If, as Keegan argues, fifth brain development
offers huge potential to address the problems we
face in an increasingly complex world, then we
need people in the fifth stage to keep working and
to keep engaged in decision-making at all levels.
Imagine a future where the current generation of
over fifties keep working into their sixties,
seventies and beyond (why not?). Older
architects, developers and town planners can
start to address
the way we
design housing
and our cities.
“Old age is like
Let’s stop
everything else. To
designing for
make a success of
the car and start
to design for
it, you’ve got to
human beings.
start young.”
Theodore Roosevelt
A
recent
Guardian article
by
Chris
Montgomery
reported on a Swedish study that found that,
"People who live in mono functional, cardependent neighbourhoods outside urban centres
are much less trusting of other people than people
who live in walkable neighbourhoods where
housing is mixed with shops, services and places
to work." So let's have mixed developments with
apartments for single people of all ages and larger
houses with gardens for families. We could create
shared spaces, indoors and out, where people
can sit and chat. Effective sound-proofing could
allow people to have quiet when they want it but
shared communal spaces could help mitigate the
corrosive effects of loneliness, which is not just
the preserve of the old. By designing real
communities we could create synergies between
the generations: an older couple living nearby
might be very happy to be adoptive grand-parents
and do some babysitting for hard-pressed working
families. Living frenzied busy lives, living for the
one or two holidays we work so hard to afford in
the year is no way to live. If we made our
communities more organic, more trusting and
human in scale then perhaps we could create
more everyday happiness for more people of all
ages.
moved I was by the sheer beauty of the works of
art, and how haunted I remain by these thousands
of years' old images. In these paintings we are
witnessing the dawn of our consciousness as a
species. These are people who have moved
beyond the instinct to merely survive long enough
to pass on their genes. Those cave dwellers were
among the first human beings to be aware of the
fact of their existence and the realisation that it
would end; that they were alive and that they
would die. It's thought that the development of the
pre frontal cortex in the brain was what allowed
this consciousness to develop. This change
explains why human beings create art, religion,
cities, technologies and culture. But as those early
humans developed the capacities that have
resulted in the exponential progress of our
species, they also created the potential for our
extinction.
Robert Keegan is suggesting that many many
more of us will now live long enough to reach the
fifth stage of development of consciousness, and
that we will do so for sound evolutionary reasons:
to save Homo sapiens from extinction. If he's
right, then older people will need to be much more
involved in conflict resolution at all levels - interpersonal relationships, politics (national and
international), justice etc. Even if he's wrong,
keeping learning and innovating throughout our
lives will create positive role models of ageing for
the generations coming after us. Surely that is
one of the most important ways to keep our own
individual lives meaningful and happy while
making a powerful contribution to the common
good?
It's not a no-brainer idea; it's a two (hemisphere)
brainer idea.
Many years ago I visited the cave paintings at
Lascaux in France. I was surprised at just how
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