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What is perhaps the major but neglected question in the study of human aging does not have to do with the special weaknesses of our elders, but with the blunt, inescapable fact of their survival—particularly the survival of elderly males—as a common human type. If we could find reasonable answers to the question, “Why Elders?” (or, alternatively, “How Elders?”) then other questions, those having to do with their nurture, their proper claim on national resources, and their function in society, might either fall into place or become irrelevant.
The question, “Why Elders?” becomes more manageable when we limit its scope to this particular concern: “Why Male Elders, that is, Why Male Gerontocracy?” We are, after all, the only primate species that has maintained, across history and across cultures, a population of powerful male elders who routinely survive as leaders for many years beyond their reproductive and muscular peak. This nagging question, “Why Male Elders?” could also be a starting point for psychoanalytic inquiry, since the structures and mechanisms that contribute to the survival of a post-reproductive male cohort may be, as we shall see, those that have been studied almost exclusively by psychoanalysis.
In addressing this question, and for purposes of contrast, I will very briefly review some available evidence concerning the fate of elderly apes, both male and female, from the most advanced and socially organized pongid species. I will then sketch out the situation of the older man, at the simpler, more primitive levels of human social organization: hunter-gatherers, as well as the preliterate folk-traditional societies. Next, I will speculate about the generic human practices and institutions that may be instrumental in bringing