The King of Britain Meets the Oldest of His Subjects, 116-Year-Old Ethel Caterham

The King of Britain has met the oldest of his subjects, 116-year-old Ethel Caterham. I sometimes remark on this gesture of British rulers: attention and respect towards the elderly, with special meetings for veterans, visits to the long-lived, and congratulatory messages. Much of this exists in our own political culture too, perhaps not always so elaborately staged and spotlit, but still.

There, a card from the monarch is due to every citizen and resident of the overseas territories on reaching the age of 100 and 105, and every year thereafter.

Such respect for the long-lived is probably not so much a "natural" feeling or an emotional impulse as an important cultural gesture. Nor is the attention focused so much on recognising their personal merits, whoever they may have been in the past, as on acknowledging their role in preserving tradition and memory. In the elderly person the idea of a symbolic debt finds its embodiment. Venerable old people are associated with the bygone, with the continuity of values, with a symbolic order that has made its way through many decades in the person of one individual.