They shoot horses don't they?

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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“They shoot horses don’t they?”

For a period of some two hundred years America had an every moving new frontier. One of the appeals of this ever-present frontier was the sense that there was always a place for the rugged individualist. A place existed for the individual who was enthused about the prospect of uninhibited growth where each individual could test his or her capacity to be all they could be. No one had an edge over the other person beyond character and motivation.

Darwin’s theory teaches us that mating and reproduction is the means whereby the species adapted to a changing environment and thereby created the possibility for survival of the species. Generally speaking the human species stops this procreation process before the age of forty. Biological evolution provides little means for adaptation in our species beyond forty years of age.

Human instrumental rationality has created a technology that continually increases the longevity of individuals of our species. Instrumental rationality is the ability to determine and execute the best means for reaching an established goal. We have determined the goal of ever extending life to be a valuable goal and are constantly extending human longevity.

Simultaneously with an extended life span we are continually shortening the social value of longevity. Like the rest of our commodities we have a throwaway culture for long-lived persons. Our society seems to mimic biological evolution in placing forty years as the beginning of the end of adaptability. Biological evolution terminates concern for those beyond the age of reproduction and our culture terminates concern for those beyond the age of commodity production.

Biological adaptation has abandoned us after forty, our instrumental rationality is responding to our unexamined desire to prolong life; how do we mange to survive as a species if we do not find a rational means to engage this challenge? The challenge is to create the societal value of human life after forty.

Where is the ever-moving frontier of expectations for the man or woman beyond the age of forty? Is age beyond forty to remain the beginning of a throw-away social value?

If you quibble about the number forty you may use fifty or sixty if you feel better about it.

Questions for discussion

After forty what is left?

What is the “commercial value” of an object of great consumption but little production?

In a Commodified (object of commercial value) Society What Value Longevity?

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After forty what is left?

Hmmmm are you a long lost child from the makers of “Rebel without a Cause”?
because your post has that sad fatalist hopeless ring to it

After forty what is left? If one believes Vogue and Elle magazines newest claim
40s are the new 30s of of our epoch…
People eat better, take care better of themselves, work-out…
a chronological age is just that …a number on a paper…
biological age has nothing to do with the first one… often enough
Our society is a big sponge that soaks up trends, vogues, styles, faster
than skinny jeans are in and out of fashion…it is very malleable.

they shoot horses dont they? your subject line …and
a gory-glorifying movie that disrespects lives as disposable wreckage …

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After forty?

I agree that we as a society have established the fact that after a certain age, we can no longer hope to contribute anything new as the world is constantly changed, upgraded if you will, and we can only handle re-adapting so many times before it takes a price, but consider this:
Maybe the grand biological scheme never meant for us to live past a certain age. Perhaps we are designed to live life for ourselves once we can do nothing more for others.

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Where do you go to buy shoes? To a bakery? No, not to a bakery. You buy shoes at a shoe store. What time should you go to the shoe store at? Three o’clock AM? No, not at three o’clock AM? Maybe you should go before six; if the shoe stand is in a night-market, then perhaps sometime after dinner.

IPSO EST, after forty, one can do after-forty-things. You must see, that there is a major fallacy in your article; biological arguments almost never carry over well into shewing something about human values; this is also the case with commercial facts. If your health and character are strong, there is little reason you shouldn’t be able to live a frontier life style. At 50 Hermann Hesse wrote Steppenwolf, Plotinus wrote The Enneads, and Samuel Adams ‘hosted’ the Boston Tea Party. Sade wrote Justine at 51; at 53 Beethoven completed his Ninth Symphony and Vaclav Havel became president of Czechoslovakia. At 55 Picasso finished Guernica. At 59 Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity was well underway. At 63 Jonathan Swift wrote A Modest Proposal and from the same age Dryden translated the entire works of Virgil into English. At 66 Webster completes his Dictionary. At 69 Canadian Ed Whitlock finished a marathon in under three-hours, he did the same again at age 73. Benjamin Franklin was 70 at the time he worked on the American Declaration of Independence. At 74 Ferdinand Marie de Lesseps began working on plans for the Suez Canal. After 80, Churchill, Tolstoy, doctor Benjamin Spock, Somerset Maugham, “Coco” Chanel, Michelangelo and Albert Schweitzer were still active; after 90, Chagall, George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell were also.

Answer: Very high. But I think that you mean, what is the value of an agent. A few things that you may wish to consider, are that an older person may have accumulate very considerable wealth by their old age --either in monies and property, or in knowledge and skills.

In a market economy, ditto above.

On the frontier, I imagine that it would not be at all uncommon for an older, tougher, more experienced sod-buster to succeed where younger men failed. On the other hand, in some places, life is cheap. Be ye twenty, forty or sixty, you’re not worth twenty dollars to anyone.

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Gorgias what an absolute wonderful and so very witty response you just have post!

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In a strictly material world as we get older we produce less until we reach a point when we are only consumers. In a world with other values, where intellect has meaning beyond maximizing the production of stuff, where we start developing an intellectual life we can become producers of intellectual things and therein lay our future, therein where longevity has value. If, however, we never develop an intellectual life while we are younger we can never find a means for a productive old age. Of course we must develop a different set of values as to the worth of a developed intellect.

The point is that we need to develop an intellectual life so that our longevity can be an asset to our world and to our self.

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Billionaires:

Bill Gates -52
Warren Buffett -77
Carlos Slim Helú -67
Ingvar Kamprad -81
Lakshmi Mittal -57
Sheldon Adelson -73
Bernard Arnault -56
Amancio Ortega Gaona -71
Li Ka-shing -79
David Thomson -50
Lawrence Ellison -63
Liliane Bettencourt -85
Al-Waleed bin Talal -52
Mukesh Ambani -50
Karl Albrecht -87
…

There are between 700 and 1000 billionaires alive today, of whom, just 21 are under the age of 35. A “strictly material world” does not favor younger people in my opinion, contrary to your out-look.

I feel that this matter is highly one of perspective. Many un-intellectual older people seem to get along quite well, and are both useful to themselves and to their communities. (This is not to say that billionaires are not intellectual.) On the contrary, intellectual young people are often quite useless and contribute little to the world. Regarding the frontier life, Clint Eastwood was alread 35 when his very first significant western, A Fistful of Dollars came out.