In 1889, when he was setting up the world’s first pension system in Germany, Chancellor Bismarck is said to have asked an adviser: “At what age should you set the retirement age so that you never have to pay it? »
“At 65,” he would have replied, which made Bismarck laugh since he himself was then 74 and still in business.
A rising life expectancy
No offense to the chancellor, his prognosis was wrong. At present, all so-called “developed” societies are faced with the problem of retirement. In the West, the life expectancy of the population has increased continuously. In France, the average life expectancy is 85 years for women and 80 years for men. In 2003, there were nearly 10,500,000 retirees compared to around 15,000,000 in 2022 (source: CNAV).
It is up to the political power and the social bodies to reflect on the practical way of setting up a fair and balanced retirement system for each and everyone, present or future.
Contrary to this fundamental demographic movement, our society likes to focus on “youthism”: everyone must be young, beautiful (preferably rich) and in good shape. Alas! The reality is quite different for millions of retirees who too often live close to the poverty line.
The debate on pensions will have to raise the fundamental question of the dignity of the human being. The great Christian religions will answer that man and woman, created in the image of God, are necessarily worthy by essence and by nature. Can this message be heard in a so-called secular society? It will be necessary in future debates to give another definition of dignity, such as that which can be found in Kant: “The person must never be treated only as a means, but always also as an end in itself. » (Foundation of the metaphysics of morals, 1785). A useful reminder for a society where men and women are defined by their ability to work, as a “human resource”. But the human being is above all a person on the legal, philosophical and religious levels.
Old age is not necessarily “a shipwreck”…
One of the challenges for our churches is to affirm that, whatever their age, everyone is worthy of care and is precious before God. In his Memoirs of War, General de Gaulle had this unfortunate formula, and too often taken out of context, when he spoke of Marshal Pétain, Head of State at 85: “Old age is a shipwreck. »
Today’s theologians cannot overlook a theological approach to old age and its dignity. Christianity apprehends the existential path of the human being from birth to death. It is not a linear or bell-shaped path with a rise to the climax of midlife and then a descent, inexorable, to the end. From then on, old age is seen only as a sinister decline, a preamble to death. But life trajectories are not so simple: “There are steps, levels, plateaus, relapses, rebirths, we constantly go up and down, whatever the age. And you can have at 90 a psychic dynamism and a joie de vivre that you don’t have at 20! Old age is not a self-effacement, it is rather the opposite, a major crisis, a vast reorganization of drives. »*
*Geneviève Delaisi de Parseval, psychoanalyst, author of The art of accommodating old age, Odile Jacob, 2022.
