Age into Race: The Coronization of the Old (International Perspectives on Aging, 38) [1st ed. 2023] 3031406680, 9783031406683

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International Perspectives on Aging  38 Series Editors: Jason L. Powell, Sheying Chen

Haim Hazan

Age into Race The Coronization of the Old

International Perspectives on Aging Volume 38

Series Editors Jason L. Powell, Department of Social and Political Science University of Chester Chester, UK Sheying Chen, Department of Public Administration Pace University New York, NY, USA

The study of aging is continuing to increase rapidly across multiple disciplines. This wide-ranging series on International Perspectives on Aging provides readers with much-needed comprehensive texts and critical perspectives on the latest research, policy, and practical developments. Both aging and globalization have become a reality of our times, yet a systematic effort of a global magnitude to address aging is yet to be seen. The series bridges the gaps in the literature and provides cutting-­ edge debate on new and traditional areas of comparative aging, all from an international perspective. More specifically, this book series on International Perspectives on Aging puts the spotlight on international and comparative studies of aging.

Haim Hazan

Age into Race The Coronization of the Old

Haim Hazan Department of Sociology and Anthropology Tel Aviv University Tel Aviv, Israel

ISSN 2197-5841     ISSN 2197-585X (electronic) International Perspectives on Aging ISBN 978-3-031-40668-3    ISBN 978-3-031-40669-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40669-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

For my loving and beloved granddaughters Emma, Noy, Alex, Bar, Anna, and Ariuka.

“For our custom up here is that all old people who can do no more, and whom death will not take, help death to take them. And they do this not merely to be rid of a life that is no longer a pleasure, but also to relieve their nearest relations of the trouble they give them.” (Knud Rasmussen, The Netsilik Eskimos: Social Life and Spiritual Culture (Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921–24) (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, 1931): 138; 143–144.) “I am sorry but this [epidemic] would fix what is a significant burden on our society and resources that can be used. In my opinion we need to adapt to a herd mentality. A herd gathers its ranks, it allows the sick, the old, the injured to meet its natural course in nature.” (Kenneth Turnage II, planning commission chair, San Francisco Bay, April 23, 2020, quoted from his Facebook page.)

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Acknowledgments

This book was born and bred at the mortal height of the Corona pandemic when the virus blew away the false security of the taken-for-granted routine and the tenets of moral commitment and community. As an anthropologist, I sought mental refuge in the discipline's vocation to document and unmask the experience of the unexpected and the feeling of awe that accompanied it. As anticipated, however, it transpired that the proverbial language of anthropological discourse fell short of offering a fitting key to a cogent understanding of the social and cultural mayhem that followed the omnipresence of the deadly outbreak. When the cloud of the pandemic was dispelled, a perspective on its repercussions was incipiently gained, and a fresh revision of old-time models became critically necessary. The fateful condition of the old, particularly at the onset of the disease, seemed to serve as a yardstick to the overhauling of the upheaval, and therefore marked a vital step toward the disentanglement of the Corona conundrum. It is with this conviction in mind that this book was conceived and written out. This feat would not have been accomplished without the actively willful and generous help extended to me by colleagues and friends. First, my profuse thanks to Professor Aviad Raz for his extensive and erudite assistance with the preparation of the manuscript. Ms. Yael Lavi and Professors Amir Cohen-Shalev, Khaled Furani, and Kinneret Lahad together with Mr. Giora Rosen read and reviewed parts of the text and offered useful comments, suggestions, and insights for which I am greatly appreciative. Mr. Naftali Greenwood's literary flair added a distinct flavor to some of the text. I am especially indebted to the Tel Aviv University Minerva Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of the End of Life for its unequivocal encouragement and financial support that enabled the research and the completion of the manuscript. Last but not least, my unbending love and immense gratitude to my wife Mercia who pitched a homely net of security and faith in turbulent times of uncertainty and havoc, and whose incisive vision made this enterprise possible. Haim Hazan June 2023

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Contents

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From Ageism to Racism����������������������������������������������������������������������������   1 Liberal Racism and Old Age����������������������������������������������������������������������   10 The Book’s Composition ��������������������������������������������������������������������������   15

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 the Cultural Origins of Ageism����������������������������������������������������������  17 On Ageism in the COVID-19 Era��������������������������������������������������������������������   21 Old Age Against Hybridity������������������������������������������������������������������������   23 Hybridity as a Condition for Globalization ����������������������������������������������   27 Where Will We Carry the Fourth Age?������������������������������������������������������   28

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Public Health COVID-19 Measures Targeting Older People as a Risk Group������������������������������������������������������������������  35 The Inherent Human Rights Dilemma of Public Health����������������������������   36 COVID-19 in the Israeli Context ��������������������������������������������������������������   37 COVID-19 Practices of Targeting the Elderly ������������������������������������������   39 COVID-19 Restrictions in Old Age Sheltered Housing����������������������������   40 Long-Term Nursing Care Homes: Operation Avot Parents Protection (Magen Ve’Imahot)����������������������������������������������   43 The Public Debate Over COVID-19 as “the Problem of the Elderly”������   45

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COVID-19 and Older People Around the World: A Global Discourse of Stigmatization������������������������������������������������������  51 “The Boomer Remover”����������������������������������������������������������������������������   52 Triaging������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   53 Nursing Care����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   54

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 Unmasked: Remarks on the Coronization of Culture����������������������������  63 The Midlife Near-Sightedness of the Anthropology of Old Age ��������������   66 The COVID-19 Revolution������������������������������������������������������������������������   73

References ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  89 Index��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  97 xi

Chapter 1

From Ageism to Racism

This essay stands at the uncharted crossroad where the forest of myths and apparitions of the phantom of old age meets the recondite thicket of the Corona age. This wilderness of epistemological obtuseness is also a window of opportunity to distill and throw into relief both the exceptionality of old age and the distinctiveness of the era of the Corona while not losing sight of their poignant interplay. The gist of the argument to be elaborated upon is that the Corona experience triggered a fundamental conversion in the social fabrication of the category of old age from being couched in culture to being deported to the land of nature, from age into race, from the malleably constructed to the immutable essentials, from impartial invisibility to adverse conspicuousness, from the revocable to the irrevocable, and from the human to the non-human. In short, an untoward event occasioned an opportunity for an overhaul in the contemporary machinery that generates codes of social classification and human typology. From times immemorial forms of dehumanization and symbolic annihilation have been known to embody and circumscribe a host of cultural configurations. The handling of the old in the course of the Corona era, however, was brought to bear as a new mode of public cleansing aiming at turning the already socially expired into naturally dead. Contrary to the dehumanization of slaves, women, freaks, and other types of less humans whose existence was tolerated and sustained due to their functionality and cost-effectiveness, the old during the Corona were proven to stand for the opposite: dysfunctional, destructive, and haunting. The study aims at calling out what seemingly happened, socio-anthropologically speaking, to the humanity of older people and to the cultural status of the old in the wake of and during the COVID-19 pandemic. This book proposes a new framing for what was clear early on, namely, that the coronavirus pandemic had and indeed was overshadowed by a generational dimension, with older people getting sicker and frailer and being more likely to die. Generational ruptures and conflicts quickly became a sign of the pandemic, with adult children unable to visit and face-to-face support their older parents or bid them farewell. While the latter’s forced seclusion © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 H. Hazan, Age into Race, International Perspectives on Aging 38, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40669-0_1

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was being promoted and explained away by middle-age society as an evil but nevertheless a necessary protection, it transpired as a step toward unadmirable wishful sacrifice of the weakest victims of the pandemic. Subsequently, the presence of the old was turned into a danger zone that risks them as well as others. As Douglas (1992) noted, when the major forces of the culture of politics and economics identify a social group as a source of risk, blame and shame are stirred and culturally formulated to purge and redeem society of that polluting agent at its midst. Subsequently, all the anti-ageist masks were removed from the face of liberal humanitarian ethics and the old were ostracized and exposed as an unadulterated race apart to be subjected to cultural geronticide, and subsequently to social morbidity no less than to viral fatality as victimized yet portentous super-spreaders (Leibing, 2020). Times of lethal catastrophe target imagined or real foes as deadly others whose menacing presence must be under surveillance if not altogether eradicated. The taboo area that the old occupies in our cultural consciousness is no exception to this rule of expunging abominable otherness, and the destiny of the old in the course of the Corona era as modern woefully mortified cum disdained pariahs was inescapable. From that irreversible fate as victims the old could not be transformed into an expiating sacrifice to absolve society’s sins (Hazan, 1990), and hence may well not be contained within its limits of tolerance and acceptance. Rather, the category of the old is turned to be a repugnant scourge of a public problem forged and versed in terms of an exaggerated moral panic (Cohen, 1972) incarnated in the form of intimidating arcane humans that are defensibly and aggressively mutated to the degree of non-humans. What follows is a horror storyline of the disparagingly plotted Coronization of the old embodied in the master-narrative of the exploits of COVID-19 whose ghastly specter exiled the excommunicated from the security of their enshrined home of place and time to a perilous zone of existential uncertainty from within and from without. Effectively such (de)civilizing process (Elias, 1994) served as a field of fire for testing out the tools of governmentality held in the possession of political-cum-­ cultural sovereigns who, under the guise of the pandemic and its ensuing state of emergency, were able to commit a hubris of betraying their own values of the sanctity of life, equality, and fraternity, previously unthinkable in a liberally oriented community. Such state apparatuses directed at the old could, therefore, be made amenable to mark other groups of disenfranchised and dehumanized others who are condemned to the execution of mortified de-civilization on grounds of disparagingly classified bio-social distinctions. Genderized and other subordinate categories are apt cases in point to endure the dire consequences of such experimentation uncontrollably conducted on the Guinee pig old. Thus, when the implausible becomes feasible and the ineffable is rendered spoken, moral boundaries are challenged. Judicial and social bounds come tumbling down gaping at and preparing for the unexpected. This spells an entry to the grips of a mode of revolution rather than of evolution, a mutation rather than an adaptation. The Coronization of culture foreshadowed by the treatment of the old is a step in that direction of exercising socially licensed practices of barring.

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In the wake of this observation (detailed in Chap. 2), my argument extends previous assertions that in the time of the pandemic, the deep structure of biopower is laid bare (Davis, 2020). Thus, the Corona-ensnared elderly are devised and evoked as prey to sheer cultural forces underscoring public issues that are supposedly open to humanely managed control. As French social scientist Bruno Latour (2020) expressed it, “by remaining trapped at home while outside there is only the extension of police powers and the din of ambulances, we are collectively playing a caricatured form of the figure of biopolitics that seems to have come straight out of a Michel Foucault lecture.” Such criticism, needed as it is, is spoken from the safety of one’s autonomous home. It fails to capture the perspective and experience of those who were dispossessed of autonomy and home and disenfranchised of basic civil rights, indeed of civility itself. Middle-age ableism, that puts on a compassionate mask in milder times, revealed its brutal face when the pandemic brought into play an apparent war of survival. When those kinds of pressured judgments occur, cost-benefit analyses assessing whose life is worth living and saving, and whose is less so, come into play. Older people, in particular, have become the main object of such a regime of biopower during the COVID-19 pandemic. The British Professor of linguistics Jonathan Charteris-Black (2021) aptly addresses this predicament in his book on COVID-19 metaphors: Often there are physical barriers to bodily proximity with the elderly, surrounded by frames, commodes, wheelchairs, and a whole apparatus of mobility making it hazardous to approach them. Yet, it was these already distanced people who were suddenly coerced into isolation, who had to be contacted remotely or viewed through screens like ageing carp in a fishpond. Enforcing the morality of care often entailed, inadvertently, enforcing a psychology of loneliness and estrangement. It was not only coronavirus that killed, but it was also the regime of separation that accompanied it.

Candid as they are, these words do not attest to the fundamental issue underlying what happened to older people during the COVID-19 pandemic, and why. We know that older adults have been hit hard by COVID-19. Mortality data from Oxford COVID-19 Evidence Service (2022) indicate a risk of mortality of 3.6% for people in their 60s, which increases to 8.0% and 14.8% for people in their 70s and over 80s. There is a consensus that such correlation between old age and COVID-19 morbidity is reliable. It is also a consensus that older adults are much more likely to develop COVID-19-related complications (Liu et al., 2020). The increased mortality reflects the underlying biological, social, and psychological vulnerabilities faced by the older population. The key question is what kind of meaning is imparted to such real or imagined correlation between old age and COVID-19 risk, and how does it become a basis for constructing a social problem with related public health policies (Gusfield, 1989a, b). To acknowledge that old age has been re-constructed as a “social problem” is an important step toward understanding what went wrong as reflected in such disturbing correlations. The answer, in a nutshell, is that unfortunately the public and policy response to this situation has been discriminatory in interpretation and misleading in its consequences. In fact, the question that warrants attention is

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how come we knew about the correlation between old age and medical risk, and yet half of Europe’s COVID-19 deaths were in apparently protected care homes for older people (Booth, 2020)? How is it that only a tiny portion of the US population lives in nursing homes, yet nursing homes have accounted for roughly 40 percent of US deaths from COVID-19 (Wan, 2020)? As American sociologist Joseph Gusfield argued, “… the conditions said to define the social problem are socially constructed, [and] are only one of several possible realities” (Gusfield, 1989b: 438). There is a structural similarity between the problematization of “old age” in the pandemic and the construction of the “drunk driving” problem, the latter being one of Gusfield’s primary examples, although these two topics are evidently culturally diverse. Dissecting the scientific literature on drinking and driving, Gusfield (1976, 1981) showed how such research is routinely cited in claims about the scope of the drunk driving problem which accounts for 50% of traffic fatalities, and so on. Like the mortality rate due to COVID-19 that increases with old age, the drinking-driving data seem to be quite solid. And yet, in both examples, there are hidden layers of assumptions that lie beneath these data: failures in testing (of blood-alcohol levels as well as COVID-19); the possibility that fatalities were caused by something other—or more—than drinking (or COVID-19) is not fully accounted for; percentages are often gathered for one purpose and then assigned to categories with completely different meanings; analysts slide from talking about older adults/drivers to statistics about deaths (which may include all of the public); and so on. As Best (2017) also argues, “the net effect is to consistently maximize the proportion of fatalities that can be attributed to drinking and driving, and then to attribute scientific certainty to the results.” Public discourse during the pandemic has increasingly portrayed those over the age of 70 as helpless, frail, and unable to contribute to society, in a word—redundant verging on becoming a nuisance. This has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. In several countries, including Italy, resource scarcity and cost-benefit calculation led to triage prioritizing and rationing of care of elderly people as they are “more expendable” than persons in other age groups. In addition, when COVID-19 was still believed primarily to affect elderly people, many younger people did not follow adequate precautions. The reaction, in the form of social distancing and lockdowns, was meant to protect older people but neglected the special vulnerability of older people in long-term care institutes. Even after COVID-19 outbreaks in many nursing homes, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines did not identify residents in long-term care and their caretakers as a high priority for testing. Not enough treatment resources and personal protective equipment have been directed toward these older people and their caretakers. Overlooked amid the war against the coronavirus and the economic crisis, older people in care homes were dying not just from the virus but from the very strategy of isolation that is supposed to protect them but accelerated their loneliness and depression. Why was public health policy and the public media so neglectful of the actual protection of older people from COVID-19 risk? Recognizing the importance of cultural context lead us, in the footsteps of Gusfield, to the crucial insight that “the construction of any social problem is the

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product of choices, choices about what the claims maker—or the analyst—decides to notice, and what to ignore” (Best, 2017: 17). In The Culture of Public Problems, Gusfield speaks of the importance of alternative consciousness (Gusfield, 1981: 45–50). His point is that all social problems can be framed in different terms. Thus, “the recent campaign against drunk driving had defined the problem in terms of deviant individuals who irresponsibly drink, then drive and endanger themselves and others on the roadways. But, once we stop taking this reasoning for granted, a host of alternative constructions become visible” (Best, 2017: 17). These alternative constructions include the safety design of automobiles, the lack of “sleep it off” arrangements, and the absence of public transportation in the late evening in bar areas. In other words, in a similar way to medicalization, the choice to focus on one aspect of the problem ignores the relevance of a multiplicity of other aspects. The point is not that it is okay to drink and drive, or that older adults can die from COVID-19. Rather, there are lots of possible ways to construct this or any other problem. Once again, “the conditions said to define the social problem are socially constructed and are only one of several possible realities” (Gusfield, 1989b: 438). The impetus for writing this essay comes from my contention that critical anthropology of old age can provide the harsh but necessary analysis of what really happened. The anthropological history of the concept of old age dovetails the cultural stories that people tell themselves about the intractable relationship between their corporeal body and their social body. This is a volatile discourse between biologically determinant invariants such as the withering body and its death on the one hand, and the ever-changing indeterminate variants of the circumstantial and the contextual, on the other. Indeed, ever since the inception of anthropological interest in old age as a discrete social category within the structure of age groups to the contemporary preoccupation with identity politics and selfhood, old age has remained a Janus-­ faced bio-social specter. In fact, it is posited as a duel fought between two rivalling paradigms: the one comprehends old age as a primarily functionally dependent category resistant to being solely reduced to its cultural components, while the other grasps it as patently symbolic construction whose functional characteristics are forever subject to socially engendered interpretations. This is a dichotomy very much reminiscent of the once prevalent division between sex and gender. Outmoded though as it might seem nowadays, this dualism has been recently re-invoked in the case of the position of the old during the COVID-19 crisis. It is my contention that the Corona era reversed the rampant constructionist social paradigm into its opposite biologically imprinted counterpart. Moreover, as the discourse of ageism is at the core of the constructionist model assuming the culturally malleable properties of ageing, the turn to a non-constructionist view of the category as an irrevocable biological entity sets old age as a phenotypically recognizable race apart. In general, the emphasis on “protecting” the elderly from COVID-19 was on the corporeal (physical) dimension, as manifested in bodily practices such as distancing, isolation, masking, and hygiene maintenance. Important as these were, they signified an incredible blind spot: It was unthinkable to treat seniors as autonomous

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partners, whose voices must be heard and their participation in decision-making must be obtained and sustained. Older people, reduced to an isolated bodily existence without voice or autonomy, were denied the right to consider and choose for themselves what degree of risk they are willing to expose themselves to. Many critical scholars and other intellectuals pointed a finger at how State power was abused under the guise of the plague. But they often missed the evidently actual target of power and subjugation, namely, older people. For the influential Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben, the fight against what he originally termed as the “alleged epidemic of coronavirus” was an exemplary way for Western states to augment their disciplinary power. He thus overfitted the outbreak and the response to it into his overarching theory about the way modern States mobilize fear to assume authoritarian powers. On February 26, 2020, Agamben wrote: Faced with the frenetic, irrational, and completely unmotivated emergency measures for a supposed epidemic due to the coronavirus, it is necessary to start from the declarations of the CNR,1 according to which not only “there is no SARS-CoV2 epidemic in Italy,” however, the infection, from the epidemiological data available today on tens of thousands of cases, causes mild/moderate symptoms (a kind of flu) in 80–90% of cases. […]If this is the real situation, why are the media and the authorities working to spread a climate of panic, causing a real state of exception, with serious restrictions on movements and a suspension of the normal functioning of living and working conditions in entire regions? Two factors can help explain such disproportionate behavior. First of all, there is once again the growing tendency to use the state of exception as a normal paradigm of government. The decree-law immediately approved by the government “for reasons of hygiene and public safety” results in a real militarization “of the municipalities and areas in which at least one person is positive for whom the source of transmission is not known or in any case in which there is a case not attributable to a person coming from an area already affected by the virus infection.” Such a vague and indeterminate formula will make it possible to rapidly extend the state of exception to all regions, since it is almost impossible that other cases do not occur elsewhere. […] It seems that once terrorism has been exhausted as the cause of exceptional measures, the invention of an epidemic can offer the ideal pretext for expanding them beyond all limits. The other factor, no less disturbing, is the state of fear which in recent years has evidently spread in the consciences of individuals and which translates into a real need for states of collective panic, to which the epidemic still offers a turn the ideal pretext. Thus, in a perverse vicious circle, the limitation of freedom imposed by governments is accepted in the name of a desire for security that has been induced by the same governments that are now intervening to satisfy it.2

An alternative view, just as critical, would stress that modernity itself is marked by the indissoluble entwining of medicine and politics. Unlike in classical or medieval paradigms, medicine is already invested with political tasks of social control (Conrad, 1992). The medicalization of politics and the politicization of medicine define modernity. The classical divide between governance as human “artifice”  The Italian National Research Council.  Translation by the author. The original can be found at https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-­agamben-­ l-invenzione-di-un-epidemia. It was translated to English and appeared in the symposium “Coronavirus and Philosophers” published online, and then removed, by the European Journal of Psychoanalysis. 1 2

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and life as a “natural” object of governance can no longer be sustained in late modernity. In addition, relations and structures of care and harm are not easily distilled from one another, as demonstrated, for example, by the form of “social distancing.” We are the security threat as well as the subjects to be secured. Therefore, the separations of biopolitics can no longer hold. Extinction Rebellion3 activists who proclaimed that “Corona is the cure. Humans are the disease” express this implosion of modernist security distinctions, echoed by the UN’s environment Chief, Inger Andersen, who argued that the virus is a message from nature that humanity is bringing these crises upon itself (Carrington, 2020). In this view, we are our own threat, we are the virus, humanity is the pathogen whose terrible virulence has changed the living conditions of all the inhabitants of the planet (Latour, 2020). Hence, the political measures adopted around the world to fight the pandemic were not the exception but rather the paradigm of biopolitics in modernity. Indeed, the COVID-19 disease was also not an exception in itself, but rather a variation on a long-standing theme. As the name of the virus causing it clearly reveals, SARS-­ CoV-­2 is the second severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus, following the first one (SARS-CoV or SARS-1) that caused the 2002–2004 outbreak. Due to globalization and frequent human–animal interactions, viral infections have become a common theme of late modernity: From the AIDS epidemic to Ebola, from avian flus to pig plagues, from the West Nile virus to the Nipah virus, and up to the 2009 H1N1 (a swine flu) pandemic. Agamben’s views on the “alleged” pandemic have not gone unchallenged. Critics have argued that the shutdown, for the sake of life, reveals that we care about the lives of others, and we are willing to give up so much in order to protect those lives, bare or otherwise. Indeed, biological (“bare”) life is itself a form of abstraction, the condition for our social, cultural, economic, and political lives, such that protecting it is a way of (indirectly) protecting the complexity of life as well. Accordingly, as Slavoj Žižek has argued,4 the response to COVID-19 is not at all anti-social, but deeply social: It reveals a fundamental care for others, and a willingness to make sacrifices for the sake of the most vulnerable. However, as both predispositions are not mutually exclusive and probably complimentary, with SARS there is a deep tragic irony in speaking about “a willingness to make sacrifices for the sake of the most vulnerable.” The quarrel about the social/ anti-social aspects (why should they be binarism?) of the handling of the pandemic misses the supposedly real victim, denying the existence of the elephant in the room. Agamben later published a follow-up called “Clarifications.” In this new essay, Agamben does not directly confront his earlier conspiracy theories, but rather says that “the problem is not to give opinions on the gravity of the disease, but to ask about the ethical and political consequences of the epidemic.”5 Indeed, the epidemic   Extinction Rebellion, 2020. Twitter, 24 March. https://twitter.com/xr_east/status/1242527618823577602/hidden. 4  https://www.welt.de/kultur/literarischewelt/article206829259/Slavoj-Zizek-on-CoronaBarbarism-­with-a-Human-Face.html. 5  https://itself.blog/2020/03/17/giorgio-agamben-clarifications/. 3

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had very concrete ethical and political consequences for older people. My purpose is not to denounce the measures taken against the pandemic in general. Rather, I focus on the extreme measures taken to “protect” older people during the pandemic, and the public health discourse and practices surrounding these measures. The pandemic (like other crises) made explicit the societal arrangements life is based on: Care, contact, recognition; “living a life” as opposed to merely “getting to live.” The COVID-19 pandemic made explicit the precariousness of life, whose life weighs more and what weighs more than life. The “herd immunity” strategy, in which large numbers of people are allowed to become infected and, hence, develop immunity, was part of the Netherlands’ and Britain’s early plans in the fight against the pandemic and also seemed to spike the interest of President Donald Trump. However, it is this herd immunity (imagined or real) that spells out the reduction of an entire vulnerable population to bare life. It is a Spencerian dystopia where older, at-risk, and less productive members of society are sacrificed for younger, healthier, more productive economic subjects. My critique of the Coronization of old age follows and extends critical commentaries by scholars of age in the humanities, such as Margaret Morganroth Gullette, an American scholar of age studies (Gullette, 2017) who said that “for the most part ageism continues to be a socially acceptable prejudice to the point of being murderous […] As we age, we are seen as less human” (cited in an interview with Canadian CBC radio, and published in April 7, 2021).6 In the same interview, Gullette refers to the high number of deaths from the virus in Canada’s long-term care as eldercare. Indeed, about 81 percent of Canada’s reported COVID-19 deaths occurred in long-­ term care—by far the highest proportion of OECD countries, where the average was 38 percent (Canadian Institute for Health Information, 2020). Gullette aptly summarizes her critique as follows: “COVID made ageism far worse as we saw people in nursing homes dying because their lives did not matter enough. Many people think that was incompetence, true—but ageism explains it better.” It is old news (pun intended) that we live in an ageist society, and many stakeholders observed that the COVID-19 pandemic has manifested and augmented this ageism, often without recognizing that the subtext of the suffix “ism” stands for a circumventing the malintent inherent in the association of old age and death. In a 2021 report released by the WHO, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA), and United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), all these high-profile global organizations unanimously call for urgent action to combat ageism and better measurement and reporting to expose ageism, which they call “an insidious scourge on society.” The report further argues that the response to control the COVID-19 pandemic has unveiled just how widespread ageism is, when age has been used as the sole criterion for access to medical care, lifesaving therapies, and for physical isolation. “As countries seek to recover and rebuild from the pandemic, we cannot let

 https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/fear-ageism-not-aging-how-an-ageist-society-is-failingits-elders-1.5978190. 6

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age-based stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination limit opportunities to secure the health, well-being and dignity of people everywhere” (Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General; cited in https://www.who.int/news/ item/18-­03-­2021-­ageism-­is-­a-­global-­challenge-­un). UN experts all had little doubt that older people were truly the victims of the COVID-19 pandemic. This victimization was social and not merely medical. “The pandemic has put into stark relief the vulnerabilities of older people, especially those most marginalized, who often face overlapping discrimination and barriers—because they are poor, live with disabilities, are women living alone, or belong to minority groups” (Natalia Kanem, Executive Director, United Nations Population Fund, cited in https://www.who.int/ news/item/18-­03-­2021-­ageism-­is-­a-­global-­challenge-­un). However, my point is that there was more than ageism going on. As the discourse of ageism is at the core of the constructionist paradigm, assuming the stigmatizing properties of ageing, the turn to a non-constructionist view of old age as an irrevocable biological entity sets “old age” as a distinct biological category—namely, racism. Racialization, a concept first introduced by French sociologist Frantz Fanon (Fanon, 1967), can be defined as “the extension of racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice or group” (Omi & Winant, 1994: 64). I understand racialization to be an ongoing process involving the people who are constructed as inferior and subjected to racism and domination and those who are simultaneously deemed as superior and maintain power and privilege in various contexts. This is why I refer to both these groups as racialized. To distinguish between the two groups and illustrate the multiple power dynamics and resource allocation differences that exist between the two groups, I refer to the dominated group—older people during the COVID-19 pandemic—as a racialized minority. By minority, I mean groups of people subjected to unequal power relations and treatment in various institutional contexts even when they do not constitute a numerical minority. Similarly, I refer to middle age (as the dominant non-old age group) as the racialized majority group, a majority in terms of power and resource acquisition. Racialization, therefore, is a process by which the time-scape of the occupants of a race is forcibly trimmed to befit its biological components such as skin color, circadian rhythms, and developmental bodily cycles. This scaling down of human temporality to the beat of bare life amounts to the effacement of selfhood from the face of race, hence unifying and regimenting all assumed as belonging to such category to one faceless image robbed of displaying and exercising a subjective sense of time. Bare life can be translated to equate with various physical and mental states, but it rarely includes, nor should it, older people just by virtue of their older age. The driving out of the homo sacer is echoed in the social and political sequestering of older people, far more widely practiced during the pandemic, even by people whose goal was meant to be protective and liberatory. My goal is to show how, and to some extent why, older people were marked off to become identified as the subjects of bare life existence during the pandemic. I stand on the shoulders of the political philosopher Giorgio Agamben in my use of his terms: bare life and the homo sacer. My contribution is needed because for some reason, the role of older people in the handling of the pandemic evaded Agamben. In one of his blogs he wrote: “Where is

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the figure of bare life today in question in the handling of the pandemic? It is not so much the sick person, who is isolated and treated as never before in the history of medicine; rather, it is the infected one, or more particularly the asymptomatic unwell [il malato asymptomatic], as he has come to be called in a contradictory expression—something that any man is, virtually, and without knowing it.”7 The asymptomatic (un)well is, I concur with Agamben, any human being. As such, it is not a proper designation of bare life. Asymptomatic people (well or unwell) are everywhere. In terms of human genetics, for example, we are all carriers of unique DNA variants—we are all “fellow mutants” (whether we admit it or not). But the categorization of older people during the pandemic was a different issue. Their life was made “bare” because it was presumably sick-prone and frailty inclined, thus in need of complete protection, deprived of its freedoms and subjected to prohibitions and controls of all kinds. True, all women and men are virtually asymptomatic patients, and so older people were made into scapegoats warding off the imminence of falling mortally ill. The mass deaths of older people at long-­ term care institutions did not happen in a vacuum. A former nursing home chaplain in the United States has confessed that dependent elderly has long been made to “vanish,” rendered “other” rather than part of a community of mutual recognition. If this is true, then we should situate the new mass death within a prior and ongoing condition of exception and erasure (Harper, 2020; Cohen, 2020).

Liberal Racism and Old Age Ageism could shift into racism also because racism has been shifting toward ramified cultural differences. Unlike traditional racism, which constructs a “self” and “other” group using “evident” biological features (such as skin color) as the main signifier of group difference, cultural racism constructs groups from perceived ideological differences such as civilization, religion, or “way of life” in general. Some academics have referred to this phenomenon as the “culturalization of races” (Essed, 1991) since cultural racism’s rhetoric focuses around the “irreducibility of cultural differences” among groups as opposed to the outright conflict among races. Therefore, cultural “racism” is something of a paradox. In the context of the stigmatization of old age, this paradox becomes double, as “old age” is constructed as both culturally and biologically different. But evidently, both attributed stigmas are part of the same cultural construction, and their merging in the pandemic—where the “frail ageing body” was amalgamated with the view of the old as socially expendable—only served to increase the effect of that double helix of the generically genetic old.

 Translated from https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-la-nuda-vita-e-il-vaccino by Alan Dean (https://d-dean.medium.com/bare-life-and-the-vaccine-giorgio-agamben-775ad3efd79e). 7

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Racism begins when we group people according to biological characteristics, and ascribed inferior or superior qualities and skills (or lack of skills) to them. Biological racism was dominant in the past, and it developed as an integral part of Europe’s control and its regimes of justification of its overseas colonies. The natives of Africa or Asia was called “subject races” and were described as unable to think independently or maintain a free society. The race was mainly characterized by skin color and body structure, and certain biological and certain cultural traits were attached to it: primitiveness, disorder, or excessive sexuality. Biological racism also characterized the attitude toward the Jews in Europe. However, a merely biological definition of racism is problematic. Because the concept of “race” is imagined and invented, it makes the definition of “racism” deceptive and elusive. If we consider the following two problems related to biological racism, it becomes easier to understand how ageism can be linked to racism. 1. “Race” is an imagined concept. Race does not exist in nature. “Race” is an imagined and contrived concept that originated in biological science beginning in the mid-eighteenth century. Following biology, doctors, anthropologists, linguists, sociologists, ethnologists, writers, theologians, and government officials began to explain and assess the inferiority or superiority of groups through the analogy of the discourse on race. Thus, differences between social and cultural groups were justified through biological formulations, as in Nazi Germany and its formulation of “Jewish blood.” However, no one can truly determine what Jewish identity is by a blood test. The proof of the existence of “Jewish blood” was based on social characteristics, such as “Jewish” lifestyles and habits (such as going to synagogues), or by tracing family history. When differences between cultural groups are articulated in biological language, culture is seen as a derivative of nature. As in nature, the properties of groups are seen as essential and immutable. Here we are faced with an apparent contradiction: Although “race” is not a real category of nature, it becomes a real category due to its role in human culture. Therefore, although we are morally required and culturally indoctrinated to reject the use of “race,” we cannot deny its existence sociologically. 2. Notwithstanding other harsh realities of worldwide racist discriminations, the comparison to the extreme racial policy of the Nazi state makes it difficult to define racism in seemingly similar contexts. The association of racism with the Nazi state and the language of biology blocks the ability to talk about it in other settings. Indeed, after 1945 there was a reluctance to use the term “race” and other substitutes were found for it. The French sociologist Étienne Balibar (1991) called this racism “new racism,” because it allows the existence of “racism without race.” The “new racism” replaced the biological descriptions of groups with social and cultural descriptions. For example, a tribe is described as a group with a common history and identical social and cultural habits. Although taken from a cultural dictionary, “tribe,” like “race,” is a pejoratively imagined concept.

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We do not like to think of ourselves as racists and by no means admit that racism is an inseparable part of our daily lives. But unfortunately, racism is a widespread cultural phenomenon ranging from allusive references to mere rhetoric to executing policies found in every society, even liberal societies (Sleeper, 2002). Liberalism is distinguished by a set of beliefs that includes, among other ideals: the primacy of individual rights over collective or group claims; an appeal to universalism; the sacredness of the principle of freedom of expression; and a commitment to unassailable human rights and equality. But as many have observed, liberalism is full of paradoxes and contradictions and assumes different meanings (Hall, 1986; Apple, 1993; Winant, 1997). Liberalism “is both egalitarian and inegalitarian” (Parekh, 1986, p. 82). Ageism has been a part of liberal societies despite the sacredness of the principle of freedom of expression and the commitment to human rights and equality. Liberalism simultaneously supports the unity of humankind and the hierarchy of cultures. It is then both tolerant and intolerant (Henry & Tator, 2006: 28). The shift from ageism to racism was indeed one of the paradoxes of neo-liberalism during the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the paramount strategies of liberal racism involves the burden of representation (Shohat, 1995). The mass media tends to take representations of the subaltern (or marginalized) as allegorical. Since representations of the marginalized are few, the few available (already constructed according to fit the biases and premises of the majority) are thought to be representative of all ostracized people in that group. Hence, the depiction of one older adult in a nursing home becomes a metonymy of all older adults in nursing homes. Especially given the lack of public voice of older adults, the few images are thought to be typical. In the words of Ella Shohat, “the denial of representation to the subaltern has historically formed a corollary to the literal denial of economic, legal, and political representation. The struggle to ‘speak for oneself’ cannot be separated from a history of being spoken for, from the struggle to speak and be heard” (Shohat, 1995, p. 173). Older people are especially vulnerable to being represented through some sort of medium that is external to the actual group/individual. These representations are constructed images, images that need to be interrogated for their ideological content. The crisis of representation and translation is especially crucial regarding extreme old age. The social oblivion of old age, juxtaposed to death in a youth-­ centered culture, is captured in the gerontophobic assertion by the French social philosopher Jean Baudrillard who describes the redundancy of old age as generating a taboo which is “a marginal and ultimately a-social slice of life—a ghetto, a reprieve, and the slide into death. Old age is literally being eliminated. In proportion, as the living live longer, as they win over death, they cease to be symbolically acknowledged” (Baudrillard, 1993(1976): 163). One of the reasons for such symbolic elimination is the lack of relevant theoretical coordinates of meaning stemming from the perceived otherness of old age. In the case of old age, this also breeds gerontophobia and ageism. Older adults are often socially positioned as others within their own society in a way which promotes and legitimizes ageism and disengagement (Hazan, 2009; Phillipson, 1998; Vincent, 2003; Agich, 2003). Why is it so difficult for midlife

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society to take the perspective of older adults? Our taken-for-granted western, midlife, neurotypical assumptions about identity and the Self embrace both the socially subjugated, that is the disciplined “me,” and its complementary opposite— the individually subjective, namely, the “I” (Mead, 1934). The inconsistent ravages of old age, however, often separate body from mind, and their respective trajectories are no longer effectively synchronized (Archer, 2000). This discrepancy spells a theoretical paradox for those who grapple with current holistic discourses of the nexus of the social and the corporeal. Even gerontology, the supposedly scientific field of old age studies, seems to be torn between the two contingencies of viewing old age as first and foremost mentally molded or as somatically determined. With the deterioration of cognitive skills and the diminishing of social functioning, old age is deemed beyond translation and reversibility. Similar views of holding mainly biologically based categories as discrete impregnable entities have indeed been applied to racial separation (Fanon, 1967 (1952) that annuls linguistic capabilities of communication between different skin colors, or to gender differences construed as mutually incommunicable by virtue of nature rather than culture (Irigaray, 1992). Furthermore, the expectation of dominant midlife culture that selected members of minority groups “teach” the dominant majority about the minority culture, the dominant culture’s misperceptions, and racism, is underpinned by the burden of representation. The liberal expectation that black individuals should teach non-­ blacks how to be anti-racist is as realistic as expecting an older adult to teach middle-­aged individuals how to be anti-ageist. This is probably why most of us continue in failing to recognize an older adult in a long-term care institution as a “regular” member of society. Liberalism argues to fight age-blindness as it does color-blindness. The liberal premise is that sameness is a compliment. “I don’t even think of you as black/old.” Espousing the liberal sentiment of “we’re all the same under the skin” disguises structural inequities and different needs (Zamudio & Rios, 2006). One of the major mechanisms at work in our neo-liberal, self-proclaimed age-­ blind and color-blind society is the primacy of the discourse that obscures both the prevalence of racism and the extent of white/middle-age privilege (McIntosh, 2004). The way that the COVID-19 response epitomized older adults’ stigmatization and victimization can be described as a racial project (Bonilla-Silva, 2003; Omi & Winant, 1994). The notion of “isolating older adults to protect them from COVID-19 risk” reflects the contemporary racial project in its attempts to perpetuate existing structural inequality by obscuring the structural dimension of age inequality. Bonilla-Silva (2003) argued that racial meanings are interpreted through cultural frames and that the frame of abstract liberalism provides the dominant interpretive mode of colorblind racism. This is also true of age-blind racism. For instance, “the principle of equal opportunity, central to the agenda of the Civil Rights Movement and whose extension to people of color was vehemently opposed by most whites, is invoked by whites today to oppose affirmative action policies because they supposedly represent the ‘preferential treatment’ of certain groups” (Bonilla-Silva, 2003, p. 28). In a similar manner, relying on liberal principles as central to the age-­blind race project works to deny the existence of the structural disadvantage of people of

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old age, while simultaneously obscuring the structural advantage or embedded racial privilege of middle-aged people. This radical association of ageism and racism, enabled by the spatiotemporal tumultuous forces whirlpooling the Corona epoch, calls for an explanation in terms of converting one worldview into a diametrically opposed one. I suggest that such metamorphosis could take place when the two paradigms are fundamentally unbridgeable, and any attempt of translating one to the language of the other is thus doomed to fail. The lost translation between the dynamic, knowable paradigm of ageism, and the unknowable stagnant paradigm of racism is inherent in the debatable dictum that old age is an extra-cultural state beyond the understanding of those who do not experience it. In other words, this breach is a split between two perceptions of times, one that holds ageing as a processual cross-generational continuum, a life span developmental script, whereas the other singles out old age as an exclusively inimitable temporal realm; a cleavage which reflects the division between the terminal and the durable alongside the linearly sequential and the eternally cyclical. These two complementary and interwoven cultural views of old age have accompanied western society all along. In the COVID-19 pandemic, they became competing and mutually exclusive. The Corona pandemic highlighted and reshuffled social boundaries as it challenged the routinized divides between life and death, control and fate, randomness and predictability, rationality and delusion. Nevertheless, in spite of and indeed because of the blurred lines between habituated categories, old-new social boundaries have been resurrected. The COVID-19 discourse underscored the interplay of the universal and the particular in terms of public health risk and safety. First, we were told that the COVID-19 virus is a universal pandemic from which no one can escape, equally threatening rich and poor, East and West, developed and less developed countries. But quickly and persistently, this view of a universal pandemic was complemented by another view of social grouping, instigating conflict, and setting boundaries. This latter view accentuated, for example, those who are vaccinated versus those who are not, within countries (as a result of ideologies) and across countries (as a result of unequal access). It also accentuated the boundary between those more vulnerable—older people and people with certain medical conditions— and the public at large. This grouping created an inevitable tension between ever-­ decreasing safe zones and ever-increasing danger zones. While “herd immunity” was on the one hand hailed as the inevitable public health solution to the collective problem of the virus, on the other hand vulnerable groups such as older people had to be individually protected. As I later discuss, such (well-wishing) attempts of protection often became practices of social control, segmentation, surveillance, and distancing. In the course of the reign of the untamable and menacing coronavirus, both virus and old age cohabitated a danger zone of sudden death, fatal illness, and infectious pollution. In other words, the COVID-19 virus charted a circular line around older people, ensnaring them in a perilous space of the unidentifiable yet impending peril beyond any social or medical remedy or restoration. Old age, already being a muffled social category of the unknowable, mutes its incumbents, the elderly, their

The Book’s Composition

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voice getting lost in translation. Instead, the voice imputed to the elderly is one superimposed by their often-patronizing caretakers. Otherwise, it remains suppressed and unheard, superseded by the loud and clear presence of an alternative locution of those who institutionally colonize older people while presuming to re-­ present their world. The helping professions alongside the emissaries of the therapeutic professions therefore become agents of this surrogate representation. Notably, there were also some positive responses to older adults during the pandemic. Early in the pandemic, many communities instituted permissive policies to limit the exposure of older adults to the virus. For instance, stores offered early morning hours for shopping that were meant to limit crowd exposure and to ensure entry after the store had been thoroughly cleaned. Community organizations stepped up to provide home deliveries of food, medications, and other essentials. Some nursing homes began video calls or scheduled window visits, and intergenerational programs designed to connect older adults with children and high school students through letter writing and pen-pal programs flourished. However, some of these practices, no matter how well-intended they were, became detrimental to the cause of the elderly as they contributed to the reinforcement of their desolation and exacerbated their distinctiveness. My emphasis in this book, nevertheless, is on the negative yet revolutionary aspects of COVID-19 regarding older people.

The Book’s Composition In the following section I turn to discuss more broadly the cultural origins of ageism. To advance the argument of what propels ageism in our age and time, I juxtapose old age to other non-hybrid categories such as the Holocaust, fundamentalism, pain, torture, autism, cognitive deficit, and trauma. These, like “old age,” all serve as markers of phenomena of seclusion and threat that defy sequencing, ranking, and regulation so as to be left in their state of unchanging non-fungible uniqueness. In contrast to the “neither here nor there,” between and betwixt cultural contamination of past sources of dread such as chimeras and other monstrosities, today the culturally fearsome is that which stands alone, and which cannot be assimilated and incorporated into the deemed normal and moral. Following the hitherto theoretical introduction which provided a framing for the ensuing analysis, I turn to examine what actually happened in the context of public health COVID-19 measures targeting older people as a risk group. The analysis of what occurred begins with the inherent human rights dilemma of public health, locating the implications of public health policies concerning COVID-19 in Israel, describing how older people were targeted by these policies, and how this targeting was discussed by the media, professionals, and the public. I focus on workplace-related ageist policies, COVID-19 restrictions in old age sheltered housing, and, in particular, how long-term nursing care homes became a death trap for their elderly residents. There was wide agreement in Israel and elsewhere that COVID-19 policies targeted older people as a risk group, setting it apart from the rest of the public. And yet, long-term facilities for

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older people became COVID-19 death traps. What kind of neglect propelled this apparent paradox? I provide an answer to this question by discussing the public discourse, in Israel and elsewhere, of COVID-19 as the inevitable “problem of the elderly” and, by implication, as our own public problem. The following chapter broadens and extends the scope of the discussion by looking at COVID-19 and older people around the world while demonstrating the global discourse of their stigmatization. Here I draw on global studies of old age home residents’ experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as on the popular Western discourses attaching inter-generational conflict to COVID-19, such as the infamous “herd immunity” policy and the “boomer remover” meme. I also discuss and compare practices regarding COVID-19 triaging, lockdowns, and distancing that targeted older people around the world. The final chapter provides some concluding anthropological remarks. While the thrust of my main criticism concerns how old age was racialized by midlife society in the wake of the pandemic, here I focus on yet another context of neglect and blindness, which is the anthropology of ageing itself. This trusted source of so-called objective knowledge in fact reproduces the myopia and blind spots of midlife society which gives it credence. In conclusion, I touch on the COVID-19 revolution more generally, locating the racialization of older people within broader processes such as the crisis of trust in regulatory science as well as workplace-related social changes such as the so-called great retirement/resignation. The epilogue of the book provides some reflections concerning the repercussions of the spirit of Corona time on the changing relationship between nature and nurture vis-à-vis the epistemological standing of the category of old age and the elderly.

Chapter 2

On the Cultural Origins of Ageism

Old women from the sheltered housing Come at 10 on the dot to swim Slowly they lower their bodies into the water and then they float there, in the swimming lanes only their eyes glittering under the pink rubber caps. Now and then they flip onto their backs and flail as if drowning, in the broad sense of the word and their limbs, long since merged until no longer worthy of their name protrude here and there among the waves as though someone there has given up on trifles such as these. But we, the real swimmers, rip the water our brown bodies gleaming in the sun and our muscles celebrating the movement we burst from the depths and dive back, lungs full struggling to surmount our secret pleasure to rush past them arrow-like and spray them in haphazard grace with the mischief of our youth. We have no compassion for pretenders. On the contrary: With crude hints we put them in their place a place in no way among us here. The swimmers wholly uninterested in seeing, now of all times the goal toward which we strive. Agi Mishol, “The Swimmers” (Mishol, 2003)

True to its way, poetry yields more accurate and telling distinctions and insights than does any academic rumination. Therefore, we continue with matters of poetry. “Where Will We Carry Old Age?” is a pointed paraphrase of the title of another poem from famous Israeli poet Nathan Alterman’s collection Joy of the Poor: “Where Will We Carry the Shame?” Indeed, our society’s attitude toward old age couples condemnation of that condition with breast-beating for shaming it or, in well-shaped and laundered academic phraseology, discrimination for reasons of shame, etched into the labeling of old age per se. Thus, people use the concept of ageism with a mingling of guilt and shame together preparing the soil for culture’s crop of main discourses about “old age” and “older people” in our time, mistakenly © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 H. Hazan, Age into Race, International Perspectives on Aging 38, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40669-0_2

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and misleadingly equating them. The public’s attention, followed by academia’s attention, to the symbolic-cognitive-subconscious-rhetorical category that’s called old age indeed nestles in a cultural gray zone aimlessly meandering between guilt and shame. Righteous guilt centers on moral responsibility for the bitter socioeconomic functional lot and fate of people at the end of the road, whose journey, of course, is not ours. Derived from this is the personal and intergenerational commitment, produced by a blend of liberal-humanistic moralistic ethos embroidered with tiny remnants of residual loyalty, to provide them with at least their basic needs. Shame resides in the cultural envelope that mobilizes and stains the category of old age and its trapped elderly representatives as victims of dehumanization and its ensuing consequences such as maltreatment, dispossession, exclusion, humiliation, repression, and distancing; all on account of a fissured and defeated humanness, a humanness that shrinks to fit a one-size-fits-all Procrustean bed laid for the old and made of demonization, pathologizing, medicalization, and infantilization. The shift from the dynamic classification of age to the atemporal racialization of the old also strips the old of any vestiges of human dignity. Like the Musselman as described by Agamben, this race of the old is devoid of shame and therefore left to its fate and concur in come what may. On the face of it, what we seem to behold is a state of quasi-oppressive colonialism, today an abhorrent concept that denotes the revocation of human and civil rights of peoples and minorities. In fact, however, in contrast to the viral use of anti-­ colonialist slogans, the resort to this populistic and alluring concept in order to understand old age and its place in social power systems drowns into the sea of research into old age, if it is noted there at all. Hence, old age is even denied the seal of political correctness that would include it in the legitimate social agenda, a field worthy of accommodative, understanding attention and justification of its entitlement to a commonplace mention alongside concepts such as rebellion and dissidence against oppressive conventions and conditions. See, for example, the ageist indifference of the “Me Too” movement to demeaning sexual assaults against older women, who are hidden from the media eye; or the earlier censure of the conservative old Uncle Tom character, guileless and outmoded, in the black and young protest movement of the American Black Panthers. These two discourses—one of guilt, centering on needs, and the other of shame, focused on rights—twine themselves into a tangled web of beliefs, opinions, and actions, from which blossoms a third discourse, overarching, dominating, and spreading, which snares the attitude toward old age in the vise-like grip of the concept of ageism: a concept, or let us say a withering force, that seeks to address a phenomenon, old age, in a way that combines estrangement and sanctimony while controlling its range of manifestations and their ascendancy and staging. Shame and guilt are indeed the contrasting but complementary markers of the coding of ageism as a sorting classification across the timeline of life from childhood to elderness. In the remarks that follow, I investigate the age-oriented manifestations of this monitoring, marking, and controlling system of taxonomizing the category of old age. The main principle of that classification is the total and uncompromising socially engineered identification between being old and

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belonging to the category of the old. Such ageist presumption leaves no leeway for some degree of subjective presentation and personal latitude. Ageism is a multifaceted social phenomenon that the World Health Organization (WHO) defines as “the stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination directed towards others or oneself based on age” (Officer & de la Fuente-Núñez, 2018). Ageism has several interrelated aspects. It combines three dimensions—stereotypes (thoughts), prejudice (feelings), and discrimination (actions or demeanor); three levels of manifestation—institutional, interpersonal, and self-directed; and two forms of expression—explicit (conscious) and implicit (unconscious). The elderly is often socially positioned as others within their own society, in a way which promotes and legitimizes ageism and disengagement. Age itself becomes an outcast that needs to be fought against and kept away, as much as possible. However, the failure of battling against age is well-known in advance, making it a priori futile, because of the very perception of age as a non-hybrid natural given which resists negotiation and therefore beyond change (Hazan, 2015). The postmodern zeitgeist of hybrid globalization cannot tolerate such non-hybridity in its midst thus it seeks to repel and expel it. Ageism can be defined as the functional outcome of these social strategies (Phillipson, 1998; Vincent, 2003; Agich, 2003). The racialization of age, or age racism, is in this view an age-based form of discrimination that changes the core definition of the category of old age from a dynamic, universal variable of human life into a static, a-chronological, and atemporal category. When old age is petrified in this manner, it becomes total and immutable to hybridity and assimilation by society, and hence something to be rid of. Transforming ageism into age racism does just that. The roots of ageist classification are planted in the status of old age in the modern world as intrinsically contrasted to the values of the modern zeitgeist that include, but are not limited to, the personal advancement of a subject of free will who sets eyes on the horizon and strives to reach it, continual social mobility, rationality of thought and deed, and an accumulation of capital that confirms the fitness and competence he or she boasts (Butler, 1975). The outcomes of this clash between the spirit of modernity and the overt images of old age are estrangement and separation, revulsion, and gerontophobia. Any idea of closing this unbridgeable gap is doomed to failure ab initio because it means no less than a hopeless demand to reshuffle the tectonic plates of the acquisitive and competitive capitalistic society that we inhabit. As I show below, not only is no such process occurring but the fundaments of discrimination and estrangement toward old age are sliding into ever-deeper strata. What is more, to instill the prime concept of the prevalence of a moral order with our Euro-centric, Western, dualistic reasoning, it has to be presented as natural and therefore self-evident. For this purpose, contemporary society, predicated on scientific truths along with devotion, if not mindless addiction, to their repudiation via fake news and media deceptions, tends to adhere to things that are external to society and independent of its constantly changing distinctions and preferences. To wit: it gazes upward to a human god, be s/he postmodern trickery, the occult of New Age power, the wonders of Artificial Intelligence, the secrets of psychoanalytic myths, the primeval ties of national tribalism, or the theology of sustainability.

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An extra-cultural phenomenon such as “old age,” perceived as defying the grip of time, is the attribution of social positionings and behavior patterns to the effect of forces beyond human control, neither subject to our intentions and convictions nor captive to our rules of moral judgment or power systems. We want to extend our grip of control to ever more faraway zones, assimilating them into our cultural reach. For example, the human genome, a hereditary, non-engineered entity that until recently was described as indifferent to environmental feedback, has become a code to be decoded and the manipulation of behavioral, emotional, and cognitive tendencies that we consider innate to us by the nature of our creation. To modify and control them, forces of biochemistry, also natural, are mobilized, as is the pharmacological treatment that is manufactured by synthesizing them. Their praises are sung as keys to the revision of sensations, emotions, and inherited traits from depression to learning disorders and addictions and ultimately to mental disturbances. Thus, something once considered a perversion of nature can be repaired only by derivatives of nature, its susceptibility to the effects of the environment perceived as negligible if not nil. Resistance to ageism, in contrast, is essentially a movement based on the idea that mistreating the elderly is an essentially unnatural act, namely, the rotten fruit of prejudice. As with racism, sexism, and colonialism—additional depravities of the human mind—one can and should fight ageism by redrawing the contours of employment opportunities, educating in tolerance, and inculcating a consciousness of egalitarianism and distribute justice. In fact, the criticism of ageism and its lumping together with the other evils of social unfairness and moral failure is a neo-­ liberal political iteration, one may say, of the version of social constructivism that considers balances of power, dependency, and exchange as the infrastructure of social order and disorder. If so, old age in the mirror of ageism is fraught with tension between its social driving force and the natural biological force that determines its progression and its inevitable end. The equilibrium between them, like the outcome of their rivalry, is contingent on the zeitgeist and on given historical circumstances. It tilts to the social side insofar as the anthropocentric Renaissance-modern belief in the strength of human beings’ ability and right to shape their fate and the course of their life rules the cultural roost. The pursuit of false ageist anti-ageing potions attests to the power of the cultural flank over the natural one. The inverse belief, however—anti-ageism in its various complexions—is also a two-edged sword because, while purporting to normalize old age and blunt its biological sting, in practice it actually empowers it and sharpens its manifestations, excluding instead of respecting and labeling instead of branding. This constructivist contradiction-in-terms way of looking at things underlies additional social waves that sweep away the masses, such as protesting against racism, recognizing various LGBTQ types while blurring their distinctions, and acknowledging the various generations and tones of feminism. However, the struggle between what is perceived as natural and the culture that seeks to restrain and discipline it, by which it also gives it meaning, reveals junctions where domesticated nature erupts, trounces its human trainer, and forces her/him to submit to the withering power of its privileged advantages. Here, instead of a misleading bivalent stance, one finds unequivocal recognition of the edge of nature over nurture. The

Ageism in the COVID-19 Era

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same occurs, for example, when titanic natural forces such as tsunami, earthquake, floods, and storms erupt. So it was, and still is, in the era of COVID-19, caused by a virus of unknown origin that has battered civilization into a rear-guard war of self-­ seclusion, separation, isolation, and survival.

Ageism in the COVID-19 Era The population that was identified and marked as the main victim of the pandemic at its outset, demonstratively and almost exclusively, was that of the elderly (Powell, 2022: 97–114). Distancing them and self-distancing from them imprinted them ineradicably as members of an excluded, befouled, and befouling category, objects of pity and fear, in need of defense and defense-against. Under these conditions of social confirmation of, and collaboration in, the status of old age as a category in itself, distinct and differentiated from other ages and thus dissociated from the continuity of the flow of life, the thundering voices of anti-ageism—guilt and shame— steadily weaken until they fall mute and disappear. Thus, ageism is not only legitimized but also invoked to describe a situation instead of the accumulation of bygone statements, a necessary outcome of natural reality, an uncontestable need. In one pandemic stroke, old age was evicted from the arena where it contended with common stereotypes that shaped it in its social images and its own metaphors, and shoved into its longtime earlier place, the natural-biological one, where it foreshadowed the end of life in an exponential process of physical and mental decline. This is a conscious bio-political waiver of several decades of attempts to down the walls of the category called “old age” and extend the properties of ageing to places beyond the consumer and producer characteristics of middle age. The reserves of strength and vitality at this age serve as a desired destination for the identity and self-identity of those catalogued as old—in other words, a behavior pattern and a litmus test for what the public discourse calls “the Third Age,” a concept beset with an analytical poverty that stands in inverse proportion to its cultural power. The angst surrounding the coronavirus, in contrast, gathered under its bureaucratic wings and its administrative orders the full set of old-age variants irrespective of the indicators of function and functioning that account for the range of difference of which so-called old age is composed. The advent of the pandemic and its identification with the vulnerability of elderly people has transformed the old-­ age category from a gerontophobic phantom, a platform for fruitful old age, into a real and indivisible social reality of walls, confinements, lockdowns and quarantines, decrees, and deaths. Due to the imposition of this state of emergency, the age-transcending concepts of law, justice, and fairness have also been suspended, the discourse of rights being abandoned in favor of a discourse of needs that purports to serve old people but is actually mobilized for the sake of those who derive their power from not being identified by the scarlet letter, the inescapable stigma, of old age.

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In fact, the very notion of extreme measures and “State of Emergency” powers that are being rolled out across the board can be linked to protective perspectives that target both the “general public” as well as “vulnerable groups.” It appears that liberal rights and freedoms are a threat to public security. The public is the problem: They are irrational; they socialize; they party; they travel; they put others and themselves at risk. People in general are the vector for the spread of the virus when left to their own devices. They thus need to be protected from their own stupidity. The policy responses, which go well beyond the provision of emergency medical assistance, suggest that people are understood as both dangerously irrational and as weak, vulnerable, and in need of protection, from others as well as from themselves. “Keeping calm and carrying on” is not an option. In order to “flatten the curve,” Governments across the world were drawn to reinvigorate central authority and to nationalize and unite societies, flagging the collective struggle for security. Thus, the banal term in daily discourse, on both its public and academic tiers, acquires redoubled force—the “old man,” a catch-all nominative that converges, externalizes, unifies, and defines the full set of those who are considered carriers of age and huddle under an imposed and shared categorical roof. By so being, that expression effaces and nullifies differences among subgroups and individuals, on the one hand, and separates the category from its tangents, on the other. In this manner, under the patronage of the coronavirus, the category of old age coalesces again and again as part of a biological classification that dictates and justifies sociopolitical sorting. This reversal of the natural and the social eviscerates the discourse about ageism of its existential justification. It snatches old age from the social body in which it resided, within which both ageism and anti-ageism were born, and returns it to flesh-and-blood corporeality, which makes ageism irrelevant to its constructionist properties by its very ontology as a material fact. It indeed parades back to the origins of the symbolic, and sometimes even the physical, extinction attached to old age as such and of old bodies as intolerable anomalies, a zombified living-dead, an incurable trauma of the corporeal and the mental. Indeed, old age as a life-­ threatening state invokes the concept of trauma as a key to sounding out the social reverberations of its phantoms. Thus, the phobia of being associated with the category of old age could be recognized in terms of the effect of a pre-traumatic fear of the horrors of the last demise. The construction of midlife inspired by the third age is a testimony to its anticipated dread of the fourth age (see below) consisting of ghastly images out of social time and space outlandish ending, foreboded bad death of no sense or solace (Baltes & Smith, 2003). Musselman-like ghostly figure that denote, paradoxically, life that is not life and death that is not death nestle and flutter in the nooks and crevices of the modern mind. Simultaneously surfaced and suppressed, these fiendish reminders of the twilight zone between the living and the dead become objects of both symbolic cleansing and moral absolution. Thus, modern pariahs such as illegal immigrants, refugees, the mentally sick, and the homeless are often socially destined to lead a form of wasted life (Bauman, 2003) as outcasts that are doomed to be at the same time out of sight and touch while serving as sacrificial objects for philanthropic and charitable expiration. The stigmatic labelling of the old as redundantly dependent calls for

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such social designation turning human bane into collective boon (Hazan, 1990). To the mind of the British anthropologist Mary Douglas (1966), this anomality of cultural displacement spells is a kind of dirt, a cross-categorical social pollution, an unbearable impurity, not either or but this-and-that-together, negatively so—entity and non-entity that cohabit, a substance whose place cannot be known and that, therefore, undermines the foundations of cultural certainty that wields the authority of axiom. Usually, Douglas claims, anomalous entities are cleansed of their impurity by being sacrificed in atonement of the death-sins of those who sacrifice them. As we shall see, however, the elderly is denied even this dubious status of sin-offering. Thus, the coronavirus era offers an opportunity to contemplate the category that comprises old age per se, irrespective of social masks. This category is free of internal stances that repudiate its pure existential being as bare life, life stripped of its cultural guises and reduced to the mere satisfaction of requisites of survival and less to a claim of rights to equality, freedom, autonomy, and respect—all of which are justifications and wishes anchored in culture and not in nature, even though are in denial of culture. Thus, generated by the symbolic machinery that produces images of humanness, the category of old age is paradoxically constituted as an extra-­ cultural displacement of humanity. This blot on the landscape of the territory of age identities is both a result of contrived myopia alongside a dazzling clarity of the status of later life. In a society that cherishes and revers longevity while fearing and disdaining those who reach it, life as a predestined self-told story of a developmental project culminating toward a crowning summit of accomplishment or disintegrating into its shambles, old age is forever reviewed as an affirmation or untoward consequence of past record rather than a present bound experience in and of itself (Erikson, 1982). The category of old age, therefore, spells an insufferable state of mind, a cultural trap from which the elimination or the demolition of both the clamps and the bait is the only escape. This repugnant embrace by a self-condemned to be held accountable for which it is not responsible renders that category seemingly unique in its unwitting irreversibility, non-negotiability, and impregnability.

Old Age Against Hybridity Old age, perceived in this sense as having properties unique to it alone, becomes a window through which one can peer into categories apparently similar to it in structure and characteristics although possibly diametrically different in contents and social station. Such an analogy positions old age alongside other categories as the model of an overarching pattern of a type of humanity fundamentally separated from the normativities that make up quotidian life. They are enclaves of time and space, being and experience, that belong to worlds of consciousness and experience of a different species—to our way of thinking, as we will show, a non-hybrid species in both cases. The attempt to decode the old-age category as the key to a holistic understanding of a distinct type of cultural category may lift gerontology out of its

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marginal status, tainted with academic ageism among the behavioral sciences, and propel it to centerstage among social theories. To make this happen, we need to plunge into the cauldron where human fear, of which ageism is only one type, coagulates, and ask ourselves what it is that terrifies us. What evokes in us those primordial responses of flee, freeze, or fight? Let us contemplate the origin of our current fears. Demons, spirits, and monsters no longer terrorize our sleep and confound our minds and our world; they have long become imaginary, unreal beings whose presence we fold within the pages of books or observe on screens. Like their brethren in today’s horror stories—zombies, vampires, and wolf-men—they are mere images in movies, on television, as interactive digital figures, at the theatre, and in amusement arcades. No longer do they disrupt our serenity and demand exorcism or cure; instead, they are at home in every home, deceiving, taunting, but above all entertaining—the sort that accompany contemporaneous human life solely on the sides of the road, no longer liminal creatures but liminoid, cannibalistic manifestations as in the observations of anthropologist Victor Turner (1968). These are self-contained public non-committal moments of fun and games of no critical consequence. These hybrid creatures, positioned between the human and the animal, the living and the dead, and the biological and the mechanical, embodied in earlier eras in mythical images such as the Egyptian or Greek Sphinx, the centaur, the gargoyle, the chimera, the Pre-Plucked Olympia, or Frankenstein’s monster, have in our times become fixtures in the socialization of the offspring of modern culture. Oddity becomes familiarity and distant twilight zones become well-lit and intimate spaces. It is the mingling and blurring of categories, not the rare and the exceptional, that has become commonplace and routine. Aliens, cyborgs, bionic people, and other humanlike androids populate contemporaneous reality and flood post-human consciousness. From Star Wars to Pokémon, and from the Lord of the Rings to Dungeons and Dragons, fright becomes pleasure and cataplexy becomes a play and the temporal is rendered atemporal. Furthermore, contemporary socio-anthropology not only grants the presence of these mixed-breed entities a place of honor in the description and theory of daily life in the society that we inhabit, but in part it even argues for the fluid existence and frantic activity of hybridity wherever we turn. The work of the French anthropologist Bruno Latour (2007), for example, attributes human characteristics of interpretive agency to living or fossilized animals, inert objects, natural forces, technologies, and so on. All having an interactive place and role in social-media, they are “actants” as he puts it—active players in the actor-network theory. Indeed, deconstructing and shattering the conventional categories and re-welding them by hybrid means of hyphens or slashes as in African-American, trans-gender, Arab-Jew, animate-­ human, or man-machine are common practices. They challenge both the identity politics that demarcate people and shove them into impermeable borders of willing or unwilling affiliation, and the binary grasp of reality manifested in dividing people into defined either-or structures cleansed of hybridity. Hybridity indeed defies a structuralist worldview composed of second-order contrasts that, some believe, underpin all of human awareness. Hybridism and its intrinsic swapping of categories, however, subvert this world order and even topple the routine barrier between

Old Age Against Hybridity

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the category of nature and that of culture, erasing and protesting against the specificity of each, as in the analysis of the French anthropologist Philippe Descola (2014). Undoing this categorical order as a quotidian act renders the threatening liminal and the anomalous normal and is accepted in the molten and spasmodic core of a rickety cultural order. Hybridism cancels otherness as we have known it, a status that used to be a subject of reviling, distancing, and extirpating. The other is no longer a shunned and terrifying, alien, and hostile hybrid being that represents the unequivocal “them” and stands in diametric opposition to “us”; it is, by the impact of intensively hybridized popular culture, us. If so, how in a society that routinely relishes changing or blurred boundaries will we identify the category of the maligned and malevolent other, such as to be able to recognize ourselves as its self-righteous opposite? What mirror image is there that will signify the dialectical tension between us and the inverse of our self-image? If the hybrid stranger is but us, how will we find another who is unlike us, and against whom we can recognize ourselves as distinct? If so, what are the forces of horror, as Julia Kristeva (1982) puts it, that cause us to experience the terror of abominable others, that force us to flee from them, freeze in fear of their presence, or resist in order to banish if not annihilate them? What new demons and spirits are these that pursue us, neither those of the between-this-and-that model nor those that are both-this-and-that? In today’s modern Western world, it transpires, we are deterred and frightened by that which cannot be divided, crossbred, intersected, chained, fused, and melted together, that which derives its power and fearsomeness from its singularity, its irreversibility, its inimitability—literally and figuratively—which cannot be replaced and converted; that which is unadulterated, rigid, impenetrable, and staunch. These are phenomena that can neither be translated nor even reworked and made out verbally and visually; they transcend representability and reflexibility, discourse and play; they are opaque enclaves of experiences, unmediated, unstructured, or at times even unconscious. Despite this, or perhaps for this very reason, they leave traces, sometimes deep and ineradicable, in the lives of those who experience them and in the culture that envelops them. These imprints, however, can never mimic or reproduce this kind of feeling as it really is. A partial list of opaque, furtive, and therefore daunting phenomena such as those in the bustling public space around us includes, for example, the discourse over the uniqueness of the Holocaust and, within it, Ka-Tsetnik’s testimony at the Eichmann trial, which purified the Auschwitz experience in an unparalleled manner when the witness collapsed on the stand, and the concept that he coined: the other planet, a term that became a resonant cultural icon that denotes an extra-cultural world. It is a phrase that is not common currency because its value is immeasurable and, therefore, defies comparison with other cultural currencies that are convertible and representable; other experiences that allow themselves to be reduced to small and minute change. Or another example: the (western liberal) public panic of extreme religious fundamentalism and its offshoots is also a source, like the atrocities and extermination of the Holocaust, of our underlying existential dread of the uncompromising tyranny of destructive, indomitable, and lethal force, an ultimate evil devoid of

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inhibitions and restraints such as the ferocious brutalities committed by ISIS. The list also includes pain, bodily and psychological traumatic agonies that leave their imprints for years and are presumed to remain with us forever, both in our personal experience and in the social sphere that wishes to flush them to the surface and hide them away as well. Here is the root of the need and the stubborn attempt to expose these matters by means of scientific language and to cover for them and hide them away by the use of that selfsame language—a language that reveals and conceals, usually a therapeutic psychoanalytic jargon, in which the post-trauma that nestles in the victim of enmity replaces the monsters of yore. Thus, those hybrid demons and spirits are replaced by the uncrackable hard cores of the bruised psyche, a culture shock that resembles and resonates shell shock, and a tormented body or a wounded and damaged conscious or subconscious that seeps into the individual and burrows there for days and years, sometimes not loosening its grip until death. The problematic, disturbing, and menacing place of exceptions to such a hybrid culture is evidenced in the efforts and resources that are invested in repudiating, concealing, abating, curing, rehabilitating, or normalizing them. These deviations challenge the boundaries of what our society considers solid worthy, and sane. Thus, painkillers have become so very common right up to death because of the uniqueness of pain as a uniquely personal sensation whose intolerability cannot be shared with others. Therefore, its abatement is presented as a fundamental human right, like palliative treatment or, in a much different vein, “humanitarian” executions that range from the guillotine to lethal injections. The bodily injured are rehabilitated and their organs are repaired or replaced; the mentally wounded are restored to the appearance of normality by means of psychological care, pharmaceuticals, electric shocks, or behavioral coaching. So, too, people with Down Syndrome are visually and behaviorally enhanced in order to acquire the look and appearance of ordinary folks. Autists are situated on and arrayed across a spectrum that aspires to meet the standard if not to surpass it. People with Asperger’s Syndrome, for instance, are mainstreamed in schools and workplaces and even receive encouragement and popular confirmation as cultural heroes. The mechanisms of political correctness make sure that every such difference does not become otherness to the hilt and never find shelter in the shade or the light of the claim to normality, albeit on its brink or on its slopes for the time being. Hence, for instance, the unprecedented uniqueness of the Holocaust is eroding and dissipating by the force of globalization that turns it into yet another historical event, one of many although an uncommon one of the genocidal annihilations of a people like any other. Consider the discourse surrounding the Armenian holocaust. Minimizing the singularity of the Holocaust is paralleled by setting Judeophobia within a comprehensive colonial context of other phobias, a force of evil that inflicts harm wherever it strikes. The sterilization of the fundament of uniqueness and nonrecurrence positions the Holocaust on a continuous stepwise historical timeline that strips it off the frightfulness of its unbelievability under other circumstances and, as a consequence, of demands for acknowledgment of the moral, philosophical, and political quiddity that may be derived from it.

Hybridity as a Condition for Globalization

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Holocaust, fundamentalism, pain, torture, autism, cognitive deficit, and trauma, like dementia-ridden old age, all serve as markers of phenomena of solitude and threat that behooves sequencing, ranking, moderation, softening, and regulation so as not to be left in their state of unalterable singularity. The responses to them in the modern world indeed take aim at change at any price, in any situation, and in any case of blatant unreasonableness of occurrence: No more pain without palliation, no more trauma without therapy, no more autism from an extra-terrestrial world, no more another planet of the Holocaust or the civilizational collision of Islamic fundamentalism with the West, as Samuel Huntington had envisioned (Huntington, 1996). All is fluid, continual, pliable, and reversible. The elimination of singular witchcraft from these forces of terror is tied to the rationalization and regulation of their action, and with their extrusion from the singular moment that separates them from other forces; an ahistorical if not mythical moment of their very own, which lends them their specific toxic, corrupting, and lethal value as well as their formative, constructive, and mobilizing value, an intolerable value in any case.

Hybridity as a Condition for Globalization Why does our society refuse to accommodate, and even to repel in shocked fear, categories unfit for sequencing and transformation? Alongside its refusal to accommodate these indivisible categories, modern culture promotes the invasion of closed compounds of consciousness such as the binary gender division, which over the past generation has become a dynamic and reversible continuum of subcategories—like the LGBTQ+ rainbow that blurs genders and physicalities; the accelerating mingling of boundaries between man and animal that leverages movements such as naturalism, triggering a discourse about animals’ rights and anthropomorphism; and the narrow and frail line that challenges and subverts the separation of the two categories, just like the humanization of objects and the objectification of human beings that generate a transhuman age of newly emergent being, with technologically enhanced physical and cognitive capabilities, such as bionic cyborgs combining natural and artificial forms of intelligence and bodily capacities. Why, then, is contemporary society—if I may adopt the terminology of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (2000)—a fluid society that dissolves everything that stands in its way and beclouds its traditional internal dividing lines? The answer lies in the global characteristics of modern society, a society that opens its cultural, ethnic, national, religious, geopolitical, and, above all, communicational borders to the passage and exchange of information, goods, services, means of transport, people, finance, and technologies. If so, the condition for comportment in such a hacked world is the ability to convert, translate, process, and duplicate one cultural artifact into another. Just as money can convert one thing into another, as in capital labor, globalization has the limitless, borderless ability to shed one form and adopt another. The condition for the essentially multi-channeled and multi-directional, noncontingent, and uncontrollable flow of the global march is the hybrid situation, which is

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nothing but a mechanism of perpetual inversion, change, and motion. It is a flow that may persist and advance as long as it does not encounter non-hybrid hurdles that obstruct its continued accumulation of convertible cultural capital that amplifies and magnifies its power and broadens its radius of diffusion and influence. It is an all-sweeping movement, relentless and limitless to infinity. These non-hybrid entities deal a death blow to the existence of the global project and the self-justification of its course. Virtual digital culture, which does, refuses to acquiesce in the lifelessness of the non-living, indeed rests at the core of global processes that power and steer them as if they were vitally animated. Fundamentally, nothing stands in the way of its incessant meanderings and ever-expanding horizons. Thus, the cyber culture fuels and sustains the craving for commemoration after biological death; it stores memories and identities—authentic, imitative, or imaginary across boundaries of time and space. They assure a lateral spatial continuity that is free of temporal constraints of body and matter and depends solely on the caprices and clouds of Artificial Intelligence, which serves theoretically and practically as the immortal, imperishable consciousness of the algorithm-woven Web. The illusion of immortality under cyberreality’s patronage makes rigid categories soft and amorphous, immune to extinction and degradation, because they change their essence relentlessly, endlessly, and unrecognizably. Primo Levi’s Holocaust becomes everyone’s Holocaust, autistic children become children for any occasion on a spectrum that belongs to one and all; members of ISIS become partners in discourse and objects of empathy among various groups in the West, whereas the aching and tormented personal body acquires collective metaphorical political values that lend it a halo of a collective victim- or self-victimizing identity that lays claim to affirmative-action rights.

Where Will We Carry the Fourth Age? The only category that has a finite and unequivocal body, the one with a death-mask that no rhetorical trickery or quackery faking another age, pressed to its face inseparably down to its last creases that can be removed, is old age. It is death that defines the category, which, in a secularized world that dissociates itself from life after life, is in a sense a mere negative of life. Namely, “old age” is constructed as an existential void that lacks an intrinsic meaning that has to be covered up, acculturated, or fought to defeat or escape. In any event, it is a plainly irreversible category, and its end/our end is foreknown and foreboded. It may be the only indivisible category that globalization cannot surmount and survive, least of all by putting up an antiageing posture that expresses pity in the best case and sanctimony and self-righteousness in the less-than-best event. Either way, it is a stance that repudiates the possibility of old age having unique markers distinct from other segments, stages, or perhaps continual in the course of people’s lives. That is, it evades the possibility that, after all is said and done, old age is a state of life per se, unique in human

Where Will We Carry the Fourth Age?

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reality, to which the rules of comprehension and explanation that apply in research to the other segment of life fit loosely and poorly and may not apply at all. In fact, as the Palestinian literary scholar Edward Said (2006) put it, old age is exile. Like any place of exile, it is worse than death because it deprives the exiled person of her or his identity and humanness. Exiles are excluded, shunned, and ostracized; they suffer a social death that has an unaccepted logic and a grating sound of its own that precede biological demise, a fortiori in cases of dementia and also under uncommon conditions of loneliness and loneness. Thus, the unique human situation of old age parallels the status of the homo sacer, whom the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (1998) describes as someone who has been excepted and cast out of the collective and the community, who should not be sacrificed because he lacks all symbolic value and therefore may be killed with impunity— existence in a place devoid of the time that, in the other spans of linear age and regulated and ordered life, is usually guided by social clocks of unidirectional and controlled function and functioning. The normative map of social ages spreads across four functionally related domains. Let us consider them. The first is devoted to training and preparing children and adolescents for the transition to the identities that await them in the continuation of their parentally plotted lives. The second is the acceptance, assimilation, and performance of these and other roles and identities in keeping with the script of life that the adult has chosen, tracked, set up, or invented. In the third domain, people cling to the roles of middle age, intensive with power and status, as they would to the horns of an altar, just as they begin to exit from this phase to the twilight zone of late pre-elderliness. This forced and desperate concentration of wishes and resources is meant to stop, or at least delay, the impending irreversible and irreparable malignancy of old age. This illusion of stopping time in its tracks is nurtured and ultimately dashed by preserving and improving the body, adhering to Third Age patterns of consumption and lifestyle, and flat rejection by those who are presumed to serve as carriers of old age. In a society that abandons the dualistic ethos of body and mind in favor of a forced existential monism in which only the body counts, and identity is but its consequence, this is a hopeless last stand in which stinging defeat is assured. When this stillborn attempt, doomed to foreknown failure, taps the players on the back, the carnival of opposites in the postmodern hall of funhouse mirrors that makes it possible scatters and dissipates in the breeze. When the power of New Age enchantments, surgeons’ scalpels, and the promises of nutrition and wellness gurus who nurture the delusion of immortality ebbs, the masquerade ball of the Third Age comes to its end. In its wake arrives the Fourth Age, the indivisible and irrevocable core of an age whose social clock has stopped, an age free of age and therefore independent of any chronological index and stripped of all socially incorporated identities. It is a place of survival, one of loss of role and mores, usually accompanied by the blunting and contraction of physical and cognitive functioning. The Fourth Age, in a sense, is a return to the raw humanness of the dawn of the First Age, a time devoid of function and functionality, lacking cultural relevance, and set within a space impenetrable to connection and communication, hybrid openness,

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metamorphosing metaphors, and the language of indefatigable progress. It is also impenetrable to the surging dynamic of persistent change, conversion, and transformation and cumulativeness as the finest of the modern zeitgeist and the culture of capitalism. The Fourth Age, like an unincorporated village, projects onto the sides of the road and even onto the kind of anti-ageism that, by implication, strives not to acknowledge the slowing of capabilities and the thinning of vitality in old age. It is an age-without-age in the sense of age as a social indicator of time. Those who reach this desolate stage are natives bereft of citizenship, human objects deprived of subject, culturally obsolete, and invalidated. The certainty of their social death deprives their biological death of meaning and validity. The heterotopical enclaves to which are banished those identified with this stage of existence are physical just as they are symbolic—hospitals, nursing homes, special-purpose clinics, or unprotected/overly protected spaces in homes that have become non-homes. Moreover, these enclaves for the elderly during COVID-19 can be compared to the colonial camps of South Africa or Cuba called lager which are an administrative space where men and women who have not committed any crime are denied their right to mobility. In Spain, after the military was deployed in March 2020 to disinfect care homes, “the army found seniors who had been completely abandoned, some dead, in their beds,” according to Spain’s Defense Minister, Margarita Robles (Booth, 2020). Prosecutors in Spain said that they had opened 140 investigations into care homes, prompted by complaints from family members and relatives. The Federación Empresarial de la Dependencia, an industry association that represents care homes in Spain, said that homes had been left to care for residents after overwhelmed hospitals refused to take in more patients or to send care homes the appropriate medications (Booth, 2020). In the research literature, with its conceptual and methodological lack of adequate tools to describe and analyze it, the Fourth Age is a senseless and unsolvable riddle, near-virgin soil located on some other continent or, perhaps, another planet. It seems, however, that this unplowed field, of all places, is the indivisible hard core of the gerontological empire called old age, which steadily and haughtily expands from mid-life to the end of life. One might expect academics who wish to investigate old age to focus their research on the crux of the topic, the Fourth Age. However, the academic discourse, in addition to its being the product of a public socio-­political agenda that affords the Fourth Age no priority, is foremost an active and valued partner in the incarnations of globalization, which, as stated, does not recognize entities that defy the ability to translate and explain, for example, the Fourth Age. Thus, grudgingly and under duress, the attempt to breach the fortified rampart of experience devoid of representation, of language without a familiar and communicable vocabulary, semantics, praxis, syntax, and rules of composition that please the ear, is repressed and gagged, its words, meanings, and internal grammar left opaque and undeciphered. Indeed, with the impasse, save a few exceptions, that old-age research has reached, it is left only with the safe ground of the prequels to the category in its undiluted state. These prequels take the form of representations of the Third Age, yielding a banal and accessible discourse of needs for the treatment of

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poor functioning and coping tactics for a hostile world and a frustrating and sometimes abusive bureaucracy—a bureaucracy that is always open to bargaining and management, even if aggressive or Kafkaesque, but in any event another milestone on the road to globalization. The problem is that the logic of these prequels does not necessarily herald the crucial transition to a film for which they serve as bait, that is, to the Fourth Age, since, after all, this is largely the opposite of those Third Age prequels, those of the promised rose garden. The study of old age becomes a theoretical and methodological extension of research on the progression and fringes of Middle Age, as they amass wrinkles and apply makeup in the course of the Third Age, which is but a euphemism for the kind of old age that is controlled, “successful”, structured, and distinct. It is the old age that its researchers usually search for under the lamp of outlooks and tools, theoretically tried and tested but practically dubious if not thoroughly specious—anything but having to cross the scholarly Rubicon to the Fourth Age side. This is indeed a horizon beyond which hide unknown islands, where academic virgin soil awaits ploughing under parameters that are unfamiliar if not nonexistent. Out there exists another culture, unknown, that maintains a different kind of rationality, a different consciousness of time, space, and meaning from another galaxy, or the absence thereof. That world appears to be different in its priorities of survival; perhaps, too, it acquires its cosmology from a different existential universe—one of a language that is not attuned to frequencies audible among those of the other ages, perhaps apart from counterparts in the First Age, the age of infancy and childhood, since old people in both literature and folk culture are childlike. A researcher who enjoys this long voyage into this academic wilderness is liable to encounter a state of fundamental incomprehension that anthropologists and philosophers call epistemic relativism. It reflects the realization that truth can never be understood except in terms of the context from which it emerges; however, since researchers’ roots are planted in the soil of their homeland and their place of upbringing, they are plainly unfit and unprepared to sink roots in foreign soil, the kind that will keep them from producing research output of any sort, the kind that would receive the blessings of intellectual church of studies and publications. From this standpoint, old-age research is unexceptional among attempts to decode and unpack kernels of resistance to the steamroller of globalization. The epistemological failure that the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard (1988) noted in his claim that Auschwitz triggered an earthquake that destroyed the seismographs meant to measure it, is shared by one and all. Thus, as stated, research into the Holocaust era lays down its Jewish uniqueness and turns its gaze to other forms of colonial genocide; the autistic syndrome sprawls over a steadily widening ambit of shades of behavior; and pain switches from a non-transmissible and unsharable sensory experience to a metaphor for a collective sense of pronouncedly political victimhood. Queer research literature, in turn, has created a new language that supplants the dichotomous one of division of the sexes and denies what separates them—a language whose Weltanschauung and concepts have long since been torn

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from the trove of medical and legal insights that recently defined them until not long ago as pathological syndromes in need of cure, such as by conversion therapy. Old age, in contrast, cannot be torn away for two reasons. First, it is still perceived as a kind of incurable illness; second, its inescapable proximity to the certainty of death makes even its invisibility into a visibility that manifests in all of its age-related symptoms, including those in the Third Age, where already evident indications of the Fourth Age seep into the social treatment of that age and paint it prematurely in steadily graying shades of dementia, senescence, fragility, and frailty. Third-Age researchers who try to understand old age do notice the imprint of these metaphors on the stereotyped cultural conceptualization of the period of life that they are studying. However, in an attempt to bleach away this ageist stain, they, as in Bertolt Brecht’s poem “The Unconquerable Inscription,” and, in its wake, Israeli poet David Avidan’s verse: “The Stain Remains on the Wall,” pound it with anti-ageist accusations that intend to make it go away but, by so doing, merely underscore and perpetuate its impression. And if for this reason alone, the Fourth Age refuses to be torn out, its absence is but a condition for its presence. Still, it is recommended to marshal the intellectual and emotional courage to “stare at the sun,” at its proximity to death, as in the title of Irvin Yalom’s 2008 book—to “stare at the sun” not in order to go blind but to cure old-age research of its self-induced blind spot. One does this by contemplating old age as it is, transient but present always and forever, or, if you wish, old age in its undiluted form, naked, and yes, its age-related private parts and all, with no fig leaf to conceal them. As in the story in Genesis about primordial sin, so here, too, guilt connects with shame and old age, a corollary of both, is banished from the Eden of life fit to sustain them. So also thought the philosopher and essayist Jean Amery (1994, 1999), the survivor of Auschwitz who wrote about his tormented body that had become the be-all and end-all of his existence, and who continued to write about the vicissitudes and humiliation of old age up to his last book, in which he spoke in favor of the choice of suicide. He followed his own advice: at age 68, before crossing into the Fourth Age and losing both his body and his mind, he took his own life. The path that Amery sought for himself, from the hardships of old age to social and personal cessation, becomes a parable for the age-related ordeal that accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic: an emergency into which the routine normative moral order topples, thereby bringing to the surface the denied Gordian knot between social death and biological death. When the liberal-humanist separation of these situations vanishes, in the shadow of an epidemic as in Amery’s case, they become a single death again. This merger of deaths prepares old age amidst a pandemic for service as the necessary scapegoat for the unloading of guilt and the erasure of shame in a society whose attitude toward old age has long since become a litmus test of tolerance of racism. COVID-19 stripped old age of the flimsy camouflage of familiarity and hypocrisy and, backed by the breaching of moral boundaries intrinsic to the mortal peril that the pandemic augurs, revealed its other face, a Medusa’s face that turns all who stare at it into stone.

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Thus, the advent of COVID-19 debunked society of its fragile moralistic guises while petrifying moral judgement and levelled reflexivity. Consequently, it unleashed and licensed an unrestrained outburst of undercurrent decultured streams of hitherto covert tabooed worldviews and practices. The Israeli case chosen to evince how such latent layers are being uncovered is firmly couched in Westernized globalism alongside sentiments of national solidarity. Hence, it could serve as a global encapsulated panorama for micro viewing of such engulfing worldwide macro processes.

Chapter 3

Public Health COVID-19 Measures Targeting Older People as a Risk Group

Shrouded by the fading remains of socialist ethos, Israeli highly capitalistic society still harbors and maintains a host of effective welfare services and institutions. The onset of the pandemic put into a critical test both the efficacy and the viability of that infrastructure of cultural codes and organizational frameworks. The elderly population, being the most dependent and vulnerable segment of those in need of social provisions, became the hub of the Corona instigated experiment in an unprecedented trial of moral commitment and redeployment of resources. In the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak in Israel, most of the seriously ill and ventilated patients were old with complex co-morbidities. By April 2021, most of the deceased (92%) were older people (65+), and most of the older men who survived experienced deterioration in their health (State Comptroller, 2021). Geriatric-nursing institutions were major outbreak centers (Zulat, 2020). The policy adopted by the Israeli government was to treat all the elderly as belonging to a distinct risk group that needs to be protected from the virus. This wholesale grouping ignored the fact that advanced age is one of many risk factors for COVID-19 morbidity, along with other risk factors that prevail in all ages, such as underlying diseases that damage the immune system. In addition, such stereotypical designation ignores the fact that among older people there are both physically and cognitively healthy elders who are functioning independently and lead active lives to the best of their abilities. People aged 65+ make up over a tenth of the Israeli population (11.5%). It is a diverse population of people, some of whom are healthier and some frail or sick, some live independently and some live with a disability. The average life expectancy in 2019 reached 84 years among women and 81 among men, which is relatively high in comparison to the world. The elderly population is diverse in terms of needs and cannot be treated as a single group. Only 3% of the elderly in Israel, approximately 25,000 men and women, live in long-term care institutions: geriatric hospitals and nursing homes for chronic hospitalization or residential settings for debilitated elderly people. This is a relatively low rate regarding Western countries. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 H. Hazan, Age into Race, International Perspectives on Aging 38, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40669-0_3

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The vast majority (93%) of Israeli long-term care (LTC) recipients aged 65+ were reported to receive care at home. Israel’s Social Security (“National Insurance”, as it is called in Hebrew) provides partial funding for in-home LTC services to those who have reached retirement age, fall below a certain income level, and either need assistance in performing daily activities or require supervision at home for their safety and those helping them (The National Insurance Institute of Israel, Long-­ Term Care, 2022). Yet during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and through most of its peaks, older people were singled out as a wholesale category that needs to be protected. State spokespeople warned grandchildren not to hug their grandparents. In the hospitals, isolated older men and women died in solitude. Older incumbents of nursing geriatric institutions became locked in, with visits and exits prohibited for many months. All these feats were sanctioned and legitimized in the name of public health. Before turning to describe in detail the practices employed as COVID-19 measures targeting older people as a risk group, we therefore need a broader framing that looks at the inherent challenge to human rights in public health.

The Inherent Human Rights Dilemma of Public Health Public health needs to balance individual autonomy and collective goals as it caters for populations while maintaining public trust, and to balance public order and duties while recognizing social justice and vulnerabilities (Schröder-Bäck et  al., 2020; Dawson, 2011). There is an inherent moral bias leaning toward collectivity in the public health perspective. From a public health perspective, the pursuit of individual choice is often only possible where collective capacity allows it to occur. This dilemma was highlighted during the COVID-19 pandemic in relation to vaccination, where human rights were at least officially maintained by avoiding mandatory vaccination. Although in 2019 the WHO declared “vaccination hesitancy” as one of the greatest threats to global public health, historical reframing can remind us that there have always been people who have refused, resisted, or been skeptical about vaccination (Hausman, 2019). This dilemma requires balancing of conflicting values when self-determination (e.g., in the form of anti-vaccination or vaccination hesitancy) implies harming others. Given that vaccination is also part of a “social contract” (Korn et al., 2020), it may be ethically difficult to deal with free riders benefitting from collective immunity without getting vaccinated themselves. Indeed, while vaccination for COVID-19 was not mandated, human rights were compromised by varying incentive schemes with benefits provided selectively to vaccinated individuals (e.g., the green pass) and/or geographical locations (e.g., opening schools depending on the number of infected pupils), as well as sanctions against those who are not vaccinated. The Green Pass, used in Israel between 2020 and 2021, is a certificate which allows its holder to establish her or his immunization status and take part in various activities such as cultural and sports events, conferences, gym classes and workouts,

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exhibitions, swimming in public swimming pools, hotel stays, eating out at restaurants, and visiting tourist attractions, which were all closed intermittently since April 2020. However, as Kamin-Friedman and Peled Raz argued (2021: 2), “as the Green Pass program imposes restrictions on the movement of individuals who had not been vaccinated or who had not recovered, it is not consonant with the solidarity and trust building that are both central to public health.” Perhaps a more correct assertion would be that solidarity and trust are ideally central to public health. My point is that, on the contrary, the Green Pass demonstrates the very conflict between public health ideology and individual determination. The intricate balance between preserving individual rights and securing public health has generated discords in Israeli society throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, from mask requirement via social distancing to recent mass vaccination (Raz et al., 2021).

COVID-19 in the Israeli Context At the end of December 2020, the Israeli Ministry of Health began to vaccinate Israel’s population against COVID-19. The first to be inoculated in the vaccine campaign were people aged 60 and older, as well as other groups: people under age 60 defined as being at risk due to their health condition, medical staff, and crucial role holders in the economy whose uninterrupted functioning was seen to be vital. Subsequently, the vaccination campaign was expanded to include other age groups. A lockdown was imposed in mid-March (2021) and most restrictions were lifted a month later, in mid-April. Between April and early June, the COVID-19 infection rate in Israel remained stable but then began to rise and in late September the country entered a second nationwide lockdown. At the end of December 2021, a third less strict lockdown was announced. The social effects of the coronavirus pandemic tend to exacerbate preexisting socio-economic ruptures and weaknesses, and Israeli society was no exception. Alongside spearheading global vaccination, the Israeli case shows social discords around gaps in public health communication. For example, a disparity emerged between the official message of social distancing guidelines and the ultraorthodox Jewish (Haredi) value of keeping religious institutions of education open. This led to recurrent Haredi deviations from imposed policies. Similarly, pilgrimaging, weddings, and tribal public reconciliations are important Arab social activities that reflect religious and social norms which continued in the face of social distancing restrictions. The lower COVID-19 vaccination rate among these two socially excluded minorities reflects mistrust that was aggravated by the COVID-19 situation (Raz et al., 2021). Furthermore, those who entered the crisis without an economic “safety net” or those who lost their livelihood during the crisis became more vulnerable to the effects of unemployment and were more concerned about their future. Surveys demonstrate that most of the public did not trust the political leadership and State institutions, even blaming them for the COVID-19 crisis because of what was perceived as ongoing failure in dealing with the overall situation. This

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signifies a challenging crisis of confidence between the public and the government, which presumably affects the extent to which the public is willing to comply with the restrictions imposed on it as part of the effort to reduce the mounting morbidity. Likewise, the government apparently did not trust the public to behave in a way that will reduce morbidity. This has led to two complementary strategies—full-speed vaccination on the one hand and a recurrent lockdown strategy, on the other hand. There were several national strategies that were adopted at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic to promote public health, including population-wide COVID-19 testing and contact tracing. COVID-19 testing. In mid-April 2020, 10,000 tests were performed per day, in August 30,000, in September 60,000, and in early January (2021) there were around 130,000 tests per day. The tests were offered free of charge by health funds and local authorities and were highly available. Since November 2020, the HMOs have been working with the pooling method, which allows for a total of 8 tests to be analyzed together. It is also possible to perform private tests, for example, at Assuta (private hospital) or order tests from the company Lab2door. The private tests cost between 200 and 1000 NIS. There are also fast tests, which are usually paid for out of pocket. The state also allocates some fast tests at Israel’s one and only international airport, costing very little. A combination of public labs and private companies was set up to support the testing frenzy. For example, My-Heritage, together with the Chinese company BGI, have set up a large laboratory for tests, responsible for about a quarter of the tests in the country. During calmer periods, test results were received within a day. But at the beginning of January 2020, long queues led to around 48 hours or more until receiving a test result. The government, the prime minister, and the National Security Council were accused of “data engineering,” given there was no official data on the testing policy. The number of tests fluctuated, and some lab employees argued that by the number of tests and where they are concentrated, we know when a lockdown is planned. When you want to increase the morbidity, you check a lot, especially in red areas. And when you want to downplay it, the number of tests goes down. Unfortunately, despite all this frenzied testing, little testing has been done in long-term care facilities for older people. Contact Tracing  The Departments of the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Defense (Home Front Command) worked together to check where COVID-19 patients were, who they were in contact with, who should be placed in quarantine because of them, and whether they violated their quarantine conditions. In addition, there was digital tracking of citizens. This surveillance was operated by the Israel security agency. As early as March 17, 2020, the government passed a set of emergency regulations authorizing the Israel Security Agency (ISA) to aid in the national effort to limit the spread of COVID-19, and permitting it to collect, process, and use citizens’ personal data. The ISA started using a cache of mobile-phone-location data to help identify people who had crossed paths with patients who tested positive for COVID-19. People found to have been in close contact with an infected individual were placed into mandatory quarantine to stop further contagion. Six days after the initiation of mandatory COVID-19 surveillance by the ISA, the Ministry of

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Health launched a very similar but optional service named HaMagen (the protector), an open-code application that allows citizens to opt into the logging of their mobile phone locations. This application notifies mobile users shortly after they come into contact with a person who has tested positive for COVID-19 (as recorded by health officials) and advises them to self-isolate. A public debate ensued in Israel regarding the use of these surveillance technologies (Keshet, 2020). Critics described the tracing as a fatal invasion of privacy, employing methods used against terror and terrorists on civilians. The main criticism was that the ISA should not deal with this, but rather civilian solutions should be offered (like HaMagen). Petitions were filed to the High Court of Justice against the use of surveillance by the ISA. Experts outside the government, for example, from the Israel Democracy Institute, have suggested alternative monitoring methods, based on the public voluntarily installing contracting software that is not forced from above, based on transparency and social solidarity, like “HaMagen” application. One of the justifications given by the government for the secret service monitoring is the fact that the ultra-Orthodox do not have smartphones, and therefore regular applications cannot track them. A report by the Israel Democracy Institute indicated that Israel is the only country in the world that uses its secret service to carry out such civil surveillance. Likewise, a special report by State Comptroller, which examined the functioning of the government during the COVID-19 pandemic, revealed that the security service’s surveillance, which was originally intended to detect terrorists, was used to monitor civilians without the appropriate authority—and that it failed to provide information for its intended goal. Therefore, the Comptroller stated that the government and the Ministry of Health must reconsider it. Eventually it was discovered that human epidemiological interrogation is much more effective than digital tracing. As of January 20, 2001, the secret service surveillance arguably ceased to operate digital tracing on the entire population.

COVID-19 Practices of Targeting the Elderly The well-wishing protective designation of older people as a risk group vulnerable to COVID-19 engendered a ripple effect of stigmatization leading to structural discrimination. Thus, a COVID-19 work-related quarantine regulation was established which stated that an employer would not allow the entry to the workplace of an employee over the age of 67, unless the employee was at the workplace in the 3 weeks preceding the start of the first closure. All this was without any evidence base, even though there is a huge difference in the functioning and health of elders of the same chronological age. A petition to the High Court of Justice claimed that the proposed regulation was unconstitutional in harming the right to equality and constitutes discrimination on the basis of age in a way that harms human dignity. This regulation was indeed canceled a few days after the petition was submitted to

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the High Court.1 However, structural discrimination works not only top-down, through regulation, but also bottom-up, through actual workplace practices. In a media interview the director of an association for the employment of older people said that since the outbreak of the coronavirus, the task of finding work for older people has become impossible. The reason, she said, is that old people have been marked as people who can be quarantined and controlled in terms of mobility. When she contacted the Ministry of Education regarding the search for teachers and teaching assistants, she was told that people over the age of 63 are not allowed to enter the classrooms, even though there was no such directive from above.2

COVID-19 Restrictions in Old Age Sheltered Housing Old age sheltered housing, with more than 15,000 housing units in a prestigious private for-profit market, employed considerable restrictions in the first wave thus probably preventing large-scale infection, but with a high toll regarding the elderly’s autonomy and well-being. In some sheltered housing there were restrictions on the choice of what to eat, when to sleep, with whom to spend time, and when to host and be hosted by friends and other members of the house. The shelters were closed to outside visitors, including family members, sometimes long after the closure ended. In addition to the ban on visits, restrictions were placed on the residents’ exit from the compound. During the lockdown, in most houses, tenants were forbidden to walk outside, even the allowed 100 m, so in fact they became prisoners in their apartments. There were reports on families in distress, who came to the gates of the institutions but were not allowed to enter and remained there shouting through the fence to try and communicate with their loved ones. Research eliciting the responses of shelters housing older tenants found that in places where the approach was paternalistic, most of the tenants were critical of over-protection and paternalism.3 In other words, the imputed crisis turned the high-class sheltered housing into total institutions or in the words of tenants, “golden cages.” Managers of old age homes justified confinement measures as protective. Daniel Johnson, CEO of Edmonds Senior Center (Canada), provided a typical illustration of this well-wishing rhetoric:4

 Petition to the High Court: Cancel the regulation prohibiting senior citizens from working, Tali Haruti-Sober, The Marker, 4/30/20. https://www.themarker.com/coronavirus/2020-04-30/ tyarticle/0000017f-db87-df9c-a17f-ff9f3b080000. 2  “There is no legal discrimination, not even against the elderly,” Nurit Wargaft, Haaretz, 17.8.20. h t t p s : / / w w w. h a a r e t z . c o . i l / o p i n i o n s / n u r i t / 2 0 2 0 - 0 8 - 1 7 / t y - a r t i c l e / . premium/0000017f-f540-d460-afffff668fa10000. 3  “Housing too protected? Zero visits, zero exits, zero corona,” Shlomit Len and Hadas Magen, Globes, 11.7.20. https://www.globes.co.il/news/article.aspx?did=1001335220. 4  “Navigating COVID-19: Compassion or ageism?” Posted: June 3, 2020. https://myedmondsnews. com/2020/06/navigating-covid-19-compassion-or-ageism/. 1

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Public safety policy, by nature, is applied broadly not individually. Admittedly, it would be difficult for a 65-year-old to be expected to stay at home until phase 4 because they have been deemed “vulnerable” among the 65 and older population, while their 64-year-old spouse is free to leave the house. Public safety policy is informed by data to establish the guardrails to protect the general public. Non-smoking laws, bike helmets and seatbelts are all public safety policies designed to protect, not restrict. It is all about the motive. The motive for sheltering at home is to save lives, not to discriminate. Our policy at the senior center for reopening our services: 1. Our members’ safety is our top priority 2. To revamp as many of our services as possible to accommodate our members who are staying at home 3. To reopen services based on the governor’s and mayor’s plans. We will not offer programs that require seniors to leave their homes to participate until phase 4 These policies are not intended to be discriminatory, but rather the best evidence-based approach to keep our members safe. Just to clear the air, we are not replacing our senior volunteers with younger ones. We are building an army of volunteers of all ages. During the pandemic, we are calling on our volunteers under 65 to deliver meals and work in the thrift store. Serving seniors is in our DNA. That will never change. In navigating the pandemic and beyond, we are committed to engaging, lifting up and protecting our seniors, not diminishing, or limiting their vast potential.

The chains of sheltered housing closed their houses already in the first half of March 2021, and in addition to the state’s instructions, they dictated their own rules. This created frustration among residents, as the following words from media interviews illustrate: “They put all kinds of treats at my door, but I didn’t see a face. That’s not what people pay so much money for. The reasoning was that they were guarding the tenants, but they behaved in panic, closed down all the activities, imprisoned us without an arrest warrant and without a court, only under the authority of their administrative power… It seems that we, the tenants, disturbed the staff, we were unnecessary in their eyes. We were closed for two months, we were not allowed to sit in the lobby, go to the pool, even throw garbage. They took extreme measures against us that a person living on the street would not experience. A person like me is not prevented from going out 100 m, going to the grocery store, to a pharmacy… They turned the people here into puppets. The willpower is over, the ability to think is fading. They took away our individuality, the freedom to decide. It was ruthlessly extreme. I understand that no one wants to die, but if they had exercised a little more judgment, they could keep the lobby open, to allow going out into the corridor. We didn’t leave the apartment for two months. We weren’t the cause of the infection, but the staff. But they dropped the responsibility on us” (amalgamated quotes from sheltered housing residents in Israel). “These are people who understand what’s going on and know how to take care of themselves,” the newspaper report (Lan & Magen, 2020) quotes Dr. Aviva Kaplan, an anthropologist and gerontologist from Netanya Academic College, “What is this ageism? I had many conversations with assisted living residents during this time, and I heard quite a few people who regret having entered. If they had known what

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awaited them there, they would not have made such a decision. But the ads work and the salespeople are skillful.” Resident R., who is approaching 90, also felt that the lockdown in the institution where she lived in the center of Israel was too rigid, and above all that the new situation required special dialogue and attention—a need that she did not receive a response to. “They were treated wonderfully, really, I have no words,” says her daughter. “The problem is that the body is taken care of, but not the soul. There is no discussion, and no attempt is made to deal with the far-reaching consequences of this matter. The sheltered housing is usually inhabited by educated, well-established people, but they are treated like dogs. When I approached the CEO about the matter, he said he would return to me with answers. I told him: don’t come back to me, come back to my mother, she is a clear, understanding person. Why talk over their heads?” The following quotes from the report (Lan & Magen, 2020) illustrate the reactions of residents. E. lives with her husband in sheltered housing, so the Corona pandemic passed relatively well for her. But she witnessed the difficult experience of her friends at the institution: “I saw what was happening here, and there were quite a few tenants who had a very hard time. There was no mental support—no psychologist, no psychiatrist, no gerontologist. We are used to a lot of activities, and suddenly being alone at home, without an answer and mental help, it deteriorated them significantly. For years we had a say, and then an event like this comes. There were many cases of crying and depression. The managers decided everything on their own, and no one wanted to take responsibility.” Avraham Bar David, chairman of the Association of Residents of the Sheltered Housing, has been an ardent supporter of life in these prestigious institutions, but he has encountered quite a few cases of frustrated tenants, and is now trying to find solutions for the next closure. “There were those who wanted to leave in the middle, some of them even rented a guesthouse or went to live with the children and returned after the end of the quarantine. In most sheltered housing it was not possible to walk even the 100 meters allowed. These days we are in talks with the managers of the networks to draw conclusions, for example to allow tenants to stay in the capsule in the event of another closure, that is, with another friend or two.” The managers of the networks, for their part, think that, despite everything, the residents of the prestigious protected houses are satisfied. Miki Farnes, CEO of the Bayit BaKfar (A Home in the Village) chain, says: “We received endless letters of thanks. The amount of disgruntled people on our network did not exceed 10%.” And when he talks about disgruntlement on the network, he means the complaints directed at him following the “Zero Corona” campaign. For example, the daughter of one of the tenants wrote: “It’s lovely to know that the capital my father pays for sheltered housing in the village... is used for a sales campaign that boasts of the glittering prison in the country. For four months, self-employed people, with private apartments, were locked up there, some of them still working. (They) were cut off from the family and are still cut off, even when other citizens their age are walking around freely.”

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Resident N., approaching 80, has been living in luxury sheltered housing in the center of the country for the past year, and she, like Yossi, was also not allowed to leave her apartment during the Corona period. “We received exceptional service, we had services that others did not have, but they forced us and dictated to us what was allowed and what was not allowed and in an aggressive tone. They did not take into account that people our age are careful anyway.” These difficult feelings led N. to leave the sheltered housing for a small apartment she owns, close to her daughter. “I felt that I had gone free, and I decided that I would not return until the isolation was over. In general, this whole event made me and all the other tenants think about whether the decision to move to sheltered housing was correct and to recalculate a course.”

 ong-Term Nursing Care Homes: Operation Avot Parents L Protection (Magen Ve’Imahot) I have already mentioned the extremely high COVID-19 related mortality in the geriatric-nursing institutions in the first wave, around 85%. In some cases, the care workers were the source of morbidity. Social distance, unfortunately, could not be kept efficiently as part of nursing care where physical proximity in the form of bed and body work to the patient is imperative. The risk of morbidity in such institutions was already known, as the large outbreak in Europe (in northern Italy) started in them. Despite this, there were no adequate Government preparations regarding the conduct of the institutions, not in the provision of personal protective equipment for the staff, caregivers, and workers, and not in the establishment of a fast and efficient testing system. It was only at the end of April 2020 that a “national plan for the protection of senior institutions against the corona virus” was adopted. Known as the “Mother and Father Protection” program, the program opened with a worthy and promising statement: “The challenge of successfully dealing with the coronavirus lies in reducing the morbidity of the elderly population, first and foremost those hospitalized in institutions. That’s why the main emphasis in the national strategy, the main attention concerning resources, execution, protective measures, testing, epidemiological investigation, personnel, equipment, and money should be directed to these institutions.” It should be noted that Israel was ahead of many other countries in adopting such a plan. The program mainly applied to over 1300 long-term care institutions with nursing care. It referred to the need to find solutions to the effects of isolation due to reducing visits and reducing the supportive and social activities for the frail elders living in these institutions. Magen Avot ve’Imahot (in Hebrew, Shield of Fathers and Mothers) was initially designed to provide coronavirus testing to more than 90,000 people at more than 1300 long-care institutions. On March 10, 2020, a novel regulation was issued completely banning visits to long-term care institutions. This was an early response to

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the COVID-19 pandemic (Alon, 2020). As the COVID-19 pandemic spread, sharp criticism was voiced that long-term care institutions were being neglected (Tsadok-­ Rosenbluth et al., 2020). As of April 12, the number of deceased in Israel was 96, of whom one-third had been long-term care institution residents (Koratz, 2020a, b). In the second wave, which started at the end of June 2020, the proportion of sick and deceased elderly people decreased, although remaining high relative to their proportion in the population. By August 2020, almost two-thirds of the patients were 40 years old or younger, and less than 5% were 70 years old or older. It is reasonable to attribute this reduction to the fact that the elders behaved according to the preventive recommendations maintaining physical distance and avoiding social contact, and wearing a mask. However, the rate of mortality of the elderly remained relatively high, especially among those aged 80+. In total, in the first year since the beginning of the epidemic, about 85% of those who died with COVID-19 were over the age of 70, of which about a third were infected in institutions for prolonged treatment. The average age of the deceased was 81 (Zulat Institute for Equality and Human Rights, 2020). Professor Roni Gamzoo, the CEO of Israel’s second largest hospital and a former “corona tzar,” was appointed to manage the Program (Israel Ministry of Health, 2020a, b). The program developed recommendations and guidelines for geriatric facilities, allowing visits by family and friends (starting April 20, 2020) under strict conditions (e.g., outdoors, distancing, prior registration). The Health Ministry also limited workers’ ability to move between units and prohibited staff from working in more than one facility (Israel Ministry of Health, 2020a, b). The “Fathers and Mothers Shield” program received very high ratings by long-term care staff, presumably after new visitation policies and guidelines replaced the initial total ban (Cohen-Mansfield & Meschiany, 2022; Cohen-Mansfield, 2022). Yet in August 2020, the State Audit Committee held a public discussion on the state of COVID-19 and heard sharp criticism from representatives of associations for the elderly concerning the conduct of the Ministry of Health and Magen Avot. Dr. Orien Yitzchak, founder of the association “Families of the Elderly,” told the Committee that “especially among the elderly in nursing care, the deterioration is evident mainly due to the disconnection from their family members, a disconnection that leads, among other things, to cognitive, physical and mental damage… My grandmother stopped recognizing me. These are elderly people who were in relatively good cognitive condition, and almost all of them see a significant restlessness, which we demanded to check already at the end of April. No one bothered to go to nursing homes to do a survey.”5 The new Head of the Magen Avot veImahot program, Prof. Nimrod Maimon, said in the discussion that starting in mid-July, 8000 samples are taken every day of the workers in the nursing homes. “We found over 200 asymptomatic workers who were walking around in the system,” he said. “What we actually saw is that all the

 “The Knesset discusses the failure to treat the elderly in Corona: terrible gaps and inaccuracy.” YNET News, Maya Horodniceanu, 08/17/2020. https://news.walla.co.il/item/3380846. 5

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incidents that occurred in the first month, in the first wave, occurred as a result of asymptomatic caregivers treating nursing patients. The very fact that you are close to a nursing patient, there is a chance of infection even with a mask and gloves. And incidents of this type have costs, especially severe morbidity and mortality very high.” The high mortality in long-term care institutions in the first wave of the pandemic in Israel, similarly to other countries, thus resulted from a serious omission. It was possible to know in advance that the elderly living in institutions were vulnerable to the disease, due to their nursing condition, simultaneous underlying diseases, closed living conditions, and contact with staff members who are exposed to the virus on their way from home to work. Even so, it took several months before equipping the care takers with protective equipment and establishing an effective testing system (testing the caregivers and not the patients). The “Fathers and Mothers Shield” was indeed adopted relatively early compared to other countries and was instrumental for safer conduct in these institutions, but it did so without efficient regulation or supervision.

 he Public Debate Over COVID-19 as “the Problem T of the Elderly” There was wide agreement in Israel that COVID-19 policies targeted older people as a risk group, setting it apart from the rest of the public. On the other hand, long-­ term facilities for older people became COVID-19 death traps. What kind of neglect propelled this apparent contradiction? COVID-19 was often presented as the inevitable “problem of the elderly” and in the public discourse, a clear division of ages was promoted, separating the young from the old. However, the overall appraisal of COVID-19 public health practices aiming at older people was framed by public health experts and politicians as playing a functional and necessary role in protecting vulnerable older people. Gerontologists warned that such wholesale stigmatization promotes ageism and called, in academic articles, to “avoid ageism and foster intergenerational solidarity” (Ayalon et al., 2020). Other gerontologists, like Prof. Rabieh Khalaila, were more critical of the situation, accusing that “in the first and second waves [of COVID-19], we saw that the human rights of the elderly were harmed by public health policies infected with paternalistic overprotection.”6 In a recent newsletter of the Israeli Center for Population Aging,7 Prof. Liat Ayalon, one of the leading social gerontologists in the country, was asked what she sees as the consequences, challenges, and opportunities of the coronavirus pandemic for the  http://bioethicsnews.zefat.ac.il/inner.aspx?id=443&cat=77.  Newsletter of the Israeli Center for Population Aging, 2021, July, #48 (in Hebrew). https://www. cdc.gov/aging/covid19/covid19-older-adults.html#:~:text=Increased%20Risk%20of%20 Severe%20Illness%20from%20COVID%2D19,Older%20adults%20are&text=The%20risk%20 increases%20for%20people,having%20certain%20und erlying%20medical%20conditions. 6 7

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older population in Israel and the world. Her response is worth citing in detail as it captures the inherent ambivalence of gerontology in the face of the pandemic and its containment: Let’s start with the fact that Coronavirus is an age-related disease—they kept explaining to us how actually age is a risk factor for death and serious illness. Although there were those who opposed it, as of today this is what the research says: that age is one of the risk factors and not only the health condition. It changes our thinking about old age, because even though gerontologists say it’s not just age, there is variation and heterogeneity and it is more complex, still age is a risk factor. This situation has created a lot of confusion and difficulty, and also difficulty in the message itself. I think the message telling people: ‘You are at risk because of your age’ is a problematic message in certain respects. On the one hand, we know that a message was needed so that people know they need to be careful, and on the other hand such a message is like a self-fulfilling prophecy. When you put the elderly in a risk group, you actually make them a disadvantaged group.

In her ensuing comments, Ayalon stresses the need to find a balance between overprotection and solidarity: At the beginning of the epidemic, we were unable to find a balance and there were very problematic messages telling us to stay away from our grandchildren, not being together, severing an intergenerational connection… Along the way there were changes for the better. For example, institutions for long-term care closed everything in abysmal fear to the point of violating the rights of the tenants, but later changed the policy for the better. I think the complexity is now to learn how we move on from here with the very problematic behaviors that were suddenly allowed, under the cover of coronavirus, like the denial of rights, or the saying that old people are not allowed to leave the house. How do we continue? Moving on and realizing that what we are doing is problematic, that protecting only the body and not the mind does not work. All of these are challenges, but I do think that Covid brought the issue of old age to the headlines, and this is an advantage that you need to know how to leverage… For example, in terms of the question what we are doing in a situation of scarce resources, we saw that Israel behaved affirmatively with the vaccines. It prioritized the older population. This didn’t happen everywhere. There were countries, such as China, where older people were not given the opportunity to get vaccinated. So I think it is possible to conclude that there were processes, some of which are better and some of which are less good, but the topic of old age should be kept on the agenda without constantly talking about a weakened and vulnerable population.

Medical ethicists, while joining the call to promote solidarity, usually collaborated with the Establishment in stressing the pros over the cons of COVID-19 measures for older people. This stance is represented by Israeli medical ethicists Mark Clarfield and Alan Jotkowitz (2020). They start by explaining that unfortunately, and “despite the wishful thinking of many older persons and some mistaken authorities,” the facts show that the older one is, the higher the risk even when controlling for various relevant co-morbidities. It is thus, according to them, a myth that a healthy older person can be at lower risk from COVID-19 than younger people with comorbidities. The authors cite the American Centers for Disease Control (CDC) as substantiating the claim that old age is a risk factor for COVID-19 risk. Indeed, the CDC website warns that “older adults are more likely to get very sick from COVID-19. Getting very sick means that older adults with COVID-19 might need hospitalization, intensive care, or a ventilator to help them breathe, or they might

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even die. The risk increases for people in their 50s and increases in 60s, 70s, and 80s. People 85 and older are the most likely to get very sick.”15 Later on, CDC removed the specific age threshold from the older adult classification. CDC now warns that among adults, risk increases steadily as you age, and it is not just those over the age of 65 who are at increased risk for severe illness. This statistical association is perhaps not surprising considering that age is an independent risk factor for severe illness in general, but risk in older adults is also in part related to the increased likelihood that older adults also have underlying medical conditions. In the public’s view, this discourse of statistical association was often mixed with a discourse of causality. In addressing the medical ethics of autonomy versus paternalism as illustrated in the context of older people isolation policies, Clarfield and Jotkowitz (2020) reach the conclusion that older persons or anyone with other risk factors could ideally be free to take their own decision, “however, as we are now riding a second wave, this argument (supporting autonomy) seems much less valid in that it will also be crucial to protect the stock of hospital and ICU beds so that they would be available for as many as possible—young and old. In such a case it may well become necessary to be stricter in regulations taking distributive justice into account by enforcing isolation of all high-risk groups, older persons among them” (p. 6). This argumentation is a sad demonstration of how from a public health perspective, the pursuit of individual choice is often only possible where collective capacity allows it to occur. To begin to illustrate the paternalism of this argument, consider, according to the same logic, also isolating cancer and diabetes patients due to their higher risk for COVID-19, so that their “irresponsible behavior” should not result in clogging ICUs. The proponents of benevolent ageism also failed to anticipate how sequestration exposed residents to COVID-19 in long-term care settings where, as we saw, they were concentrated and infected in large numbers. The authors even go further to suggest the possible need for ICU/ventilation triage: Should the present second wave tower high enough to threaten to overwhelm Israel’s limited supply of ICU and ventilator stock (as was observed in Italy, Spain and NY State several months ago), the need for difficult choices will inevitably arise. Much has been written about the vexed subject of ventilator triage… Should they wish, and we believe many might elect to do so, a significant number of older persons could voluntarily avoid ending up a triage case or at least ensure clarity relating to their wishes should they reach such a fork in the road. In a thoughtful piece in the NEJM, Aronson recently offered, ‘I know many happy engaged elders in their 70s, 80s, 90s, and 100s … who would not want to be put on a respirator … Patients and [the US] health care system would be better served if all adults and elders use some of the spare time created by our new, home–confined lives to discuss and document their care preferences, whether the goal is aggressive, supportive or palliative care.’ Unfortunately, Israel is still quite far behind other industrialized countries in this domain, only recently beginning any discussions on the possibility of ‘a good death.’

Individual older people who wish, out of their own free will, to avoid triaging, should evidently be respected. For example, in a media interview the 83-year-old famous Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua claimed that “it is clear that in every country Covid-19 hurts the weak more than the strong. And there is also some harm to the

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elderly, which is actually a consoling harm, that it does not kill children and young people—so at least it gives some kind of proportion. I, as an 83-year-old man, am ready and prepared to die if it is in the place of a young person, from my family or not from my family. I accept this judgment, and even with satisfaction. This is one thing in which I see that this epidemic still has some compassion. The young are really the future.”8 Such individual beliefs are legitimate but cannot be used to draw any collective or objective conclusions. However, this is not the core argument of Clarfield and Jotkowitz (2020). Their “soft utilitarianism” downplays the autonomous desires of older people for the sake of what promises the greatest good to the greatest number. Such a utilitarian public health perspective carries not-so-soft implications for strengthening the stigmatization, seclusion, and racialization of older people, especially in times of emergency. A distinct critical voice in the Israeli public discussion was that of Zulat (Hebrew for: the Other) Institute for Equality and Human Rights. Given the high proportion of old people among COVID-19 patients and those who died from the coronavirus in the first wave of the epidemic, Zulat Institute convened in July–August 2020 a team of Israeli experts, led by Dr. Carmel Shalev, to examine the government’s policies in relation to the Corona disease among the elderly in Israel and these policies’ impact on human rights (Zulat, 2020). The report stresses that the human rights of the elderly were indeed jeopardized. It argues that in sheltered housing, strict restrictions were imposed on the freedom of elderly tenants to the point of “incarceration,” and visits by relatives were prohibited. In addition, elderly people in intuitions infected with the virus were automatically isolated, sometimes until they died. Old people also died at hospitals in isolation and loneliness, without relatives who were denied visitation. As for the majority of the elderly living in the community, the report accuses that the first-wave quarantine damaged the elderly’s well-being due to loneliness, without adequate reinforcement of welfare services. Many routine medical treatments and examinations were avoided for fear of contracting the virus. In general, according to most members of Zulat’s expert team, the COVID-19 policy regarding the elderly was characterized by intimidation and paternalistic overprotection, without a transparent and reliable evidence base. Although the elderly has been defined as a risk group to be protected, no plan has been made to prepare for the expected wave of illness in the winter to reduce the vulnerability of the elderly. The Zulat’s report summary raises criticism which is similar to what this essay has argued: “Imposing special restrictions on individuals and groups solely due to their chronological age violates human rights for respect and equality and constitutes prohibited age discrimination. Since man is a social creature by his very nature, death in solitude in a hospital, institution or at home, it is a serious violation of the human dignity of both the elders and their relatives” (Zulat, 2020: 5). While sharing this criticism, I attempt here to further provide it with an underlying anthropological

 Plotkin, Y. “A. B. Yehoshua: Ready to die, if it is instead of a young man.” Ynet 14.04.20. https:// www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-5713984,00.html. 8

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rationale, framing how it has become manifest, and how such violations of human rights and human dignity were taken-for-granted by politicians, public health experts, and the public at large. This was manifested, I argue, as part of the racial paradigm of old age, which was given legitimacy and prominence by the pandemic “state of emergency.” It was the result of the COVID-19 pandemic reversing the prevalent social paradigm of old age into its opposite biological counterpart. In a similar manner, the corporeal emphasis as the one and only emphasis in “protecting” the elderly from COVID-19, manifested in bodily practices such as distancing, isolation, masking, and hygiene maintenance, was not coincidental. Of course, it was important in itself, but its singularity highlighted what was glaringly lacking: treating elders as autonomous partners. This was yet another symptom of the prominence of the racist paradigm. Older people, reduced to an isolated bodily existence without voice or autonomy, were denied the right to consider for themselves what degree of risk they are willing to expose themselves to. The racist paradigm, evidently, does not stop at isolation. When older people in the pandemic are stigmatized under the “vulnerability narrative” (Cohn-Schwartz & Ayalon, 2021), this leads to over-protection. However, with the addition of the “burden narrative” flourishing as a result of an overwhelmed health care system that cannot provide adequate care to all (Ayalon et al., 2020; Ayalon, 2020), older people are logically degraded to the status of “surplus weight.” This extreme realization of the vulnerability narrative has led, in some countries, to implementing an age limit for intensive care treatment or a ventilator machine (Truog et al., 2020). This practice highlights perhaps the most extreme indication of the COVID-19-induced racialized devaluation of old age.

Chapter 4

COVID-19 and Older People Around the World: A Global Discourse of Stigmatization

Around the world, many people viewed COVID-19 as an “older adult” problem (Fraser et al., 2020). As Lichtenstein (2021: 2) explains, “from health advisories on age vulnerability, to the ghettoizing of older adults for risk mitigation, ageist rhetoric has been a dominant theme for pandemic control.” As politicians around the world were getting anxious to restart the economy after lockdown, the confinement and death of the elderly was often implicitly, and at times explicitly, cast as a trade-­ off, a price to be paid for saving the economy (Pittis, 2020; Bass, 2020). We can recall here the lieutenant governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, who told Fox News in March 2020 that “he would rather die than see public health measures damage the US economy and that he believed ‘lots of grandparents’ across the country would agree with him” (Beckett, 2020a, b). He continued to praise Donald Trump’s focus on the economy, stating that he does not want “the whole country to be sacrificed” and, as someone who was turning 70, “he was in the high-risk group, but he was willing to give up his life for his six grandchildren” (ibid.). This sacrificial logic also saw the willingness (both explicit and implicit) of some states and countries to accept the death of the elderly and the sick in the quest for “herd” immunity as an alternative to closing their economies. A San Francisco Bay area planning official, Kenneth Turnage II, planning commission chair for the exurban city of Antioch, infamously wrote (on April 23, 2020, on his Facebook page) that I am sorry but this [epidemic] would fix what is a significant burden on our society and resources that can be used. In my opinion we need to adapt to a herd mentality. A herd gathers it [sic] ranks, it allows the sick, the old, the injured to meet its natural course in nature.

Turnage later deleted the post but refused to resign or back down from his comments. During a two-hour Council meeting held on Zoom, Turnage said his personal opinion had no bearing on his duties as a planning commissioner and that removing him would violate his freedom of speech. But city officials countered that his posting caused a loss in confidence and created a disruption to the city. After the council stripped him of his post, Turnage interestingly said that if residents had lost © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 H. Hazan, Age into Race, International Perspectives on Aging 38, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40669-0_4

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confidence in him, “that’s their opinion and I can’t help that […] It’s not like it used to be,” he lamented, “when you could have an opinion, talk about it and then sit down and have a beer together and talk about football.” Advocating that we “let nature run its course,” the COVID-19 pandemic here offers a corrective and natural action, as another US politician commented, to “reduce burdens in our defunct Social Security System, health care cost (once the wave subsided), make jobs available for others and it would also free up housing in which we are in dire need” (quoted in Law, 2020). As Cohen (2020) aptly summarizes: “In these pandemic times, the mass fatality of the old could be given over to nature in order to make a racialized claim for culling the herd.”

“The Boomer Remover” “Boomer remover,” “The old ones spoil the statistics,” “Stay home, save grandma”— these are just some of the phrases that have been used in public discourse when it comes to the description of the Sars-CoV-2 virus with relation to older adults (Kornadt et  al., 2021). Ranging from outright discrimination (prioritizing life-­ saving treatment on the basis of chronological age) to well-meant forms of patronizing such as strongly advising older people to self-isolate indefinitely, regardless of health status, these narratives portrayed older people as homogeneously weak and in need to be protected from the consequences of the pandemic. At the same time, there were discussions as to how the protection of this supposedly most vulnerable population placed a strain on younger people, who, despite their statistically lower likeliness of going through a severe course of the disease, have to adhere to strict guidelines, relinquishing their freedom and liberties for the sake of the older ones. Initial media reporting of the COVID-19 crisis in Britain made reference to the tenor of conversations in government circles in relation to the impact of the virus on the elderly population in particular and a policy of herd immunity: “The report claimed that at one private event at the end of February, Cummings outlined then government’s strategy at the time in a way that was summarized by some present as “herd immunity, protect the economy, and if that means some pensioners die, too bad.”1 In addition, the excess deaths of 125,000 people in the UK by March 2021 meant that the Treasury would have saved more than £1.5 billion in state pension payments in 2022.2 Other ageist phrases and messages were also heard from policymakers and heads of state in Israel and around the world. Thus, for example, the first statement of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson, was: “business as usual” while he suggested that the elderly aged 70 and over should isolate themselves for  https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/mar/22/no-10-denies-claim-dominiccummingsargued-to-let-old-people-die. 2  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/12/covid-crisis-social-care-elderlypeople. 1

Triaging

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4 months, so that everyone else would continue with a routine of life. Indeed, in the United Kingdom, from March 30 to May 1, 2020, Public Health England (2020a) provided social distancing guidance for those aged 70 or older, regardless of medical conditions, which was predominantly social distancing with and within their household. Further guidance included the need to significantly limit face-to-face interactions with friends and family, arrange deliveries of food, medicines, and essential services, and the access of medical assistance remotely with the postponement of medical appointments. The only reason for leaving the house was to take daily exercise. For those over the age of 70, “shielding” or “cocooning” was recommended, with the advice not to leave home for any reason until the end of June 2020. Amended guidance published by Public Health England (2020b) on May 11, 2020, reinforced this message. Worldwide, similar recommendations have been implemented for those aged 70 and older. Recommendations have been widely distributed by governments through social media, and this may have both a practical and emotional impact on older people who are required to social distance or isolate due to their higher risk of mortality. The closing of the elderly in their homes for several months was also heard from the governor of Texas in the United States who asked to allow the young to continue their daily routine, arguing that “the elderly have already lived their lives and now it is time for them to retire,” thinking that the elderly live on their pension funds, and that they will not experience the farreaching economic consequences that follow social isolation (Fernandez & Montgomery, 2020). A similar statement was made by the former Director General of the Ministry of Health in Israel, who stated: “for a few people, whose expected life expectancy is not particularly high, they do not destroy a country” and “the country should sacrifice these people” (Mako, March 10, 2020). Also, in other countries, such as Italy, professional organizations in the health system have stated the need to establish an age limit for ventilation and hospitalization of patients in intensive care units in order to save resources for the benefit of people whose chances of survival are higher or who have more years left to live (Vergano et al., 2020). An example of this from Italy is the release of “ethical” guidelines for the allocation of treatment in exceptional resource-limited situations by the Italian Society of Anesthesia, Analgesia, and Intensive Care (SIAARTI). The SIAARTI guidelines suggest that an age limit may need to be set for admission into intensive care (Cesari & Proietti, 2020).

Triaging In Italy, early triage excluding severely ill older persons from respirator access was widely publicized. Cohen (2020) cites two Italian geriatricians who explicitly used the figure of gerocide in the pandemic’s first months to argue that Italian national unpreparedness in old age medicine specifically targeted the old for COVID-19 death. Their argument is worth repeating here in detail. Adriana Servello and Ettorre Evaristo wrote that the older adult:

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4  COVID-19 and Older People Around the World: A Global Discourse of Stigmatization became the “Achille’s heel” of Italy and, in some cases, our “Trojan Horse.” Since the outbreak of COVID-19, we have heard about patients who had been hospitalized on regular wards for days or weeks although they were actually affected by COVID-19 … as their symptoms were consistent with their condition as geriatric patients. We were unprepared for this situation and we were unable to plan dedicated facilities and staff adequately trained to manage the need for assistance of the geriatric population during a pandemic. … In the most difficult phase of the outbreak many of them died alone … following the heartbreaking impossibility of being taken care of in the ways and times necessary for a geriatric subject. (Servello & Evaristo, 2020)

It may seem logical and even obvious that in pandemic settings, as on the battlefield, there must be prioritized triaging. Many states have adopted such utilitarian guidelines, including the state of Washington, cited in a complaint by disability groups because Washington’s official guidelines recommended giving limited resources only to younger, healthier people, not to older patients. Alabama has specified that people with intellectual disabilities “are unlikely candidates for ventilator support,” while Tennessee has excluded from critical care people with spinal muscular atrophy who need assistance with activities of daily living.3 As with the social and political critiques of utilitarianism, one might want to be skeptical of any “greatest good for the greatest number” argument. While founding texts of utilitarian philosophers usually grounded their arguments on economic principles, current applications fall prey to simple analogies. Disease is translated to discussions about health. Health is notoriously hard to define, but healthier patients become the priority. The ideology of health is deeply imbued with ableist notions of the normal and the abnormal.

Nursing Care As we already saw, these long-term, for-profit institutions for elderly care were uniquely positioned to make decisions about who lives and who dies. The social and medical forces at work clearly have placed these lives at the bottom of lives worth living. Visitors to aged care homes were officially banned in the United States. An official statement by the US Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services warned that “All visitors are to be restricted, effective immediately, with exceptions for compassionate care, such as end of life situations” (Lichtenstein, 2021: 4). The aged care association followed, stating that they are on the front line of the COVID-19 virus, with banning visitors a difficult—but necessary—step to protect residents. Complaints by family members quickly followed but to no avail: “I don’t feel like my mother’s life should be disposable” (letter to The Guardian, US Edition, April 27, 2020); “I’m concerned that the loneliness and helplessness will kill her quicker than the virus” (letter to The New  York Times, March 10, 2020; quotes cited in Lichtenstein, 2021).

 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/23/opinion/coronavirus-ventilators-triage-disability.html.

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The governments of Australia and the United Kingdom permitted family visits to some extent. Australia’s low infection rate could account for the difference in that country. The official policy was one visit per resident per day in own room (up to two people per time). Advocating this officially, the Australian Prime Minister said: “Don’t lock aged care residents away from their families. It was never the national cabinet’s advice to shut people off or to lock them away in their rooms” (Prime Minister Scott Morrison, quoted in The Age, April 21, 2020). However, despite the government’s permission, the aged care industry independently instituted a total ban on visits. Aged care managers said they had no intention of lifting the ban on visits from relatives since the risks were too great. On April 15, 2020, the French Senate accepted the proposal made by the President of the Scientific Council for COVID-19, which called for an extension of the confinement only for people over 65 years of age (Barth et al., 2021). Older adults felt discriminated against by these announcements: “When they said that the older adults were not allowed to go out. We’re not pests! We’re old enough to know what to do!” As Barth et al. (2021) who cite this respondent show, most younger study participants (under 70 years old) did not view themselves as “older adults”: “When they started talking about the end of quarantine, I said to myself” ah shit, I’m in it! “I wanted to tell myself that I wasn’t concerned.” (François); “I don’t feel old. I ride my bike and last summer, my daughter called me for her moving day, to help her carry things!” (Eric). Based on these and similar statements made by younger participants, consideration of “older adults” as one homogenous group did not correspond to how they felt they should be treated in reality. Most older adult participants in the study found the most difficult part of the COVID-19 pandemic was not the discrimination based on their age, but the isolation they experienced. What they missed the most was seeing their children and grandchildren. The older adult participants longed for shared intergenerational moments: “Jérôme, my son, I told him as soon as you can get out, your first visit will be for me […] Vanessa, my granddaughter, she lived with me during her studies, I miss her” (Marie); “For us, the most difficult thing is that we don’t see our children and grandchildren anymore. We deal with the rest [of the pandemic].” (François). The United Kingdom had no formal policy on the issue of confinement, and Prime Minister Boris Johnson explained that “healthy relatives can visit elderly care home residents” (Boris Johnson, quoted in Daily Mail, March 14, 2020). However, the United Kingdom’s aged care industry rejected the government’s decision to allow healthy visitors, and banned everyone without exception, explaining this was a preventative measure. In addition, the British government had become aware of the importance of finding language that would encourage compliance with COVID-19 restrictions on public behavior and often relied on ambiguous metaphor to achieve this objective by appealing to the moral frame of care. A central metaphor in its communication strategy was that of “cocoon,” beginning March 1, 2020. On June 29, 2020, the UK government issued a document entitled “Guidance on cocooning to protect people over 70 years and those extremely medically vulnerable from COVID-19—updated guidance.” “Cocoon” was offered as a positive concept

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to encourage the elderly to protect themselves from infection by staying indoors. Critical comments regarding the “cocoon” concept quickly followed: I notice that this is beginning—in the case of the elderly—to morph into the idea of “cocooning,” another suspicious expression which originally applied to insects. To act like an insect might be safer than membership of a herd but the idea of a cocoon in its new linguistic use implies a “wake-up” time which some of those sleeping away may not ultimately enjoy.4

In terms of self-solation, Australian authorities expressed a strong recommendation for senior citizens to self-isolate at home: “The elderly should stay home and self-­ isolate to the maximum extent practical, no matter what their symptoms or situations are. It is for their own protection” (Prime Minister Scott Morrison, quoted by 7 News.com.au, March 29, 2020). In the United Kingdom, policy dictated that people over 70 must self-isolate for up to 4 months: “Pensioners will be told to stay in their homes for months as part of a ‘war-time-style’ isolation plan to combat the coronavirus” (Health Secretary Matt Hancock, quoted in The Sun News, March 14, 2020). And in the United States, the CDC stated that “older adults and people with underlying conditions should stay home as much as possible” (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], April 18, 2020). These policies were received with growing criticism from older people: “The possibility of long-term self-isolation for our age group is unprecedented and hugely concerning. The main feedback we have heard from our members covers multiple worries about the impact and indeed the feasibility of social distancing” (UK National Pensioners’ Convention website, March 18, 2020). The notorious concept of “herd immunity” also became a contentious policy with fierce debates. Proponents of herd immunity claimed that lockdowns to protect vulnerable people were not worth the cost to society. Herd immunity logic was underpinned by the assumption that COVID-19 should be allowed to run its course. The “herd” of survivors (presumed to be immune) presumably did not have to include older people. It was a revival of the pseudo-Darwinian logic of “survival of the fittest.” “Boomer Remover,” a mean nickname for the novel coronavirus COVID-19, began trending on Twitter during March 2020. The term has appeared in more than 65,000 tweets and referenced the higher mortality rate among older people infected with COVID-19—particularly among people over 60, including the Boomer Baby age cohort approximately between the ages of 56 and 74 (Whalen, 2020). The nickname is most often touted by teenagers. Notably, Gen Z and Millennials have adopted the term “OK boomer” to dismiss views more popular among older than younger people, including global warming minimization (Elliott, 2022). The hashtag #BoomerRemover highlights two prevalent ageist attitudes in the COVID-19 pandemic response. First, that older adults are “sitting ducks,” vulnerable and helpless against COVID-19. Second, and in contrast, that healthy younger adults may perceive themselves as invulnerable to COVID-19 and, as a result, may  Robert Fisk, The Independent, March 24, 2020.

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not realize the importance of following public health advice and policies on infection prevention. The problem, of course, relates to uncontrolled illness and death until (or if) immunity is achieved. As the United States belatedly imposed restrictions and lockdowns to flatten the curve of COVID-19 morbidity, President Trump urged American “warriors” to self-sacrifice for the economy (Nakamura, 2020). Which warriors would be sacrificed—that was clear, as we recall from the Texas official who proclaimed: “lots of grandparents would rather die than see health measures damage the US economy” (Beckett, 2020a, b). At US capitols, armed protesters demanded an end to lockdown orders, advocating herd immunity with signs saying: “My virus, my choice”; “My right to die”; “Sign up to die for the economy”; “Natural immunity over manmade poison”; and even “Sacrifice the weak”. The easing of state and municipal lockdowns left older adults to their own devices, perhaps to self-isolate indefinitely. While the United States and the United Kingdom as well as many other countries embraced “herd immunity” at least at the beginning of the pandemic, Australia rejected it for what it was—inhumane and morally unacceptable. Protecting lives was the more important goal in Australia, and a strictly universal lockdown was the way to achieve it. In Malaysia, old age homes became isolated with the enactment of the Movement Control Order (MCO) enforced on March 18, 2020 (Shah et al., 2020). Older adults were not allowed to have face-to-face contact with their family members out of fear that they may comprise at-risk individuals (Shah et al., 2020). In a study of old age home residents’ experiences, Chee (2020) cites the following typical assertions of anguish and fear made by residents: I can’t risk having to leave the home to seek treatment during COVID-19. […] I think about going to the hospital also feel scared. At my age, you have very little do so. With the imposed Movement Control Order, we can’t even leave the home or walk to the park. So, I try to keep busy by reading books, rest in bed or to help out chores to kill time. It can get lonely since I do not own a mobile phone. I sometimes try to exercise in whatever open space I can find since this home compound is a corner lot. […] I was more concerned about being hounded by other residents or being sent to the hospital for treatment. The living environment here is good but I don’t feel safe. A few months back I felt safe, but now, hard to say. The rules are flexible too, as long as we don’t utter bad words and create a negative atmosphere, we are free to move around on our own. What I worry about now is the disease, I watch the news, they said that it is harder for old people like us to survive the disease. I am suffering. I am unhappy. I don’t want to live that long. What is the point? I am surrounded by a group of old people, the oldest in her nineties, she is at least 30 years older than I am. The thought of having to spend another 30 years here was already bad enough, and now with COVID-19, no one knows what will happen. Take it from a ‘young’ older adult who is stuck here because I am half-paralyzed, I have absolutely nothing to look forward to. To put it simply, passing time became difficult. It’s like I’m useless. There is no sense of satisfaction and that was somewhat missing.

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Older adults in the Malaysian care homes developed signs of fatigue, stress, and paranoia throughout the lockdown period. Fearful of COVID-19, they developed a fear of communicating with others; complained about the shortage of face mask supplies and difficulty in breathing when worn for a prolonged period of time; and stressed the need to implement appropriate safety measures for caregivers and visitors. Participants described their aged care living environment as “confined in a crowded shrinking space” (Chee, 2020). Participants expressed feeling trapped and vulnerable. To reduce the risk of exposure and cross-infection, caregivers took additional precautionary measures before activities resumed, including avoiding crowded gatherings, minimizing physical contact, regular hand washing, and routine checks to ensure that all residents are healthy. Additional measures were also taken to prevent a possible deterioration in mental well-being by providing opportunities for older adults to make video calls and exchange photographs with their loved ones. In the Netherlands, around March 2020, residents of long-term care facilities were not allowed to leave their rooms, and visitors were not permitted. Staff members were generally very busy managing COVID-19 infections among inhabitants and there was a shortage of staff as a result of infections among them. Residents interviewed by Verhage et al. (2021) strongly emphasized their social isolation, as one resident reflected after 3 weeks of lockdown: “they probably haven’t forgotten me, but at the moment it gets to me. Though you really need that [attention] now, you are disconnected.” In general, residents tried to implement the imposed measures according to their interpretations: I am not going to think “I want this and I want that.” That is fooling yourself of course. Be realistic and follow the rules. And live by the rules you always had, your own rules I mean, then there is still something of your own [laughs]. (Male, 79, living together)

Following their own interpretations of measures was by some described as an act of solidarity: “If I buy groceries, I wear latex gloves and I bring my own shopping trolley, so the girls don’t have to clean it […] simple, daily things by which you indicate that you also think about others” (female, 72, living alone). Others, however, described how they experience anxiety despite preventive measures: I don’t have a piece of bread in the house, but I don’t dare to go out, because I am scared of dying and I live in fear of going out, because I might catch something. (Female, 79, living alone)

Some Dutch older adults described that the media representation of older adults as vulnerable made them angry: “At first, I was so outraged. When you are older, you are thus vulnerable. No, older people and vulnerable older people that is something else” (female, 73, married). Since they believed that age alone does not equal vulnerability, they experienced this ageism as disregarding the heterogeneity among older adults: Well, I find it a good thing that they represent older people as a vulnerable group. I think I am part of that group with 67 years. I am not sure, but … in my own perception I am not at all 67. I don’t feel I belong to this group. I just have to be careful. (Male, 67, married)

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However, opinions were diverse, which was reflected in their reactions to initiatives for older “vulnerable” people, for instance to a special “senior hour” in supermarkets: Oh no, I just do my groceries. […] I mean I know I am old, or at least older, but I do not go to those senior things of shops. No, not for me. What they [other age groups] do to older adults to enjoy themselves. (Female, 73, living alone)

In Spain, a geriatric emergency was been declared due to the high incidence of COVID-19 in older adults. This led to the implementation of specific actions for people aged over 65, including the regulation of restricted departure times for people over 70. Measures taken during confinement have forced changes in people’s daily routines and drastically reduced contact between people. Some of the older people interviewed by Jiménez-Etxebarria et al. (2021) in Spain expressed positive evaluation of the aid initiatives at both a private and public level during the confinement. On the negative side, the participants highlighted the overprotection of people, including discriminatory behaviors based on age, such as measures taken in the health system or the residential environment. Critics of COVID-19 policies in Canada, too, emphasized the long-term care crisis of the first year. Many homes across the country were unable to protect their residents. Of the more than 22,000 Canadians who have died of COVID-19, 55 percent were in long-term care.5 According to Cohen (2020), “mass death of institutionalized elderly in Québec, Canada, resulted from coronavirus-infected patients who were designated as ‘frail elderly’ and moved out of hospitals into nursing homes, to make respirators and beds available in hospitals for the ‘appropriately’ sick, creating conditions for amplified viral spread.” Freeman and Freeman (2020) note a similar failure to that of the initial Italian response, when acutely ill and chronically frail elderly were treated as a single population effectively marked for death. The Canadian long-term care system also had widespread problems, including accessing PPE, overcrowding, understaffing, and insufficient infection control. Some critics, like lawyer and seniors’ advocate Laura Tamblyn Watts describes what happened to seniors over the first year of COVID-19 as a “senicide.” Seniors who survived the first year of COVID-19 endured isolation and crushing loneliness. Did the use of prevention measures targeting long-term care (LTC) older residents influence their COVID-19 morbidity? Empirical comparison suggests that countries that implemented specific, mandatory prevention measures targeted to the LTC sector at the same time as their stay-at-home orders and closure of public places (Australia, Austria, the Netherlands, Hungary, Slovenia) had fewer COVID-19 infections and deaths in LTC (see Fig. 4.1). These prevention measures included immediate infection control measures, isolation wards, and additional supports for LTC workers such as restaffing, specialized teams, and personal protective equipment (PPE). Figure  4.1 (reproduced from the Canadian Institute for Health Information, 2020: 5) is based on a comparison between Australia, Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal,  h t t p s : / / w w w. c t v n e w s . c a / w 5 / o n e - y e a r - l a t e r - w h y - c a n a d a - s - c o v i d - 1 9 - c r i s i s is-being-called-a-senicide-1.5332262. 5

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Fig. 4.1  Impact of COVID-19 on long-term care (LTC) residents by level of policy response at the time of 1000 COVID-19 cases. Notes: LTC long-term care, PPE personal protective equipment. (Sources: Canadian Institute for Health Information, 2020. World Health Organization. COVID19 Health System Response Monitor. International Long-term care Policy Network. Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. AI Policy Observatory. North American Observatory on Health Systems and Policies)

Slovenia, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Countries are grouped according to which policy interventions were announced as mandatory at the time of a country’s first reported 1000 COVID-19 cases. Interpretation of this information needs to consider several reservations. This data represents a snapshot as of May 25, 2020, which was collected from official surveillance websites. It was in this beginning period of relative havoc that most measures were taken to reduce the impact of COVID-19 (quarantine, visit ban in nursing home, etc.) significantly influenced the lives of older adults. Reporting of COVID-19 cases and deaths in the LTC sector is not directly comparable due to different testing and reporting standards across countries, as well as to different definitions of LTC. In many countries, COVID-19 cases in this sector are underreported due to a lack of testing in care homes or lag times in reporting test results. The definition of LTC for COVID-19 reporting varies by country. For Canada, Hungary, France, and Belgium, LTC includes both residential facilities with 24-hour nursing care and facilities with fewer services, such as retirement homes and assisted-living facilities. Data for Germany and the Netherlands includes all communal institutions such as prisons, shelters, and homes for residents with disabilities in addition to assisted-living and residential care facilities. Data for Italy and Israel includes only those seniors’ homes with intensive nursing support. Data for Austria

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includes residences for residents with disabilities. Data for Australia, Ireland, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Slovenia, the United Kingdom, and the United States includes residential and nursing homes and skilled nursing facilities. In addition, information is not available at the country level for many factors that may influence COVID-19 outcomes in LTC. These factors include staff working at multiple sites, the density of the resident population in care homes, hospital transfer policies, and access to PPE. Policy implementation can vary substantially within countries as some of these measures may be applied at the local level only. Some regions or provinces may have acted earlier than the national announcement in order to better manage their own outbreaks; however, the category of policy response did not change as a whole for the country. At the end of the day, while targeted restrictions may have reduced COVID-19 morbidity in LTCs, and while these measures are meant to be protective for an age group at greater risk, the application of these measures to a specific age group without consultation of the affected group or consideration of the negative impacts of these protective measures on them can be considered ageist. The finding that more strict and targeted measures reduced morbidity suggests that authoritarian states are better able to protect their citizens from the existential threat posed by the virus, and their fellow citizens who carry it. They can intrude upon the private lives of their citizens with relative impunity, tracking their movements with mobile technology, and quarantining whole regions more effectively with the military than the Police. China inevitably comes to mind. Significantly, such authoritarian countries can do so without unravelling the social bonds which tie the nation together, thus preserving political order. But do we want to be part of such authoritarian regimes? Are they really in a better position to guarantee our human security? Measures to reduce the impacts of COVID-19 have significantly affected older adults, who paradoxically had little voice in these matters. In addition, these measures come with a toll. Quarantine and the isolation of the older adults, especially in institutional settings like nursing homes, can also lead to “syndrome de glissement” (“failure-to-thrive syndrome”). This French geriatric concept is a psychopathological mechanism close to depression and is often linked to unstimulating environments (Santini et  al., 2020). Forbidding people to go outside based only on chronological age, not the state of one’s health and resilience, is not only a form of ageism, but a major health risk for older adults. Older people with few social contacts have a higher mortality rate than people with many social contacts (Smith et al., 2020). To sum up, this chapter provided a cross-country review to broaden the scope of the discussion by looking at COVID-19 and older people around the world and demonstrating the global discourse of their stigmatization. Sadly, the differences between countries were mostly variations on the same theme. Old age home residents’ experiences around the world were quite similar, and unfortunate, during the COVID-19 pandemic, with comparable initial neglect of long-term care residents.

Chapter 5

Unmasked: Remarks on the Coronization of Culture

Old age has been cast in the COVID-19 pandemic as a silenced, ex-communicated category that crosses the Rubicon between the domain of speaking humans and the planet of tacit aliens, namely, the class of the limbo people, the sojourners of the liminal zone between life and non-life, the carriers of insufferable temporariness, irreversibility, and terminality. Thus, consigned to the land of questionable humans, the exiled/old were made to take a quantum leap from being victims of ageism which nevertheless wears the insignia of belonging to humanity, to becoming objects in a biological order rather than constructs of cultural imagination, a racialized species in its own right verging on the end of being human, neither human nor animal, not a ghost nor hominoid, neither an actor nor an actant; simply old, a creature dead alive, a specter of deadliness in a time of a deadly plague. The coronavirus storm blew away a seemingly clear sky of knowledge for a cloudy atmosphere of recondite comprehension. The old as a customary source and cause for this kind of nebulous grasp of life was not foreign to the turbulent experience of the Corona time. As such this rickety state of being old was put into the practice of racializing the elderly to befit their image of reluctantly belonging to the unfamiliarly intolerable, to the apartheid country of untouchables. Marking off the old as a race apart is tacitly and blatantly practiced through the execution of regimes of seclusion and exclusion. By the administration of selective temporal and spatial parameters of separation, the category of the old was racially classified as inhabiting a land of banishment designated for the sinlessly condemned such as refugees, the homeless, the certified mentally ill, the hospice bound terminally sick, and other classes of heterotopic inmates. In a word, those surviving in a state of exception in which the excommunicated could be socially sequestrated and expunged, while left to their destiny as mere biologically bare beings. As such their presence in the world is denied of a say, and in spite of some theoretical speculations that accord them a social standing of their own, their say is but a faint echo sounded by those whose speech circumscribes the counters and characteristics of the category. Like in other

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instances of subordinated races, the old is a category of the subaltern whose voice was robbed, manipulated, and distorted, thus rendering it clearly untranslatable. In the absence of an accountable voice, barely any negotiating power on the part of the disinherited and the disfranchised could be wielded to better their doomed situation. Untranslatability, therefore, serves as a prerequisite for identifying and demarcating a category as a distinguishable race with neither exit to flee nor a chance for a reversal of fortunes. Imagined races such as black people, Jews, and the old thus fall captive to a dire strait of no escape. Trapped in this subjugated of deemed position of deemed biological subordination, the racialized are marooned not only in a superimposed impregnable space but also are assumed to stand still in an immutable time zone. The old are stereotypically believed to live in a supposedly self-sufficient meaningful world of past memories, but nevertheless to exist in a presence of sheer subsistence, constantly encountering pressing exigencies of the here and now. Thus, the racially based biological is governed by inertia, and it is condemned to be at loggerheads with any linearly geared open-ended universe outside it. This state of racially circumscribed isolation is often put into practice by means of setting up special enclaves of inclusive exclusion. Thus, from black slavery as a dehumanized state of being through colonized geographies of segregation to concentration camps for the excommunicated, the operational spatialization of race sets impervious boundaries between those whose life is worthy of living and those whose life is not, between those who live in the time zone where transformation and conversion, history and legacy are allowed and encouraged to an out-of-time world where past and future are null and void. This lack of temporal commensurability interfacing the two modalities inevitably generates unbridgeable cohort lags and generation gaps resulting in gross misunderstandings, linguistic confusions, and cultural ruptures, not to mention flagrant animosity to the extent of dispossession and even annihilation. The Corona threw into relief this collision course by introducing a stark contrast between the category of the old conceived of as part of nature on the one hand and people as people still belonging to culture on the other. The former, being racially geared, are resistant to any translation endeavor, while the latter remains answerable to the colonizing rules of ageist translatability. Racism, therefore, spells a translation deadlock, whereas ageism signifies a form of distorted translation, however forced and false it might appear. The onslaught of the pandemic not only drove a wedge between the two perceptions but also made the divide between them insurmountable. It poignantly pointed to the morally contestable proposition that the category of old age only overlaps the community of the elderly and that the cultural construct of the old barely echoes the lived experience of being old. Ageism has been previously considered as different from other “-isms”, such as racism or sexism. Whereas other “-isms” involve bias against relatively stable subpopulations that do not vary across the life course, ageism involves a slant against a “moving target.” People belong to different age groups at different points in their lives and, thus, will be more or less likely to change positions, something which is

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not so common in the context of race or sex. Despite our denial, we are all old people in training, foreshadowing a future in the fold of that category. Nevertheless, to become old often means to become “the other” in Western society. However, the pandemic somehow increased the denial of the former and the othering of the latter. The pandemic provided a cultural frame that enabled the shift from ageism to age racism. It was an imagined transformation that transfigured old age into a separate biologically identifiable category, a different race that “we” are not and cannot be members of. The pandemic enabled such categorical transmutation free of moral guilt, justified and rationalized within a social problematization of committing to old age within a framework of protecting and shielding our grandmothers and grandfathers. However, under the guise of public health and rational economic management, a death verdict for older adults in long-term care homes was passed and inadvertently executed. In a recent study, Israeli old age scholar and ethnographer Galit Nimrod (2022) depicts a North American community of baby boomers who are committed and devoted to one life project, that is, to preserve and relive the lifestyle of the spirit of the time of the 60s’ hippie culture that formed and formatted their evergreen cohort consciousness. Thus, by transcending the biological boundaries of their contemporary age group, they hold time eternally still with flowers, music, pottery, and poetry in an ageless momentum of immemorable youth. Aside from keeping mortality at bay, their perennial happy hippieness wards off any suggestion of ageism from without and from within, thereby obviating apparent identification with the abominable age category of the old. This self-evident denial of old age should serve as a vantage point for considering the agelessness of old people as divorced from their socially imposed position as reluctant carriers of old age. This dialectically deceptive relationship is amply reflected in the current gerontological debate concerning ageism and its anti-ageist counter-stance as involving both an age category and those trapped in it. Thus, the predestined effect of old age as a culturally bound, historically constructed zeitgeist on flesh and blood humans otherwise labelled elderly turn into a kind of circular reasoning whereby the category and its presumed incumbents become mutually fungible and indistinguishable. Subsequently, the nexus of the category of the old and the individuals staged as its presenters molds them both as one indivisible mass. It takes an earth-shattering historical event to throw into relief the covert contours of the rupture that separates these two ontologically and epistemologically diverse objects of inquiry—a social construct and cunningly entangled humans. The age of Corona and its aftermath puts such misnomers into a critical test as it challenges the taken for granted identification between the old and the elderly. Anthropologically speaking, this double-edged perspective on the study of ageing would unfold two diverse, possible divorced, landscapes: the symbolic configuration of a cultural category dubbed old age versus the interactional and relational domain of encountering lived-in experiences, so-called old people.

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The Midlife Near-Sightedness of the Anthropology of Old Age So far, the focus of my criticism was how old age was racialized by midlife society in the wake of the pandemic. However, there is yet another context of neglect and blindness, which is the anthropology of ageing itself. This trusted source of purported objective knowledge in fact reproduces the near-sightedness and blind spots of midlife society which gives it credence and legitimacy. My criticism therefore needs to be extended in order to offer a reflection of the academic perspective from which it sprouts and with which it argues. Anthropology’s reluctance to adopt the uniqueness of old age as a valid and plausible disciplinary mission is worth reflecting on. The anthropological objective of this essay, therefore, is to bring to bear two schisms in the anthropological vista begotten by the Corona crisis. The first is presumed by the heuristic realization that the place of the elderly embedded in the category of the old has crucially and radically mutated in the wake of the pandemic from being part and parcel of us to becoming them, from the anti-ageist moral embrace of the familiar on the scale of humanity to the racist belligerence of treating them as a dubiously human foe. This is a move that spells a profound shift from the humanly accepted “we” to the non-humanly excepted “them” suggesting a repositioning on a racially charted spectrum. In our terms it is a metamorphosis from belonging to a culturally engineered age category to being appropriated and classified as an extra-cultural questionable human type. Subsequent to that upheaval in the perception of fitting to a normative order, the very understanding of the modern image of the Anthropos as an object for inquiry into the nature of humanity is dared. Likewise, some conventionally employed methodological apparatuses that modulate the anthropological observations of old age within the parameters of known and tried worldviews are rendered epistemologically inept. Consider, for example, age-­ related attitudes toward mortality and associated death anxiety. Here, the intercourse physiologically predestined and the socially constructed come into play. The aborted translation between the dynamic, knowable paradigm of ageism and the unknowable stagnant paradigm of racism is inherent in the debatable dictum that old age is an extra-cultural state of mindless mind beyond the comprehension of those who do not experience it and, therefore, are unable, unqualified, and unlicensed to credibly reflect upon it. In other words, there are two perceptions of time at play here, one that holds ageing as a processual cross-generational continuum, life span developmental script, whereas the other perspective singles out old age as an exclusively inimitable temporal realm. This duality mirrors the division between the durable and the terminal alongside the linearly sequential and the repetitiously cyclical. If old age falls under the category of this kind of exceptional state of consciousness, then it would be rendered untranslatable, hence indefinable, and unfathomable. The second schism rests on the realization that in the course of COVID-19 the wall between the biological and the cultural, the natural and the nurtured, has been re-erected under the auspices of the pandemic in a way that divides us and them, sending both virus and old age to cohabitate and mingle in a shared danger zone of

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sudden death, fatal illness, and infectious pollution. In other words, old age and the virus were made to occupy the same perilous space in the Corona uncharted map of the murky territory of dread and trepidation of the inscrutable other. Old age, being a muffled category of the unknowable, mutes its incumbents as their voice too gets lost in translation. Instead, the voice imputed to the elderly is one superimposed by their patronizing interlocuters. As long as the façade of appropriating old age into the framework of a continuous life course developmental model, such ageing in disguise (or better yet, the “Third Age”) could pass as a genuine reflection of the worldview of the old. However, when critical crisis such as the Corona pandemic strikes, the undercurrents of that inner hushed reality that lurks underneath the mask of ageing surface. Then, the otherwise veiled non-sharable and non-representational quiddity of old age as a unique state of being is exposed. This quest for translation has underpinned (or restricted) the academic evolution of anthropological gerontology. This very discipline is, to begin with, split between the more practically geared, care-providing gerontological project, and the more theoretically ingrained, and humanistically oriented, anthropology of old age. Yet even within the latter, the unending quest for translation has become a fundamental axis of theoretical discussions that appear to deny the very simple yet unacceptable proposition that old age is beyond translation. Instead, at least three competing models for managing the relationship between the interior and the external in later life have been propounded. My point is that such pre-occupation with managing appearances also reflects the midlife perspective of the primacy of this topic. Indeed, all these models are chiefly concerned with midlife anxieties and fantasies rather than with old age per se. The first model can be referred to as the notion of an “ageless self” (Kaufman, 1995). It reflects the midlife fantasy that in old age, the adult “persona” or social mask is finally replaced, overthrown, by culturally configurated statements of individuated or authentic self. The “false wrappings” of the persona are shed for a more developed state of psychological integration—in psychologist Erik Erikson’s influential view, Ego Integrity. It is the ultimate victory of the ageless “I” that, having finally assimilated the accumulated identities of the social “Me,” distills its inner sense of self before the end. It is also a victory of mind over body as continuity of identity is stressed despite the physical and social predicaments and transformations associated with growing old. Second, in Featherstone and Hepworth’s (1989, 1995) “mask of aging” view, old age provokes a lack of fit between physical appearance and the inner experience of self. While bodily deterioration increasingly signals “old age,” the inner experience may be one of passivity and becoming hidden from view. Once again, such rupture creates a need for self-management, also reflecting the midlife anxiety of being banned from engagement with consumer society and the multiplicity of lifestyles that it abundantly offers. Third, the notion of masquerade is drawn on to explicate the tension between the interior and external logics of adult ageing (Woodward, 1991, 1995; Biggs, 1997, 1999). Woodward’s feminist interest in masquerade highlights it as a performance that supports identity in a hostile (midlife, youth-trapped) environment, managing

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to preserve the self by submission to dominant social codes. As Biggs (2005: 125) argues, “while others are rarely unaware of the older woman’s presentation of a younger self, they go along with the disguise.” In Biggs’s view, if increased self-­ awareness cannot be safely expressed owing to age prejudice, it requires social masking until facilitative social environments are found that do not force it undercover. Although the contents of these conceptualizations vary, they all center on the need for self-management, driven by tensions between self-experiences, bodily aging, and social prejudice. Moreover, all these models reflect the deep-seated midlife anxiety to find a terminology that translates the inconsistencies and ambivalences spelled by old age. Anthropologically speaking, translation is made improbable when interlocution is rendered inertial, when liminality loses its dynamic potency, and when, to use Paul Stoller’s lingo, the transformational power of the between wanes. To turn to Vincent Crapanzano’s elaboration of the Moroccan concept of the Barzakh, that is, the interstice amidst times, once the space between silences dissipates and even the entry into dreamland is banned, no translation could possibly take place. So, let us scout this non-place where sounds do not turn into voices. In a way it is a call to speak of the unspeakable, as untranslatability like unknowability alludes to a contradiction in terms, namely, to contemplate and discuss something beyond the limits of discourse, a point of singularity, a void where sense becomes senseless. This epistemological non-sequitur is rooted in the double bind of belonging to two diametrically opposed worlds at once: the discipline of anthropology and the study of old age. The former necessitates translation as an indispensable means of spanning diverse cultural domains, thereby rendering any kind of otherness somewhat intelligible, while the latter encounters outwardly unintelligible others who arguably desiccate translation altogether. This reflects an ambivalent dialectic of the communication imperative on the one hand and the plight of failing to understand the incommunicado on the other. It calls for a tangled attempt at interfacing and interlacing distinct life worlds interweaved with their corresponding cosmologies and temporal orientations. The impasse of translation resists making sense in terms of another system of comprehension or extrapolation; refuses to defile the sacredness of the original text, as Walter Benjamin would have it, and to disclose and obscure it at the same time, as Jack Derrida would deconstruct it. The specter of untranslatability, therefore, haunts any act of translation. However, there seem to be an exception to this oxymoronic rule of translatable untranslatability, and that is the apparent incomprehensibility of the symbolic category of the old. In a death-repellent society where its elderly appointees are deployed as the buffer zone between the inexorable translatability of life and the willful untranslatability of non-life, they become ineffectual as subjects amenable and accountable for translation. This follows from contemporary prevalent ageist conceptions that hold old age as an omnipotent fable of inexpressible cerebral infirmity rather than a variegated epidemiological mirror image of reality. This imagery, particularly in its more advanced manifestations of ascribed mental malfunctioning, obtains unique

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figurative markers of a race apart enmeshed in its own state of consciousness or the lack of it, as entrenched in an outlandish country of still time and static space. Furthermore, in a culture that sanctifies progress tempered with the possibility of assumed reversibility, the status of the seemingly inalterable, irrevocable old, embodies and invokes both terror and fascination, thus planting the trope of the old in a taboo territory, a heterotopic enclave to be obdurately shunned, spurned, guarded, and surveilled from within and from without. In that respect the cultural depiction of the mentally frail old tags a murky blot on the landscape of proverbial others, the majority of whom though are deemed tamable, domesticated, and thus given to be translatable. Conversely, the unbridled savage old is debatably beyond translation, somehow pre, past, under, and outside the civilized order. As such it escapes the disciplinary anthropological gaze that incorporates even the most unyielding of others into what Norbert Elias coined as the civilizing process, simply dubbed by anthropologists as culture. The extra-cultural designation of the old also implies the denial of their memory. No wonder that memory among the old is regarded as either merely out of context reminiscing or lacking altogether due to attributed age-related, enforced pathologies. Ungraspable and incomprehensible, memory in old age is deemed fading and ending as a template for constituting atemporal holding, selfhood, and social identity. Such lack of memory could be associated with the post-civilized state phrased by Elias as the “loneliness of the dying.” It evokes a sense of otherness beyond the articulated reach and grasp of anthropologists’ passion and ambition for translation at all costs, even at the expense of losing sight of the source material itself as versed and styled in ethnography. Thus, in the case of accounting for the conduct of and the communication with the old, the anthropologist as a translator would often pick out the option of a suspicion of betraying the authenticity of the field rather than being failingly and painfully faithful to it; to keep allegiance to the college of colleagues rather than to the fellowship forged in the field. The result of such misconception could be a fake translation that not only fractures the credo of the anthropological project, but also averts the vital grain of translatability, namely, the feasibility of a candid dialogue between ethnographer and field partner, or likewise between any pair of similarly frustrated conversationalists such as physician and patient, teacher and student, writer and reader, speaker and listener. Otherwise coined “the crisis of representation,” this dialogical impasse is at the core of the conundrum of the untranslated, and in our case of the untranslatable. The anthropologist is ideally considered an omnipotent translator of others; that whose main preoccupation is with the linguistic-metaphorical devices employed to cogently transmute one cultural habitus into another. Then why and how could such a dialogue be aborted and what prevents two discourses from cultivating a shared arena of mutually intelligible symbolic exchange and dyadic interplay? The following sketches a number of possible conditions for being lost in translation with the danger of untranslatability forever looming on the horizon of anthropological practice, thus sapping the whole of the representational endeavor. The foremost condition is the inability to credibly transfer one set of metaphors into another. Such critical incommensurability might occur when the signifying foundation of two

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cultural codes reflect unrelated or even non-relatable spatiotemporal scopes, and hence sets them apart as mutually exclusive epistemic realms: two languages with no common generative grammar. Under such scarce circumstances the ethnographic liaison is rendered unattainable. In the absence of a modicum of overlapping grounds of joint meaningfulness even the most virtuoso among anthropological conjurers would not be able invoke the spirit of common experience out of nothing. In the absence of a recognizable other, translation loses its obliging or reluctant addressee, and is thus rendered futile and ineffectual. In other words, where no others are present, a reason for bridging real or imagined gaps between us and them no longer prevails; in fact, both concepts turn to be of no consequence. Such conditions of annulling that binary opposition also arise when hybridizing globalism staggers cultural boundaries while invoking visions of the utopian emergence of a cosmopolitan universe, as wished-for by some. Subsequently, the notion of otherness is revoked altogether and the need for translation is deemed dubious if not superfluous. Contrary to the futuristic global ethics of the redundancy of translation, the reality of failing to communicate cross-culturally is glaringly extant in the gap inherent within intergenerational relationships. The splitting force of the cohort lag effect generates cultural autism of sorts, a state of critical misunderstanding across self-­ conscious generations that cripples any attempt at exchanging and translating historically contingent cultural paradigms. A case for the untranslatability of generations apart rests not only on culturally stipulated linguistic discrepancies, but also on structures of dependence that replicate and engender diverse discourses of foundering conversation between the superordinate and the subordinate, or to use Edward Said’s vocabulary in his posthumously published essay on late style regarding the position of the dispossessed old in modern society—the exiling and the exiled. This kind of post-colonial idiom apparently puts the old on a par with other categories of outcasts, or as sociologist Zygmunt Bauman coined them: “wasted lives.” Still, this analogy ignores the fact that unlike other politically discarded groups the old are denied the right to resist, to reverse their fortune, and to be reckoned with, not even by supposedly pertinent academic disciplines such as post-­ colonial anthropology which, nevertheless, welcomes into its fold any other category of politically disqualified others. Testimony to this reluctance to adopt the uniqueness of old age as a legitimate and plausible disciplinary mission is the dearth of late life ethnographic accounts. The very few and far between that dare plough such arid fields often imply a denial of the research topic or a strong sense of unease at the ethnographic brinks they reach when delving into the alleged experience of aging. Denial of the subject matter is, for example, illustrated by all those ethnographic texts which, following run-­ off the-mill stereotypes, reduce old age to welfare topics and social problems, while manuscripts like that by Laurence Cohen, “No Aging in India,” completely do away with the Western concept of culturally distinct aging. The ethnographic distress and confusion of playing anthrophony with old age is embedded in the grappling with the predicaments of managing time in old age and with the ethnographer’s loss of authority in the authorship of discordant temporalities. Perplexing monograph titles

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such as “The Ends of Time,” “Uneasy Endings,” “Breaking the Watch,” “Number Our Days,” and “The Limbo People” reflect both the prominent place of time and its convolutions in reporting aging alongside the trap that such ethnographic accounts set for accounting for aging. Desperate to fill the gap between the race for a monograph and the lack of ethnography, anthropologists shift from impressionism to expressionism by a recourse to armchair methods of auto-ethnographic or even fictional writing of culture such as the making up of feigned characters that are designated to inhabit and mediate both worlds. As for me, should you wonder, I concede an a priori defeat and indulge in doing anthropology of failed ethnography including my own, searching to no avail for a point of temporal coupling and departure that might throw into relief the metacultural essence of time, the embracing logic of divergent logics. A deadlocked conversation such as the following could demonstrate that sense of ethnographic obstruction and destruction: Ethnographer: Could you tell me your life story? Interviewee: There is nothing to tell, everything is disconnected. Ethnographer: What do you hope for in the future? Interviewee: Nothing, the future is over. All my life chapters are empty, all my life. Ethnographer: Could you tell me what you mean? Interviewee: Just nothing, nothing at all. That nous of emptiness is the only point of juxtaposed temporalities that draw the anthropological draftswoman or draftsman back to the ethnographic drawing board, thus rendering otherness other-lessness, beyond charting and delineating; and yet its uncanny presence overshadows any ethnographic encounter with an air of imminent breakdown. Is there a way for anthropological gerontology to bear witness to the hearing of that muffled authentic sound of so-called deep old age from beyond? I have suggested that such experience looms outside the safe zone of familiar discourse. This can be a paralyzing assertion since it leaves us with no options, save for the recognition of our own limits. On the other hand, the potential option of substituting the eager anthropological preoccupation with people, problems, and images for the unveiled logic inherent in the matchless and unacquainted state of being terminally old could posit the study of that category at the forefront of the intellectual pursuit of sensing the edges of the social, the cultural, the psychological, and ultimately the human frontiers where the untranslatable overrides the translatable. This may open up the option of reconsidering older people as postmodern pioneers. Indeed, deep old age lies further from the presumption of communication, the corrective power of therapy as well as of prevention. Subsequently, it speaks in a language deemed unworthy of translation or even dangerously so, for translation turns the far removed other into a closely menacing stranger. This potentially polluting category is often disparaged by present-day culture and its constructionist devices, thus regarded by many as a form of human obsolescence, ghostly or

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zombified existence unfit for modern consumption and academic digestion. In other words, it is a socially reckoned extra-cultural, non-transformable category at the margins of known humanness. What are, then, these translation-resistant seemingly extra-cultural realities? Can they be recognized and monitored? Are we dealing with a kind of exclusion which cannot be subject to inclusion by any means, an anthropological blind-spot that obscures the unknown by rendering it unknowable? This test could be conventionally phrased in terms of the discourse of the boundaries of otherness: that is, which categories are reasoned as acceptable, and which are rejected. Whose voice is heard, and whose voice must be elicited and made to be audible? Prevailing winds of post-colonialism, feminism, cosmopolitanism, and globalization have greatly expanded the range of sounds emanating from the recognized and authorized regions of otherness. Illegitimate otherness, however, is that whose voice is mute, not necessarily due to repression and silencing, but rather because the frequencies of its audio-transmissions are not tuned to the receptors of the listeners. Inaccessibility to impervious alterity, therefore, signals the advent of respective impregnability of discrepant walled categories, and hence the inevitable infeasibility of translation. Incommunicable old age is but one example for such mutual impermeability. Anthropologists are well aware that any ethnographic transaction harbors the seed for its own destruction. Implicit at the core of the ethnographic encounter lies the dreaded yet expected possibility of the staggered feat of striking rapport, of reaching an interactional impasse, of grinding the ethnographic move to a halt. Driven by this constant apprehension, ethnographers have long been contending with the quandary of differing temporalities that account for the menacing emergence of unreachable otherness. “Time and the Other” as Johannes Fabian aptly put it, thus adding another layer to the multifaceted construction of cultural relativism and its alethic implications on the plausibility of translation. Consequently, the innermost core of ritual, the secret spell of witchcraft, the playfulness of those at the border of life, the elusive figure of the court jester, and the sanctification of national death are all anthropological black holes that barely emit some faint light of translatability. Don, however, in his shamanic touch, shows how to catch a glimpse of it, while magically deflecting it to anthropological reflections. The common denominator apparently stringing all such translation-resistant provinces of seclusion is their presumed immutability, unyielding solidity, indestructability, and ultimately their shared yet divisive atemporality. This, together with their embedded mythic-like qualities, makes for the absence of lability of narrativity, for the amiss fluidity of storytelling, and for the wanting flux of historical sense from their midst, thus obviating any attempt at dialogical interpretation and translation. Consequently, without open-ended leeway for construal and construction facilitated by sequential causality and metaphoric imagination that expands and extends the scope of intertextual dialogue, no translation could conceivably and convincingly take place. In conclusion, when plateaus of divergent otherness are not coalesced and their synchronicity is frayed, the absence of their presence forestalls any suggestion of

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transition and transformation of any kind. This is where untranslatability becomes ineluctable, and its location, therefore, is at the critical turning point from transformability, transience, and liquidity into stillness, singularity, and quiddity. In other words, it is the Kafka-like metamorphosis of the lived in, the dynamic fluid temporality of us into the deadly, flowless, and frozen spatiality of them. This spells the incapacity to convert one state of the matter to another, to travel from one time zone to the next, to move from time to time, if possible. Perhaps we can still take comfort in the philosophy of old age. Thus, philosopher David Norton suggests that “where old age is judged by the criteria of maturation, it exhibits itself to be mere deterioration. But to him who will dispense with such criteria and look upon old age with fresh eyes, it displays evidence of a rebirth under novel criteria” (Norton, 1976: 165). If Norton is right, this explains why so many midlife anthropologies of old age are short-sighted. Intended as reports on others, they are self-reports on other parts of the personal life course likely to be subject to error. It is hard to enter the life world of a person at a different stage from oneself without considerable effort. As Biggs contends, “it may be as difficult for older persons to recognize discontinuity between current and preceding parts of their lives as it is for younger adults to understand a stage that has as yet not been experienced” (Biggs, 2005: 123). Yet recognition of difference should not always be a mirror image of the priorities of the life course the observer is currently in. If the COVID-19 storm showed us anything, it is that far more now depends on the degree to which intergenerational relations rest on a will to self-awareness and openness to interpersonal empathy.

The COVID-19 Revolution So far, I have focused on an alternative anthropology of ageing to explain why the pandemic induced a paradigm shift from ageism to racism. However, there are broader perspectives related to the cultural ramifications of the pandemic, not just for the elderly, or for their anthropologists. The COVID-19 pandemic has created a perfect storm for age discrimination. We began with data lending themselves to the simplistic interpretation that COVID-19 was itself “ageist,” with an increased coronavirus-­related mortality rate with age. During the first year of the pandemic there was a powerful discourse that younger people were paying the price for older adults, through physical distancing, reduced income, and other sacrifices. As millions of people lost their jobs, with fear of a global economic recession, a scapegoat was desperately needed. This social, medical, and economic crisis evolved against the backdrop of rapid growth in an ageing population. Abandoning the Baby Boomers was perhaps an extension of their being blamed for a myriad of social problems as the generation that took their children’s economic future. The COVID-19 crisis appeared to have intensified these generational divisions. From January to May 2020, there was a diversity of tweets that implied the life of older adults is less valuable, a reasonable sacrifice, or downplaying the pandemic because

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it mostly affects older adults, explicitly supporting the idea of just isolating older adults and other high-risk groups (Xiang et al., 2021). What are the implications of such deep-seated changes? They tell about a talk held in 1972 between the Chinese Foreign Minister, Zhou Enlai, and the American Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. Kissinger asked Zhou what he thought about the French Revolution and Zhou supposedly replied: It’s too early to tell. The chronicles of pandemics, like those of revolutions, show that their blowbacks bring on tectonic changes in space and time. Given that we are in the midst, or perhaps at the tentative end, of a pandemic, and 200 years down the road one doubts that we will be able to convene again to assess and contemplate the matter, we can only take a quick glimpse at a reality-in-the-making, a moment of occurrence that has left its imprint on humankind while expunging the human, perhaps already obsolete, from its midst. If so, what follows is an invitation to look over our shoulder in a flash at a then-uncoded experience of life that mutated, a life that became a horror story of sorts, verging on nightmare, terror, nullity, and loss of language and mind. A life that for many has become literally standing “at the edge of the void.” It is a moment of neither here nor there, in which the logic of life defers to an anti-logic of death, as Jean Améry wrote in his book on suicide. In other words, the world may have unwittingly experienced the brink of the overturning of its order and the ensuing categories that give it its structure, from a biological essence that surmounts social identity and revises the perception of the course of life, via the cracks that are radiating across the cultural infrastructure of trust, faith, and convention, to the rocking of orders of rule and governance and methods of deliberations and comportment amid the drama that reshuffled the systems of power and knowledge that determined our political and moral consciousness. Furthermore, the jaded world that the COVID-19 eruption brought in train was emptied of its precursor’s secularized and rational promises of redemption. Gone were objectives given to the pursuit of realistic or imagined attainment, dreams that come true in fact or in fiction, and adherence to plans that can plausibly be accomplished. In lieu of all these, the gap between real and desired has lost its validity, and thus too has collapsed the march of time that had been attuned by the tension between them. Linear time has become Godot-time—purposeless waiting in anticipation of the unknown. The complementary category of time, too, the circular time that goes around/comes around in the form of calendrical Sabbaths and holidays, and the mythical time, the sanctified narrative that becomes transcendental and self-perpetuating, has despaired of offering meaningful asylum from the shattering of the routine and foreseen course of life. Contesting the interwovenness of those three kinds of time—the linear, the circular, and the mythical—the zeitgeist of the coronavirus tipping point uncouples them, eroding each of them and all of them together: a zeitgeist of waking nightmare, a dream that plays out in another time and another place. Thus, true to the tradition of horror stories, the world has awakened to discover that suddenly it is in exile on its own soil, a refugee in a homeland that has become overnight a foreign and unknown “solitary land” (cf. Lev. 16:22), where the lands of

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the living became lands of death in one stroke. Or if we resort to a Kafkaesque metaphor: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect,” and from then on his/our life was made over unrecognizably, a trampled non-man replacing a trampling man. The shunned Kafkaesque insect reversed its antennae and became an uber-ruler. The age of the all-dominant human, the Anthropocene in which humankind became one more geological stratum of nature, has ended. The eruption of the post-Renaissance viral revolution dislodged the human from its place as the motive and generative force of the world, and a naughty strand of RNA that does what it evolutionarily pleases has anthropomorphized in its stead. Thus, the familiar has become alien, the proximate non-approximate, the systematic disarrayed, the comprehensible opaque, and the audible muffled. It is the flash of the thrust of the Robespierrean guillotine blade that transfigured Western history beyond recognition and made the French Revolution into something that started the count of time anew—and the coronavirus into the portent of an inversion that puts death before life. I wish to give the progression of this turnaround, in its initial manifestation as cognitive, economic, social, and cultural chaos, way beyond the designated destiny of the old, a name—Coronization—and to signpost it with markers as well, in order to introduce a bit of method into the madness, a touch of anthropological order into the catastrophic disorder of a disease that evolved from a medical incident into a global pandemic; a literally and figuratively viral phenomenon, biological and communicative, that spread through and infected the steady shrinking global village under the authority and in the service of the Internet, which has become an inescapable maze with neither a destination nor an exit, a new and unfamiliar paradigm of life that nevertheless, and for this reason, unifies and consolidates the nascent reality of living in a matrix of apparent absurdities. Perversely, this virtual common fate of all humanity, which embraces and entraps, has by wielding the sense of helplessness that spawned it shredded the cultural envelope of mundane values, norms, and rituals that generated the illusion of certainty, existential confidence, and control of the future. The pandemic, a decree of fate that defies bargaining and appeasement, rattled the pillars of personal and social time and transformed them into a Beckett-ian time of waiting, a mode of temporality deprived of interpersonal space, turning it into a mythical atemporal epoch. All those previously familiar and foreseeable life events now shed their expunged scripted scenarios and brought the sky of free movement and open borders down upon our heads, converting them into regimes of lockdowns, sieges, policing, and subversion of trust in the promises of a modern world that proved to be a false potion of control, sobriety, and rationality. Thus, too, toppled confidence in scientific rationality and its medical derivatives, which were found to be futile, in the nation-state, in the state’s chimerical representations of delivery of social services in response to its citizens’ distresses, and, above all, in the illusion of freedom of individuals and the ability to look ahead to desired goals and objectives. All these broken promises have cultivated fertile soil for the growth of alternative worldviews that supplant the mundane, the axiomatic, and the self-evident. Thus, a wide and inviting gap has opened up to admit an efflorescence of meaningless

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words, conspiracy and false theories, groundless rumors, and fake news of sundry kinds. Competing narratives in an all-accommodating postmodern spirit have vanished; in their stead is contestation over the validity for life and death of a single indivisible and uncompromising truth, a war to the finish over the meaning of the rationale of social order, its justness, its regulation under chaotic conditions, and the ability to control it. It is a stance taken in view of an uncertainty that carries theological indicators of compulsory heresy against the sanctuaries of the modernity religion of faith in progress, reason, and human beings’ accountability for their world and fate. If so, the coronavirus revolution is also a slap in the face of the god of modernity alongside the retreat and downfall of the Antichrist of modernity and postmodernity, both rendered null and void by the pandemic. Under these conditions of subversion of the base of knowledge and consciousness, the status of the priests of the churches of knowledge who mediate between belief in the verity of knowledge, and its producers, believers, and consumers, becomes dubious if not treacherous. Thus, doctors, scientists, researchers, experts, managers, and employers, and other servants of progress and of the sacraments of modernity, lose trust and faith in their role as prophets of decision making and risk-­ management under conditions of uncertainty. As the COVID-19 pandemic showed us, a distinct kind of trust in experts is needed when experts not only provide “objective” information and “scientific” data, but also play a political role in the formation of science-led policy. When public policy (e.g., in the form of public health) claims to follow the science, citizens are asked not just to believe what they are told, but to follow expert recommendations (Bennett, 2020; Mihelj et al., 2022). However, this leads inevitably to a clash of authority. As scientists become spokespersons of policy, they are urged by media people to provide predictions reflecting their expertise. However, this forces scientists out of the “comfort zone” of the lab and into a reality that is not amenable to scientific prediction because it is a turmoil of intervening variables. Instead of simply contending with medical uncertainty, experts sided with “regulatory science” to confront global health and public health uncertainty, with a lack of basic scientific knowledge about the disease and with a lack of knowledge over its transmission (Au & Eyal, 2022; Kelly et  al., 2020). As Gil Eyal argues (2022), the issue is mistrust in regulatory science, science that purports to regulate us. As Eyal describes, regulatory science facts take the form of cutoffs, thresholds, and “acceptable levels” that trigger a decision about how to act. Consider, for example, the “two meters” distancing “rule” propounded by policy science, or the mask-­ wearing policies. As Eyal (2022: 38) explains, “Such regulatory facts suffer from a set of congenital problems and provoke mistrust in a way that normal science facts do not. The cutoff converts uncertainty into calculable risk. The assumptions necessary in order to do so create ignorance about everything that was left out of the calculation.” Therefore, where existential stability teeters and professional authority and lay opinion can no longer be ranked, the boundary between the normal and the abnormal, the sound and the unsound, is breached. The COVID-19 pandemic also brought about a revolution entailing a crisis in the context of remote work and the “great resignation.” Around early 2021, millions of American workers started resigning from their jobs en masse. According to the US

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Bureau of Labor Statistics, 47.8 million Americans voluntarily quit their jobs in 2021.1 Worker shortages are still plaguing every industry in 2022. People are resigning from their jobs to find better ones, even those who had been in their positions for years. As with most labor and work trends over the last few years, the main catalyst seems to be the COVID-19 pandemic and its subsequent fallout. This also has a generational aspect. The pandemic exacerbated pre-existing conditions in the labor market that would have eventually surfaced, such as “early retirement” of baby boomers. Many in the Baby Boomer Generation (currently an estimated 76 million Americans between the ages of 58 and 76) did not feel comfortable returning to work during COVID-19. Others were deeply affected by recent illnesses, quarantines, and deaths, and started reprioritizing time with family over work. So many chose to retire early. In that sense the Great Resignation could just as easily be dubbed the Great Retirement.2 Retirement aside, once employees experienced the differences between working from home and the office, there was almost no going back. Now, if the option of hybrid or remote work is off the table, many employees would look for new opportunities. In addition, the pandemic highlighted a lot of the pervasive problems in the workforce, while also forcing organizations to come up with new ways of getting work done—remotely and otherwise. PwC’s Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey from March 2022 showed that one in five workers globally is planning to quit this year.3 Furthermore, 35% of respondents would not consider a new job unless it gave them the option to work remotely. However, we should remember that such changes also depend on and epitomize inequality. The privilege of some to stay at home evidently depended on the exposure of those who do not have the privilege of self-isolation and the option of working from home to the perils of COVID-19. In the United Kingdom, this has led to excess deaths among groups from Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic (BAME) backgrounds as they are disproportionally represented in frontline roles and precarious occupations and therefore at a heightened risk of contracting COVID-19. Such reality demonstrates all the more that “the (mis-) management of the current pandemic is happening along the same familiar lines of class and racial divisions that are deeply embedded in the rampant exploitative and unequal structures of contemporary capitalist societies” (Ajana, 2021). What we have here is evidence of a crisis in which trust, belief, persuasion, and convention have lost their relevance. Thus, it is above all a cognitive rift, essentially a crash-landing from the status of a dutifully and functionally healthy humankind, resting on safe ground, to a state of perfidious medicalization that renders humans prey to an unknown illness that comes with weird symptoms, odd forms of death, hospitalizations in astronaut-like surroundings, and withering demise of asphyxiation, disconnection, and muteness. It is indeed a sterile death, monitored and  https://edition.cnn.com/2022/03/30/economy/great-resignation-uk-australia-europe/index.html.  https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/11/04/amid-the-pandemic-a-rising-share-of-older-­ u - s a d u l t s - a r e - n ow - r e t i r e d / # : ~ : t ex t = A s % 2 0 e m p l oy e r s % 2 0 c o n t e n d % 2 0 w i t h % 2 0 growing,adults%20ages%2055%20. 3  https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/issues/workforce/hopes-and-fears-2022.html. 1 2

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estranged, or, as the philosopher Susan Sontag says, a transition from citizenship in the land of the healthy to citizenship in the land of the ill since all of us are potential COVID-19 patients if not yet actual ones. And, as Sontag goes on to say, it is an illness free of metaphor that would endow it with substance and meaning, that would make it easier to cope with and would set it within a familiar and comprehensible cultural frame; such as the melancholic but creative romanticization of tuberculosis in the nineteenth century, the shame and concealment once associated with cancer, and the moral castigation of guilt and punishment affixed to AIDS in its time. Sontag inveighs against the metaphorization of illness because it masks the struggle against the disease and undermines our awareness, free of dulling, shadowing, and disguising cultural mediation, of the medical profession’s curative abilities. But COVID-19, a tortuous and elusive disease, has not yet acquired symbolic markers, as had tuberculosis, cancer, and AIDS, that would give it a cultural cachet and dress it in anesthetic metaphorical masks. Therefore, COVID-19 lacks the mask that would conceal it from us and alleviate our deathly terror of it. Its unmediated presence among us is blatant and dazzling—an epidemic disease that blindfolds its observers and offers no cultural visual and imagery aids with which we may grope. It returns its casualties to the Plato’s cave of representational silhouettes, of sensory phenomena devoid of rhythm, rhyme, and reason. In a sense, the advent of COVID-19 lacked poetic coverage, nourishment, and solace. It also bears mentioning that, when we led COVID-19-free mundane lives, we participated in a lengthy masquerade ball, a post-modern carnival, in variable mocking roles and identities that camouflaged the personalities that hid behind them through role-playing—between the performativity of mask-wearing as identification with the socially desirable, as occurs on Halloween or Purim (a Jewish festival traditionally marked by dressing up), and of unmasking as a personal statement that emerges on Yom Kippur (the Jewish day of atonement). The latter phenomenon, the stripping and tearing down of the psyche, sometimes flickers, admittedly in a controlled and protected way, in a supervised and limited therapeutic-psychology clinic encounter or through sober, charmless, illusion-free socio-anthropological analysis. The COVID-19 era, in contrast, has torn off the masks with a savage viral thrust, also sundering the pretense that the masks had pasted across our faces, and hurled us into the illusive dark hall of the theatre of the absurd turned real, where the viewers are the actors, who lack a stage from which to observe and from which to keep at arm’s length, a director in charge, a play and a playwright, plot and catharsis, and velvet pleats behind which we could hide from ourselves and our surroundings; a play whose heroes are viruses, RNA molecules, protective spacesuits, syringes and swabs, knights armored with inoculations and wrapped in the righteousness of their struggle for the public weal, and those who oppose them with swords of denial and daggers of individual freedom of choice. It is a show that impersonates a medieval-­ style morality play but without the permission and authority of a supreme ecclesiastic cosmology that picks one side as the ultimate winner. If so, the wearing of literal masks has substituted for the lack of COVID-19 tailored cultural masks. In their stead, we don glasses of stratified reality, through which we can imagine the unfamiliar and estranged experience that is battering us.

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We have brought the discourse about the pandemic to match companion-like analogues while encoding it with a profusion of archetypes and stereotypes that recall past epidemics such as the medieval Black Death, the early-twentieth-century Spanish flu, the poetics of Albert Camus’s The Plague, the story of escaping from it in Boccaccio’s Decameron, and other historical literary referends. Metaphors that one could clutch desperately as to the horns of an altar of meaning, awareness, and insight—since without them, after all, we would be facing the impasse of existential arbitrariness barricading itself in mere survival, metaphorically barren and free of order-regulating rituals so essential to the structuring of temporality and the forging of morality in the face of mortality. Indeed, in a sense we have returned to the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs—to the primary need of satisfying our basic physiological conditions of existence. Usually, we meet the provision of staples through cooperative communication that makes culture possible. But now that our cultural ground is quaking under our feet, we remain threatened by a nature turned unbridled in the form of a virus that is, as it were, plaguing it while turning it over. We lose the game of the delicate balance between the discourse of the natural, which attributes primacy to biology and independent ambient factors in shaping human characteristics, and the discourse of culture, which sees people as landscape models in the habitat and contexts of their lives. Spreading between them is a broad set of combinations, melds, and mingling, that empties and strips the discourses of their practical validity. Before COVID-19, we thought we had tempered and outsmarted biology in the name of and for the sake of culture, or by merging the two categories, both of which are cultural products anyway, in the form of pharmacology for the body and the soul, genetic-behavioral engineering, life-prolonging medicine, and invasive and cutting intervention in the appearance and vitality of the body. Now, however, Frankenstein’s creature has turned on its creator, the tables have turned, and the discourse of the tyranny of nature has overwhelmed its captor, the discourse of human freedom. The abyss between the natural and the cultural has reopened and the non-dialectic dualism between them is being strikingly experienced. What does the human mind do to counter a nature that’s running wild and abusive? We erected a literal, tangible buffer between what’s cultural and what’s natural, between human and virus—a barrier in the form of a mask that conceals and, ostensibly, is concealed from the gorgon’s killing gaze, that of the creature/matter that bears down on us. What is more, the individual, wherever positioned on the male–female spectrum, has despaired of destroying the invisible enemy with the help of disinfectants and cleansing agents. Culture proves to be a slender reed of support, its shakiness forcing us humans to return to the drawing board of our personality, which is no longer fit to call on the cultural symbols and contexts that were deemed natural and self-evident until the pandemic. The net of cultural confidence, unfurled to slow down the possible descent into the abyss of meaninglessness, suddenly seems perforated and unraveled. Lacking their cultural support, moral restraints slacken, shame and guilt dissipate, the agreed social order comes apart, and the thing we call anarchism surfaces and even spills into the streets. For this very reason, however, the need for curative meaning grows, together with a search

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for the culprit behind the disintegration of the cultural plinth. And as in other epidemics or, more generally, in disasters that give neither forewarning nor meaning, a scapegoat will be found, or a witch-on-duty on whose tail one may pin the blame for the downfall and burn at the stake of punishment and atonement, thus alleviating, however slightly, the moral panic that grips us in view of the advent of a malevolent invader who sows destruction, presumably in retribution for some sin we committed. Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, for example, is exposed by the oracle at Delphi as the miscreant behind an epidemic that broke out in Thiva due to corrupt and unconscious actions that civilized people abhor; the Black Plague in Europe was attributed to Jewish poisoners of wells; and the waves of AIDS in the 1980s were blamed on “deviant” homosexual relations. All were considered unnatural, meaning intrinsically immoral, and were therefore banished to the “solitary land” of the taboo of the excepted outcast. To explain and rationalize the escalating lethality of the coronavirus pandemic, it would be impossible to settle for folklore tales about bats, pangolins, and Chinese as spreaders of the disease, even though each of these, in the eyes of Western culture, is a boundary-violating chimera prone to accusations of malevolent witchcraft and, therefore, to be tried, eradicated, and purged. If so, who is the witch of the coronavirus, the chosen culprit, the ataxic chimera who at the outset of the pandemic became its chief indicator and suspected perpetrator, the heralder of the power of its death-dealing nature, and therefore had to be returned to its cage where its extinction awaited? Who could be sacrificed on the altar of the pandemic without pangs of conscience in order to cleanse oneself of her, to obtain absolution for our sins that caused that unthinkable evil, without repudiating her as such? The ultimate chimera-witch, the perennial dead-alive zombie, is apparently old age, which is, albeit sinlessly, identified with the occurrence of illness and the imminence of death either way. Thus, the pandemic handed us an opportunity to banish and silence this unwanted and daunting promo of ours, so near and yet so far (Balberg & Weiss, 2021), which by the blessing of forgetting allows us to banish and disavow it. We deprived it of its subjective belonging to us, leaving it behind as a merely remote biological object. In a world that purports to be holistic, which sees body and psyche as indivisible one, there is no place for the dualistic reality of being old, that separates I from me and body from mind; instead, the social gaze turns toward their corporeal-based monistic being that transforms their consumable body into the sole hub of their identity, and vice versa—the wilted mind is reflected by the withering body. The treatment of old people, like the reference to their place in the world, is indeed defined in the language of the workings of the body and the basic and focused satisfaction of the body’s functional and material needs. The medicalization of old age has accelerated powerfully in the wake of COVID-19, further limiting the elderly to their physical being. This attitude, nurtured by professional agents of old age such as doctors, welfare officers, and gerontologists, is empowered and corroborated by the elderly themselves, who gripe constantly about being betrayed by their bodies, thus splitting their self- and social image into the physical and its correspondingly matched psychological, the latter effaced and nullified by dint of its symbolic invisibility. The elderly’s very existence is presumed to be an act of

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unfaithfulness to a social body that is not built to accommodate a vitiated and redundant appendage, the degeneration of which is liable to impair the integrity and vitality of the whole and whose presence in the world dismally fails to represent it let alone belong to its fold. This state of mutual treachery between the body social and the body personal invokes a parallel of sorts to the broken connection between fascist-­nationalist regimes dissident individuals whose body and mind cease to serve as icons of the collective consciousness of the nation. The penalty for such betrayal could be manifested in a grievous if not lethal blow administered to the personal body through torture, execution, shaming, banning and incarceration, all of which are, in various degrees of severity, also applied to the old in our society. The elderly hence appears as foreign, excluded, and estranged, a specter who threatens and disturbs our rest. Therefore, when the pandemic erupted, the elder’s visibility, place, and time were limited to specified hours and fortified walled spaces, lest old age pollute the land of the healthy—a place to which the elderly have no claim, after all—with its toxic presence and contaminating ill effects. And if we wonder why this of all victims was chosen to bear the guilt of the pandemic, from the days of the biblical and medieval leper, via the Christian theology of Jesus on the cross, to the contemporary blaming of victims for their victimization, the cultural mechanism remains the same. Paraphrasing the Prophet Isaiah (53:3), it despises our illness and suffers our torment. Who like the generation of the elderly bears the guilt of the distortions and the wrongs that it bequeathed to its successors. Here it is worth recalling one of the horror stories of the master of that genre, Edgar Allan Poe, “The Masque of the Red Death.” A terrible lethal plague is raging; it is called the Red Death because its victims bleed to death in agony. The aptly named Prince Prospero convenes a thousand of his cronies in his castle, where they round in order to celebrate life and avoid the Red Death that is rampaging outside. As they revel in their costumes, a figure swathed in bloodstained shrouds suddenly appears: the apparition of the Red Death. When the prince tears the mask off its face, he finds to his horror that there is nothing behind it; it is hollow. With that, he and his associates drop dead. The analogy of Poe’s spectacle of horrors and the phenomenon of an old-age voided of humanness but persistent in lethality, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, seems fundamentally specious: What has a medieval Gothic got to do with our times, and for what business has that shrouded figure invaded our abodes? By employing poetic comparative deduction, however, we may liken old age to an absolute Otherness, hollow in its identity, lethal, invasive, and dangerous, defiling and defiled by its presence, evocative of our own death, demanding distancing and purification, lockdown, invisibility, isolation, and self-righteous blaming of the elderly for their own loneliness. After all, a variety of moral absolution facilities are established as conscience-cleansing fig leaves in the form of anti-loneliness settings for the old, such as age-segregated facilities—golden-age homes and clubs, and appointed loneliness officers to alleviate their desolation while amplifying it by prodding old people to connect with others, without realizing that more connections combined with less meaning may only aggravate their assumed condition.

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The COVID-19 pandemic provided us with a view on how old age ceases to be but one more category of the deprived, a receptacle for the victims of ageism, of discrimination like any other discrimination against marginal but somehow accommodated groups, and evolves into a target for sheer racism, segregation, and profiling as a separate human essence, or perhaps not even plainly human, the kind that does not cry out for empathy, consideration, and moral responsibility. It is reminiscent, admittedly in a hard-to-digest fashion, of the predatory and murderous colonial racism toward the blacks in Africa that Sven Lindquist, for example, describes in his book Exterminate All the Brutes, not to speak of the status of the Jews in many antisemites’ eyes as earmarked for extinction. The transition from ageism to racism in regard to old age actually denotes an inversion in the attitude toward it, from a category on the timeline of life among all who live long, into a category copied into another socio-biological space that uncouples it from the rest of humankind. In the coronavirus zeitgeist, however, old age is stripped even of its paper-thin cultural properties that wrap it in bigoted claptrap of false humanistic-­like Newspeak, remaining merely as an unadulterated physical entity devoid of humanly ascribed mental faculties, as in any fallacious racist doctrine. We have seen how old age, already denounced and spurned, is identified not only with illness and death but also with an outcast form of biological existence that by no means can be identified with us and, therefore, does not represent the life-and-­ death cycle of people qua people. The external and overt signs of ageing as bodily and behavioral changes distinguish between the carriers of the old-age category and their social superiors. The appearances of old age, anchored in ingrained myths of offensive ugliness alongside dependent helplessness, somewhat evoke the youth culture of the 1960s, in which the elderly, the “them,” were allotted no right to exist as human beings and were doomed to imminent eradication in literary and cinematic fantasies. Those voices resonate somewhat in the Coronization of old age. In the course of Corona time, as in the Middle Ages, and unlike pre-Corona days, it has become a presence that awaits us every moment and therefore transforms all of us from potential elderly into real ones, for whom Corona-time seems a time of retirement that ends with the metamorphosis of social death into biological death. And if the yearning for eternity, for immortality, is the underpinning of society, as many researchers and philosophers believe, then the non-denial of death in the COVID-19 era equals the denial of timelessness and the culture that animates it. From this standpoint, the repression and exclusion of old age ostensibly negates the impending and inevitable end, the fear of death that’s hastened and amplified by the presence of the virus inside us. For those who flee from their fate, the events that attend the internal encounters with old age resemble a confrontation with a painting of Dorian Gray, whose furrows, scars, and hideousness are images of our secretive amoral and tormented life course, and therefore concealed features, which must remain in our attics, stashed away, as long as the unmasking coronavirus has not yet found its way there. If this is indeed the old-new depiction of old age as a dehumanized race apart, despite the imprint of the liberal-humanistic ethos that dominated the pre-­coronavirus society, what conditions and circumstances allowed this extreme pivot from the

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human to the a-human to take place? From declarative if flaccid adherence to moral value and lip service to an intergenerational bond, via the forsaking of all of these with the slamming of a door in the face of the faceless elderly; to their sequestration behind lock and key in total institutions from which relatives are turned away, limited to snatched glances from the other side of the street, shouting from the terrace across the road, and are restricted to occasional encounters on the stairwells, if any? The explanation for the cognitive and practical viability of this turnabout, not unlike in any other colonial rule, is rooted in the effects of the pandemic on the orders of governance and authority. By enforcing it as a state of emergency, the struggle against the pandemic has turned into a war scene of sorts, and once it is war, you do as you do in war: The features and orders of the world change; what was perceived as forbidden and unbecoming becomes tolerable, amenable if not desirable. The coronavirus era indeed precipitated a radical socio-political upheaval, something beyond our control and not for our own good—expansion and amplification of the sovereign’s authority precisely in view of the fecklessness of its efforts to protect its willing and confused subjects. The state, its governmentality eroded but anxious and eager to pursue the futile rear-guard war-to-the finish that it had declared against the virus, rushed to suspend its citizens’ relative independence, making them into indentured subjects prone to circumscribed movements, freedom of expression, social connections, appearance, and even thought—limitations with penalties attached. Walled off by the proclamation of a state of emergency, the democratic contract between citizens and government was suspended and social time, linear and cyclical alike, stopped running. Reliance on rights and memories implanted in the past stalled; they were no longer relevant for planning and plans toward an unknown future. As we recall, during those lockdowns in which every day resembled every other, as in the experience of prisoners, inpatients, or other inmates in captivity, one lost track of days, weeks, and even months. In lieu of the lost time, people’s very essence was tunneled to flashing graphs and columns of Excel worksheets based on the pandemic data. These became the be-all and end-all, an exclusive Draconian tyranny, due to the indication they gave of who would be destined to live and who would be fated to die. The stochastics of death replaced the memory of the dead. Thus, if at the beginning of the pandemic those who died were still noted by name, farther on they became numbers; apart from a few cases that were privileged with media coverage, no one bore a name anymore. And here, as happens whenever systems crumble, the unidimensional, numbered, and numbering bureaucracy nurtured the illusion of order and control, an epitomic marker of tyranny and dehumanization. In a sure-fire outcome of life under siege, the boundaries among quotidian domains such as sleeping, working, cooking, eating, and leisure became blurred, all crowding and intermingling under one roof and together with the same co-­ inhabitants. That is to say, participants in a state of emergency essentially enlist in a life that is metaphorized as a total institution or even a totalitarian regime of unchecked and omnipotent sovereign authority. Under these conditions of internal non-separation and outer separation, we are compelled to cling to the remnants of freedom left to us and to reinvent ourselves as hedonistic gourmands, perpetual

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drinkers, media junkies, captive gamers, information addicts, and communication aficionados of screens, as well as around-the-clock pajama enthusiasts. If so, the state of emergency brings in train an obeisant but creative adjustment to an overarching authority that purports to limit the uncertainty, regulate it, and promise redemption from it. In return for liberation from personal responsibility, we shed our selfness and willingly become the sovereign’s zombies, who, in the manner of zombies, do their masters’ bidding even at the moral price of harming themselves and others, even close and familiar others including spouses, children, and parents. The state of emergency transforms us, like our acquaintance Gregor Samsa, from cultured beings into biological life-forms denuded of culture and exposed to every misfortune, whose survival is anchored solely in the here-and-now and subjected to conscious, calculated risk management as in a paraphrase of Ian McEwan’s The Cockroach, who wakes up from mad dreams only to be astonished by the misdeeds of and associated with populistic human democracy. So, at the onset of the pandemic, which returned man to his animal essence, the mask that had concealed the brittleness of Western democracy was torn off, revealing it as a shaky barrier against the takeover of the political by the viral and the dystopization of the political. And yes, it brings us very close to the world of other animals. Here, perhaps, resides one of the most important lessons of the coronavirus: Recognition of our existential default as biological beings who submit, above all, to the supremacy of biology within us or without us. The price of our being existential objects is the negation of a life of rhyme and reason. So powerful is the existential impulse that it surmounts humankind’s imperative to procreate; indeed, global birthrates, unlike the interminable spread of the virus, plunged during the pandemic. An interesting question is whether the baby boom that followed the catastrophe of World War II will recur once the pandemic wanes. The state of emergency that is supposed to assure its wards a viable life is actually bringing their death nearer and so has become the virus’s accomplice. It hastens the nullification of all that is human, promotes the dying-off of the self, corrodes the social, and, in what counts most, exposes its victims to the risk of physical annihilation from depression, loneliness, neglect, and loss of the will to live. Perhaps here lies the explanation of the seditious defiance and refusal of individuals and groups, and against the frustration that follows, to acquiesce in what they evidently perceive as the tyrannical biopolitical management of their lives. The anti-vaxxers are not only instigators who crave controversy and strife but also conservatives who refuse to recognize the cosmological implications of the pandemic and instead cling, even at the price of ostracism, shaming, and ridicule, to conspiracy theories and a-­scientific theologies in order to indulge in blatant counter-modernity and thus adapt to the void of irrationality that the pandemic has left behind but is nevertheless openly tempting. As could be expected, this state of anomie, namely, the dissipation of normative order, involves a surge in the incidence of suicide but it would seem that suicide rates during the lockdowns and restrictions actually fell, even though calls for psychological help against suicide, particularly among the young, have increased.

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From a sociological point of view, waves of suicide rise and fall in tandem with levels of solidarity, sense of togetherness, and mutual responsibility in a society that faces mortal peril. Such is the case in war, crises of survival and transition, and states of willing or unwilling fraternity that demand the responsibility of self-­ mobilization and rallying to the flag. Class, group, and personal differences lose their edge and the need to unite around to-be-or-not-to-be in view of a real or imagined enemy temporarily sets aside hierarchy, acquisitiveness, competitiveness, subversiveness, and dog-eat-dog warfare. It is all happening so that the collective body can survive through the creation of a forced and false sense of well-feeling, of communal camaraderie among equals in the face of death. The masks only expedite the process of faceless unification by concealing the misleading and fraught look that is under them, leaving only the direct and credible, although possibly deceiving, gaze observable. They even soften and distance friction and promote a secondary discourse that becomes a primary one of batting an eye, arching an eyebrow, furrowing the forehead, and winking—a sign language that circumvents the masked speech that becomes muffled, literally, and metaphorically losing its lucidity, potency, and validity even when it continues to roll on the tongue indefatigably. Broadly viewed, the body language that had to abandon the affected culture of forced hugs, fake kisses, and ritualistic handshaking, has turned the loss of contact induced by the distance mandate into a new and challenging playground—a place where unfamiliar limits, rules, and players demand creativity, innovation, and audacity, along with their risks and opportunities. The turn of the coronavirus indeed invited multiple game settings such as these, reconfiguring the models of reality to which we had grown accustomed. Virtual fields on screen became important media channels and shapers of consciousness. This transformed them into accessible and alluring comfort zones, in which Zoom squares combine with the uninhibited rule of cellphone rectangles and their ilk to flatten relations among their users to two dimensions and dilute the senses by depriving users of taste, smell, touch, affect, weight, and volume. Furthermore, the digital skill of the young, in contrast with the awkwardness of the adults, turned the generation gap inside out, children becoming their parents’ tutors and burnt-out parents surrendering the last residues of their authority and becoming subtenants, unneeded vestiges that do not find their place in an ambiance packed with imposing markers of childhood and unfamiliar technological mastery and dexterity, in their own home. On those flashing screens remain the talking heads, some with distorted features, whose digital crowding into a single frame exorcises the sense of togetherness and intimacy from the authenticity that should breathe social life into it. Even the rituals of entering into and exiting from interpersonal relations have lost their affectations of etiquette and small talk in favor of abrupt electronic on/off codes, sometimes with no forewarning. The sensory deprivation levied by digital media has narrowed the body worship that is used to amply our visibility, our presence, and our power to attract in intimate quarters as well as in public. Its space has shrunk into something unitary and indivisible, a place where communication is comprised mainly of seeing and hearing, with no touching and sensing. Consider, too, our addictive and self-devoting exposure to mass media and social networks

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that the state of emergency has invested with the discipline-inducing images of an Orwellian Big Brother to whose rules and regulations we are captive. In many ways, the pandemic encapsulated as well as revolutionized our social reality. It epitomized “the inevitability of a struggle over how we are governed, a struggle, that is, over the ways that politics and biology will interface and be configured” (Short, 2020). This is, as Ajana (2021) argues, “at once a class struggle in the Marxist sense and a biopolitical struggle in the Agambanian sense whereby what is at stake is life itself.” The pandemic indeed highlighted the need for an ethics of living “in which no life can be destroyed or sacrificed in favour of another,” as Esposito (2008: 194) asserts. The ascendancy of puritanical political correctness and “cancel culture” to omnipotent tyranny, perversely and perhaps due to the convention-breaching coronavirus era, attests to the toxicity of the Internet, which derives its power from its ability to label and imprint, elevate and rate, exclude and erase, ban and boycott in the guise of an off-with-their heads folk democracy that is exercised with a keystroke. Its resonance of the horrors of revolutions such as the French, the Soviet, or the Chinese Cultural Revolution, of course, is not by chance. The trouble is that the reign of terror animated by the internal revolution is headless; unlike the other upheavals, headed by tyrants who could be sent packing, here vox populi, vox dei. From this standpoint, the coronavirus revolution, apart from shredding the epistemology of world-knowledge, is a theological revolution without a theology, its gist expressed in dressing up opinion as wisdom that is presented in an axiomatic manner and is therefore, paradoxically, conditioned on groundless belief backed neither by foundation nor by circumscription nor by doubt. It creates a sweeping/demanding viral cosmology that offers the pretense of irregularity, randomness, freedom, and spontaneity, as in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s metaphor of the continuously growing rhizome but is in fact merely the sum of its branches and leaves, which wildly radiate in all directions (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Thus, in the name of presenting and externalizing the subject, a new kind of dictatorship of transhumanism, which is beyond the inhuman, the superhuman, and the post-human, has taken shape, creating the illusion of networked solidarity in order to attenuate the dread of disintegration and crumbling that the virus has sown. However, countering the lethal radiation of the dictatorship of the masses that serves as the messenger of the killing solidarity, there appears an old-new horizon of the familiar tyranny of oppressive authoritarian regimes that embraces the principle of nullifying the subject but rescues it from its coronavirus-induced exile in order to reclaim its ancient and experienced roots—of blood, soil, nation, and motherland. The Russia–Ukraine war may be the first flickering of this countermove. Time will tell whether the whole thing will leave a historical imprint in the manner of previous world-transformative revolutions. As Zhou Enlai, quoted earlier, said, it will take a few more centuries to find out. In the meantime, however, the coronavirus has afforded us a time-out for abstention, reflection, replotting of course, self-criticism, and perhaps soul-searching before the violence of the next variant batters us—unless it has already arrived. The nascent race of the old, however, would seem to escape this coming age of revision and reflection since it offers

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an escape from the no escape of ageing-dependent mortality that the epoch of Corona unyieldingly reinforced. In that sense, the Corona revolution is tied to the anticipated revolution racing toward the point of singularity of immortal physicality as predicted by Ray Kurzweil in his book “The Singularity is Near—When Humans Transcend Biology” (Kurzweil, 2005). Marooned to its strictly biological existence, the extinct race of the old is out of the race toward transcending the biology of humanity. In effect, it does not and cannot exist in such a trans-biological world. It remains to be seen though how the deferral of death will allow culture to survive without the ever-haunting hound of mortality at its back. Or, put it differently, could the social be imagined without representations of the fear of death as its raison d’être and its driving force? The Corona perpetrated possibility of expunging the old from the midst of culture offered us a glimpse into such eventuality.

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Index

A Agamben, G., 6, 7, 9, 29 Ageism as age racism, 65 definition by WHO, 19 Ageless self, 67 Amery, J., 32, 74 Anthropological gerontology, 71 Anti-ageing, 20, 21 Anti-vaxxers, 84 B Baudrillard, J., 12 Bauman, Z., 27 Biopower during COVID-19, 3, 7 Boomer remover, 52 C Canada, 59 Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 46, 56 Covid-19 and eldercide, 8 in long-term care housing for the elderly, 59, 61 mortality from, 3 quarantine, 39, 42, 55 surveillance, 38 testing for, 38 and triage, 4, 47, 53–54 vaccination, 37

D Disengagement, 12 Douglas, M., 2, 23 E Eyal, G., 76 F Fourth Age, 29 G Gerocide, 53 Great resignation, 76, 77 Green Pass, 36 Gullette, M.M., 8 Gusfield, J., 3, 4 H Herd immunity, 8, 51, 56 Holocaust, 25, 26 Ka-Tsetnik’s testimony, 25 Homo sacer, 9, 29 Hybridism, 24 J Johnson, B., 55

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 H. Hazan, Age into Race, International Perspectives on Aging 38, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40669-0

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98 L Latour, B., 7, 24 Leibing, 2 Liberal racism, 10–15 M Magen Avot ve'Imahot (shield of fathers and mothers), 43–45 Malaysia, 57 N Netherlands, 58, 59 Norton, D., 73 Nursing homes, 4, 54 O Old age anthropology of, 66–73 cocooning, 55 as extra-cultural, 72 images in modern society, 19 and impurity, 23 in Israel, 35, 36 as a ‘racial project’, 13, 19 sacrificial logic, 51 as a ‘social problem’, 3, 4 P Poe, E.A., 81 Public Health England, 53 R Racialization, 9, 11, 19 Regulatory science, 76

Index Risk, 2 S Said, E., 29 Senicide, 59 Sheltered housing, 40 Shohat, E., 12 Social distancing, 7, 37, 53 Social problem, ‘old age’ as, 3 Solidarity, 37 Sontag, S., 78 Spain, 59 disinfection of care homes in, 30 T Third Age, 21 Translation, 67–70 Triage, 53 Trump, D., 57 Trust, 76 V Vaccination hesitancy, 36 W World Health Organization (WHO), 8, 19 Y Yalom, I., 32 Yehoshua, A.B., 47 Z Žižek, S., 7