Old Age in the Time of the Coronavirus

The metrics of the corona virus, complicated as they can be, pretty clearly indicate that older people are at significantly greater risk than younger people. Not surprising really and not unusual for diseases. The mortality rates skew heavily toward the 60+ demographic. One ethical upshot of this pandemic is how much of an economic hit should the country and the world take to preserve, to extend the lives of seniors. As a member of that demographic, let me just say, “Not so fast.” Seems a pretty complicated policy question to me and prone to any number of paradoxes. For example, a couple of 60+ prominent right-of-center public figures have—well, not quite—offered to die for their country in the interest of re-opening the economy. They’re white and sufficiently-resourced with access to higher-end healthcare, I suspect, so they’re not exactly proposing to actually die, but to run the risk. Which I am, too, personally, having no underlying health issues, but it’s not so simple. You also have to be willing to kill, to possibly be a vector to vulnerable populations, however unwittingly and unintentionally. Social distancing is as much about protecting others as protecting oneself.

An equally profound paradox arises with regard to the idea of “dying for one’s country”—not to mention the distinction of dying for one’s country’s economy. Depends on the country. In Alcestis, Euripides’s tragicomedy, the main character, Admetus, the king of Pherae, received from the god Apollo the extraordinary privilege of not having to die at his appointed time if he could find somebody to voluntarily take his place. (A weird premise, no doubt, but such are the workings of art sometimes.) Among Admetus’s expectations is that because his parents are older and seemingly closer to death, they should  rightfully take his place: “They were ripe enough to die with grace—/yes, die gracefully and praised—/for their own son’s sake: an only son at that.”

Neither of Admetus’s parents were so inclined, and his father, Pheres, spoke for them,

I brought you into this world. I brought you up:

you to be the master of this house.

Ought I now to die for you?

Is this the custom handed down—

that fathers die for sons? The Greek tradition?

It was never handed down to me.

You were born for your own good or ill.

Whatever is your due from me you’ve had.

…………………………………………………………………..

Don’t you die for me and I shan’t die for you.

You enjoy the light of day.

Do you think your father doesn’t?

Admetus, the king, personification of the city-state, strikes us as both resolutely presumptuous and supremely unappreciative. He permits his wife, Alcestis, to die in his stead. Need any more be said about his qualities.

A country that expects the older, the more vulnerable, the darker complected, the poorer, and the generally more at-risk to die in its interest is not a country worth dying for. That country is already morally dead.