In the spring of 2018, I went to the Royal Ballet in London to see a performance that celebrated the centenary of the birth of Leonard Bernstein, the American composer and conductor. One of the three items on the programme was a revival of The Age of Anxiety, first performed in 1950 with choreography by Jerome Robbins (who also collaborated with Bernstein on the musicals On the Town and West Side Story). Robbins used Berstein’s second symphony as the setting for his ballet, which had premiered in April the previous year, conducted by the legendary music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Serge Koussevitzky. (Here is an early recording of the symphony, with Bernstein conducting, from 1950.) This score was Berstein’s musical reinterpretation of a long, book-length poem of the same name by the expatriate English poet Wystan Hugh Auden, written in America towards the end of the second world war, and published in 1947.
Auden’s poem The Age of Anxiety was immediately recognised as having captured something of the spirit of the age of those post-war years, but more for its snappy title than for its unperspicuous contents. Today the poem remains better known for Bernstein’s musical adaptation and Robbins’s ballet – which Auden reportedly disliked – than for the ideas presented in verse. It is structured as a discussion between four people who meet by chance in a New York bar, but this is no simple late night conversation or pub argument. Rather, Auden offers his readers a sophisticated attempt to analyse the problematic spiritual condition of modern western societies, characterised by the loss of traditional faith and the loss of a sense of shared community. The opportunity to exploit these absences for our own advantage, “the temptation to sin” – which, a few years earlier, Auden had described as “what the psychologist calls anxiety, and the Christian calls lack of faith” – is contrasted with the opportunity to establish community and solidarity with others, who share both our recognition of this loss and the sense of impossibility of recovering faith or community in their tradition senses.
Each of Auden’s four interlocutors can be seen as representing a variant of the faculty of judgement, which is duly exercised with differing emphases and effects. In this respect, he drew upon the work of Carl Jung, who was a significant influence on his thinking at this time. These four fragmented approaches – intuition, thought, feeling, and sensation – were once unified, in the religious conception of human life “before the fall”: in Eden we judged holistically. Today, our capabilities having been fragmented, we find ourselves in a society of individuals each of whom errs disproportionally towards one of these four elements – that is, who overemphasize intuition, thought, feeling, or sensation at the expense of a more balanced, integrated view of life. In the poem, Auden images the possibility of these four strands coming together in a shared approach, fuelled by alcohol and a shared experience of distress at the state of the world, then still at war.
The belief that the experience of fragmentation that is characteristic of modern life could be overcome, and that personal and community integrity could be restored, typically manifests in one of two forms. Those who look to the past, to a pre-modern form of life in which there was a better balance between individual freedom and social harmony, and those who look towards the future, to a post-modern world in which personal and collective problems are resolved through the application of technology and a better distribution of resource and wealth. Auden labelled the former Arcadians and the latter Utopians; he was temperamentally attracted to the Arcadian view and suspicious of the Utopian, but in the poem he makes clear his scepticism about the practical realisation of either these options.
For example, Malin (the character who represents thought) speaks of the sixth age of life, in which a person “…. takes pills for vigour / and sound sleep …. He pines for some / Nameless Eden where he never was.” Later, Rosetta (the character who represents feeling), introduces the seven stages of movement towards happiness with the words, “…. may our luck find the / Regressive road to Grandmother’s House.” Neither of these observations suggest a naïve embrace of Arcadian conservatism. As for progressive Utopianism, this is dismissed towards the end of the poem, when the narrator observes that “Alcohol, lust, fatigue, and the longing to be good, had by now induced in them all a euphoric state in which it seemed as if it were only some trifling and easily rectifiable error, improper diet, inadequate schooling, or an outmoded moral code which was keeping mankind from the millennial Earthly Paradise.”
The poem is not primarily a political commentary, but instead offers the reader a sensitive and sympathetic description of a generation unmoored by wartime disruption and the loss of security associated with social upheaval. Each of the four characters is able to reflect on their personal histories, their individual search for meaning and fulfilment in life. As they observe the inexorable passage of time – their passing through the seven ages – they are thereby pushed to reconcile themselves with their sense of their own diminished achievements given their youthful ambitions, and to face up to their own mortality. Anxiety might be their shared starting point, but each character finds some form of consolation by the end of the night – whether in sleep, self-deception, or some form of religious or philosophical self-acceptance: “Tired as we are. We must try to get on …”.
Do we still live in an age of anxiety? Perhaps. But more importantly, today we must learn to live with the anxiety of age. Auden was in his late-30s when he wrote his poem, and Bernstein in his early-30s when he wrote his symphony. These are the artistic productions of youngish men. Now, in our day, there are more many more older people – living into the extended sixth and seventh ages of life – as a proportion of the population than ever before, and it is their fears which are shaping our world. In part this is because in Europe and North America, our electoral and welfare systems have been designed to give more weight to the interests of the old than to those of the young. But, it is primarily a consequence of the loss of faith, both in social progress and in personal immortality.
Despite the fact that economic growth continues to improve living standards, that life expectancy continues to rise, that financial wealth continues to accumulate even as the hours needed to work each week to pay for food and shelter continue to reduce, despite all this there is widespread scepticism about likelihood of continuing improvements in the quality of life into the future. The public form this scepticism takes might best be described as the politics of nostalgia: things were so much better in the past when we were younger, so we must resist change and try to return to the days of our youth. Characteristic of these politics is a complete disregard for evidence of how things were in the past, and a complete disregard of evidence about what needs to be done now to maintain social and economic progress. Rather than investing in education and research, new forms of energy production, an expansion of trade, and the construction of more and better housing, the politics of nostalgia emphasises traditional manual skills rather than the knowledge based economy, fossil fuels rather than green energy, domestic industry protected by tariffs rather than trade and multilateralism, and restrictions on new building to protect the value of existing properties.
The inability or unwillingness of many older people to adjust to the present and to understand the promise of the future is hardly a new phenomenon. There is nothing more persistent in human culture than the belief that the era in which we came to adulthood was the very best of times, not just for our personal history but for the whole history of humanity. Today, this propensity to look back to a golden age is exaggerated by the loss of faith in a life to come. Those who once believed that at the end of life they would depart an imperfect world for the paradise to come, could relinquish their nostalgia without regret on their death beds. Now, as belief in life after death becomes rarer, the desire to cling on in this world, and to resist any changes to its familiarity, has become far more prominent. Rather than welcoming the prospect of a more abundant future, and all the benefits this will bring to subsequent generations, many older people seem resentful of the coming prosperity and willing to do all they can to disrupt it. For those elderly voters for whom paradise lies firmly in the past, their aim seems to be to find some way to reverse the passage of time, to get us back to where they felt they once belonged.
Embellishing the past as superior to the present is not a credible political stance in the immediate aftermath of war. When Auden wrote and Bernstein composed, most people were looking forward to the better future that would emerge from postwar reconstruction. Eighty years later, we seem to have lost this confidence, despite it being obvious that much progress has been made. Paradoxically, the old, who are the best placed to remember how much has changed, are predisposed to not to do so. It is as if the fear of their own mortality metamorphosizes into a conviction that the future must be bleak because they will not live to see it; as if a world which does not include them cannot be a better world. Hence the seduction of the politics of nostalgia, which celebrates the time when they were in their prime, but like many other seductions this form of politics is, in Auden’s words, a temptation to sin.
There is nothing we can do to stop growing old, but we can try to prevent the ageing process from limiting our ability to think clearly. One strategy is to keep reading history – real history, not the sugar-coated costume-drama version – which provides us with a useful reminder that only two generations previously, life was far less rich in quantity and quality than it is today. Another useful approach it to spend time with people from younger generations, who remind us that the future still holds great promise. Rather than spending our retirement cultivating an increasingly narrow view of life, inhabiting the echo chambers of geriatric social media, we should try to get out more, diversify our social group a little – as Auden proposed in his poem – and view without regret the possibility that the future will be more fun than the past. We don’t need to become sentimental utopians, we just need to avoid becoming credulous arcadians.
As our bodies age, so we need to rejuvenate our minds; to live life forwards without succumbing to the temptation of thinking backwards. The best perspective to adopt, borrowing the words of another great young poet, is therefore: I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.