Transcript: STEPHEN JENKINSON on Closing Time
Ayana Young [For The Wild Update]
Stephen Jenkinson This is what he said, “And I lift my glass to the awful truth, that you can't reveal to the ears of youth except to say that it isn't worth a dime and the whole damn place goes crazy twice and it's once for the devil and it's once for Christ and the vast don't like these dizzy heights and we're busted in the blinding lights of closing time.”
Ayana Young Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. Today we are speaking with Stephen Jenkinson. Stephen teaches internationally and is the creator and principal instructor of the Orphan Wisdom School, founded in 2010. For anyone with a desire to be useful to those who inherit an endangered and often dangerous world. It is for those who have an instinct and a desire to be an ancestor worthy of being claimed. It is for those wishing to learn something of the skills of grace in a graceless time, of mentorship and fierce and exemplary compassion. It is for those elders in training.
He is the author of Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul, Homecoming: The Haiku Sessions – a live recorded teaching (2013), How it All Could Be: A Workbook for Dying People and Those who Love Them (2009), Angel and Executioner: Grief and the Love of Life – a live recorded teaching (2009), and Money and the Soul’s Desires: A Meditation (2002), and former contributing author to Palliative Care – Core Skills and Clinical Competencies (2007).
Stephen Jenkinson is also the subject of the feature length documentary film Grief Walker, a lyrical poetic portrait of his work with dying people. Stephen lives a handmade off the grid life on a farm beside the river of abundance and time in the Ottawa Valley and Ontario, Canada.
Well, welcome back to For The Wild, Stephen. It is such a gift to be sharing space with you in this way again.
Since we last spoke, you have composed a new book Come of Age: the Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble, which is to be released this summer. And I listened to a recent interview, and it led me to reflect upon how dominant culture neither encourages nor celebrates elderhood, instead, exalts youthfulness. And I think this obsession with youth is intertwined with capitalist ideals of limitless growth. In this interview, you said “Elderhood is a consequence of life's limits, not life's extensions and victories”. So, Stephen, I'd love you to open up this conversation by speaking about your case for elderhood and what transpires in its cultural vacancy.
Stephen Jenkinson [Laughter] Okay, you want to start off easy, and then we'll get to the tricky stuff.
Ayana Young [Laughter] Precisely.
Stephen Jenkinson Okay. Well, let's see what we can do with this. I mean your question cuts a wide swath of course, even though you've quoted me in there somewhere. But let me start with something maybe easier to approach and not so conceptual. And it's something like this, “Why did I take this on? Was I drawn to this subject?” Or “How did this come about?” And you could say, “Well, you know, you're 63, it's kind of in the territory.” Well, a lot of 63 year olds don't write about elderhood. In fact, virtually none of them do in English, at least, maybe in other languages I know nothing of. So there's the first thing I mean, I look around as I did when I worked in the death trade. And I looked around for some sign, some indication that the dominant culture and all of its citizens were kind of in the ballpark of what was happening. Not on top of it necessarily, because who can be these days, but at the very least, that there was a combination of curiosity and something like concern that drove people in the direction of what's happening now. I don't mean what's current and sexy I mean, what's happening? You can't go to the news for that, you have to be remarkably discerning and have the capacity for a real cultivated discipline. Or as I've often threatened the people in my Orphan Wisdom School, one day, the reading list is going to be 20 books long. And the assigned question will be, what's not in any of the books that you've read?
So this is how I came to it. I simply wondered, where's the elderhood function to be found? Because early on, that was my first take on that elders are not personality types, you know, they're not in nice gowns. And you know, nicely coiffed hair or no hair at all depends on your style, and things of this kind. Elderhood doesn't really have much regard for or use for, or maybe even ways of employing particular personality types, but maybe it's a function instead of a person. Maybe it's a way, instead of a thing done. That's what I started to wonder about. So, needless to say, I looked and I looked, and I looked in vain, for something like a concerted, ongoing, recognizable elder function in the culture. And here's the irony, I came upon very, very quickly. We, no news to anyone listening to this or yourself, this is an aging population in North America and for the next, I don't know, 15 or thereabouts years, that will be the case that the lion's share of the population will be over I don't know 50, whatever the numbers are, you would think then, let's do the obvious math. If you have more old folks per square foot than you've ever had before, which we do numerically and as a ratio of the population. It would stand to reason then that we would have more elders than ever before. Or would it? Or does it even matter because it's not hypothetical.
You know, I could simply ask you, is it your experience, that the culture that has given you your education, and your concerns, and your style options and everything in between, has provided you with so much elder presence in your life, that you actually need a break from it? Because you're forever guided by its presence and its affable wisdom, and it's time tested abilities, and its sustainability. I mean, I'm asking this somewhat in jest, because I'm guessing you wouldn't even have this podcast and you wouldn't be having me on it if that was true about your life, personally, that you were awash in the presence of elders in your life. So how can this be then, that we got more old people than ever before, and we don't have a commensurate presence of elders In that demographic? Well, it's in the reasoning, where you look for the gap or the shortfall, you don't look for it in the old people per se.
You ask yourself this instead, from whence comes elderhood? Does it come from age? Does it come from the sort of cumulative sort of blunt force trauma of the thing that we call experience? Is elderhood an inevitable consequence of an aging population?
And I think the answer to all those questions is no, it's none of those things. As it turns out, our reliance upon experience as the midwife of elderhood has put the emphasis on the wrong syllable culturally speaking, because it imagines that sheer endurance confers wisdom. Let's just call it experience, experiences and wisdom. They're not synonymous nor does one inevitably give over to the other, in fact, enough experience in one place and one person produces trauma, just as likely, as it produces wisdom.
And then the next thing is to wonder, well, what is this wisdom thing if it's not the cumulative consequences of just a lot of experience. Well, you know, you and I are contributing to the dilemma surrounding wisdom right now as we're speaking, because the notion of wisdom has been so desperately democratized through the new media that's available in the last, I don't know, 15 years or something, that instead of an understanding of wisdom, what we have is a kind of marketplace jangle of opinion. The understanding being that if enough opinion is out there, you hear the theme again, if there's enough opinion out there, wisdom will just kind of inevitably out itself and emerge and become inherently useful. Well, we're a little bit… we're well into the experiment of social media now. And I would dare say that our encounters with wisdom are no more numerous now as a result of this media than they were before it, if anything, the notion of wisdom itself has taken a hit.
Okay, so if you add all of that I go on, of course, but if you add all of this up, I'm answering the question from whence came my concern about the book. It found its parallel. You mentioned Die Wise kindly earlier on, which came out about three years ago now, which was a book ostensibly about dying. But it wasn't really, it was about the refusal to die in the dominant culture of North America. And the parallel reasoning that informed my approach to Come of Age came to this: You have more dying people when you have an aging population. You have more dying people per capita than you've ever had before. I don't know anyone that even says that out loud. But if you are, as a culture, you devote your technology to the life extension business, be not surprised you look up one day to realize that there are more dying people around you than there have ever been. Because they're not dying, you see, they're not dead. I should say, they remain dying, and they can be dying for an awful long time. And often they are.
So we have that much more dying around this. Should that not translate into kind of a death, wisdom, a death friendly way of life, death literacy, and things of that kind by sheer exposure to it? Well, that's not what I saw. That's not what prompted me to write the book. I wrote the book because I looked in vain for some death wisdom, that was that was deriving from all of this presence of death among us. You see, it was then that I realized, “Oh, yeah, cumulative consequence, is not the same thing as cause.” We have more deaths around us than ever before—more death programs, more deaths on the front page, more death books, and that contributed to all of that stuff. And the upshot is that it seems to me people are dying, more devastated deaths than they did even 15 or 20 years ago, a direct consequence of there being more death around us. So it's absolutely confounding until you begin to wonder about your basic assumption of where understanding comes from. So that's what prompted me towards it all. And no surprise, at least not to me, that when I came around to the subject of elderhood, I was doing so as a kind of effort to wonder how we might achieve, obtain guidance on to our dining time and unto our limited And then it hit me… you have all of these old folks and there's so many of them, because their lives have been extended.
And I guess, if things continue to go as they've gone, I'm about to join the ranks, and not too long from now. And we have fewer elders, and it could be that those two things are linked causally. Meaning that if you have a lot of old people, it's because the natural limits and the naturally occurring limits of the human lifespan are being confounded.
Now people might say extended, but I think confounded is a better way of understanding what's actually happening. Take one more step and the loop begins to close, desperately and beautifully. At the same time, and it's this, could there be something about the God-givenness or the natural order givenness of limits upon human life, including its lifespan. But not only that, is there something about limits that create elderhood in our midst? I think the answer is almost certainly, yes. How can I tell? Because when I look at our limit confounding life, I see that we are running desperately short of elders. And it struck me that there's something about our unwillingness to live according to limits of all kinds that confound the elder function to the point where after a couple of generations of this confounding, there is no functioning social body or order called elderhood anymore. And 50 and 60, and even 70 year olds are lining up at the trough at the self help center at the retreat center, looking for the same things that 20 and 30 and 40 year olds are looking for. And that might be a sign by which we our era, today, will be recognizable in time to come as a particularly confounded era.
Ayana Young Wow, Stephen, I'm so mesmerized by the idea of limits in this dominant culture and how that relates to elderhood. But, honestly, how that relates to the predicament that we find ourselves in right now, in the Anthropocene, dealing with climate change and how our denial of limits, how our desire to not live by limits have led us to this place and you were mentioning how there are more elderly people than ever before, both in sheer numbers and as a percentage of the population. And then that means that these people are dying without dignity or unwisely. And I wonder what are the collective spiritual consequences of this? And are there places you're seeing promise for resurgence of elderhood in modern civilization?
Stephen Jenkinson Well, you know, I'm not really the promise guy. I'm not really the hope guy. I think you probably—
Ayana Young And I love that about you.
Stephen Jenkinson You have a clear sense of that. Not a lot of fun at parties. And of course, I don't get invited to them anyway. But not that I'm asking, I'm just observing that.
Well, here's the thing. First of all, you're kind enough to ask me to appear on your program, but this does not confer upon me or anything I say, some kind of timeless sagely “I get it, I’ve got it, don’t worry, I’ll let you know” kind of status at all. It's really important to keep saying this over and over again. Because in a time of phantom, talking heads and so on, if you make it to the airwaves, you're already trafficking in this idea that you've got something fundamental to say, I don't accept that assumption at all. So I have to earn my way towards being listened to. I don't assume that by any stretch of the imagination, right, that's the first thing. So the second thing would be this. I don't have a plan. I don't have a scheme. I don't have the answers. I don't feel any obligation to have the answers, that is a seduction as least as fierce as anything that comes from the marketplace.
You asked me about the youth culture earlier, a little bit of the new book has leaked out. In fact, I think I leaked it, but I forgot, but it's out there, a little bit and there's already been responses. And as I predicted in the book, and as I've said, whenever I've taught this material, the lion's share of the volatile reactivity against what I'm talking about, comes from people my age and older. It's quite interesting. It's very important to observe it, because ostensibly at least, I wrote a book about elderhood, for those people who are demographically in the ballpark. You see, not as an instruction manual. But as a plea. I'm pleading for them to reconsider what the latter half of their life is for. And they might say to me, who are you? And I say, well, I can answer the question, but it's not that relevant. Who am I to do such a thing? But I waited, frankly, for somebody else, and I stopped waiting and I just decided, well, I'll just kind of wade into this thing.
And one of the most reliable upon offenses is this allegation about youth culture. Now, I'm not pretending for one second that there's not such a thing. Or that it's, it's the sexy beast and has been well, since I was young myself, probably, you know, youth in and of itself is a value today, it's absolutely bizarre. And it's everywhere. I grant all of that. And it's pernicious, and how it leans upon aging people, and it leans upon people who begin to look their age, when that is no longer a compliment. If it ever was a compliment, to say to someone that you look your age, you don't look your age is more often a compliment. But for all of that, I would like to raise the ante about it all and say, I don't think it is in the realm or in the job description of being an elder to be thwarted in your elderhood by the dominant culture worshiping youth, straight up, that's what I'm saying. I am laying the gauntlet down before all the old people who feel discredited by the youth culture and I say, it's time to grow up. That's not a good enough reason, okay to take your marbles and go home, or stay inside the gated communities, or just stick with your own age group or whatever else the decisions might be that ensue from that, or the offense or the hurt, or the feeling that you enjoy at best, that kind of liminal status, that nobody has any recourse to you anymore, that you've become, sorry, I forget the word, the manufacturing term when the the item is no longer necessary. It's been, you know, co-opted by the latest new version of things, whatever the word is. It's just not enough. It's not good enough.
And here's why, because the subtitle of the new book is The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble. That's a very important thing for me to put in there because it is one thing to talk about elderhood in the abstract, although I don't think there is such a thing as elderhood in the abstract. It's another thing entirely, though, to wonder about what has become of elderhood in a time so utterly threatened and threatening, so utterly endangered and endangering, that the ante is upped on us all. Because the time will come. It's already emerging, but the time will come when someone one-half your age, even one-third your age, will ask you in one way or another. When you were my age, they'll say to you, “Did you know what was happening?” Now, with all of the information out there, how could you possibly say that you didn't know what was happening? And yet, you know yourself that it is more than possible to not know what's going on, more than possible. You could be looking in the wrong places, you could be listening to the wrong thing. You could be not listening. You could be deciding that it's too late, that there's nothing to be done, that you're tired, that you worked already for 40 years in the marketplace, you don't need this, whatever it is, okay, but that doesn't mean the question is not going to come. And it doesn't mean at some level, that person one third, your age, doesn't deserve an answer for the likes of you, once you hit your 60s, or 70s. So what are you going to say? Because whatever you and I are doing today will contribute to whatever answer you have to give, when that day comes.
So somewhere in there, the answer is going to come to something like this, if you're willing to be really candid, and not defend yourself. It might sound something like this, “Well, everybody who wanted to know what was happening when I was your age could have known. There was enough ways of finding out if you were brave enough and if you're heartbroken enough, you could have found out, but the truth is that when I was your age, not everybody wanted to know what was happening. So not everybody did.” And that's a candid truth.
You know, here's the other. Here's the other question that will come along. “Okay. So what did you do?” And not only did I write the book with those two questions ringing in my ears, but I'm speaking to you now, with those two questions ringing in my ears and I can't imagine looking someone your age in the eye and saying,”You know, it's just such a drag, that everybody's worshiping youth. I just feel useless.” And I take it as a personal insult or tragedy or worse, and I'm defeated by it. Given everything that's going on in this world right now, I'm afraid that that defeat is indefensible. It might be accurate, emotionally and psychologically and spiritually accurate, but is indefensible given the troubled times that we're in. So, last thing I'll say on this subject, then you could imagine or reimagine that elderhood’s function is not a universal function, nor any eternal function, that the ways in means of elderhood are purely and properly a consequence of the times in which the elder finds himself or herself. In other words, your understanding of elderhood is dictated to you by the times that you occupy.
So elderhood, first and foremost, is both a child of its time and in some ways a redemption, of its time. And it takes enormous courage of the heart and enormous discipline to take what you know about what's happening in this world and translate it to a purposeful or purpose driven life, I guess I would call it but that is your practice for elderhood to do that very translating. So leave it there for now.
Ayana Young I was leading some workshops last year with a dear friend Niria Alicia Garcia, and I remember her saying to this group of people she was speaking, as if she was the future generation, back at us when we in our grandmother states, and she said, as the grandchild, “What did you do Grandma? What did you do, Elder, when you knew this was happening?” And she would always say, “Look at these scars, look at this worn body. You know, when I found out, I gave my whole self.”
And I think it's such an important place to put ourselves in for those of us who are still in this youthful millennial state of, how are we going to answer the future generations, when they ask us “What did you do when you learned?” and I think being able to stand, and honestly like you were mentioning, and maybe the answer is, I didn't want to know, I didn't have the courage to know, I didn't choose to look in the places that had the answers because of course we're in a time of so much information and this headline culture that it's coming at us at all moments of the day, this information becomes debilitating is one word with desensitized—
Stephen Jenkinson Can I interrupt you for a second?
Ayana Young Yes, please.
Stephen Jenkinson Please don't forget what you're about to say now. But just on the matter of too much information, consider the real possibility that what information is today is what consumer goods were 15 or 20 years ago, it is the current consumer good. It's the principal consumer good. It's what you can buy, thinking that you're not even paying for it. Right? And the total exposure that you have to this stuff is no different from walking down the main street of any town and being exposed to stuff. And it is, as you say, desensitizing in the extreme, don't think for a second that that's not in the scheme. Or the design. Because it would appear that more information is giving you “more choices.” That's exactly what a consumer culture tells you about the number of brands of cola available at Walmart. It pretends that's a choice. And it's the same thing with this information, you know, the information in and of itself is a stillborn proposition. It has no inherent consequence at all. But one of the first consequences I see is that people are awash in impotence, the more stuff they hear about. This is an absolutely staggering arrangement because it is so widely distributed. Now, it's not just in your generation. It's across the board, that the more things that people “know” the more stymied they are.
So one of the principles that we engage here at the school and on the farm is to put that damn thing away. And don't take it out while you're here. And that you see people get the shakes, because they're like, cold turkey on cigarettes. It's worse, cold turkey on crack. That's what it is. And it's staggering to see what it's done to people in such a short time. Because the allegation is you're learning. You're not learning by turning those things on and finding out what happened in the Ukraine today. You're not learning. But if you are, you're learning a kind of program of impotence that is intensely information fed. It's so ghoulish. It's so demonic in its fashion, and it shows absolutely no sign of doubting itself, never mind reversing itself. So it's very important and please, let's go back to what you're going to ask. But it's very important that people begin to seriously question, to the point of undermining the assumption, that more of anything grants you greater opportunity to respond to react to have a fulsome, heart engaged reaction or response to anything at all. It's demonstrably in your generation, no longer true. If it ever was true. It's not true anymore.
Ayana YoungI'm so happy that we're on this topic because I am somebody who was just consuming information and it was almost like this addiction to a type of suffering, of trying to take in as much bad news as I possibly could. And that's actually why I created the podcast because at that point, five years ago, I was just in a state of just pure saturation and it did lead me to this place of “How do I possibly move on from here? Where do I go from here?” And I think I'm learning and perhaps this is one way, but I'm trying to think strategically, if we are to really shift circumstances, shift experiences, shift the way that this global corporate system is strangle holding cultures and Earth’s ecosystems, it seems that we have to focus, we have to really focus and learn more deeply about certain topics. The headline culture is really—
Stephen Jenkinson Specifically, how it came to be as it is. If you're not careful, this turns into yet another… Now you're going to focus on more stuff and that focus is going to help. No, no, no, no, we could say it this way. My parents came out of The Depression. Now that might sound like about 1000 years ago, but it's not that long ago. And it had enormous consequences for that generation, because when they came into their parenting time, they were desperate to see to it that their children had more in their childhood than the parents had when they themselves were children. Right? Kids deserve more than I had when I was their age. That was a basic parenting strategy that was born out of trauma, the trauma called The Depression. I mean, it's suited a consumer culture beautifully, but it was almost a religion.
Okay, so how do you call this into question? And the answer is, it's very dangerous to call a religion into question now. You're asking for it. But I would challenge deeply the idea that you and your generation, or your children in their generation, deserve more of anything than you had when you were their age or that I had when I was their age. In truth, your children will deserve less of everything you had. Now, by deserve I don't mean they will be punished for the excesses of your generation or mine. Although I think that's probably going to happen. I mean, instead, by using the word deserve, I'm saying it is their proper birthright to not be inundated in the way that we were, that they'd be spared in some fashion, the pseudo choices of more of anything. And if we have any respect for them, any love for them in principle at all, we will try our best to engineer a world in which there are fewer or less of everything than there was when you came on the scene, or when I did, and that includes less friggin yammer.
Okay, by which I mean, wouldn't it be something if this ludicrous idea that everybody has an opinion, or a right to an opinion and right to express it, and to be heard, was challenged fundamentally and held to a standard of something like discipline, or learnedness, or something like wisdom, where the idea would come around, that may be your right to an opinion has to have the consequence of deepening, feeding, sustaining the culture, not sustaining you. But the culture instead, you know, last thing about it. I'm asked fairly routinely now, to lead people in various ceremonial endeavors. I don't advertise it. I'm not advertising it now, but this observation comes from that.
When I'm asked to do these weddings, one of the things you see is there's an understanding of, of a wedding ceremony. That it's a rubber stamp upon how two people feel about each other. But that has never been, what a marriage. Oh, excuse me, a wedding is. A wedding is to craft something that isn't there. Now, that isn't there as a result of cohabitation, for example, is it there as a result of common law union, that there is something fundamental, it's the word used is matrimony, that matrimony happens as a consequence of people undertaking certain things, ceremonially speaking, whenever I do these things, I see to it that symbolically and materially and in every other way i can think to do it, that I insert the culture and its problems and it's betterment in between the two people that I am wedding, and I insist that it be there throughout the ceremony and after it, I literally put the world between these two people and their feelings for one another. My assumption being at least that how you feel about each other if it passes through the world, you see, doesn't go directly back and forth between the two of you like a Pokemon game, but actually passes through the, the medium, called the world, that the world is the beneficiary of your willingness to enter into this matrimony, not the two of you, the world that has granted you virtually everything. So this is my way of, you know, holding even the public yammer and my participation in it to some kind of standard that can have deep efficacy, that I'm not sitting here, listening to myself talk, admiring the sound of my own voice, even though clearly I talk a lot.
But I'm trying to speak in such a way that I would tend eventually towards silence, which I understand the responsibility of any elder to do is to work themselves out of a job. If you're doing the work, you are less and less mandatory in the arrangement. If you're doing the work, they'll need you less than less.
And I learned this when I was in the death trade, people would ask me all the time, “You were there at the moment of death of all these hundreds of thousands of people”, I say, “No, I wasn't there. There are many people that I was involved with at the end.” But if I was there at the end, man, that's a little ghoulish, isn't it? That I engineered an arrangement in which I was needed up to the point of death and even beyond, when in actual fact if I'm serving these people at all, should I not become more and more obsolete in that function? Should they not be able to turn to each other, and to their circle of companions and so on in their lives? And this death wisdom become democratic, instead of more specialized, which is what's happening? It's becoming more specialized. It's no surprise, the dominant culture has a remarkable capacity to not change while appearing to change, and you are seeing that happen in this parallel universe now, of these alternative death practitioners, the death, doulas and all that, if you pay close attention to what they say that their job is, you will find it's another iteration of the job that's already there to help somebody die. But it never wonders what happens when the somebody in question, doesn't want to die, refuses to die, won't understand themselves in those terms even. Who are you helping now? And what's your repertoire for being helpful? and comforting? and all the rest? That's what I called into question in that book, Die Wise and this new one. I guess I'm calling the question the very notion that older people simply by their presence should be reassuring. There is a quote from the book that's handy in my mind right now. So I'd like to tell you because I'm proud of it, proud of that I came up with it. aAnd it said something in the order of this, “Elders call still water to rise when the people have forgotten their thirst.”
Ayana Young I've been thinking a lot about the disparities between what we say we want as these children of the dominant culture and what we actually want in movements for social and environmental justice, per se, and I see true equity as being unachievable. And not even just true equity. I mean all the things even talking about as unachievable as there is capitalism and addiction to consumption and addiction to staying alive and youthful and so on and so forth. For example, even if racial fissures and economic fissures were equalized or healed in the United States, the surface of long lines of slave labor, and Earth suffering would barely be scratched globally. So I wonder, what are your thoughts on equity, fairness and freedom for humanity as realities, versus idealistic illusions that just make us feel better when we say we're fighting for them?
Stephen JenkinsonThis is a very well wrought question. And it's a bit overwhelming. You know, anybody who leaps into the fray with a ready answer to the question that you've just asked, is not to be relied upon, necessarily. And so I, I don't have a one size fits all ‘Don't worry about it’ kind of response to that. I would say that confoundment that you described is a mandatory confoundment to have when faced on the one side with the, with the systemic, deep justices that you've identified.
Yes, indeed, historically, and in a contemporary way, the dilemmas that you've articulated about deep inequity or systemic show no sign of backing off and bedevil and bedraggled any attempt to wrangle any other kind of fundamental change. Absolutely true. All I would say, in support of your confoundment would be this: One of the things that really concerns me about people coming to me with this kind of global scaled conscience is that they tend, from what I can see, to be in some fashion, both enraged and paralyzed simultaneously. Without realizing that one begets the other, that the rage, as understandable as it is, is a midwife for the impotence. You know, you're rising up against nothing. There's nobody there, the forces that you're talking about, that you'd like to take on, it's sort of Don Quixote style, right? You're looking for the windmill, the bad guys concentrated in one place, but the “bad guys” are way ahead here. In this regard, they don't sit in one place, waiting for you to find them. Right, that's not how it works.
Right and wrong are two possibilities now, but they're not, everything doesn't divide up that way into right. It's too confounding. The people that you would want to free from the shackles are also beneficiaries of the arrangement that you've articulated. So you're not going to get a lot of takers. As soon as you try to operationalize this kind of paralyzed conscience, kind of macro level insight thing. The principal reason being that our take on what constitutes human has been really compromised by the dilemmas you described.
Here's an example. We have one word human in the English language, we have another word humane. Ever wondered what the difference is between the two of them? Because they're two different words, there's just an ‘e’ that separates them. Or is there? Well, I can tell you this as somebody who worked in the death trade, it was often claimed by people who are in support of euthanasia, that physician assisted death is humane. How so? Because it solves a world of problems, does it? How does it do that? Well, it ends the suffering of the person who's dying. Really? How does it end their suffering by ending their life and their consciousness? As far as we know? I see. Are there any problems that euthanasia doesn't solve? Dead air. A question that’s never wondered about. So I’ll wonder about it for you now, absolutely. The answer is, oh, man, there's all kinds of problems that euthanasia doesn't solve, suffering problems that it doesn't solve, like what? Well like this one, you know when this person was dying badly, and they finally opted for euthanasia, and they lived in a jurisdiction where it's legal, and they had recourse to it and they did it, successfully.
Can you do the math on what the learning consequences for the younger people in attendance at that event? I'll do the math for you. It's this, dying, I don't know if you can swear on your program, but here we go, dying can be such a fucked up enterprise. That it can drive you to the absolute cliff edge of sanity and beyond. That is in the nature of dying. So the best death is the least death, meaning the one that has the least conscious approach to it the least time to do it in. These are all solutions to when you offer euthanasia. You are reinforcing the idea that death is unendurable. That's one of the consequences of this pseudo revolution in the death trade, of people having control over their own endings, didn't we say at the beginning of our conversation? Well, I did, I guess, that one of the signal features of elders is that they are crafted by the troubles of the times. And that our shortage of elders is directly traceable to our shortage of limits, or unwillingness to be limited. Okay, then go back to euthanasia and ask yourself, Is this an exercise of limit? Or is this a way of pushing the limits ever further away from us, so that you don't even have to die? No, I'll say it differently so that there's no longer any such thing as your time to die. And there isn't. That's happened during your lifetime, and it's not coming back. So what God of life are you serving when you decide you'll die when you want to die, not when you're dying? What God is being served? Well, you know which one, the marketplace God.
And by the same token to take this confounding understanding to the dilemmas that you've described, I really want to say, I support enormously anybody wrangling this thing and being utterly defeated by it from time to time. Because the young people who come to me have two things in their hands, one is impotent rage. And the other one is this kind of mangled conscience. It's a kind of anxiety conscience masquerading as a conscience. It's like a program of being undone, imagining that this is in a deeply achieved thing. Some people think that that's what I'm advocating. All I'm talking about is learning how things got to be as they are. And having your peace of mind, your sense of well being, take a more or less permanent hit by virtue of being willing to learn this stuff, then and only then do you begin, I think, to craft the possibilities of a change. I'm not sure I'm someone who trusts programmatic, large scale prescribed change, frankly, I don't know why. But I just don't instinctively. It seems to me that the principal responsibility for a changed world lies with the people who are this world's beneficiaries. Not the bosses, the leaders, not the new leaders, not the leaders who claim they aren't leaders, not those guys, but the rank and file people. And you know, I just have to say it, and it's gonna sound a little cynical, but good luck appealing to people to try to change the world who are just making it through.
Ayana Young Well, thank you so much, Stephen, again, for spending this time with me and with all those who will listen, and the mind takes a deep sigh, a deep breath and rearranges all of its little tracks that it makes, which I'm very grateful to you for. You've definitely given us a lot to chew on.
Stephen Jenkinson Thank you for the invitation. I'm honored by it as well. So, let us continue as best as we can.
Ayana YoungThank you for listening to For The Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. The music you heard today was by Jess Williamson from the record label Mexican Summer. I'd like to thank our incredible partners, the podcast team, our Producer and Editor Andrew Storrs, Research Director Madison Magalski, Media Director Molly Leebove, and Research Assistant Francesca Glaspell.