Category: Life Issues

Sermon copyright (c) 2025 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The text below has not been proofread. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation.

Readings

The first reading is from a June, 2020, article on the Psychology Today website titled “The Wisdom of Elders,” by Paul Stoller. Dr. Stoller is professor of anthropology at West Chester University of Pennsylvania.

“In some parts of the world, elders continue to be highly respected members of their communities. Considered the custodians of wisdom, elders in many societies enjoy considerable degrees of social reverence. If a person of power exercises sound judgment, he or she relies upon the wisdom of elders to reinforce important social values or to maintain a sense of social justice. In this way, elders have long been an elemental source of social well-being….

“In contemporary American society many, if not most, elders are neither respected nor revered. Consider Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick’s heartless comment that elders, who are at high risk of becoming seriously ill or dying from the Covid-19 virus, should sacrifice themselves for the common economic good….

“Such an ageist statement underscores a eugenic worldview in which society purifies itself when its putatively weaker members (the old, the sick, and/or ethnic and religious minorities) are deemed weak and expendable — a drain on economic resources. In a June 12 article in Sapiens, anthropologist Jayur Madhusudan Mehta rejects this eugenic supposition. He writes that ‘…our species would not be where it is today without grandparents to care for younger offspring. Elders are reservoirs of knowledge and experience, critical for preserving history, traditions, and survival skills.’…”

[Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-path-well-being/202006/the-wisdom-elders]

The second reading is from No Stone Unturned: The Life and Times of Maggie Kuhn, the 1991 autobiography of Maggie Kuhn. In 1970, when she was 65, Maggie Kuhn found the Gray Panthers organization to fight age discrimination.

“I believe the intergenerational war over federal benefits, which continues to this day, is a charade to divert attention from the real budgetary issues. We do not need to take from the young to feed the old, or take from the old to feed the young. There will be enough for everyone if the federal government ends its love affair with military defense hardware and extravagant tax breaks to the rich….

“I can’t understand or sympathize with people who think of government only in terms of what it does for them personally. That includes both the old who vote down school budget increases because they don’t have any children in school and the young who gripe about Social Security because it doesn’t do anything for them now. The elderly lobby has been forceful and effective in preserving benefits for the old. I would like to see it speak out as forcefully on behalf of the nearly 14 million children who now constitute 40 percent of the nation’s poor…. I feel strongly that the old must not simply advocate on their own behalf. We must act as elders of the tribe, looking out for the best interests of the future and preserving the precious compact between the generations.”

The third very short reading is a contemporary Nigerian proverb: “What an elder can see when sitting down, a child cannot see when standing up.”

Sermon

A number of people from the congregation have asked me to talk about age discrimination. This morning I’d like to talk with you about some ethical and religious dimensions to age discrimination. And I’d like to begin by telling you a story.

Some years ago, my cousin went to Kenya for her job, and spent two years living there with her husband and daughter. As a stay-at-home dad, her husband wound up doing a fair amount of driving. It’s important to know that his hair had gone gray early on, and at the time of the story was all gray. Now by his account, it sounded to me as though Kenyan drivers were even worse than Boston drivers. Not only that, but they have rotaries in Kenya, just as in Boston, which sounded to me like rotaries in the bad old days of Boston driving: complete free-for-alls where no one paid any attention to right-of-way rules.

In any case, the story goes like this: My cousin’s husband was driving on a Kenyan rotary, taking their daughter somewhere or other, when he got into a collision with a truck. Both drivers had gotten out of their vehicles when a police officer drove up. The police officer asked what had happened. The truck driver, who was Kenyan, gave his account of the collision, saying that my cousin’s husband was entirely to blame. My cousin’s husband then gave his account of the collision, but with a sinking feeling that the police officer was going to believe the truck driver. The police officer listened to both stories, then said to the truck driver, “I believe him [pointing to my cousin’s husband’s white hair] because he’s an elder.”

This story shows that other cultures have other attitudes towards elders; our current American attitudes towards elders are not the only possible attitudes. Had my cousin’s husband gotten into a traffic accident in one of the rotaries around Boston, he would not have been given the benefit of the doubt because of his age. In American culture, rather than treating elders with respect, we are more likely patronize or condescend to elders. This can serve as a very basic definition of age discrimination in our society today: age discrimination is the widely-held belief that elders are always less able, and less capable, than middle aged and young adults, and more prone to error.

It is not clear to me where this strange belief comes from. Judaism and Christianity, the root sources of many of the ethical values in our society, both teach respect for elders. In the Hebrew Bible, Proverbs 16:31 tells us “Grey hair is a crown of glory; it is gained in a righteous life.” One of the commandments that God gives to Israel, as told in Leviticus 19:32, says this: “You shall rise before the aged, and defer to the old.” Yet our American culture tends to pass lightly over the commandments given by God from the book of Leviticus, instead focusing on God’s commandments as stated in chapter 20 of the book of Exodus, where it only says, “Honor thy father and mother.” Thus as is true of most cultures around the world, American culture picks and choose which aspects of its religious heritage that it prefers to follow. And on the whole, American culture chooses to emphasize two different interpretations of our religious heritage. On the one hand, there is the strand of American culture that teaches submission to authority — where children submit to parents, wives submit to husbands, and the populace submits to the rulers. On the other hand, there is the strand of American culture that teaches equality between all people, as epitomized in Leviticus 19:18, “you shall love your neighbor as yourself,” words later repeated by Jesus of Nazareth. Yet neither of these strands of American culture teaches respect for elders; you are not going to find anyone saying that we should post Proverbs 16:31 in all school classrooms.

From this, you can see that American culture tends to ignore its core religious teachings about respect for elders. Are there then any widely-held ethical principles in our American culture which can offer us guidance regarding age discrimination?

Many Americans no longer rely on religion, but instead turn to science to provide justification for their ethical judgements. And beginning in the late nineteenth, Social Darwinism purported to offer ethical guidance, based on science, on how to structure society and social relations. Social Darwinists took Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory of the survival of the fittest and applied it to human society.

This held true across the political spectrum; Peter Dobkin Hall of the School of Public Affairs at City College of New York writes that Social Darwinism “served the purposes of both liberals and conservatives.” Political conservatives argued that giving aid to poor people only served to destroy their work ethic; Peter Hall quotes an 1874 report on pauperism in New York City which argued “The public example of alms induce many to be paupers who were never so before.” Political liberals also became Social Darwinists, though with a different emphasis. Peter Hall writes that while “conservatives emphasized the role of nature — competition, natural selection, and heredity — in shaping evolution, liberals stressed the role of nurture — humanity’s ability to manipulate the environment to foster evolutionary progress.”(1) Thus, Social Darwinism prompted Americans across the political spectrum to appeal to scientific data to justify their proposed solutions to social and economic problems, including how to treat elders.

These Social Darwinist arguments remain powerful in the twenty-first century. In the first reading, we heard an example of the Social Darwinist thinking as applied by a political conservative to the COVID-19 pandemic. In late March of 2020, a week or so into the COVID pandemic, Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, then age 69, argued that elders like himself should be willing to take a risk with their health in order to keep businesses open and the economy going. Faced with mandatory shut-downs, Patrick said, “Those of us who are 70 plus, we’ll take care of ourselves.” He went on to add, “No one reached out to me and said, ‘As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that America loves for its children and grandchildren?’ [But] if that is the exchange, I’m all in.” This is classic Social Darwinist thinking, which begins with economic data, then applies a survival of the fittest theory to social policy, with the ultimate goal of making a stronger society.

The second reading exemplifies the way political liberals have used Social Darwinism. Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Gray Panthers, argued that there could be plenty of money to fund benefits for elders — this could be accomplished by changing social policy to prioritize elder benefits over military hardware, such as expensive warships and airplanes. More to the point, Kuhn believed that society would be stronger if we adopted policies to eliminate poverty among elders. This again is classic Social Darwinist thinking, which begins with sociological data, then argues that humanity can manipulate the environment to create evolutionary progress in our society.

Today, in the twenty-first century, Social Darwinism continues to dominate American thinking on social questions like about how to treat elders. We never see appeals to religious texts like Proverbs 16:31. Both political conservatives and political liberals, good Social Darwinists as they are, argue that our policies regarding elders should be guided by the data collected by social scientists — economists, sociologists, and so on. The problem is that the liberals and the conservatives use scientific data to come up with opposing solutions to the same problem.

So traditional American religion fails to give adequate guidance on how to treat elders, and appeals to scientific data wind up giving us contradictory advice. Perhaps there are other sources of ethical or religious guidance that would be more helpful. Since this is a Unitarian Universalist congregation, let’s take a look at how our Unitarian Universalist worldview might offer us more secure guidance on how we should treat elders.

First of all, as Unitarian Universalists, we place a great emphasis on individual human beings. The old Universalists spoke of the supreme worth of every human personality. Among the Unitarians, people like Emerson and Thoreau found infinite universes within each human personality. In the late twentieth century, Unitarian Universalists encapsulated both these old teaching in the phrase “respect for the inherent worthiness and dignity of each person.” (As a parenthetical note, many other religious groups say similar things. Some liberal Quakers, for example, like to say that there is that of God in each person; we might argue with them about what they mean by God, and whether the God they talk about is something we can believe in; but we can see that they are saying much the same thing that the old Universalists said, and that Emerson and Thoreau said: each one of us has something of supreme worth within us.)

If we truly affirm the supreme worth of every human personality, then this gives us a starting point to understand why age discrimination is bad. Let’s return for a moment to Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick. If he makes the personal choice that he’s willing to die of COVID for the sake of the younger generation, then we can respect his individual choice, and we can even celebrate his willingness to put his personal duty to humanity over his own individual survival. However, if he makes this statement as a public official in such a way that it can be understood to encourage others to make the same sacrifice, and further it he seems to encourage public policies that may force other elders to make the same choice he wants to make, then we can challenge him on ethical grounds. Because we value the supreme worth of every human personality, we recognize that each person is going to have slightly different priorities. Some people in Dan Patrick’s age cohort might have been be pleased to follow his example, but others might have had ethically sound reasons for preferring social policies giving them a better chance of surviving COVID. Think, for example, of a 69 year old grandparent who had sole custody of their eight-year old grandchild: in our view, that grandparent would have had a valid reason to want government policies that would help them survive COVID, so they could continue to care for their grandchild. Or, for a more Emersonian example, think of a 69 year old novelist who is the midst of writing a great novel; perhaps they should not be forced to follow Dan Patrick’s example, and risk their life before their novel is complete. If I truly believe in the supreme worth of every human personality, then I’m going to be cautious about public policies that put large groups of individual human personalities at risk of extinction, just because they happen to be part of some group or other.

By now you can see that this principle can be easily applied to the issue of age discrimination. Once we affirm the supreme worth of every human personality, it becomes obvious that this is true regardless of age. A newborn baby’s personality is supremely worthy, as is that of a teenager — and we hold the personality of a middle-aged adult to be equally worthy as that of an elder. It doesn’t matter what age a person is; no matter what their age, we find an inherent worthiness in every human personality. From this basic principle we can generate a more pragmatic ethical statement to help guide our actions. The book of Leviticus phrased offers just such a pragmatic ethical statement: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Admittedly, this is still a fairly general statement. But how might this general statement be applied to the specific situation of society’s treatment of elders? A partial answer to that question can be found in the Gray Panther organization. Maggie Kuhn founded the Gray Panthers specifically to combat age discrimination. So let’s take a look at what the Gray Panthers do.

Today, the most active Gray Panthers chapter is the New York City chapter. The New York City Gray Panthers engage in a wide range of actions to help end age discrimination. At one extreme, they carry out very simple, hands-on, one-to-one actions, such as their nursing home card project, called “Caring by Card.” The New York City Gray Panther website describes this project as follows: “Nursing homes are sad and lonely places to live, with very little personal freedom for residents. People living in nursing homes all too often feel forgotten. Will you join us in lifting up our elderly friends by reminding them that they deeply matter and are loved? Will you join us in sending handmade cards to a nursing home…?” To put it in larger context, the “Caring by Card” project addresses the social situation which forces us to put some elders into bleak nursing homes — not through data-driven social science interventions — not through appeals to religious scripture — but through the one-on-one human action of sending a handmade card to someone living in a nursing home.

At the other end of their range of actions, the New York Gray City Panthers work on wide-ranging global policy initiatives. They have “consultative status” with the United Nations, and have consulted on policy issues ranging from the international rights of older persons, to the status of older women.

And then, somewhere in the middle of their range of actions, the New York Gray City Panthers host monthly educational webinar series. At these, they invite scholars and policy makers to speak on emerging topics of concern. In October, they had a speaker on the future of health care at the Veteran’s Administration; in September they hosted a panel discussion titled “The Power of Age-Diversity in Dismantling Ageism.”

For me, the signature initiative of the Gray Panthers is the way they have consistently taught that elders must work with youth to combat ageism. Maggie Kuhn called this “youth and age in action.” When I was eighteen years old, I heard Maggie Kuhn talk about this principle. I had become a committed pacifist under the influence of my Unitarian Universalist minister, and I was at a rally in support of stronger nuclear weapons treaties. Maggie Kuhn spoke at that rally, and made the point that young people and elders are natural allies to work together on things like limiting nuclear weapons — youth and elders have more time and a greater willingness to tackle difficult issues like world peace. She was making another related point at the same time — the best way for elders to tackle age discrimination was to build working alliances with younger people, and to work with them on problems of mutual concern. In the second reading this morning, she clearly articulated this principle: “I feel strongly that the old must not simply advocate on their own behalf. We must act as elders of the tribe, looking out for the best interests of the future and preserving the precious compact between the generations.”

This is perhaps the best solution to the age discrimination problem. Those of us who are elders (which includes me, as I’m now officially classed as an elder) — we can follow Maggie Kuhn’s advice and reach out to younger people, we can work together with youth on projects of mutual concern. By acting as elders of the tribe, we can become more open to the possibility of working with younger people.

Indeed, many of us in this congregation are already doing this kind of collaborative work across the generations. I know of elders from our congregation who work with younger people on a wide range of topics: empowering women; supporting food banks such as End Hunger New England; advocating for world peace; supporting the arts; and so on. And within our own congregation, we model how intergenerational collaboration can work in the way we govern ourselves: our Religious Education committee includes a teenager, middle-aged adults, and an elder; the same is true of our governing board.

Obviously, none of this will magically end age discrimination. But it shows us a good way to begin to end age discrimination. And by working together across the generations, we can live out one of our core ethical and religious teachings — that we value the supreme worth of every human personality. Or, more succinctly, to paraphrase the Hebrew Bible, we aim to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.

Note

(1) Peter Dobkin Hall, “Social Darwinism and the poor,” Social Welfare History Project, Virginia Commonwealth University, 2014, https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/issues/social-darwinism-poor/ accessed 8 Nov. 2025.