong disdain for money,’ he said, and often worked for low fees or no fee at all. His daughter complained, when his bank balance was low, ‘Dad, just stop helping everybody.’ When being a communist became a crime, and he was persecuted by the police and fled into exile, he was proud that he publicly stood by his communist friends. What was important, he said, was to remain true to one’s convictions and to go on protesting. But he was conscious that with time old friends just told one another the same old stories.
Niemeyer achieved one of humanity’s most ancient ambitions, to live as long as possible in good health, but it was not because he remained young at heart. Neither his bonhomie nor his architectural genius ever extinguished the gloom that infected him in adolescence and that he could never get rid of. Those who talk about remaining young into old age forget how much fear there is in childhood and how much uncertainty in adolescence. The realities of youth and old age are no longer what they used to be.
If I were living among the Visigoths after the collapse of the Roman empire, once I was over sixty-five I would be worth a hundred gold coins, the same as a child under ten. An adolescent of fourteen was worth 140, an adult man up to the age of fifty was valued at 300 and a fertile woman between fourteen and forty at 250, but after that her worth was only forty, and after sixty almost nothing. These valuations express the fundamental concerns of a society where women’s function was to produce children and men’s to be strong warriors. But other valuations are possible.
It is only a half-truth that old men once ruled the world and enjoyed universal respect. Age was never a sufficient qualification for power. Old people who were incompetent or unhealthy were frequently neglected, indeed sometimes killed off, even in illiterate societies which depended on the memory of their traditions. There are records of the young challenging the old as far back as ancient Mesopotamia. In Athens, democracy overthrew gerontocracy, and only in Sparta did the over-sixties keep their ascendancy. Though Aristotle admired some aged philosophers, he also wrote that most old people were pessimistic, distrustful, malicious, suspicious, small-minded, and continually reminiscing about their past, but so humbled by their failures that they have no greater ambition than to remain alive. The Roman aristocracy was paralysed by bitter opposition between fathers and sons. In India, the old were encouraged by their religion to withdraw from worldly activity and prepare for death. ‘Better is a poor and wise child’, said the Old Testament, ‘than an old and foolish king.’ For all the supposed wisdom that experience produced, the ancient Egyptians hated the disabilities of age: Ptah Hotep, chief minister of the Pharaoh, said in 2450 B.C. that what old age does to man is evil – weakness, forgetfulness and pain. It was his civilisation that invented anti-aging wrinkle cream.
However, remaining young can be as difficult as being old. Youth continues to be both envied and denigrated as it always has been, both loved and repressed, over-sentimentalised and underpaid, sometimes admired for energy and ‘innocence’ and sometimes attacked for disobedience, licentiousness, frivolity and many other sins. Does remaining young mean one never stops growing? Does it mean rejecting the lifestyle of one’s elders? Is it because the old have lost confidence in their own life-style that they tell their children to find their own way of being happy? And if youth is the model of physical fitness, why are so many young people in prosperous countries becoming monstrously unfit and obese? Children who used to participate in adult work are now protected from its grim realities and exhorted to play instead, but at the same time they are compulsorily schooled to acquire the skills adults demand, and punished when they fail to integrate. They are encouraged to be themselves but are subjected to ceaseless training to improve them, by experts who keep changing their theories about what is wrong with them. They do not even own ‘youth culture’, which is commercialised so that participation is expensive, and the profits go elsewhere. Minorities among them may be rebellious or inventive or energetic, but the majority, according to social researchers, generally adopt the same values as their parents, and inherit the same religious convictions. In countries entering prosperity, many say their goal is to become rich, as though they cannot imagine anything different to replace their parents’ failure to become rich.
The distinction between young and old has recently been confused by a radical transformation of their status, with both generations being eliminated from the active working population, the young by education and the old by retirement. Never before have so many able-bodied people been paid to be professionally inactive. But the old are too diverse in health and wealth to form a single category. Not all of them appreciate being officially branded as useless: retirement is a liberation for those who hate their work, but an insult to those who do not want a divorce from active society. The meaning of pensions keeps on changing; they were invented for the working masses in the late nineteenth century by Prussian landlords as a bribe to win them away from socialist revolution; but the workers originally rejected the whole idea of retirement, and American trade unions went on strike against it – with good reason, because hard labour ruined the health of the poor, who seldom survived to enjoy their pensions for very long, and it was the middle classes who benefited most. Now that the whole pension system is collapsing because people are living longer, the idea of retirement is ready for retirement. If people live for a whole century, they cannot spend forty years working and forty years in retirement. No amount of financial wizardry could fund them. Something else has to be invented. Besides, now that half of young people in some countries are unable to find work, remaining young takes on a sinister meaning.
A new vision of the future emerges if, instead of being fixated on the differences between the old and the young, useful though the distinction sometimes is, one asks not how many years someone has lived, but how they have lived. A human head is an antiques shop full of bric-a-brac, of memories, habits, prejudices and fairy tales dating from a variety of centuries. Each life is partly shaped by a different mixture of ideas inherited from the past, and by emotions that contain traces and flavours from disparate epochs. Each person has not one age but many. It is not even true that the body ages gradually, that ‘from hour to hour we ripe and ripe, and then from hour to hour we rot and rot’: there is no such steady progression. Oscar Niemeyer’s obsession with death, his fatalism, his roots in family, his passion for protest, for surprise and for curves, his loyalty and generosity and humanism, each re
veal him drawing sustenance from traditions and ambitions of varying antiquity, and by mixing them he acquired a unique flavour. The quality of a life depends, in part, on how skilfully, how painlessly, how elegantly memories are combined to inspire experiences that together achieve more than their different elements could alone. None of this can be measured in the number of years one has lived.
The antiques shop may constantly be replenished, or remain immobile gathering dust. One’s physical age says nothing about the age of one’s ideas. What is special about ideas is that they can resist the passage of time and remain fertile, capable of generating new ideas when embraced by new questions, or they can fossilise. Whereas sexual fertility is the flower of youth, intellectual fertility is what turns the silences between the past, the present and the future into music. Confucius hoped his disciples would aim at that when he said ‘a man who brings warmth to old knowledge – or keeps cherishing his old knowledge – so as to acquire new knowledge, may be a teacher for others’ (Analects 2.11). Everybody is constantly espousing, divorcing, ignoring, misunderstanding relics from past thoughts and only occasionally begetting new thoughts. A conversation that surprises, challenges, stimulates, soothes or inflames, because it rearranges these relics, helps one to see what is missing from one’s life. In each of my chapters I have found myself being pushed into thinking beyond my existing beliefs after an encounter with a figure from the past who saw the world differently from me. In the twentieth century it became fashionable in some countries to limit oneself to excavating one’s own personal and family memories as a way of reducing one’s anxieties. But more interesting results come from exploring, outside one’s own head, the ideas of people one never imagined could be one’s ancestors, and the legacies of places far distant from any that one has visited. To aim to know only oneself is to choose to close one’s ears to the screams that echo throughout history and to be unable to distinguish which are of joy and which of pain.
The Hidden Pleasures of Life Page 32