Aging & Wisdom Quote by Rowan D. Williams

Western modernity doesn’t just export technology and markets; it exports a mood. Rowan Williams is zeroing in on something subtler than “culture clash”: the way a modern Western attitude toward ageing - equal parts denial, dread, and irritation - travels quickly and lodges itself inside communities that once treated old age as socially meaningful. His “incidentally” is doing rhetorical work, too: this isn’t a side note. It’s the quiet poison you notice only after the big changes have already arrived.

The intent is pastoral but also diagnostic. Williams frames indifference, anxiety, and hostility as a spectrum, suggesting that modernity’s problem with ageing isn’t a single ideology but a pervasive affect. Indifference reduces elders to background noise; anxiety turns ageing into a private medicalized crisis; hostility treats dependency as moral failure and older people as obstacles to efficiency. The subtext is theological without being preachy: a society’s relationship to ageing reveals what it thinks a human life is for. If worth is measured by productivity, youth becomes currency and age becomes debt.

Context matters: as a cleric who’s watched institutions and communities thin out under consumer logic, Williams is arguing that modernity reshapes not only rituals but time itself - what stages of life are honored, funded, listened to. The real warning is about contagion. When a culture “quite rapidly” absorbs contempt for ageing, it doesn’t just lose respect for elders; it loses a shared narrative of endurance, memory, and obligation. That’s not nostalgia. It’s a critique of what happens when speed and self-sufficiency become moral ideals.