Can an ageing society possibly have no adults left in it? Just look at the world around us. In Malta, in the rest of Europe, in the US, people complain that their politics are conducted without any adults in the room.
Conventionally, we think of this condition as an affliction, something we could get rid of, if we could just manage to fix our broken politics. Or attract better candidates for public office.
Maybe, however, there are no adults in politics because there are no adults left in the world. Our world, at least. Not even us.
How come? Surely, our problem is too many adults, not too few. The median age in Malta is 42.6 years, almost identical to Europe’s. The USA (38.3) and Australia (37.9) have slightly younger populations but evidently in our ballpark when compared with Africa (19.7).
Our life expectancy at birth is 82.8 (for women, 85). The population under 15 is 14 per cent, compared with Africa’s 41 per cent. (Although Africa, too, is getting older. It wasn’t too long ago that over half the population was under 15.)
What these statistics say, however, is that we’re getting older. Being adult is something else.
What is an adult? It’s someone whose emotional and mental maturity makes them responsible, able to respond to the situations that life throws up and who can accomplish mundane but necessary tasks. To be adult is to know: to be a fully fledged homo sapiens.
As young children, we’re more like small cuddly animals, sitting on laps, enjoying being petted and fetching things no one asked for, eating off the floor and fouling up the room at the most inconvenient moments.
As adolescents we’re like Neanderthals – musical, angular, with an ingenuity that’s the envy of humans but not very cooperative.
But, as adults, we’re supposed to be sapiens – the creature who knows what to do, who can get things done, with discipline and cooperation with other adults we don’t very much like. What happened to us?
On reflection, there’s no irony or contradiction. An ageing society obliges its elderly to live in a world without maps or precedents, without the experience to handle 70 years of marriage or the disappearance of the personality of one’s spouse due to dementia.
We don’t live in a world flooded with stupid people. We’re surrounded by stupid actions or inaction- Ranier Fsadni
But before we even get to be old, in our daily lives the world without precedent – the world of climate disasters, pandemics, disappearing jobs, artificial intelligence and prospects of immortality – has already left its effect on us.
In many of our mundane tasks, we’re left without know-how. Our home appliances have become too complex to fix. Every habit is under scrutiny since it may destroy the planet or at least our neurological circuit. We can’t even advise the young members of the family about career prospects – not for jobs that haven’t been invented yet.
To be adult is to know what to do when things break down. Yet, we find that the more time passes, the less we know. We find ourselves instead improvising wildly.
If you think this means that our choices can be safely delegated to experts, think again. COVID has shown that even the experts have had to make it up – more or less – as they went along.
Then, again, the 2008 financial crisis should have told us that. And Brexit, and the rise of Donald Trump, both of which are due to multiple expert botch-ups as much as populism.
It’s in the disappearance of adults that I see the cause of so many books, in multiple European languages, about how to deal with idiots. They’re books written by psychologists, philosophers and management consultants.
A recent bestseller is called Surrounded by Idiots. But the sentiment has long been coming. One of the most globally syndicated comic strips of our time, Scott Adams’ Dilbert, is essentially about working with idiots.
It’s no coincidence that Dilbert broke out in the early 1990s, just when the white-collared middle class began to lose control over their careers and the digital revolution began to destabilise entire ways of life.
The problem isn’t really idiots. We don’t live in a world flooded with stupid people. We’re surrounded by stupid actions, or inaction, committed by people no longer able to respond adequately to the world around them. It shouldn’t surprise us that this very problem has entered our politics, pitting trust in experts as a polarising issue.
Returning the world to adult hands is essentially the challenge of organising our politics so that we know how to respond to the unexpected and unprecedented. That calls for many things but one comes before the rest.
We need to recognise that the goal of politics is security, not risk-taking.
Risks are for adolescents and entrepreneurs. Politics makes the world safe for both – against those prepared to threaten violence against the young and the market.
Embarking on economic projects that are fraught with risk to reputation, environment, public health and social cohesion should only be done if we have robust security forces and systems, not when they are one of the weakest links in the chain.
Otherwise, we have either politics by adolescents or private enterprise by people disguised as politicians.