By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)
In modern society, Simone de Beauvoir observed in her later years, “it is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life” — it is something upon which the vast majority of humanity looks upon “with sorrow and rebellion,” dreading it more than death itself. But her one solution to the problem of keeping old age from becoming “an absurd parody of our former life” is balanced precariously on the tip of Maslow’s pyramid, entirely depended on the needs below being met. So too with Bertrand Russell’s key to growing old contentedly and Ursula K. Le Guin’s insistence on the civilizational value of elders. The great paradox of modernity is that we are creatures of fraying flesh and brittle bone whose destiny is to diminish in abilities until all is dust, living in a culture equating productivity with the value of personhood, so that the person in the creature is increasingly devalued with the ripening of age.
Eva Perón (May 7, 1919–July 26, 1952) was still in her twenties when she set out to change that.
Growing up in rural Argentina, she had been moved to tears by the elderly man who regularly came to her family home asking for help, “humiliated to the point where the only thing he had left was his humility,” she would later recall. That humiliation, she came to see, was a structural problem, a flaw of the system design. And so, knowing that the most valiant way to complain is to create, she set out to redesign the system.
After researching all past efforts across legislation and philosophy, none of which offered an adequate solution to the problem of ensuring rights she saw as “profound” and “primordial” — “the Rights of Old Age” — Evita wrote them herself. She did not know then, nine months before her thirtieth birthday, that she would never live to know old age.
Eva Perón by Pinélides Aristóbulo Fusco
On August 28, 1948, before the eyes of her people, Evita presented to the president — her husband — the decalogue she had been working on obsessively, to be included in Argentina’s Constitutional Reform the following year. Addressing the nation, she held the whole world accountable for what she saw as one of the most overlooked social injustices of our civilization:
The problem of abandoned or dispossessed elderly people lacking the essentials of life has always been a key concern for the governments of all nations. Unfortunately, it has never achieved a definitive resolution… The issue remains open to all kinds of improvisations, theories, and even undermining born of apathy…
At stake, she insisted, was nothing less than “the miracle of successfully closing the cycle of human life” — a miracle that demands of society a “collaborative, just, humane, and effective” collective will that includes “all individuals without exception.” The ten rights she outlined were not just a political statement but a humanistic appeal to “all people of goodwill who feel connected to the plight of those who, after contributing their labor and social support, reach old age deprived of the means necessary to continue living with dignity in the common life of humanity.”
These are the ten rights, which I have translated into English from the original 1948 document held in the archives of the Congressional Library of Argentina:
Every elderly person has the right to fundamental protection, under the auspices and at the expense of their family. In cases of abandonment, it is the State’s responsibility to provide such protection, either directly or through institutions and foundations created, or to be created, for that purpose, without prejudice to the State’s or said institutions’ right to subrogate and demand the corresponding contributions from any non-compliant but solvent relatives.II. RIGHT TO HOUSING
The right to hygienic shelter with basic household comforts is inherent to the human condition.III. RIGHT TO NOURISHMENT
Healthy nourishment, adequate for each person’s age and physical condition, must be particularly considered.IV. RIGHT TO CLOTHING
Decent clothing appropriate to the climate complements the previous right.V. RIGHT TO PHYSICAL HEALTH CARE
Care for the physical health of the elderly must be an especial and ongoing concern.VI. RIGHT TO MORAL HEALTH CARE
Free exercise of spiritual expression, in accordance with morality and creed, must be ensured.VII. RIGHT TO RECREATION
The elderly must be recognized as having the right to enjoy a moderate amount of diversion in order to bear contentedly their awaiting time.VIII. RIGHT TO WORK
When the state and conditions permit it, occupation through productive work therapy must be facilitated. This will prevent the decline of the personality.IX. RIGHT TO TRANQUILITY
To enjoy tranquility, free from anguish and anxiety, in the final years of life is the heritage of the elderly.X. RIGHT TO RESPECT.
The elderly have the right to the respect and consideration of their fellow human beings.
While Evita was ensuring that growing old remains a privilege and not a privation, cells were silently mutating in her body to deny her that privilege. But the decalogue she left behind was nothing less than a revolution. Word of it traveled throughout Latin America, so that when the young Che Guevara passed through Peru on his motorcycle as Evita lay dying at thirty-three, an old indigenous man who spoke no Spanish timidly approached him and, with his son translating, asked for a copy of the famous rights of the elderly in Argentina’s new constitution. Che “enthusiastically promised to send him one.”
Rights, however, are not one-time feats but the ongoing responsibility of the society which they serve. Within three years of passing the Constitutional Reform, the widowed Juan Perón was overthrown and the military dictatorship that set in overturned his constitutional amendments, cutting out Evita’s decalogue, affirming what we so willingly forget: that progress is not a vector pointing up and up but a sine wave slowly undulating upward through regular dips. John Steinbeck knew it: “All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up,” he wrote at the peak of WWII. “It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die.” Zadie Smith knows it: “Progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive,” she wrote in the wake of the first Trump election.
Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days
Evita’s revolution of dignity may have been stricken from the Argentine constitution, but the words with which she ended her speech that August day lit a torchlight for the future history of our world:
Nothing more.