Composing a Further Life

they become the makers of arrows—and tradition ascribes to the arrow maker the primary credit for the kill, so that in the distribution of meat to all the members of the community, the arrow maker is treated as the source. Looked at pragmatically, the making of the arrow is indeed a contribution, one that could be made by a younger man but has been reserved for the old, but less of a concrete contribution than the honor it is given, which makes it central to the solidarity of the band. Similarly, only when women are too old for childbearing are they permitted to become shamanic healers, a translation of the love and care they have given their children to the health of the wider community. In both cases, an appropriately limited effort is recognized as having a profound value. 5
    A similar alchemy occurs in a New Hampshire yoga class I have attended for over a decade, consisting mostly of women past middle age, and a few men. 6 Midway though the class, the participants pair off to give each other neck and shoulder massages. The younger members of the group have strong fingers and strong arms and give fairly energetic five-minute massages. But others, in their seventies and beyond, with arthritic fingers, can only manage the lightest touch, like butterflies alighting and taking off, and themselves need to be handled gently. Both kinds of touch are equally valued in the exchange. The older members of the group emerge as experts in a type of touch used in Swedish massage called light stroking, or
effleurage
, surely efficacious in its own way, for under this touch tension is released gently into the air. It is not easy to decide what counts as a valuable contribution, even through Darwinian spectacles.
    In addition to our lengthy childhood and our postreproductive survival, a third evolutionary anomaly of human beings, which lends a distinctive character to human sexuality, seems to fit here as well. In most species across the animal kingdom, copulation occurs only when conception is possible and is triggered by the estrus cycle, most often by cues of scent—that is to say, it occurs only when the female is “in heat” and able to conceive. And of course in most species the reproductive pairing is relatively temporary and the presence of the male not necessary after fertilization.
    Yet human beings seek sexual intercourse regardless of fertility—between ovulations, during pregnancy and lactation, after menopause, and into old age—so the decoupling of sex and reproduction was with us long before the invention of contraception and surely contributes to the maintenance of affection and joie de vivre over time. Nonreproductive sexuality has to be regarded as an evolutionary change, an emergent aspect of humanness, so the question is how nonreproductive sexuality has been selected for. One possible answer is that it helps keep couples together and available to care for their young, for each other, and even for their children’s children. Sexual pleasure turns out to be an important ingredient in the human capacity for responsible caring.
    Studies suggest that men at least live longer and healthier lives if they live with a partner. 7 Marriage is based on interdependence, and in every human society interdependence is increased by cultural elaborations on the biological division of labor. Yet interdependence is obscured in economic models where, when the family income is brought in by the husband, the wife is defined as “not working,” which is to say as dependent, not contributing. Sometimes, too, sexual pleasure has been regarded as normal to males and not to females, which can lead to regarding sexual access and fertility as something the woman exchanges for economic support.
    Since the end of the Victorian era, we have moved toward a model in which sex is regarded as mutual giving, and increasingly both partners contribute both earnings and unpaid labor, often specializing in different tasks, to their common life. Each of these models depends on the notion that partnerships last because partners come to depend on each other, to need each other, and, potentially, to look at each other with gratitude. All of this suggests that when economists talk about “dependency ratios,” they are likely to be obscuring the real give-and-take—the reciprocity—on which human relationships depend. The language of economics biases our response by the selection between two closely related words that look like synonyms until