Originally published in the San Antonio Express-News June 20, 2024
Questions about President Joe Biden’s age have intensified recently as ways to discredit him and his ability to lead. But their questions are often wrongheaded. Instead of putting aging in one category, biology, we should be asking different questions about competence and character, not the calendar as indicator of being able to lead successfully. But this one category fuels ageism and stereotypes of growing older.
Stereotypes of aging narrow our imaginations of what growing older implicates. Implicit in ageism stereotypes: Someone younger is better. We need a more youthful leader. Fantasies of superior qualities in younger candidates compared to the worn down-and-out elder proliferate. Ageism then accelerates wrong impressions of incompetence and the ability to create constructive public policies.
Yet living into later years has benefits often discounted in the rush to demote Biden. What is kept out of the discussion include the following: a deeper, more holistic life perspective, a softening of perceptions through compassion, moving away from the hardening of the arteries of outmoded ways of thinking and responding, a deeper commitment to service through awareness of the needs of others, accumulation of experience that grows from a source of wisdom, a more fully-formed character honed from years of dealing with prickly political issues, the ability to tolerate multiple perspectives, and seeing the deep truth of one’s life.
Psychologist James Hillman asks in his book, The Force of Character and the Lasting Life: what is character? This is different from being a character; rather, character points to who one is meant to be. It respects one’s destiny, the core of one’s integrity, often clarified through the harder lessons of life, like loss, suffering, the ability to feel into another’s plights and aspirations, becoming more compassionate towards one’s limits, and sensing the inherent value of something larger than oneself.
These qualities inhabit the elder, not one simply aging. Aging privileges chronology and biology; eldering highlights a transition into a wider orbit of understanding and a deeper consciousness of what will benefit the common good.
In eldering one grows more aware of their specific mythology: an awareness of what has organized and ordered one’s life, produced a greater coherence, and identified what meanings predominate as one grows down into life. One’s unique character grows compliantly towards these senses of what is important and establishes what to relinquish in life’s later stages.
One can be in one’s 70s or older, yet remain arrested at an adolescent stage, which demands its own way as the only option. But Hillman suggests “we need to recognize how helplessly our thinking about the last of life has been trapped in disparaging ageism” that fixes older people as handicapped by body breakdown and enfeebling restrictions. Again, a failure to imagine more deeply.
He also believes that “ideas of soul, of individual character and the influence of awareness of life processes have become necessary decorations” to hide a basic premise: “Old age is affliction.” We must examine our fantasies of aging and set it beside what President Biden has accomplished within an unrelenting schedule that demands a level of stamina, experience and expertise that individuals much younger would find exhausting.
Biden’s consistent “force of character,” his diplomatic skills honed from a lifetime in the public arena of world politics and his presence as a beacon for the common good, has not been without flaws. Yet they too have shaped his character.
Within his own limits, he has heard and responded to the call of eldering rather than to fixed, narrow obsessions for self-gain. In the latter pursuit, character degenerates into caricature, a distorted version of the good.
Late in life, through the quality of character, as Hillman notes, “there is a clear distinction between statistical prolongation and psychological extension.” The soul of aging honors the latter.