Listening to a man with a reputation for describing the future inspires in me a mixture of awe and skepticism. I felt both last week while interviewing Ken Dychtwald, a west coast guru celebrated for his prognostications about the shape of America some decades from now.

It takes a lot more chutzpah than I possess to outline the future with the confidence wielded by this dynamic visionary.

We talked in Denver at a national meeting of the American Society on Aging, a six-thousand member organization known for its varied interests and lively spirit. Dychtwald has star quality charisma: his talk, billed as “Not Like Their Parents: The Ten Ways That Boomers Will Age Differently Than Previous Generations,” presented with the latest high tech audio-visual devices, drew a large and enthusiastic audience.

The boomers, Americans born between 1946 and 1964, have fascinated Dychtwald throughout his career. This 52-year-old consultant belongs to this group himself, a fact that gives energy to his view of the future. Some of his ten visions have already begun to take hold; others require this prophet to stick his neck out.

Here is the future according to Dychtwald:

1. Greater Longevity: length of life for both men and women will increase further, as it did in the twentieth century.
2. More Comprehension of Life Course Navigation: people will learn better how to find their way through the various stages that come with long life.
3. Growing Old Later: Americans will retain youthfulness longer than in earlier times.
4. Absence of Security: Entitlements of all sorts will come to an end and people will become accustomed to living at risk.
5. Cyclic Life Plan: instead of using the linear model, we will become used to thinking of our lives as being shaped by a series of returns.
6. Empowerment: not expecting to be handed influence, citizens will grow accustomed to seizing it for themselves.
7. Female Power: Women will take their rightful place in every field of professional activity and exercise more influence.
8. Supportive Marketplace: Choices will become much more abundant for those buying goods and services.
9. Greater Respect for Diversity: Americans will cease to assign people to categories by color, religion, or ethnic origin but at the same time retain interest in human differences for themselves.
10. Increased Liberation: we will become less traditional  –  – sexually, spiritually, intellectually, and socially.

As for himself, Dychtwald wants “not only to understand the future but to have a role in shaping it.” If he lives to the 120 – 140 year range that he foresees for some people, he will have a lot of time to do it.

The skepticism I always feel about prophets lost some of its edge when Dychtwald shared with me other, more sobering views. It may sound strange but I found reassuring his recognition that “there are some really horrible things that happen: poverty, disease, loss of sense of self-worth.”

“If we live long in states of dementia and poverty,” he warns, “that’s like winding up at a bad party and having to stay all week.”

In his writings, Dychtwald has expressed fear about huge numbers of elderly Americans spending their last decades doing little more than watching television. Even now, he reminds us, “forty million retirees average 43 hours a week of TV!”

Ken also worries about our democracy. After disavowing expertise in political science, he nevertheless doubts that our system was constructed for a population with 70 million citizens over age 65. That is the number of elder citizens the united States will have in 2030.

This swollen percentage of older people, he fear, may unbalance our system, perhaps leading to a power struggle between young and old. In that event, the old will dominate in a way destructive to our society.

The global situation also gives him pause. Already we have two groups, the developed world where the population is aging rapidly with dramatically falling birth rates, and the third world where young people are in the great majority. Will the United States find itself soon unable to manufacture goods and thus be forced to rely on countries overseas for its products?

Again, I found conversation with this futurist stimulating and also sometimes disquieting. I take issue with predictions about “dramatic anti-aging breakthroughs” any time in this century. The scientific basis for projections that have humans living to 140 in this century still seem extremely shaky to me. Moreover, if these increases were, in fact, to happen, they can bring with them much grief, given our society’s widespread inadequacies in coping with the needs of old people now.

Current world struggles also threaten to undermine rosy thinking about the future. Unless the great disparity between the haves and have-nots among the nations can be significantly reduced, the decades ahead may be marked by continued conflict and lethal terrorism. The effects of such violence would severely narrow the chances for a boomer paradise in America.

Richard Griffin

At the beginning of the late-morning class at the Hosmer School in Watertown, I offered a prize to the fourth grader enterprising enough to guess the year in which I myself began fourth grade at the Phillips School in Watertown. One of the boys immediately suggested the year 1776. That kid seems either an inspired comic on his way to Hollywood, or thoroughly confused about history.

Surprisingly, it took only a few more guesses by the children before a smart girl came up with the correct answer – – 1938, the year of the great New England hurricane. Another sophisticated youngster was able to supply the answer to my next question: What great world event followed in 1939?

My agenda for the class was to read and discuss some poems. Because I do not believe in talking down to young people, I chose some of the best contemporary poets in America who write for adults.

The first was the poem “The Promotion” which appeared in a recent New Yorker magazine. Written by James Tate, it begins “I was a dog in my former life, a very good dog, and, thus, I was promoted to a human being.”

The poet goes on for 20 or so lines to explain why he much liked being a dog, how good his life was tending the sheep, and how well the farmer and his children treated him. Eventually, however, the dog retired and died, bringing to an end an idyllic life.

Now life is not nearly so rewarding. The narrator lives in a high rise, works in a cubicle, and excites no fear from the human wolves he encounters. Sadly, he reflects, “This is my reward for being a good dog.”

In the course of discussion, the students came to see the point of the poem. A second reading, during which they remained attentive, clinched its punch for them. Some began to catch the irony in the title: what kind of promotion was it to live that kind of human life?

Then I introduced them to the current poet laureate of the United States, Billy Collins. This gracious 60-year-old has charmed America with his personality and his now wildly popular poetry. Unlike so many other poets of our era, Collins writes accessibly. His work can be understood on various levels, and, I discovered, by children.

The first poem by Collins that I chose was “Walking Across the Atlantic.” The narrator shares his feelings as he steps on the waves, looks for whales and waterspouts, and heads toward Spain. His concluding line is memorably playful: “But for now I try to imagine what this must look like to the fish below the bottoms of my feet appearing, disappearing.”

A second Collins poem I read is longer and more complicated. But “Afternoon with Irish Cows,” found in a recent New York Review of Books, also held the children and drew from them perceptive responses. Incidentally, only two of the kids had never seen a real live cow, proof that most of them have traveled outside Watertown.

The main action of the narrative is one cow’s thunderous roar, a sound that makes the poet put down what he is doing and go out to investigate. He discovered that the cow was “only announcing the large, unadulterated cowness of herself.” My auditors found this a difficult idea, of course, but it made them think.

I concluded the class with a brief poem, “My Goal,” written by my friend, the fine poet Robert K. Johnson, a resident of Needham. “My goal,” he tells, “is to write a poem whose form/disappears in the content like sugar in hot coffee; and whose content rivets the reader/the way footsteps in the next room/grip someone who had thought/he was in the house alone.”

Deliberately I thus left to the end discussion about what poetry is. My instinct was to raise this question only after we had studied individual poems. Then we could more profitably explore together what my friend writes about his aspirations as a poet.

A short time remained for student questions. A girl asked whether I wrote poetry myself. She and several others showed themselves disappointed in hearing that I do not. Pressed for a reason, I shared with them my feelings about lacking sufficient imagination to write well in that form. Yes, I had done so as an exercise when I was a student but did not then consider the product promising.

These kids, however, seemed to consider my answer a cop-out; they want me to try. This should serve as warning for readers of future columns in which I may, without provocation, burst into flights of poetry.

Being in that classroom was a rich experience. I came away from the hour spent with children once more reassured: yes, 73 can talk to 10; and 10 can talk to 73.

Richard Griffin

On lectures and sermons, I consider myself to have long ago overdosed. Hardly anyone alive can have listened to more of them than I.  

By reason of an unusually prolonged course of seminary studies, followed by extended association with a university, I have logged many more hours in lecture halls than was good for my brain. Because of a lifetime of church going, I have heard more sermons than could ever have benefited my soul.

One solid benefit of this overload, however, is that I have become a connoisseur of the spoken word. I know a good lecture when I hear one; I resonate to a good sermon when it happens.

Of course, I also quickly recognize the earmarks of bad speech. The professor skilled in dullness, disorganization, and mumbling, among other talents, always causes me pain. The preacher who has no more idea than his listeners do of where or when his sermon is going to end afflicts my spirit.

Perhaps this personal background helps explain my heartfelt enthusiasm when I come upon effective spoken language. Last week, I heard a lecture that stirred me to admiration. It had everything I love in public discourse: scope, insight, wit, sophistication, provocation, and moderate length. I felt myself to be hearing a master of the form, a person who could correct and enlarge my thinking and inspire me to further investigation of his subject.

The speaker was Bernard Lewis, professor emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton, and, before that, professor at the University of London. His writings on the Middle East have attracted wide attention; his most recent book, “What Went Wrong,” has become a best seller. It provides a fascinating account of the historical reasons for the current low ebb of predominately Islamic countries.

Now 85, Professor Lewis brings to his lecturing long experience with original research, familiarity with the countries he talks about, and mastery of other languages. Not everyone agrees with his views, I have discovered, but even his critics must admit his competence.

At the beginning Lewis set forth a simple agenda – – to refine the terms used in the lecture’s title, “The Middle East, Democracy, and Religion.”

The Middle East, he informed us, is a misnomer. He calls it a “shapeless, colorless, meaningless expression,” now used almost everywhere, even within the region itself. Incongruously, residents of the countries included use it without being aware that its geographical reference point is Western Europe.

Speaking about forms of government, Professor Lewis regrets the common Western assumption that there are basically only two –  –  democracy, and everything else. He considers this a great mistake because, among other things, it ignores the vast differences between traditional autocracies and dictatorships.

Whatever their faults, states such as Saudi Arabia respect some freedoms, whereas Iraq and Syria exhibit ruthless tyranny. The latter have implemented the only Western model successfully transplanted to the Middle East – Fascism.

In the theocracy that currently reigns in Iran, Lewis discerns a functional Christianization of traditionally non-clerical Islam: “They have created a papacy, college of cardinals, a bench of bishops, and above all, an Inquisition.”

This venerable professor shows himself skeptical about democracy as a model for all countries. “What we call democracy,” he says, “might more accurately be described as the parochial habits of the English-speaking people that they devise for the conduct of their affairs.”

He goes on to assert, “I do not share the prevailing view that democracy, thus defined, is the natural condition of mankind, any deviation from which is either a crime to be punished or a disease to be cured.”

One has to be wary: the effect of Westernization, he claims, has been not to decrease but to increase autocracy. And, too often, modernization has turned despots into dictators.

In the last part of his talk, Lewis raised the question of the compatibility between religion and democracy. By contrast with recent Christianity, Islam from the beginning has retained its identification with the state. “Mohammed was his own Constantine,” says Lewis. The Turkish form of secularization, separating religion and government, is a model foreign to the other Muslim countries.

About Islamic attitudes toward the United States, Lewis sees three groups of countries: 1) those which have regimes supportive of the U.S. but a population against us (Saudi Arabia); 2) those where regimes are against us and the people are for us (Iran); 3) places where both favor the U. S., (Turkey and Israel).

There is indeed a mood of great anger among many Muslims. They face a crucial choice. Some want to go back to what they conceive of as “true Islam;”

Others recognize their inferior place in the world and want to modernize. Their decisions will have a decisive influence on the world at large.

These brief references to a memorable lecture cannot convey the brilliance of the whole. However, this account may serve to vindicate once more the pleasures of the spoken word when it is graced with learning and matured judgment.

Richard Griffin

“How do you feel about getting old?” asked Ed Bradley, one of the announcers on the CBS show “Sixty Minutes.” The person he was interviewing, Judi Dench, answered in one word: “Awful.”  Then she added, “There is nothing good to be said about getting old.”

When Ed Bradley responded with a cliché, “It’s better than the alternative,” his guest smiled wanly and grudgingly agreed, “well, yes.”

Dame Judi Dench, a diminutive 67-year old British actress, has loomed large in notable films of late. She has played both Queen Victoria, in “Mrs. Brown,” and Queen Elizabeth I in “Shakespeare in Love.” More recently, she has scored a big success in “Iris,” taking the title role of Iris Murdoch, the British novelist who died in 2000. This latter performance has earned her a nomination for the Academy Award as best actress and, by the time this column appears, she may have won the award itself.

Despite this dazzling success, Judi Dench expresses anxiety about her future as an actress. She told Bradley how hard it is for women to get offered desirable roles after a certain age. Approaching 70, she can see herself coming to the end of her career, presumably long before the end of her life.

Perhaps she feels other fears, these provoked by playing Iris Murdoch on screen. In that role, she portrayed memorably a woman who, in her last years, was afflicted by Alzheimer’s Disease. From having been a master of the written word, perhaps the best English novelist then alive, she lost the ability to write anything at all.

I will not soon forget this film and the way Dench conveyed Iris’ plight, her expression becoming increasingly vacant as things became more and more incomprehensible to her.  Jim Broadbent, who played Iris’s husband John Bayley, also gave a magnificent performance, at least as fine as Dench’s. His face had to register a broader range of emotions than she did as he coped with the tragedy of his beloved wife’s disease. With great skill he showed the conflicting feelings he experienced, stretching all the way from tenderness to rage.

Before turning to films, Judi Dench enjoyed a distinguished career as an actress on the stage. “Sixty Minutes” showed a clip of her singing and dancing in Cabaret, one of her many roles. In this latter performance she displayed a versatility that must have surprised viewers who know her only from her films. At first sight, Dench does not seem physically suited to this kind of stage role, but apparently she carried it off well.

Returning to her comments about growing older, I find them sad.  And yet, like most people my age, I know what she means. A few weeks ago, a friend whom I have known since age fifteen entered a extended care facility. Alzheimer’s Disease had made it impossible for his wife to care for him any longer at home. Realizing that my friend Jack, when young among the most brilliant students I have ever known, and later distinguished in his career as a lawyer, has suffered the loss of coherent brain functioning  –  – all this has made me sad indeed.

Why was Jack singled out among my contemporaries to endure this frightening disease? How have the rest of us, thus far at least, escaped this plague? Why could not the inevitable cure have been found before Jack came down with the devastating illness?

No one knows the answers to these questions, of course. They are more the cries of our hearts than they are rationally posed questions issuing from our minds. But this particular disease, and others also devastating await many of us;  we know how foolhardy it is to express easy optimism about growing older. We elders have reasons enough  to be pessimistic about our prospects.

Yet, to find nothing at all good about getting old strikes me as extreme. I find it sad if Dench really holds this view. Granted that for her the looming prospect of losing her brilliant career with all its achievements, its excitement, and the celebrity that goes with this kind of work, can surely get her to feel wary of her future. But nothing good?

Even in a week when bodily life has been burdensome, I much value the psychic richness of later life. So many precious memories, such a range of extended family relationships, numerous valued friends and associates – – these qualities of my life strike me as distinctively different from what I knew earlier.

And the spiritual resources available in later life, leisure to take care of one’s soul and appreciate the wonder of it all, varied opportunities to continue the great search for truth, for insight, ultimately for God. Surprisingly, in a long life, this often turns out to be the best time for this reaching within and outside as well.

Richard Griffin