Statutory senility is clearly a demented policy

Saturday, 10th July 2010

US Supreme Court Justice Stevens illustrates why Australians should not discriminate against the elderly, says John Heard

Whatever it is that we do when we do well, we know it and we long to hold onto the feeling. We have complex ways of referring to the fact. Indeed, we usually borrow from the language of gardening, or else mix in metaphors about human and other movement. We talk, most often, then, of flourishing, of someone’s thriving, of growing into one’s skin. Someone is hitting his stride, in other formulations. Someone else is sailing ahead, or really flying. The intention is to convey tranquillity tempered by success. We want to describe what it feels like to be excellent, to achieve, to strive for worthy things and to attain them with honour.

The English language has no term for this notion, nothing like what the Greeks called eudaimonia. The closest we get in English is ‘blessed’, or, in other translations, ‘happiness’. This is what the framers of the US Constitution were talking about when they wrote about ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’. More accurately, we can think of Thomas Jefferson drafting a right to the pursuit of blessedness.

The Catholic Church denotes those who strive and attain a blessed state as beati — literally, those who are blessed. The Sermon on the Mount famously describes the blessed: those who mourn, peacemakers, and the others. Blessed, in fact, are ‘those who are called to the supper of the Lamb’, according to one of the most pressing and luminous formulas of the Catholic Mass. Regardless, the sense conveyed is the same as the Constitutional formula: getting on, getting there, breaking free — standing at last in the light.

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