On Killing Our Elders

'We modern Westerners may be the first people in history to try to flourish without a community of revered elders.' The key word is "try".

From The European Conservative

By Sebastiam Morello, PhD

We modern Westerners may be the first people in history to try to flourish without a community of revered elders.

Many years ago, aged 19, I travelled alone out of Kathmandu where I had been living as a bum for some months, my destination being the ancient temple complex of Bhaktapur. On the way, my tuk-tuk driver stopped at a small settlement to buy some bottled water. As I refreshed myself with a cold drink, I looked around at the little village beyond the staring faces of gathering residents. I decided that Bhaktapur could wait a day; I wanted to stay the night there in that village. With the locals, I communicated with big smiles, positive sounding noises, and the universal sign for ‘good’: giving a thumbs-up. Soon, my tuk-tuk driver was heading back to the capital without me, and I had found somewhere to sleep. Some villagers led me up a hill at whose foot their primitive buildings were strewn. A little way up, I was brought to a small hut wherein the elders sat.

Perched on the floor, chatting away in hushed tones, were a group of elderly people. Together, we drank butter tea. They smiled. I smiled. I nodded my head up and down and they nodded—or rather, wobbled—their heads from side to side. Then, honour having been satisfied, we descended to the village for the night, where I slept on a semi-covered bench, leaving for Bhaktapur the following morning. What I have reflected on many times since that day was the immediate need felt by the young villagers to present me to their elders. The elders were, in that place, the heart of the community. 

No traditional community has ever existed without an internal community of elders. In fact, we modern Westerners may be the first people in history to attempt to flourish without such a community. We place the elderly in ‘homes’ to be cared for—and increasingly, it has been discovered, abused—by foreign arrivals dressed up as healthcare professionals. The ethic of the ‘self-discovering individual’ leaves no room for elders, who are increasingly discussed as either a potential or a real burden, especially by those who are themselves entering that time of life which would have, in a traditional society, placed them among the elders. 

In a traditional society, the elder is a source—a treasury, even—of social and communal knowledge that allows a given community to live in a way that is contiguous with their ancestors. That is, the elder is a bridge between the generations down the centuries that conserved and protected the community against all odds, and those generations’ living beneficiaries. Put another way, the elder both represents and embodies everything from which modern man seeks to emancipate himself. Hence, modern society not only has no place for the elder, but it must actively pursue the elder’s disappearance, either by making him perpetuate his youth through cosmetics and technology, becoming by steps a freak of nature; or by hiding him away in a care home; or increasingly by developing the necessarily sophisticated and sophistical arguments to justify murdering him with ‘dignity.’

In traditional societies, elders are deemed to possess knowledge of the actual community within which they live. They offer some parting guidance by which those who are undergoing the initiatory rites to enter the community, or those who are now leaders in the community, may increase their practical wisdom. Elders have what is called ‘ancestral knowledge.’ This knowledge is typically neither very conceptually abstract nor technical, but narrative-based, prudential, and experiential. They needn’t have any special qualification or professional status. They are treasured by virtue of their years. Elders are frequently story tellers and patient listeners. Most importantly, elders might not be able to say much about ‘man,’ but they will be able to say a lot about ‘Tom’ or ‘Harry.’ That is to say, elders know the members of their community, and they know that what might work for Tom likely won’t work for Harry, and so they can nudge people this way or that when giving counsel because they know with whom they’re dealing.

This kind of knowledge—the knowledge of years—is, practically speaking, the most important knowledge to access in the raising of new generations, if indeed the flourishing of those generations, and not their mere use, is the primary objective of the whole community. We, of course, do not place such weight on this kind of knowledge. This may seem strange, but it really is extremely important to understand that modern man is not like his antecedents. He does not simply instantiate an organic, historical development continuous with those of previous generations; he is something quite new.

Go into any old church or cathedral in Europe and you will typically see at least one image of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. In the image, you will see men and women standing around the foot of the cross: the women who wept there, the beloved disciple, a mounted Roman soldier, and likely non-Biblical characters like a saint to whom there was a local devotion, or a rich merchant or nobleman who was the artist’s patron and therefore paid for the fresco. You will see that all the people in the image are in the garb of the time in which the image was painted. If it is medieval, everyone depicted will be dressed as medieval Europeans. If the image is from the quattrocento, everyone will be in clothes typical of the European Renaissance. And this habit of painting everyone in the garb of the day remained the case for works of art until the birth of modernity in the 18th century.

How is it that depicting the crucifixion of Jesus Christ surrounded by people in the present-day dress of the artist did not seem ridiculous to him, his contemporaries, and indeed does not appear ridiculous to us now? For just imagine if we tried to do the same thing. Imagine an artist today depicting the crucifixion scene with the Roman soldiers in commando camo and bullet-proof vests, the Virgin grieving in a navy trouser suit, St. John comforting her while outfitted in trainers, sweatpants, a hooded jumper, and his favourite Nike t-shirt. Such an image would likely be considered one of three things: either a bad joke, a gimmick by a failing artist, or propaganda art of the cringeworthy sort used by Jehovah’s Witnesses in their Watchtower magazine.

The reason why our ancestors in each pre-modern age could depict themselves, the saints, and the Biblical characters standing upon Calvary in contemporary dress is because they saw themselves as belonging to the same civilisation as that whose genesis began on that very hill—and so they did. That is, they held the story given to them in Holy Writ and their own story to be the same story. We moderns, on the other hand, even those who believe in the Christian religion, cannot help but look at the religious deposit that actuated our civilisation as the cult of an alien species.

‘Modernity’ is merely the term for that time in history that is both intellectually and practically devoted to atheism in its various ideological forms. Modernity is, at the deepest level, a break with everything prior to it, for everything prior to it was intensely religious. Unfortunately, by being thus devoted to atheism, modernity possesses neither meaning nor purpose. In turn, our civilisation is rapidly collapsing and the alienation that modern man experiences—from himself, his neighbour, and his world—is intensifying at a rate that makes the approaching decades look very alarming. And through this process of “biting our chains,” as Joseph de Maistre put it, we are now drifting into the abyss. Amid such a process of entirely breaking with the past, there is no place for the elder—who is, as it were, the very chain that is being bitten.

As the example of sacred art indicates, the one institution that ought to be able to affirm the role of the elder is the Church. The Church, in fact, lives by reverence for elders. Sacred Scripture is the story of the patriarchs, the apostles, and the disclosing of a Father-God. The Church’s theology is orthodox only insofar as it does not depart from the doctrine of the Church Fathers. The Church, both clerical and lay in its constitution, is, if you like, the society in which the charism of the elder is supernaturalised and rendered sacred and sacrosanct. 

Tragic it is, then, that the Church’s current hierarchical incumbents seem, generally speaking, to be neither elders themselves nor to love their elders. They appear as frustrated children who have undergone all the humane development and civilisational induction of Tolkien’s orcs. Some years ago, during one of Pope Francis’ flashy and since forgotten events in Rome, the Filipino Cardinal Tagle had a video made of himself dancing and apparently pretending to be a rapper. It makes for very uncomfortable watching. The important part about the short video is that Tagle says the following words: 

You young people have taught me, have taught the elders, valuable lessons about humanity and about following Jesus. And I hope you will continue teaching us, and I also hope that we elders could have something to teach you. So, let us journey together in this common path of becoming a better Church and a better world.

Nice sentiments, to be sure, but the entire video’s style makes it clear that he has little or nothing to say to the modern world that isn’t affirming of its trajectory. All Tagle and those like him can say—as ‘elders’—is that the whole paradigm of breaking free from our elders is one filled with justified optimism. Tagle, in that video, swaying to a synthetic beat in the cardinalatial garb that is meant to evoke the call to martyrdom, looks as ridiculous as St. John the Divine dressed in a tracksuit.

Such a spectacle is especially depressing in the case of a churchman, but its likeness is replicated across wider society. Even those who could—by some great conversion of the public arena—now become society’s elders, namely today’s Boomers, have so bought into the paradigm of elder-killing and the imperative to seek eternal youth through perennial moral emancipation, that they literally cannot be elders. In the Lord’s dialogue with Nicodemus (Jn 3:1-21), two paths are presented to us: the path of forever seeking the return to your mother’s womb, and the path of the Spirit. The former leads you to become spiritually childish, and the latter spiritually childlike. Between those two conditions of soul is the void between hell and heaven. The perpetual search for the mother’s womb, however, is the one chosen by our epoch, a childish quest to flee reality which we are now grotesquely pursuing through the coalescing technologies which belong to virtual ‘reality’ and transhumanism.

As happens in every instance of modernity’s break with nature and tradition, we haven’t actually got rid of that from which we have sought to emancipate ourselves, but only replaced it with a degraded version of the same thing. We got rid of indissoluble marriage, as it was understood by our ancestors, and we have since created a whole industry of soulmate-finding. We got rid of childhood innocence, and now we’ve created an entire entertainment industry based on perpetuating childish fantasies. We destroyed concrete and local communities and now we seek to join an ever-growing number of ‘online communities.’ We threw out liturgical religion and have since largely created the modern world by way of pseudo-liturgical ideologies. Modernity is characterised by the tragic and desperate attempt to emancipate ourselves from that for which we immediately make a rubbish counterfeit.

This pattern of replacing what we had with a poor version of the same thing is clearly observable in the cultural killing of our elders, for our societies are now full of therapists and counsellors. Thus, we moved from treasuring an internal community of people with experiential knowledge and a love for those who seek their counsel, to contracting professionals with technical knowledge who do not want to ‘bring their work home with them.’ We went from a people who will seek a solution for the problems that arise, for love of the community that they helped to build, to a people in whose financial interest it is to perpetuate the problems encountered. The very stupid assumption behind this shift from the elder to the therapist—an assumption so typical of modern man—is that in some way it is possible to bypass experience and the accumulation of practical wisdom by the accrual of qualifications. And hence, despite experience, people irrationally place their emotional development and their life’s future in the hands of a stranger for no other reason beyond a thoughtless prejudice in favour of so-called ‘experts.’

Sadly, that kind of stupidity has its analogue in the Church, too. It is disheartening to see how vulnerable Christian faithful, especially women, gather round a newly ordained priest as if he is some kind of oracle who can, at the drop of a word, transform the lives of those who dote on him. This error is in fact the same as the error that causes people to place themselves in the hands of therapists, but only this time with a religious veneer. Whereas in the former example, the therapist is thought to bypass experience and embodied knowledge by way of a qualification, the young priest is thought to do so by way of his ordination. It is thought that, somehow, whatever he has received by supernature isn’t going to transform his nature but circumvent it altogether. This inversion of Christian anthropology, which supposes that some ‘special grace’ can aptly substitute for the unfolding of human experience in time, comes from the kind of abstractionism that is the hallmark of the modern mind. Thus, one can see how what often passes for traditional Christian piety and obedience might be nothing more than the deleterious assumptions of modernity masquerading as true religion.

For me, the paradigmatic example of modernity’s elder-killing was the one I witnessed in the life of Roger Scruton. Scruton was a man who had throughout his life coupled an outstanding intellectual search with the concrete experience that allowed his knowledge to take the form of wisdom. When he spoke, those around him fell silent. During the four years I regularly met with him as his research student, I knew I was enjoying the great fortune of spending time with a man who was offering his accumulated wisdom to a people he loved, whose future he worried about. In short, Scruton was a true elder. 

In April of 2019, George Eaton, a snivelling little runt with the vacant eyes of someone for whom integrity is mysterious, pretended that he wanted to conduct a sincere interview with Scruton for The New Statesman, only later to misrepresent what Scruton had said. Given that most readers of this journal will know this very unedifying story, it’s not worth retelling in entirety here. In any case, Scruton was later vindicated thanks to Douglas Murray obtaining a true recording of the original interview. But that was not before Scruton’s health had been severely affected due to the public attack first by Eaton and then by the cowardly Tory MPs who fell over each other to denounce a man who was a thousandfold their better. That Eaton is still able to work in journalism to this day is an indication of the general corruption of our era.

The point is that what played out in those events was a distillation of the emancipator-elder dichotomy of modernity. Eaton went to Scruton’s London apartment with the intention of killing one of society’s great elders, not physically but morally and socially. And that story, half a decade later, ought to have become for those who care about our civilisation something of a parable, or at least a cautionary tale. That is to say, we need to decide what kind of society we want to live in: one in which the Eatons of this world have the upper hand, or the Scrutons. Put differently, do we want to live in a society in which we must all fear destructive little toerags—that is, the kind of society we currently live in—or one that treasures its elders.

Of course, the process of killing our elders is not new. For decades now, parents have sought to sever their offspring from the civilisational inheritance into which they should have inducted them. Neither of my parents were christened when they were babies. My father requested to be baptised in early teenagerhood and my mother in early adulthood. The traumatised generation that had suffered the bloodbaths of the 20th century wanted to free themselves and their children from all the history that had led up to those conflicts, when in fact those wars were the supreme creations of modernity, its final birth pangs. 

Indeed, the process of killing our elders began long ago, and whether we can escape that process now is one for which the jury is still out. What we can do, however, is reject it in our own homes—at least for now, until the ‘mortal god’ of the modern state finds new technological means to regulate more closely the domestic sphere. I want my children to sit attentively at the feet of their grandparents, as if they have something to learn, because they do. Indeed, I want to be unchildish enough to offer something to my grandchildren when my children grow up, marry, and have their own offspring. And at this juncture in history, I can think of an attitude no more restorationist, reactionary, and counter-revolutionary than that.