Historical Perspectives on Ageing: ‘Old People and Things that Pass’

Summary

AGEING TODAY

In 2040, 4.7 million inhabitants of the Netherlands (26.5%) will be 65 years or older. One-third of these will be over 80 and likely in need of care. Parallel to this development, Dutch society is moving away from the welfare state towards a decentralised participation society in which ‘a strengths-based approach that encourages citizens to be more in control of their own lives, of their own communities, and eventually of society as a whole’ is needed.

In its 2014 report, the Raad voor de Volksgezondheid en Zorg (Council for Public Health and Care) predicted scenarios based on this decentralisation and participation. In one of those scenarios, the council argued that by 2040 people will have to facilitate the larger part of their own care, including care in old age. They have to ‘reconquer the initiative from the welfare state’. In the nearby future, locally organised ‘care circles’ will work together with local service providers, networks of volunteers and care institutions. And since citizens will have responsibility for their own health and care, they will have to be given a bigger say in the way they wish to organise and facilitate that care (both practical and in terms of legislation), the council argues.

As novel as this prediction might seem, history shows that care systems in which locally organised care, and citizens instead of a national government arrange for the care for the elderly, have been common in the Netherlands from the Middle Ages onwards until the rise of the welfare state in the twentieth century.It has been the initiatives of church organisations, individual citizens, guilds, neighbourhood cooperatives and local governments, embedded in concepts of morality often based on religious beliefs and idea(l)s, that eventually formed the foundation of the politics and policies of the Netherlands ‘welfare state regarding ageing. It was only in modernity that ageing became considered to be a bio-medical and socio-economic problem that should be fixed by all means. Although the modern perspective has stayed dominant in our current era, the’ gradual erosion of the strong prejudices that progress renders the past obsolete, that the new is better than the old, that youth is better than old age’ has also set in in our society.