One's age is one's private property
Adapted extract from 'Life After Work - The Arrival of the Ageless Society' by Michael Young and Tom Schuller, published by HarperCollins, 1991, L16.
'Age would become information which people would not be required to give to the State or anyone else, nor others allowed to pass on, except for census purposes'
It is a central paradox of modern society that so much has been achieved, so effectively, to reduce the injury done to people by biological ageing, and so little the injury done by social ageing. In the longer run, this unnecessary insult can be reduced in a decisive manner only by a radically new approach: by regarding the ages of adults as something very personal to them, their private property, which they are entitled to privacy about, a private matter to be taken out of the public and placed in the private domain. This will require bringing age within the scope of an extended Data Protection Act which goes well beyond what is stored in computers: their age would become information which people would not be required to give to the State or anyone else, nor others allowed to pass on without permission, except for census purposes where individuals would not be identified.
The consequences would be far-reaching. Pensions would have to be abandoned along with age-enumeration, at any rate collectively organised pensions tied to ages of eligibility; and a social wage would have to be introduced in their place. A Social Wage or National Dividend has not, as far as we know, been advocated before in order to eliminate both age discrimination and age privilege. The wage would be enough to live on, even if at a modest level. Whatever the level decided upon, it would be paid to each individual adult whether it were needed or not, just as pensions are now paid to both rich and poor. But it would be taxable as part of a person's income so that wealthier people would in effect return the wage to the exchequer in the form of taxes. There would be no means test for old people or anyone else except that which belongs by its very nature to income tax.
The sole remaining ageist compulsion would be that children would have to start school at five or before. But we see no good reason to compel pupils to remain in secondary school until they are sixteen. It surely makes more sense to give the option to young teenagers to leave school if they wish to do so. We settle on the age of thirteen, which has the justification that this is now around the general age of puberty. From that time on, all information about their ages would be out of government records at Somerset House and elsewhere.
'Every teenager would be given vouchers entitling them to eight further years of education at whatever age they wanted it'
Every teenager would be given vouchers entitling them to eight further years of education at whatever age they wanted it, from fourteen onwards. Spending on education would thus have to rise, but the prize would be very great: life-long education could at last become a fact instead of a dream.
Our premise is that age has become one of the organising principles of modern society, and as such has been carried so far as to inflict serious psychological injury on millions of people. We are proposing a new negative freedom - freedom from a kind of interference which stops people behaving more fully in accord with that part of themselves which does not change with age. The young and the old - with unnecessary barriers removed - would be able to join the mainstream of society and to leave behind the segregation which has been forced upon them.
Age specialisation is no longer appropriate now that older people are living so much longer than they once did and adulthood comes to younger people so much earlier than it did. Neither younger nor older any longer fit the stereotypes of childhood and old age which social control imposed. People are ready for the next big shift in society, the generation shift, to follow on the gender shift.
'Someone whose time is not their own has therefore been deprived of something much more intrinsic than property'
Time is not an extension of the person, it is part of the person; 'Time is a condition a priori,' Kant said, 'of all phenomena whatsoever.' Someone whose time is not their own has therefore been deprived of something much more intrinsic than property, and yet it has not by and large been resisted nearly so strongly. So much of people's time has been handed over to organisations which on an unprecedented scale require the timetables of millions upon millions of people to be synchronised with the utmost precision. A city is a giant clock which all its citizens have to obey. But the stage is now set for a retreat from mass society, and for greater variety, greater idio-syncrasy, greater individuality and perhaps greater fulfilment.
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